Carlos Ghosn, Saudi Arabia, Brexit: Your Tuesday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/briefing/carlos-ghosn-saudi-arabia-brexit.html

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Good morning. A stunning arrest at Nissan, tech stocks tumble and Marseille is rife with unstable buildings.

Here’s the latest:

• Nissan’s chairman is arrested.

An internal investigation found that Carlos Ghosn, above, one of the auto industry’s most high-profile executives, underreported his compensation to the Japanese government for several years.

A director at the company, Greg Kelly, was also accused of financial misconduct and arrested. Nissan recommended that both be removed from their positions.

Mr. Ghosn, a French citizen, arrived at Nissan in 1999 after the French carmaker Renault bought a large stake in the Japanese company. He was widely hailed for saving it from financial collapse through cost-sharing and the elimination of 21,000 jobs. But he has had bitter pay disputes with the French government, a major Renault shareholder.

Nissan’s investigation into Mr. Ghosn began after a whistle-blower said he had been misrepresenting his salary and using company assets for personal purposes.

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• Bosnia as a warning to the world.

Though long at peace, the Bosnian city of Mostar has two of everything: fire brigades, garbage collection companies, hospitals, nightclubs and soccer teams. The city’s two main ethnic groups, Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats, rarely interact. Above, tourists at a Franciscan monastery there.

These persistent ethnonationalist fissures are paralyzing the country at large, which has been run by three elected presidents — one each for Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims — since the 1995 agreement that halted Europe’s worst conflict since World War II.

As Europe and the U.S. struggle with the rise of ethnic nationalism, Bosnia’s divisions offer a dark lesson in how communities can stay splintered long after many people have forgotten what it was that pushed them apart.

“You are looking at your own future here,” a scholar in Bosnia told us.

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• A studied silence.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia, above, made no mention of the international outrage toward the kingdom in his first public remarks since Saudi agents killed the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month.

He also stood by his son and chosen successor, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the C.I.A. has concluded ordered the killing. In his annual address to the Shura Council, the kingdom’s advisory assembly, King Salman showed no intention of sidelining the prince.

Meanwhile, Germany imposed sanctions on 18 Saudis suspected of involvement and froze arms exports to the kingdom, and the Turkish defense minister suggested that Mr. Khashoggi’s killers left the country with his body.

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• A “French Detroit.”

Marseille is the second-largest city in France and one of Europe’s poorest, and it has an infrastructural problem of vast proportions: 10 percent of its buildings were deemed unsafe in a 2015 government report. That’s 40,000 dwellings affecting 100,000 residents.

The issue gained new urgency this month when the collapse of two buildings killed eight people. Last week, thousands of protesters marched against the powerful mayor, even calling him a murderer.

Above, a tenant in one of the buildings who was left homeless.

Now the local government is playing catch-up, evacuating more than 1,000 residents from crumbling apartments as others walk up quaking staircases and jolt awake at night at the slightest vibration.

• Shares of the giant tech companies tumbled on Monday, pushing major stock market indexes into negative territory for the month. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft were all down more than 3 percent.

• Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain has been embraced by business leaders since unveiling her draft deal for Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U., mostly because business is hungry for any deal that means an orderly departure.

• Uber is trying to make a comeback in Germany, after run-ins with regulators forced it to retreat in 2015.

• China’s walled-off internet, which was widely predicted to fail, has instead thrived. We explore why as part of “China Rules,” a special report.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

• Global warming could cause as many as six simultaneous climate-related disasters in some parts of the world by the end of the century, researchers say. Above, the remains of a house after Hurricane Michael hit Florida last month. [The New York Times]

• Airbnb suspended listings at settlements in the West Bank, causing an uproar in Israel. [The New York Times]

• Britain is investigating the credentials of thousands of foreign physicians after a woman from New Zealand was found to have used a false qualification for decades. [The New York Times]

• Four people were shot dead at a hospital in downtown Chicago, including the shooter. [The New York Times]

• The Trump administration gave back the press pass of the CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta. [The New York Times]

• Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s daughter and one of his senior advisers, repeatedly used her personal email account for official business, a White House review found. [The New York Times]

• Progress against malaria has stalled, and the disease remains a significant threat to billions of people despite the expensive, decades-long efforts to contain it, the World Health Organization said. [The New York Times]

• An Italian town that set up a speed camera caught almost 60,000 offenders in just two weeks. [BBC News]

Tips for a more fulfilling life.

• Recipe of the day: Get into baking with no-knead bread.

• You only need four words to break the ice in any conversation.

• Tiny closets? Maximize your space.

• Bask in books: The editors of The New York Times Book Review selected 100 notable books of 2018. They’re divided into 15 categories and are a great source of gift ideas.

• Or don’t get that gift. The holiday season is full of social obligations. Here’s how to get out of them.

• Six years after a Picasso painting was stolen from a Dutch museum, the author of a book about the heist received an anonymous tip: It was buried under a rock in Romania. She dug up a painting there, but is it the real deal?

The top end of the art market is booming.

At auctions last week, masterworks by Edward Hopper and David Hockney sold for more than $90 million each.

But these kinds of numbers aren’t so new, taking inflation into account.

Twenty years ago today, van Gogh’s “Portrait of the Artist Without His Beard” sold at Christie’s for $71.5 million — almost three times the high estimate.

At that time, it was the third-highest price for any artwork at auction.

The most expensive of all was van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” bought in 1990 by the Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito for $82.5 million.

With inflation, “Dr. Gachet” held that auction record for many years, the high point of the Japanese-driven Impressionist boom.

That was until last November, when “Salvator Mundi,” pictured above, a painting cataloged by Christie’s as a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450.3 million.

Compared to that stratospheric price, last week’s sales were relatively — very relatively — down to earth.

Scott Reyburn, our art market columnist in London, wrote today’s Back Story.

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