Trump, Pakistan, Macron: Your Tuesday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/briefing/trump-pakistan-macron.html

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Good morning. President Trump threatens Iran, a bodyguard scandal consumes France and Pakistanis head to the polls.

Here’s the latest:

• President Trump’s Twitter warning to Iran, delivered late Sunday in all capital letters, showed his determination to use the same approach to diplomacy that he took with North Korea. But Iran is far less likely to bend to such pressure.

The president’s threat of severe “consequences” for President Hassan Rouhani echoed his words last summer to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, whom he said faced “fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim held a summit meeting last month during which Mr. Kim made a general commitment to denuclearization. (Satellite imagery suggests that North Korea is taking an important step by dismantling a missile-engine test site.)

But Iran’s leadership is more complex, experts say, and Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers would rather topple the Iranian government than negotiate with it.

The president may have succeeded in changing the subject after a week of bad headlines about his meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. But it only deepened questions about Mr. Trump’s Iran policy and left the White House scrambling to explain the outburst.

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• A bodyguard scandal has become the biggest crisis of Emmanuel Macron’s young presidency.

The French leader’s critics are having a field day over a video of his security chief, Alexandre Benalla, beating up a May Day protester — and Mr. Macron’s refusal to answer questions about it. On Monday, an unusual parliamentary investigative commission interrogated the interior minister, Gérard Collomb, about his handling of the matter.

The “Benalla affair,” as it has become known, has undercut Mr. Macron’s efforts to connect with ordinary voters and shed his reputation as favoring the rich. Above, Mr. Macron during a visit to southwestern France last week.

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• Tens of millions of Pakistanis will go to the polls on Wednesday to elect a prime minister, transferring power from one civilian government to another for only the second time in the nation’s 70-year history. There are major concerns about whether the vote will be safe.

Above, supporters of a Pashtun civil rights movement displaying photographs of their missing relatives at a protest rally in Karachi.

The campaign has been marred by terrorist attacks, suppression of the news media, accusations of manipulation by the military and a rise in extremist candidates. Here’s a look at the main players.

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• Bears versus sheep.

In the high Pyrenees, the French government is trying to restore the centuries-old brown bear population, which approached extinction in the 1990s. But shepherds in the region see this “element of the natural heritage in the Pyrenees,” as the government puts it, as a menace.

The bears are killing their sheep in droves.

“It was like seeing your dog being eaten,” one farmer said of catching a bear devouring one of his flock.

• Portugal defied those who insisted that austerity was the solution to Europe’s financial crisis, and it’s having a major revival. Above, a drone used for collecting data in a field owned by Elaia, an olive oil business that has invested significantly in Portugal.

• Less than a week after the E.U. fined Google $5.1 billion for abusing its dominance in smartphones, the tech giant reported $3.2 billion in profit for its latest quarter.

• Tesla wants to reopen pricing agreements with some suppliers for work already underway. It called the practice routine, but the automaker is facing new questions over its finances.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

• A deadly shooting in Toronto that left two dead and 13 wounded was the latest in a series of attacks that have shocked the city and reignited a public debate on gun control. Above, friends of a victim at the scene of the shooting. [The New York Times]

• “I’m a German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.” Mesut Ozil, one of Germany’s most celebrated soccer stars, quit the national team, saying he was a victim of bigotry and hypocrisy. [The New York Times]

• In China, parents reacted with fury after reports that hundreds of thousands of children might have been injected with faulty vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. [The New York Times]

• Wildfires near Athens killed at least 20 people and injured more than 100 in the deadliest fire in Greece in more than a decade. [The Associated Press]

• Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser, has his sights set on Europe. He’s dreaming up a right-wing “supergroup” to gain a foothold in the European Parliament in elections next year. [BBC]

• Greece and Russia have long seen themselves as natural allies, but they have had a stunning falling-out over Russian meddling in Greek affairs, a Greek newspaper columnist writes in an Op-Ed. [The New York Times Opinion]

Tips for a more fulfilling life.

• Recipe of the day: When it’s too hot to turn on the stove, make a deluxe tuna salad, above.

• Five tips for a luxury trip to Istanbul for less.

• Ditch the tech and go back to a flip phone.

• At Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, scarred by civil war, researchers see a kind of living laboratory, an ongoing experiment in how nature recovers from disaster.

• An exhibit in Antwerp, Belgium, that juxtaposes 17th-century art with works from today is “an exercise in luster, mortality and timeline-smashing,” our reviewer writes.

• Do you skip the opening credits of TV shows? You shouldn’t, our chief television critic writes. A good title sequence, he says, is “a poem, a map, an invitation to join its storytellers.”

What would Bella Abzug have to say about this year’s midterm elections in the U.S. and the surge of female candidates running for office?

Abzug herself used gender-based words to her advantage when she was first elected to Congress in 1970 with the slogan “This woman’s place is in the House — the House of Representatives!”

The New Yorker, feminist, antiwar activist and lawyer was born on this day in the Bronx in 1920. She was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants from Russia.

Abzug, who represented the Upper West Side of Manhattan for three terms, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights, child care legislation and more. And she wasn’t quiet about it. Among her nicknames: “Hurricane Bella” and “Battling Bella.”

Abzug, who died in 1998, “brought with her a belligerent, exuberant politics that made her a national character.” People called her all kinds of things, including “a noisy woman” and a “man hater.” But Abzug was unapologetic.

“Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor,” Abzug once said. “It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.”

Claire Moses wrote today’s Back Story.

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