G-20, Trump, Putin, CNN: Your Thursday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/briefing/g-20-trump-putin-cnn.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. President Trump cast himself as a defender of Western values in a confrontational speech in Warsaw. He attacked his own country’s leaders and institutions — the media, Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence agencies — in front of an appreciative Polish audience.

Now he’s in Hamburg, Germany, for the G-20 summit meeting, where he’ll have a highly anticipated face-to-face with Vladimir Putin. Leftist protesters and the police clashed in the streets, above, ahead of the meeting.

But let’s back up a minute: What is the G-20, and what happens when its members meet? Test your knowledge with our quiz.

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2. The federal government’s top ethics watchdog resigned, months ahead of the end of his five-year term, to take up a new job in campaign finance reform.

Walter Shaub, above, had sparred repeatedly with the Trump administration over conflicts of interest. The agency’s “recent experiences have made it clear the ethics program needs to be strengthened,” he said.

And we interviewed the president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, about the rancor between his network and the president. “He’s trying to bully us,” Mr. Zucker said. “And we’re not going to let him intimidate us.”

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3. Experts are lowering their forecasts for how fast the American economy will grow this year.

Economic expansion for the full year appears unlikely to be much greater than 2 percent. While hardly terrible, it is not the burst of growth — or “Trump bump” — that many expected to result from an upturn in consumer and business sentiment after the election. Auto sales, among other indicators, have been slow.

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4. The longest state budget impasse in modern history is over.

Illinois lawmakers overrode the Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, above, giving the state its first full budget in more than two years.

The decision to approve the budget, which includes an income tax increase expected to generate about $5 billion, came as Illinois was sinking deeper into fiscal misery.

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5. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Education Department over student loan protections.

It’s a little complicated, but the issue is whether colleges that acted fraudulently should end up having to bear some of the cost when loans to their students are forgiven under a federal program.

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos froze rules that were supposed to go into effect July 1, it kept all the responsibility on taxpayers.

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6. California’s junior senator, Kamala Harris, has emerged as the latest iteration of a bipartisan archetype: the Great Freshman Hope.

Like the Senate newcomers Barack Obama or Marco Rubio before her, Ms. Harris — a 52-year-old former prosecutor — has insisted that national aspirations are far from her mind, but hasn’t exactly ruled them out, either.

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7. Did Amelia Earhart survive her attempt to circumnavigate the globe?

A newly discovered photograph is breathing life into the theory that she may have ended up in imprisoned in Japanese territory, an idea that’s been kicked around many times since the aviator’s 1937 disappearance.

The photo, found in the National Archives, shows a tall, short-haired woman on a dock in the Marshall Islands.

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8. Sheila Michaels, who introduced “Ms.” into common parlance, died at 78.

Ms. Michaels, who over the years worked as a civil-rights organizer, New York cabdriver, technical editor, oral historian and Japanese restaurateur, championed the honorific as “a title for a woman who did not ‘belong’ to a man.”

But she didn’t coin it. “Apparently, it was in use in stenographic books for a while,” Ms. Michaels explained in an interview last year for her Times obituary.

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9. In the biggest upset at Wimbledon so far, Magdalena Rybarikova of Slovakia, above, ousted Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic.

Pliskova had been a favorite to win the tournament. Rybarikova, ranked 87th, was down before she rallied to win. Now she’ll advance to the third round.

And Bethanie Mattek-Sands, a 32-year-old American player, suffered what the tournament called an “acute knee injury” in a fall on the court.

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10. Finally, the Tour de France is an amazing feat of sportsmanship — and of marketing potential for the spots it passes through. We visited a small town that’s thrilled the tour will whiz by on Friday.

“Having a tour stage is probably the best publicity you can do,” said Andy Schleck, a former Tour de France winner.

Incidentally, Schleck said that the riders might be the only people involved who are oblivious to the host locales. “All that beautiful scenery,” he said. “I don’t remember seeing any of that.”

Have a great night.

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