Today In News: June 27, 2017

Today In News:

Courtesy of Reuters

• A U.S. warning to Syria's leadership against staging a chemical weapons attack was based on intelligence about what appeared to be active preparations at a Syrian airfield used for such an attack in April.

• Company and government officials reported serious intrusions at the Ukrainian power grid, banks and government offices. Ukraine's government said the cyberattack was the biggest ever to hit the country. The Minister of Internal Affairs was quick to suggest the attacks appeared to have originated from Russia.

• U.S. Senate Republican leaders postponed a vote on a healthcare overhaul on Tuesday after resistance from members of their own party, and President Donald Trump summoned Republican senators to the White House to urge them to break the stalemate.

• Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro warned on that he and supporters would take up arms if his socialist government was violently overthrown by opponents who have been on the streets protesting for three months.

• 3 Chicago police officers were indicted Tuesday on felony charges that they conspired to cover up the actions of a white police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, saying the officers lied when they alleged the black teenager “aggressively” swung a knife at officers and attempted to get up from the ground still armed after he was shot. Officer Jason Van Dyke shot the teenager 16 times.

• Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Tuesday formally acknowledged his lobbying work for a group tied to Ukraine’s Party of Regions.

• Time magazine has asked the Trump Organization to remove copies of a fake cover of President Trump that were on display at the company’s golf clubs. The request came after the newspaper reported that at least four Trump-branded golf clubs had displayed a fake Time magazine cover that depicted Trump with the headline “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” 

• A White House reporter confronted White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the top of her Tuesday press briefing, accusing her of "inflaming" tensions with the media and undercutting the credibility of reporters.

• A House panel approved a controversial proposal to separate air traffic control from the federal government. The bill, which would reauthorize the FAA for six years, would dramatically shift the country’s air navigation system over three years to a private corporation, which would be governed by a board of directors and have the power to impose user fees. 

• Judge Aaron Persky, who faced a nationwide backlash for his sentencing of campus rapist, is facing a formal attempt to remove him from the bench.  Persky stunned the world when he sentenced Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at a fraternity party.

• A federal court in Michigan has blocked the deportation of more than 1,400 Iraqis living in the US who have been targeted in recent immigration raids.

• Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, approved plans to push poor and jobless people to donate money to his Christian nonprofit, which since 2000 has steered more than $60m to Sekulow, his family and their businesses. Telemarketers for the nonprofit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (Case), were instructed in contracts signed by Sekulow to urge people who pleaded poverty or said they were out of work to dig deep for a “sacrificial gift”.

• The World Bank has been accused of systematic forced labour and cases of child labour in an area where the Uzbek government is implementing a World Bank-funded irrigation project. They are also accused of funding agricultural projects in Uzbekistan that are also linked to state-sponsored child labour and forced labour in the cotton industry.