Here’s what you need to know to start your day.
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Good morning. A one-two punch in Washington, political anxiety in Australia and Facebook’s discovery of influence campaigns around the world. Here’s what you need to know:
• A grim focus inside the White House.
After the conviction of his former campaign chairman and a plea deal by his former personal lawyer and fixer, President Trump mostly avoided the topic at a rally in West Virginia, above. The next morning, he monitored the headlines, sat for an interview with Fox News and discussed ways to try to seize the news cycle again.
But the legal setbacks — and the possibility that both defendants might cooperate with the special counsel — have all but collapsed his attempts to dismiss the criminal investigations engulfing his tenure. Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders acknowledge that he could be exposed to the possibility of impeachment.
We know it’s a confusing story. Here’s an overview of all the moving parts.
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• Malcolm Turnbull fights for his job.
If the Australian prime minister survives today’s political jockeying in Canberra, he’ll have the two weeks of lawmakers’ recess to regroup. According to this report, he may not make it.
Peter Dutton, the right-wing populist who narrowly lost a leadership challenge on Tuesday, could mount another try today. Mr. Turnbull has rejected most of the flurry of resignations from ministers, but the Liberal Party is in obvious crisis.
Here, Crikey looks at how long Australia’s modern prime ministers have lasted after they were first challenged. (The article is paywall-free for Times readers.)
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• Facebook’s use as a vessel for disinformation is spreading.
The social media influence tactics used in the 2016 U. S. presidential election, and that surfaced again in the U. S. last month, appear to have been adopted by operatives in other countries as well.
The company said it had found and removed hundreds of fake accounts, pages and groups that were trying to sow misinformation in Latin America, Britain and the Middle East.
“We believe these pages, groups and accounts were part of two sets of campaigns,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a conference call. “One from Iran, with ties to state-owned media. The other came from a set of people the U. S. government and others have linked to Russia.”
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• Air pollution is shortening your life.
Months, and sometimes years, are being shaved off life expectancy, according to a new study.
Outdoor air pollution — fine particulate matter from sources like coal-fired power plants, truck tailpipes, wildfires and dust storms — reduces the worldwide average life expectancy at birth by one year, researchers found. The average Egyptian loses 1.9 years; the average Indian, 1.5 years.
Many of the sources of outdoor air pollution are tightly linked to greenhouse gas emissions, suggesting that moving to cleaner sources of energy might deliver public health dividends.
Indoor air pollution — for example, from cooking with wood, charcoal or animal dung — can also be devastating. In South Asia, the researchers found, it reduced life expectancy by an additional 1.2 years.
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• It’s time for Filipinos to “move on.”
Imee Marcos, the eldest daughter of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, used an appearance with President Rodrigo Duterte, a Marcos admirer, to tell her people to get over her father’s misdeeds.
“The millennials have moved on and I think people at my age should also move on as well,” the 62-year-old said.
The remark came on the 35th anniversary of the assassination of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., which fueled the protests that ended Marcos’s brutal 20-year rule, during which thousands of people were killed and tortured. The Marcos family was accused of stealing roughly $10 billion in government treasure to enrich itself.
“It is so easy to say that we should all move on,” said one of Aquino’s nephews, Senator Paolo Benigno Aquino, “but for those who suffered during martial law, it would not be so easy.”
• Is China changing Google? The tech company founded 20 years ago in a Silicon Valley garage was once proudly nonconformist. But our tech columnist writes that, if it does decide to abide by Chinese censors, it would mark a new era for Google — one of conventionality.
• The U. S. will impose a 10 percent tariff this week on an additional $16 billion worth of Chinese products. Here are eight ways that could rebound on American consumers.
• Apple bought the rights to a television series based on “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” a novelistic article that stretched more than 30,000 words and took up an entire issue of The Times Magazine this month.
• U. S. market milestone: American stocks crossed a major threshold on Wednesday, and the 10-year-old bull market arguably became the longest on record. But the gains have been concentrated among the rich.
• U. S. stocks were mixed. Here’s a snapshot of global markets.
• South Korea said it would press ahead with its plan to open a diplomatic “liaison office” in North Korea this year. [ The New York Times]
• Hurricane Lane, a rare Category 4 storm in the Pacific, is bearing down on Hawaii with 160-mile-per-hour winds. The National Weather Service warned that some areas “may be uninhabitable for weeks.” [ The New York Times]
• Saudi Arabia is seeking the death penalty for a 29-year-old woman who advocates equal rights for the country’s Shiite minority. [ The New York Times]
• A Vietnamese court found two Vietnamese-Americans guilty of terrorism and sentenced them to 14 years in prison for masterminding a series of bomb plots earlier this year. [ Reuters]
Tips for a more fulfilling life.
• Recipe of the day: Tasty BLT tacos work for brunch, lunch or a light, fast dinner.
• Women and men peak at different ages on dating sites .
• How to ask for help ( and actually get it).
• New York, Melbourne or both? As a MoMA exhibition continues in Melbourne, Australia, we tested how well the two cities really know each other. Think you’re pretty global? Take the quiz and see.
• Hong Kong’s changing classrooms: More white students are enrolling in public schools than at any time in the city’s history, as wealthy Chinese gravitate to its prestigious international schools.
• And in Japan, a meeting of mayhem and sport. Botaoshi, a century-old game combining elements of rugby, sumo and martial arts, is hanging on despite being so dangerous that many Japanese schools have abandoned it.
Forty-five years today ago today, an escaped convict burst into a busy bank in Stockholm, fired at the ceiling and shouted in English, “The party has just begun!”
The man, Jan-Erik Olsson, took four employees hostage, and a tense, six-day standoff followed.
