Brexit, Trump, Serbia: Your Friday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/briefing/brexit-trump-serbia-your-friday-briefing.html

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British business braces for impact, President Trump gives an interview to The Times, and European teenagers become a protest vanguard. Here’s the latest:

Companies across Britain, faced with confusion around the country’s pending departure from the E.U., have been stockpiling products, making backup plans and exploring new shipping routes. International banks are shifting thousands of jobs from Britain to the Continent.

“It’s meant extra resources, extra overtime, to get it done,” said one executive. “It’s incredibly annoying.”

By the numbers: Britain’s economy is 2.3 percent smaller than it would have been if voters in 2016 had opted to remain in the E.U., according to one research institution. And investment in the auto sector was found to have plunged by almost 50 percent in 2018.

What’s next? Parliament remains mired in disagreement and the E.U. disinclined to reopen matters. Sixty days out from the March 29 deadline to leave the bloc, uncertainty is spreading.

Come again? As a BBC anchor ended an evening news program by saying, “Theresa May says she intends to go back to Brussels to renegotiate her Brexit deal,” the screen showed grainy images of World War II planes that appeared to be Spitfires. Watch here.

President Trump told our reporters in an 85-minute interview on Thursday that negotiations with Congress over his border wall were a “waste of time” and that he would proceed without lawmakers. This weekend he will retreat to Mar-a-Lago — his gilded club where all is well.

Russia investigation: Mr. Trump denied an account by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that late in the 2016 presidential campaign he was still discussing a project to build a Trump-branded skyscraper in Moscow. He also claimed that his lawyers had been reassured by the outgoing deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, that the president himself is not a target of the special counsel, Robert Mueller. Here are five takeaways from what Mr. Trump said.

Trade: Mr. Trump spoke immediately after wrapping up a session with China’s visiting vice premier in which the president said they had made progress toward defusing the trade war.

In other Washington news: The Senate voted to pass nonbinding bipartisan legislation that objects to Mr. Trump’s withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and Syria, the second time in two months that the Senate has rebuked the president’s foreign policy.

“Police investigators, tax officers, pro-government tabloids” have become the hammers of President Aleksandar Vucic and his populist, conservative Serbian Progressive Party. That was the testimony to the Council in Europe in November of Nebojsa Zelenovic, the mayor of Sabac, one of the few places not controlled by the governing party.

Serbia has become a live wire of contradictions running through Mr. Vucic, a former information minister for the strongman Slobodan Milosevic who rebranded himself as a moderate. He faces intense protests as he both strives for E.U. membership and celebrates President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

In an interview with The Times, he painted the protest movement as agitation against his risky plan to settle over Kosovo, and against E.U. membership. Mr. Zelenovic countered that “beneath that European surface, Vucic is a dictator.”

Big picture: Last year, Borko Stefanovic, an opposition politician who speaks out about the overlap between government and organized crime, was attacked by three men and beaten viciously. He survived, and a protest movement of tens of thousands grew from early December to resist Mr. Vuvic and push pro-democratic measures.

Quote: “I think that we belong to a very democratic society,” Mr. Vuvic said with characteristic calm.

A loose-knit environmental movement has emerged in Europe over the past several weeks, and it’s driven by young people.

Details: Tens of thousands of students skipped school in Belgium on Thursday to join demonstrations for action against climate change, the fourth consecutive Thursday of such action.

Protests have sprung almost spontaneously from social media in France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and elsewhere. The inspiration of much of it is Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swede who has called for school strikes against global warming.

Impact: After meeting with climate activists this week, Prime Minister Charles Michel of Belgium said he was prepared to act, but he also alluded to the financial concerns of the “Yellow Vest” movement in France — a sign of tensions in Europe between fighting global warming on the one hand and economic troubles on the other.

Italy: The country officially went into recession, and Europe as a whole is essentially at an economic standstill, a possible signal that the world is headed for a significant slowdown.

India: The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which came into power five years ago vowing to create millions of jobs, has been accused of suppressing an official report on unemployment that apparently showed it had reached a 45-year high in 2017.

E.U.-Iran relations: After months of delay, Britain, France and Germany unveiled a way to continue doing business with Iran despite U.S. sanctions. It is unclear when the vehicle, a new company called Instex, for bartering, will become operational.

Trump Organization: A slate of Brazilian investors have been arrested and charged with diverting pension money into a Trump-branded hotel project in Rio de Janeiro, from which the Trump campaign exited in December 2016 because of what it called construction delays. An international arrest warrant will be issued for the project’s mastermind, Paulo Figueiredo Filho — the grandson of the last dictator in the authoritarian government that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

Soccer and social justice: An increasing number of powerful sports executives have called for the release of a Bahrain-born soccer player, Hakeem al-Araibi, who has refugee status in Australia but has been detained in Thailand since late November. And in Britain, soccer clubs and their fans have emerged as an unlikely and vital resource for local food banks.

11 days offline: Tonga, a remote island northeast of New Zealand, was forced into digital darkness after an underwater fiber-optic cable was severed on Jan. 20, cutting off internet connections, international calls and even credit card payments. Repairs are underway, and some connectivity has trickled back.

Tips for a more fulfilling life.

Recipe of the day: End the week with a glass of red wine and an Italian-American classic: pasta alla vodka.

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On this day in 1786, a Briton living in India delivered a discourse on a little-known proposition: that Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, Greek and other languages might have a common source.

The commentary set off the field of comparative linguistics. Its fruits are known today as the concept of Proto-Indo-European, a mother language for dozens of tongues. The idea revolutionized not only the study of language, but also the sense of human history.

The man who delivered the talk, Sir William Jones, was, predictably, a student of languages and culture. Less predictably, he was in India because he was also a legal expert — the same reason he ultimately became convinced of his theory.

He arrived many decades before the Raj, or British government rule. The British East India Company was increasing its control over territories where it had long traded. Some of the company’s officials wanted British justices like Jones to supervise the administration of Indian courts; translations from Sanskrit to English were crucial to that effort.

Jones’s work with translators enabled his remarkable insights.

Andrea Kannapell, the briefings editor, wrote today’s Back Story.

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