Spain, Cryptocurrency, France: Your Monday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/29/briefing/spain-cryptocurrency-france.html

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Good morning. Venezuelans head to Madrid, cryptocurrencies look for a home country and France faces new anti-Semitism.

Here’s the latest:

• As their country faces economic ruin and dizzying inflation, wealthy Venezuelans have found a safe haven for them and their money across the Atlantic, in Madrid.

The Spanish city’s housing prices surged about 17 percent last year, raising the cost of living downtown to a level not seen in a decade. It’s estimated that over 7,000 luxury apartments are now owned by Venezuelans in one neighborhood alone.

Many are opponents of President Nicolás Maduro, but some are linked to his government and fear what international sanctions and social unrest will mean for their livelihoods. Above, Venezuelans protesting against Mr. Maduro in Madrid.

“We’re here as survivors who know that the bridges to our home country have probably been burned,” one Venezuelan businessman said.

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• Hedge funds go to the Cayman Islands to incorporate. Online poker companies often set up shop in Gibraltar and Malta. Where will the cryptocurrencies go?

With their eyes on blockchain jobs and revenue, small countries and territories are competing to become the go-to destinations for entrepreneurs and projects.

Bermuda, Malta, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein have recently passed laws, or have legislation in the works, to make themselves more welcoming to cryptocurrency companies.

“The largest issue blockchain companies have is not knowing how they’ll be governed or regulated,” the founder of a new cryptocurrency said. “Those markets that have made the rules clear have found many companies coming to play by the rules.”

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• “They spit when I walked in the street.”

In what commentators call the new anti-Semitism, Jewish groups and academic researchers are tracing a wave of anti-Semitic acts to France’s growing Muslim population. One attack included the killing of an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll, in her Paris apartment by an assailant who shouted, “Allahu akbar.” Above, a memorial outside of her apartment.

The issue is deeply complicated, touching on the country’s political, ethnic and religious fault lines.

Elsewhere in Europe, one Swedish woman’s act of defiance cast a harsh light on Europe’s deportations of asylum seekers.

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• China is going to the dark side of the moon — from Argentina.

Our correspondent went to Patagonia to examine a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.

The isolated base, he writes, is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future — often in ways that directly undermine Washington’s strategic power in the region.

• The E.U.’s top court ruled that gene-edited crops must be regulated as genetically modified organisms, a decision that could have a global impact, some scientists say.

• A British panel investigating Russia’s exploitation of social media to influence elections is accusing Facebook of providing “disingenuous answers” to some questions while avoiding others “to the point of obstruction.”

• Headlines to watch this week: The E.U. will publish an estimate of its economic growth, and Apple will release its earnings report while trade tensions loom.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

• An 11-year-old girl’s marriage to a 41-year-old man — the father of her best friend, above — has reignited debate in Malaysia about the persistence of an age-old Islamic practice. [The New York Times]

• The death toll from a wildfire that raged in a coastal town outside of Athens was raised to 91. An additional 25 people are still missing nearly a week after Greece’s greatest tragedy in a decade. [Associated Press]

• A Palestinian teenager jailed for slapping an Israeli soldier was released. She received a hero’s welcome in her village. [The New York Times]

• A polar bear was shot and killed after it attacked and injured a guard from a cruise ship on a Norwegian island. Its killing drew fierce condemnation on social media. [The New York Times]

• The New York Times’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, disputed President Trump’s account of a meeting between the two and said he told Mr. Trump that his attacks on journalism were dangerous. [The New York Times]

• Geraint Thomas, a Welshman with Team Sky, claimed his first Tour de France victory on Sunday. He was met with Champagne and thousands of fans along the Champs Élysées. [Associated Press]

Tips for a more fulfilling life.

• Tired of paying a big tax to leave Britain? Here’s how to avoid it. (Above, tourists on the London Eye.)

• Don’t let your phone ruin your vacation.

• Recipe of the day: Keep things simple tonight with a lovely dinner of pasta, green beans, potatoes and pesto.

• The Hoover Dam was a public works project likened to the pyramids. Now, engineers want to turn the dam, which straddles the Colorado River in Nevada and Arizona, into a vast reservoir of excess electricity.

• In his photographs of East London, Chris Dorley-Brown achieves the near-impossible: marrying past, present and future in a single frame. We take a look at his new book in The New York Times Magazine.

• Beyoncé is on a world tour with her husband, Jay-Z, and our chief fashion critic has been following her onstage outfits with some fascination. “She doesn’t really treat fashion like any other celebrity,” Vanessa Friedman writes. “It serves her, rather than the other way around.”

“We rise from the perusal of ‘Wuthering Heights’ as if we had come fresh from a pest-house,” an appalled critic wrote when the book was published in 1847.

Other reviewers deemed it “coarse” or “repulsive.”

Its author, Emily Brontë, born 200 years ago today in Thornton, England, died of tuberculosis at 30, a year after publishing her tale of quasi-incestuous love between the savage (yet irresistibly compelling) Heathcliff and the selfish (but beautiful) Catherine. She would never see her novel, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, become the template for a thousand future romance stories.

Today there are some 60 translations and multiple film versions of “Wuthering Heights,” including in Japanese and Spanish (directed by Luis Buñuel).

Emily, the middle of three literary Brontë sisters (Charlotte wrote “Jane Eyre”), rarely left home and had few friends. Naïve, stubborn and prickly, she gravitated to animals and the Yorkshire moors, above circa 1940, where “Wuthering Heights” is set. She was both a novelist and poet.

She was also, noted Virginia Woolf, a genius on a par with Jane Austen, writing without fear of what the male-dominated literary world might think.

“I have never seen her parallel in anything,” Charlotte Brontë reflected after Emily died in 1848. “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.”

Nancy Wartik wrote today’s Back Story.

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