Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Tuesday, December 8th,

and this is your FT news briefing.

Boris Johnson heads to Brussels with Trade Deal Talks in a deadlock.

Uber is ditching plans to develop its own self-driving car,

and China has curbed its overseas lending in a serious way.

Plus, there's a tonne at stake for Europe during the EU summit later this week, but

Angala Merkel has a lot of skin in the game too.

We'll explain why.

I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

Brexit talks continued on Monday with very few developments and it caused

investors in Sterling to lose confidence. The pound was down more than a half a

percent against the dollar yesterday afternoon. But there were two bits of important news. UK Prime Minister Boris

Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said they're going to meet

in Brussels soon. And Johnson scrapped the law-breaking clauses from the UK's Internal Market Bill.

Here with me now is the F.T.'s EU correspondent Jim Brunston to break these two things down.

Jim, why is the meeting between Johnson and Vander Lyon a notable development?

It's quite a striking development. It basically means that talks are now shifting to the highest political

level. So we've had months and months of Michelle Barnier that he used chief

negotiator negotiating with his UK counterpart David Frost, but that now seems to be

more or less at an end. And effectively Boris Johnson and Ursce von der Leyen are going to take over that negotiation

and try and hammer out a deal while he's in Brussels. The issue there a bit is that there's so much still

...