Mike Pence, Uber, Greece: Your Tuesday Briefing

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/briefing/mike-pence-uber-greece.html

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Good morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

• An 11-person team of diplomats and former journalists is Europe’s front line against an onslaught of fake news. But their task has proved overwhelming.

Many recent false reports have targeted politicians who oppose closer ties with Russia, while others seek to portray refugees as criminals, fomenting populist anger.

President Trump stood by his attack on Sweden’s migration policies, doubling down on his suggestion that refugees had caused a surge in crime there. Statistics do not support Mr. Trump’s claims, and the Swedes were flabbergasted.

Above, Syrian refugees in Denmark on their way to Sweden.

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• Vice President Mike Pence told E.U. leaders in Brussels that the White House fully supported European institutions, despite Mr. Trump’s critical comments about them.

Britain’s House of Commons debated an online petition signed by more than 1.8 million people that called for denying Mr. Trump a formal state visit.

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• Mr. Trump chose a widely respected military strategist, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, above, as his new national security adviser.

Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Jim Mattis, is touring the Middle East. He sought to play down the president’s remark last month that the U.S. should have “kept” Iraq’s oil after the 2003 invasion.

Some Arab allies are alarmed over a proposal by the Trump administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

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• Ukraine reacted furiously to a peace plan secretly put forward by two Trump associates and a Ukrainian lawmaker that seemed to advance Russian interests. The Kremlin denied knowledge of the plan.

Complicating peace talks, Russia issued a decree recognizing passports issued by two separatist governments in eastern Ukraine.

And the Kremlin is stirring tensions in former Yugoslav republics. Above, a NATO patrol in Kosovo.

Russia has thrown around its weight globally, but at home a grinding recession has lowered living standards. We visited Irkutsk, a city where at least 76 people died from drinking a tainted vodka substitute.

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• Greece appeared to win a reprieve from years of crippling austerity: Eurozone finance ministers agreed to begin negotiations over government overhauls in exchange for bailout payments.

With taxes rising, many Greeks are shutting down their businesses, at least on paper, and joining a growing shadow economy. The tax consultant in the photo above lost at least half of his clients in recent years.

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• There were 2,473 billionaires in 2015 by a new count, 6.4 percent more than a year earlier. The top 10 — nine from the U.S., one from Spain — have a combined net worth of $582 billion.

• Snobbery is alive in Britain, and it’s not just about accents. A new report points to pay gaps as evidence of a persistent class system.

• Secrecy has long been central to the art world, but some experts say that extreme discretion in art sales invites international money laundering.

• Sexual harassment claims by a former engineer at Uber underscore how Silicon Valley continues to struggle with women’s issues.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

• The French police again searched the headquarters of the National Front, the party of the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, as part of an inquiry into reported misuse of E.U. funds. [France 24]

• War and a collapsing economy have set off a famine in South Sudan, leaving millions of people in urgent need of food, the United Nations warned. [The New York Times]

• Hundreds of migrants tried again to breach a border fence between Morocco and Ceuta, the Spanish outpost in Africa. [The New York Times]

• Forty-seven former Turkish soldiers were brought to trial on charges of trying to kill President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a coup attempt in July. [The New York Times]

• Thousands participated in rare protests in Belarus over the weekend, opposing a new “law against social parasites” that would charge people for being underemployed. [Radio Free Europe]

• A court in Paris sentenced a cat burglar known as Spider-Man to eight years in prison for stealing masterpieces worth over 104 million euros. [The New York Times]

• We’re in Week 4 of our New Year’s resolutions month, in which we’re helping you stick to your goals. There’s still time to join.

You may be wavering. And that’s O.K.! What’s important isn’t that you adhere 100 percent to your resolution, it’s that you forgive yourself for slip-ups and get back to it.

So we’re giving you permission to just move on. Research suggests that “giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health.” That’s all for this week. (And if you haven’t slipped up, great!)

If you’ve gotten off track, write and tell us what happened and your ideas for avoiding that pitfall next time.

• Recipe of the day: Like bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches? You’ll love breakfast carbonara.

• In memoriam: Vitaly I. Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, died at 64. Dick Bruna, above, the Dutch illustrator who created Miffy, a white rabbit that is one of the most recognizable characters in the world, died at 89.

• A working-class brasserie in central France mistakenly received a Michelin star, inundating its staff of two with calls.

• El Bulli’s pastry chef tries to reimagine his brother’s legendary restaurant in a bland office building in Barcelona. One dish: squid tartar brushed with a thin layer of coconut oil and a drop of slightly spicy squid ink.

• A.S. Monaco faces Manchester City in the Champions League today. Financial fair-play rules have turned the Monte Carlo club into a hub for soccer prodigies.

• A digital sleuth discovered a previously unknown serial novel by the poet Walt Whitman. It survived in a single copy of an obscure newspaper.

• And older Americans are increasingly turning to marijuana to treat aches and pains. “All I know is I feel better when I take this,” a 98-year-old said.

Today the United Nations is celebrating International Mother Language Day. Started in 2000, it is a day to celebrate linguistic diversity and draw attention to endangered and defunct languages.

An event 65 years ago this week was the inspiration. Students in Dhaka — then the capital of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh — demanded that the government designate Bengali an official language. Violence broke out, and the police opened fire, killing at least six demonstrators.

There are around 3,000 endangered languages, some of them dialects, in the world, the United Nations’ cultural body, Unesco, estimates.

Vancouver Island in British Columbia lost one of its First Nation vernaculars last year with the death of Alban Michael, the last speaker of a dialect of Nuu-chah-nulth.

Multilingual education is the focus of the day this year. “Education and information in the mother language is absolutely essential to improving learning and developing confidence and self-esteem,” Unesco’s director general said.

A post last week on the Unesco Twitter feed was even more emphatic: “#Languages are who we are. Protecting this identity is a matter of human rights!”

Palko Karasz and Sandra E. Garcia contributed reporting.

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