Here’s what you need to know to start your day.
Good morning.
Here’s what you need to know:
• North Korea agreed to send athletes to the Winter Olympics in South Korea next month, a symbolic breakthrough after months of escalating tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.
The announcement was welcomed in the South, but few believe that the sudden charm offensive was motivated by Olympic spirit.
The North not only shunned the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul but also tried to disrupt the Games after talks to co-host the event failed.
This video looks back at how international sporting events have long been a window into geopolitics between the two countries.
Above, the North Korean delegation arrived in Panmunjom, South Korea.
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• President Trump appeared to endorse a broad immigration deal that would grant millions of undocumented immigrants a pathway to U. S. citizenship, saying he would “take the heat” for an approach that many of his hard-line supporters have long denounced.
And the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, Robert Mueller, above, told Mr. Trump’s lawyers last month that he would probably seek to interview the president, two people familiar with the discussion said.
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• India’s Supreme Court ordered a review of a colonial-era law that criminalizes sex between men. The law was briefly rescinded, but restored in 2013.
Gay rights activists said they were elated but still cautious. Public opinion on homosexuality has shifted in some parts of India, where marriage is often viewed as a social pact and attitudes remain deeply conservative.
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• President Emmanuel Macron of France came to China bearing gifts. He tried his hand at Mandarin and visited an ancient capital.
Mr. Macron, who called for “a new relationship” with China, is using the three-day visit to reinvigorate ties as the two countries grapple with the strident nationalism of President Trump.
He and President Xi Jinping outlined a vision that is sharply at odds with Mr. Trump’s worldview: They spoke of a need for free trade, embraced multilateralism and emphasized cooperating to combat climate change.
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• A former Hong Kong government official, Chi Ping Patrick Ho, pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to bribe top officials in Chad and Uganda for oil rights.
Prosecutors say Mr. Ho was involved in two bribery schemes for a Chinese energy company. The governments of Uganda and Chad have denied the charges. If convicted, Mr. Ho could face more than a decade in prison.
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• “Ask this guy,” Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha of Thailand told reporters, walking off and leaving them with a life-size cutout of himself.
It was not the first time that Mr. Prayuth had dumbfounded the news media. In the past, he has touched the ear of a sound technician, flung a banana peel at cameramen and threatened, with gruff humor, to execute any journalist who criticized his government.
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• AT&T dropped a deal to sell Huawei smartphones in the U. S. This latest setback for the Chinese phone maker underscores deepening geopolitical rifts over issues of technology, privacy and security.
• H&M, the clothing retailer, apologized for an image on its online store showing a black child in a sweatshirt that said “coolest monkey in the jungle.” The item has been pulled .
• Supporters of the new U. S. tax law say it will help American multinationals compete more aggressively overseas. Others see incentives to put factories overseas.
• Apple was asked by two major investors to study the health effects of its devices and to offer parents more tools to limit children’s screen time.
• Cambodian real estate agents are brushing up on their Mandarin as Chinese investors flock to Phnom Penh .
• U. S. stocks were up. Here’s a snapshot of global markets.
• South Korea said it would not revisit a widely criticized 2015 agreement with Japan to end a dispute over women forced into sexual slavery during World War II. [ The New York Times]
• Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called President Trump “psychotic” and repeated the accusation that the U. S. instigated a week of protests across the country. [ The New York Times]
• India will no longer require theaters to play the national anthem before movies. [ Al Jazeera]
• At least 226 people were injured in a train collision near Johannesburg, the second serious rail accident in South Africa in a week. [ The New York Times]
• Bill Clinton, the former U. S. president, joined calls for the release of two Reuters journalists detained in Myanmar. [ Reuters]
• One of China’s best-known women’s rights activists, Xiao Meili, pushed the #MeToo conversation forward with a plan to stop sexual harassment on college campuses. [ SupChina]
• Record heat in Australia has killed hundreds of flying foxes, a species of bat that has experienced heat stress from the extreme temperatures. [ The Guardian]
• The Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai said he had grown more than 3.5 inches since arriving at the International Space Station three weeks ago. He’s now worried he won’t fit into his seat for the journey home in June. [ BBC]
Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.
• Recipe of the day: Use our basic template to make soup with whatever you want .
• That game on your phone is tracking your TV-watching habits .
• Learn to manage your career .
• More than 13,000 people applied to visit every destination on our Travel section’s annual list of 52 Places to Go. Meet a few of them in this video. (We’ll announce the winner and the destinations this week.)
• New videomicroscopes are giving surgeons at a Manhattan hospital “Superman eyes,” making delicate operations easier to navigate .
• And an Italian law requiring customers to pay for plastic bags has prompted a flood of protests. But the anger is about more than a 2-cent surcharge.
Ninety years ago this month, Leon Trotsky, above, one of the early leaders of the Communist Party, was exiled by his rival Joseph Stalin to what is now Kazakhstan, clearing the way for Stalin’s complete control of the Soviet Union.
An ever-wandering revolutionary, Trotsky was no stranger to exile.
More than a decade before, in January 1917, The Times noted his arrival in New York City: a “Russian journalist and Socialist” who had been “expelled from four lands.”
Trotsky and his family lived only briefly in New York — what he called “the city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of Cubism” — before he returned to Russia to help lead the Bolshevik Revolution.
