North Korea, Ireland, World Cup: Your Monday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/briefing/north-korea-ireland-world-cup.html

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Good morning.

U.S. negotiators in North Korea, Ireland voted for abortion rights and Russia’s World Cup stadiums enriched oligarchs. Here’s the latest:

• Will they or won’t they?

A team of U.S. negotiators crossed into North Korea, hoping to nail down details for a potential meeting between North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Trump in Singapore on June 12. Mr. Trump canceled the meeting last week, only to revive its possibility just as abruptly.

For his part, Mr. Kim met again with South Korea’s leader, Moon Jae-in, above right, who said Mr. Kim was determined to meet Mr. Trump and was committed to “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula.

The U.S. negotiators want to determine what “denuclearization” means to the North Koreans, and how it might happen. Negotiating those questions would normally take months, but Mr. Trump is in a rush. After a White House official told reporters that June 12 was too early for a meeting, Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that the official was a fake person invented by The New York Times. (The official was from the White House, and gave an anonymous briefing to scores of journalists.)

Mr. Kim may also be eager for a deal, our reporter writes, so he can deliver on the prosperity he’s been promising to North Koreans.

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• Ireland voted decisively to repeal a ban on abortions, one of the most restrictive in the world, ending an era in which thousands of women each year had been forced to travel abroad or illegally buy pills online to terminate pregnancies.

By the time all the votes in the referendum were counted on Saturday, the “yes” camp had taken more than 66 percent of the vote, according to the official tally. The government has said it will pass legislation by the end of the year to allow unrestricted terminations up to 12 weeks.

The push to overturn the ban was prompted by the death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012 from an infection contracted after she was denied an abortion during a miscarriage.

Major tech companies took steps to prevent foreign meddling online before the voters cast ballots. Here’s how those efforts worked.

Pope Francis, who seems resigned that a devout and Catholic Europe has largely slipped into the church’s past, has shifted his focus to the global South.

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• An anticorruption group says Russia’s World Cup stadium construction — costing more than $11 billion — became another means for the Kremlin to reward favored oligarchs.

Some of the six stadiums resemble ships and a flying saucer. In one city, a 35,000-seat stadium, above, will eventually be used by a soccer team that draws an average of 4,000 spectators. “The Forbes list is growing longer,” said a resident.

Meanwhile, one of Russia’s most famous paintings was badly damaged when a man who was drunk attacked it with a pole.

And in Italy, the last painting damaged during a deadly Mafia car bombing in 1993 was restored and returned to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

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• President Trump escalated his confrontation with the nation’s top law enforcement agencies, accusing the F.B.I. of placing a “spy” inside his 2016 campaign.

Our reporters in Washington write that the confrontation has no precedent in the modern era, and holds great stakes for the autonomy of law enforcement investigations.

Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin of Russia hosted the leaders of France and Japan in St. Petersburg, where they showed unity in their criticism of Mr. Trump’s recent moves.

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• Filthy egg farms and rotting chicken corpses.

Scorned by French lawmakers, an animal welfare group is stepping up a campaign of guerrilla tactics, releasing clandestine videos of mistreatment and appalling conditions in an attempt to shock Parliament into action.

“Our goal is to make progress one step at a time,” a founder of the organization said. Above, the group’s supporters demanded the closing of slaughterhouses during a march in Paris last June.

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• Europe’s next privacy battle is over legislation that’s even stricter than the recently enacted G.D.P.R. It would protect the confidentiality of electronic communications — and the tech industry is fighting hard to quash it.

• Since the U.S. pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and announced new sanctions, big European companies are weighing whether to rapidly end operations in Iran, leaving many executives angry.

• France and Germany are pushing for an E.U.-wide initiative to fund technology innovation and research so Europe can compete with China and the U.S.

• Alexa, no! Amazon explained how an Echo device mistakenly recorded a married couple’s private conversation, then sent it to one of the husband’s employees.

• Reset your router now. Hoping to thwart malware linked to Russia, the F.B.I. has made an urgent request to anybody with one of the devices: Turn it off, and then turn it back on.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

• Italy’s designated prime minister failed to form a government, thrusting the country back into uncertainty — and potential new elections. [The New York Times]

• Four Russians were killed in Syria in an hourlong firefight with the Islamic State, which lost 43 militants, according to the Russian government. [The New York Times]

• After the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was delayed because of a sexual harassment scandal, the director of the Nobel Foundation said there might not be an award next year, either. [The New York Times]

• Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain faces a showdown with ministers and lawmakers in her Conservative party after she declined to support an overhaul of Northern Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion rules. [Reuters]

• In Berlin, around 5,000 supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany were outnumbered by 20,000 opponents in counterdemonstrations. [Deutsche Welle]

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

• The case for having a hobby.

• The best road trip snacks, ranked.

• Recipe of the day: Tonight, grill a large salmon fillet, then adorn it with lemon wedges and rosemary sprigs.

• Scientists see promise in resurrecting the northern white rhinoceros, above, which is near extinction. But even if the technology can succeed, should we do it?

• “Fatherland,” a play now on stage in London, is an ambitious, genre-defying work that brings together interviews about what it means to be a parent, enlivened with music and dance.

• A CNN reporter went to interview Morgan Freeman. She tells us how the story become much bigger than that.

Tennis was once the sport of kings. With the first round of the French Open underway, here’s a look at tennis’s royal history in France.

Modern tennis evolved from jeu de paume, or “game of the palm,” a sport favored by French and English monarchs alike. (This version of the game is now known as “real tennis,” and still has its devotees.)

French monarchs helped popularize the sport. One of the first courts in Paris was built at the Louvre by King Charles V, in 1368. Francis I, who ruled in the 1500s, was said to be an enthusiastic player and built courts throughout the country.

Charles IX called it “one of the most honorable, worthy and healthy exercises” in 1571. “Healthy” may be relative: King Louis X was believed to have died from a chill after a particularly strenuous game in 1316 (though some suspect poison was involved).

The sport declined in popularity during the reign of Louis XIV. Though he built a jeu de paume court at Versailles in the 1680s, he was reportedly not very good at it, and spent more of his time playing billiards.

France no longer has a monarchy, but the French Open still might: Rafael Nadal, the Spaniard known as the king of clay, is seeking an unprecedented 11th title this year.

Jillian Rayfield wrote today’s Back Story.

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