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Good morning from the newsroom of the Financial Times.

Today is Friday, February 8th, and this is your FT news briefing.

Today, OPEC, more like NOPEC.

U.S. legislators move forward with a bill to prosecute OPEC member countries for fixing oil prices.

Plus, U.S. President Donald Trump rules out another meeting with Chinese President Xi Jin Ping before tariffs are set to increase in March,

an Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos accuses National Inquirer owner American media of extortion.

Then the F.T.'s Chris Giles explains why the Bank of England is the latest Central Bank to make a dovish U-turn.

I'm Eric Krucky, and here's the news you need to start your day. I'm Ed Crooks. I'm the U.S. Industry and Energy Editor of the F.T.

On Thursday, a bill which would allow the United States government to sue OPEC, the Old Producers

Cartel, made quite a bit of progress in Congress.

Took some quite significant steps forward in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

It's called the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act of 2019.

If you take that acronym, it spells NOPEC, in other words no OPEC.

And that's the idea is that what it would do

is remove sovereign immunity from antitrust legislation

for the members of OPEC.

It would allow the US government to take action against countries that are in OPEC

for anti-competitive practices for forming a cartel to fix the price of oil and potentially

then impose penalties on them. This legislation, which has been around for a long time, many, many years,

it rose up in 2007, 2008, got quite a lot of support back then.

...