Donald Trump, Sergei Skripal, Champions League: Your Thursday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/briefing/trump-skripal-champions-league.html

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Good morning.

News consumption advice and the latest on Britain’s spy poisoning, President Trump’s metal tariffs and the Champions League. Here’s the news:

• For two months, our tech columnist skipped digital news and social media, reading only newspapers, newsletters, books and magazine articles.

He said he ended up better informed and less anxious, with more free time. “Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment,” he writes.

“I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.”

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• The British authorities confirmed that a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent in England this week.

Suspicion is now rampant that the episode was an assassination attempt, and that Russia might be responsible.

The former spy, Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, remain in critical condition.

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• President Trump is expected to formally impose new tariffs on steel and aluminum today, despite a strong opposition from establishment Republicans. As aides quit in record numbers, the president increasingly relies on his own judgment.

European Union officials unveiled an array of retaliatory tariffs they would place on American imports, including products made in Republican states, like Kentucky bourbon.

Separately, we learned that Mr. Trump ignored his lawyers’ advice and asked key witnesses in the Russia inquiry about their conversations with investigators.

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• Turkey asked Washington to stop Kurdish commanders from sending more troops to Afrin, the Kurdish stronghold in Syria’s west that Turkey invaded last month.

Besides creating a diplomatic quandary, the Kurdish deployment to Afrin is depriving the U.S. of allied troops in the campaign to stamp out the last vestiges of the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, negotiations between the Syrian government and Jaish al-Islam, the rebel group that controls diminishing parts of the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta, went nowhere. New government troops are adding momentum to the brutal siege that began in 2013.

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• In honor of International Women’s Day, an official holiday in many countries, here are some stories on the state of gender equality:

In France, the government may fine companies that do not erase gender pay gaps within three years. Some workers in Spain are striking over inequality. And in Britain, Parliament and social media debated “mansplaining.”

In the U.S., a Muslim fashion blogger is making waves by challenging stereotypes about hijab-wearing women. And the first female artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin is focusing on cultural conflicts.

Finally, there are signs that American parents’ traditional preference for sons over daughters is changing.

• A robot at the world’s largest bricklaying competition fed dreams of solving housing shortages — and raised fears for bricklayers’ jobs.

• The European Central Bank had been expected to take another small step toward normalcy today, but the populist surge in Italy’s election changed its calculus, our correspondent in Frankfurt writes.

• Huawei is determined to lead 5G mobile technology, worrying Washington. “Whoever controls the technology knows, intimately, how it was built and where all the doors and buttons are.”

• Peter Thiel, the billionaire Facebook board member and Trump supporter, discusses politics, Silicon Valley and how he was influenced by the French philosopher René Girard.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

• China’s Communist elders were too old or too cowed to resist President Xi Jinping’s backroom campaign to abolish term limits. [The New York Times]

• A court in Germany sentenced eight members of a far-right group to lengthy jail sentences for plotting to kill migrants and politicians. [Reuters]

• In memoriam: Kalman Aron survived seven Nazi camps on scraps of food from guards whose portraits he drew. He lived to become a prominent American portraitist. [The New York Times]

• Pope Francis has paved the way for the canonization of Pope Paul VI, who led the Roman Catholic Church through turmoil in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero. [The New York Times]

• The Trump administration’s plan to open a new American Embassy in Jerusalem has a hitch: The site lies partly in disputed territory. [The New York Times]

• A Utah lawmaker introduced a bill that would rename the state’s most scenic highway after President Trump. (An opponent countered with his own proposal: a “Stormy Daniels rampway.”) [The New York Times]

• Europeans running late to work or school can offer a novel excuse: Some clocks are running slow because of a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia. Really. [Associated Press]

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

• Recipe of the day: Leave ordinary roasted potatoes behind with a little lemon, smoked paprika and rosemary.

• Take the stress out of weeknight cooking with this useful multitasker.

• Find a great rug that won’t decimate your budget.

• A surprise at the Champions League: Juventus’s squad of aging veterans appeared to be on the verge of succumbing to a young Tottenham, but the Italians embraced the fight and proceed to the quarterfinals.

• Balkrishna Doshi, a low-cost housing pioneer from India, won this year’s Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture. “Architecture is not a static building,” he said, “it’s a living organism.”

• An experimental musical about Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian autocrat, was met with applause, tears and a few walkouts in Kosovo.

• Indie pop now thrums far from the swaggering, anthemic sound of a decade ago. The internet, our critic writes, has given voice and lent strength to interiority, and also undermined seriousness.

• A woman in Australia has found what is believed to be the world’s oldest message in a bottle. It had been tossed off the side of a German ship in 1886.

• And Los Angeles, long synonymous with carbophobia and anti-gluten mania, has become an unlikely bakery and bread haven.

They were sworn into service, required to wear regulation uniforms and saw the horrors of war.

But when the Hello Girls returned home to the U.S. after World War I, they were largely forgotten.

Today is International Women’s Day, a global recognition of women’s achievements. We’re looking back more than 100 years to recognize the place in history of a group of 223 women.

In 1917, on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I, the U.S. government drafted 2.8 million men into military service. The Army realized that its success would rely on the Allies’ use of a new technology: the telephone.

Enter the Hello Girls, a group of bilingual telephone operators selected for working the switchboards in France, connecting the front lines with supply depots and military command. They often handled over 150,000 calls per day.

But because they were women, the U.S. government denied them veteran status for more than 60 years after the war.

“The unfortunate reality is their service wasn’t officially recognized with veteran status until 1979, when a small fraction of those who served were still alive,” a senior curator at the National World War I Museum and Memorial said. “To achieve that point of hard-won recognition took a monumental effort.”

Remy Tumin contributed reporting.

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