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Good morning from the newsroom of the Financial Times.

Today is Tuesday, January 7th. Good morning from the newsroom of the Financial Times.

Today is Tuesday, January 7th.

And this is your FT news briefing.

Oil topped $70 a barrel at one point on Monday,

and a leaked letter appeared to suggest the U.S. was pulling troops

from Iraq. We'll have the latest on the tensions between Washington and the Middle East.

Plus, Donald Trump's former national security advisor says he'll testify in the president's impeachment trial if subpoenaed.

And former movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein, is facing new sexual assault charges out of Los Angeles,

as his criminal trial in New York gets

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

For a minute yesterday it looked like the United States was preparing to pull troops out of Iraq.

Turned out this wasn't the case, but it took the whole afternoon for the Pentagon to clear things up.

The miscommunication came just a day after Iraqi

lawmakers voted to remove foreign forces from the country, a move that was triggered

when the US killed Iranian general Kasim Salamani in Baghdad last week. The F.T.'s

Katrina Manson explains what happened.

What happened was the commanding general of troops in Iraq sent a letter a draft around saying effectively that the US was

preparing to pull out of Iraq which is of course tremendous news if it does so because the US is doing everything it can do as far as we know to stay in Iraq at the moment after the Iraqi parliament voted for US troops to leave in the wake of tit-for-tat escalatory actions between Iraq. for US allies have been scrambling to understand what's going on.

I continue, a lot of journalists have run a lot of telephone numbers

...