Start United States USA — Sport Trade, World Cup, Jacinda Ardern: Your Friday Briefing

Trade, World Cup, Jacinda Ardern: Your Friday Briefing

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Here’s what you need to know to start your day.
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up .)
Good morning. More twists on children detained at the U. S. border, World Cup spirit in Siberia and New Zealand’s new first daughter. Here’s what you need to know:
• Back to tough talk on immigration.
A day after President Trump reversed his hard-line position of separating immigrant children from their families, the U. S. asked the Pentagon to prepare housing for as many as 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children on American military bases.
Mr. Trump had taken to Twitter Thursday morning with demands: Change the laws, build a wall, and do not hire immigration judges.
Melania Trump went to Texas to visit one of the facilities where some of the separated children are being held, raising eyebrows by boarding her plane in Washington in an olive green coat with writing in white capital letters that read “I really don’t care. Do U?”
And a new focus has emerged on the youngest detainees. More than 2,400 children under the age of 12 — many of whom are toddlers and infants — are believed to be in federal custody. Many are in special “tender age” shelters.
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• Checking in on the trade war.
President Trump urged Republican lawmakers not to scuttle his efforts to help the Chinese telecom firm ZTE, which he said was part of his broader geopolitical negotiating strategy.
His administration pressed its case that Beijing is using industrial policy to dominate industries of the future, at the expense of the United States and other nations. It issued a 35-page report offering a laundry list of complaints regarding Chinese efforts to protect and promote their domestic industries. Economists noted that it lacked any plans to build U. S. influence in industries that will power future growth.
Still, the U. S. is at the top of the global economy, and growth is slowing in China, Japan and Europe. That gives Mr. Trump leverage — for now.
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• Horrific details on the chemical attacks in Syria were left out of a report by a U. N. commission investigating war crimes in the country’s seven-year civil war.
The information was included in an earlier draft of the report, which examined how the government of President Bashar al-Assad recaptured a suburb of Damascus using bombardments, mass starvation and chemical weapons.
Many of the details in the earlier draft appeared to be well established, but a member of the commission said that they still needed corroboration or clarification.
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• Our Overlooked series remembers the life of Amrita Sher-Gil, a pioneering artist who used her paintbrush to depict the lives of Indian women in the 1930s.
Sher-Gil understood the loneliness of her subjects, and their moods often reflected her own. Caught between her Hungarian and Indian roots and conflicted about her sexuality, she lived between worlds, often searching for a sense of belonging.
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• World Cup, off and on the field.
A Chinese fan paid more than $600 for World Cup tickets that never arrived. He is one of thousands of victims of a ticketing swindle orchestrated by a Moscow company, the Chinese government says.
And in Siberia, above, fans gathered until 4 a.m. to celebrate Russia’s 3-1 victory over Egypt. The city of Ulan-Ude is geographically closer to Beijing than it is to Moscow: It is 3,500 miles and five time zones away from the Russian capital, and feels culturally Asian.
Many there identify as much with their ethnic group as their nation state. But for now, residents of Ulan-Ude speak of little else but the World Cup, and lives are being arranged around game schedules.
Here’s our full World Cup coverage .
• Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled. The decision hurt the stock prices of many prominent online sellers.
• Apple announced its first foray into children’s programming: It ordered two shows — one live-action, the other animated — from Sesame Workshop, the maker of “Sesame Street.”
• Firefox is back. Mozilla’s redesigned web browser — with strong privacy features intended to compete with Google Chrome — is worth considering, our tech columnist writes.
• U. S. stocks were down. Here’s a snapshot of global markets.
• It’s a girl. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand is the first world leader in decades to give birth in office. [ The New York Times]
• The ferry that capsized in Indonesia this week was badly overloaded beyond its capacity of about 40, officials said. As many as 192 people are believed dead. [ The New York Times]
• John Oliver mocked Chinese censorship and brought up President Xi Jinping’s resemblance to Winnie the Pooh. Now his name is banned on Chinese social media. [ The New York Times]
• A common virus may interact with genes linked to Alzheimer’s and play a role in how the disease develops and progresses, researchers found. [ The New York Times]
• Australia’s steady wave of banking scandals reveals the bankruptcy of the government’s trickle-down economic worldview, an Op-Ed contributor writes. [ The New York Times]
• Can the bees save the elephants? In India, where elephants are struck by trains, railway officials are coming up with creative solutions to keep the animals away. [ National Geographic]
Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.
• Recipe of the day: If you’re craving chocolate chip cookies, go with the classic Toll House recipe .
• Here are 10 new books you should read .
• How to talk about the World Cup and sound reasonably smart .
• “Everyone is beautiful during Eid.” This is how the people of Zanzibar celebrated Eid al-Fitr — which started last week and ended on Tuesday. The festival marks the end of Ramadan and its month of fasting.
• Australia is celebrated for its cafe culture, but what does that mean? Babajan, a Turkish-inspired neighborhood spot in Melbourne, exemplifies this, our columnist writes .
• Australia letter: Our bureau chief writes of an Aboriginal-Australian student who, in an effort to better educate others on the country’s history, convinced a cafe to provide vouchers for free meals to anyone who checked out a book from his university’s Indigenous Arts and Culture department.
• And billions of moths migrate to Australia every spring using a magnetic sense, a new study found. Researchers say this is the first reliable evidence that insects can use Earth’s magnetic field for navigation.
June is Pride Month, commemorating the anniversary of the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that helped galvanize the gay community’s struggle for equal rights.

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