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Asia and Australia Edition
By Charles McDermid
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Good morning. All eyes on Singapore, towers of Indian trash and Barnaby Joyce’s video fight. Here’s what you need to know:
• President Trump and Kim Jong-un are in Singapore, with their on-again, off-again meeting — set to be the first encounter between a U. S. president and a North Korean leader — planned for tomorrow.
Some fear mismatched expectations. Few analysts believe that Mr. Kim is ready to give up his nuclear arsenal for the economic help Mr. Trump could offer.
They may not even define issues like “denuclearization” the same way. Here is a look at the issues behind the basic terminology in question.
And our Beijing bureau chief heard from analysts who say that Chinese leaders are suddenly jittery that Mr. Kim might try to counterbalance their own influence by embracing Washington.
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• The meeting in Singapore comes directly after a contentious Group of 7 meeting .
Mr. Trump — apparently incensed by a news conference in which his host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, defended Canada’s trade policies — abandoned the G-7’s joint statement and derided Mr. Trudeau as “very dishonest and weak.”
While supporters rushed to defend the president (his top economic adviser said he was “not going to permit any show of weakness on a trip to negotiate with North Korea”), many others were dismayed.
“This wasn’t just with Trudeau. This is with our best allies,” a Democratic senator said. “Not to sign a statement of solidarity, which stands for everything that we stand for, is a big mistake.”
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• Malaysia’s new leader, the 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, above, is aggressively ramping up an investigation into the apparent theft of billions of dollars from the state investment fund established and overseen by his predecessor, Najib Razak.
The U. S. Department of Justice estimates that $4.5 billion went missing from the fund, known as 1MDB — including $731 million that it says was deposited into Mr. Najib’s own bank accounts.
Mr. Mahathir has made investigating the scandal and recovering the money a top priority. Mr. Najib denies any wrongdoing.
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• “If this continues to happen, the city will drown in its waste.”
That was an environmental official speaking about New Delhi’s towering trash heaps. About 80 billion pounds of garbage have accumulated at four dumpsites on the fringes of a capital already struggling with dangerously polluted air and water.
The dumps in Delhi, and in cities like Mumbai and Kolkata, are some of the largest, least regulated and most hazardous in the world, a waste management expert said. Dislodged cascades can be lethal.
Politicians have been slow to react, but the government has now vowed to eliminate single-use plastic by 2022.
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• And tributes from around the world are pouring in for Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and television host who took his life on Friday. (Read his obituary, and an appraisal by our restaurant critic.)
His death sent shock waves through the culinary industry — and through the small French village where he died .
In Vietnam, the owner of a noodle shop in Hanoi where Mr. Bourdain shared a $6 meal with former P resident Barack Obama in 2016, said she was shocked.
“He praised our bun cha dish and its fish-sauce broth,” Nguyen Thi Nga told the Agence France-Presse. “He loved Vietnamese food.”
• Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have disagreed over the risks of artificial intelligence for years, including at a previously unreported dinner in 2014. Meanwhile, the fight over the future of A. I. has spread across the tech industry.
• A judge is expected to rule Tuesday on the U. S. government’s effort to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner — an antitrust case that has enthralled Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue. Other headlines to watch for this week: U. S. net neutrality rules are set to expire, and the White House will release its final list of Chinese products subject to tariffs.
• Sydney’s train system got an investment of more than $800 million that will see “Paris and London technology” on all lines by the “mid-2020s” and could allow trains to run every 90 seconds.
• “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” opened in 48 international markets, topping all of them for a tidy $151 million over the weekend.
• Here’s a snapshot of global markets .
• Vietnamese police detained more than a dozen protesters in Hanoi carrying anti-China banners and broke up demonstrations in other cities against plans for special economic zones. Many fear that Chinese investors will snap up the zones’ beneficial, long-term leases. [ Reuters]
• The Taliban followed the Afghan government’s announcement of an eight-day cease-fire with their own three-day suspension of operations for the Muslim celebration Eid al-Fitr. [ The New York Times]
• Barnaby Joyce posted footage of an altercation with a photographer who accuses the former deputy prime minister of threatening to punch him. [ News.com.au]
• The middle path? A giant shopping mall in the western Chinese city of Xi’an is trying a novel strategy to deal with “the heads-down tribe”: pedestrian lanes specifically for people glued to their cellphones. [ The New York Times]
• The king of clay. Rafael Nadal, 32, won his 11th French Open singles title, defeating the only person who has beaten him on clay since 2016: Dominic Thiem, a 24-year-old Austrian. [The New York Times]
• Mass skinny dip: In Ireland, 2,505 women swam naked, setting a new world record to raise funds for a children’s cancer charity. “We are all different shapes and sizes and ages and it was just super,” one participant said. [ The New York Times]
Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.
• On learning to stop worrying and love electric scooters .
• Our Midlife Tuneup will help you feel young at heart .
• Recipe of the day: Spicy Sichuan noodles are ready in half an hour.
• Susi Pudjiastuti, Indonesia’s fisheries minister, isn’t backing down to China. She has seized illegal fishing boats and sometimes blown them up, saving fish but aggravating her bosses. (“My family thinks I am a little bit of a nut case,” she told our correspondent.)
• “Glamping” at 1,320,000 feet. A new company, Axiom Space, is giving those with piles of money and an adventuresome spirit something new to lust after: an eight-day trip to space. Price per person: $55 million. (“It’s a bargain,” the C. E. O. said.)
• And do bees know nothing? Researchers say bees have shown that they understand the absence of things as a numerical quantity: none or zero. The only nonhuman animals so far to show the same understanding are primates and a single African gray parrot.
