Climate Change, Brexit, Virginia: Your Thursday Briefing
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Version 0 of 1. (Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.) Good morning. NASA measured an exceptionally hot 2018 for the planet, Britain has gone pleading to Brussels, and Democrats moved to investigate President Trump. Here’s the latest: NASA scientists announced that Earth’s average surface temperature for 2018 was more than one degree Celsius above the average of the late 19th century, when humans started pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That puts the year among the hottest in nearly 140 years of record keeping. The trend is unmistakable. The last five years have been the five warmest on record. “We’re no longer talking about a situation where global warming is something in the future,” said the director of the group that conducted the analysis. “It’s here. It’s now.” Analysis: What sets the warming apart from long climatic fluctuations of the geologic past is its relative suddenness and its clear correlation with increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. Interactive: You can see how your city’s temperatures stacked up in 2018. A reminder: To avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, scientists have said that global temperatures must not rise by more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Even an increase of 1.5 degrees will be dire, a U.N. report has found. But despite a global climate compact, it appears likely that Earth’s temperatures will ascend beyond the two-degree threshold. Britain’s prime minister will sit down with senior E.U. officials in Brussels and try to persuade them to do what they say they will not: renegotiate Brexit. Even before she boarded the plane, things did not augur well. Outraging some in Britain, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said there was a “special place in hell” for those who promoted leaving the bloc without offering a plan on how to do so. The day ahead: Mrs. May will meet senior figures like Mr. Tusk and seek help in salvaging the plan that she negotiated with the E.U., but which Britain’s Parliament resoundingly defeated last month. Under pressure from hard-liners, Mrs. May wants to alter the so-called Irish backstop. But E.U. officials have expressed little interest in her ideas for amending it, and an analyst predicted that the talks would be “wheel-spinning.” A day after President Trump denounced “ridiculous partisan investigations” in his State of the Union speech, Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that the House Democrats wouldn’t back down from holding his administration accountable. “It’s our congressional responsibility, and if we didn’t do it, we would be delinquent in that,” she said. Fellow Democrats immediately pushed ahead with several inquiries, including one focused on Mr. Trump’s tax returns. Analysis: His speech depicted socialism as a menace, alluding to both Venezuela and Democrats — a trope that could become a rhetorical touchstone in his 2020 campaign. Go deeper: Democrats’ resurgence was on full display during the address, our chief Washington correspondent writes. And the internet saw a clapback, above. In the last two weeks, thousands of people — many severely injured — have been streaming out of the Syrian village of Baghuz, the last dot of land under Islamic State control in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State, which once ruled a dominion the size of Britain, is sequestered to an area about the size of Central Park. But collapse has not meant the group’s end. It still has thousands of fighters in the region and flourishing offshoots overseas, including in the Philippines and Nigeria. On the ground: Islamic State fighters in Baghuz are surrounded, and even veteran militants are giving up. Families of militants say they have been reduced to eating a weed that grows in highway medians. American officials said that a request by the Islamic State for safe passage out of the village was still on the table. Looking ahead: In a speech to international diplomats, Mr. Trump said he expected to announce soon that the U.S. and its partners will have reclaimed all of the Islamic State’s territory in Syria. Siemens: The E.U. antitrust authorities blocked the German company’s plans to merge its train unit with Alstom of France. The deal had been pitched as a counterbalance to China’s entry into the European market. Russia: In response to the Trump administration’s scrapping a Cold War-era arms control treaty, President Vladimir Putin warned that his country was working on developing new “hypersonic” missiles that could travel more than five times the speed of sound. Some experts see a bluff. NATO: The country now known as North Macedonia was formally invited to become NATO’s 30th member, an accession that could be complete by year’s end. U.S. politics: The attorney general of Virginia, the state’s third-highest official, acknowledged that he had worn blackface at a party as an undergraduate student, an admission that followed the disclosure of a racist photograph on the yearbook page of Gov. Ralph Northam. The crisis for the state’s Democratic Party extended to the second-highest state official, the lieutenant governor, whom a woman has accused of sexual assault. Afghanistan: After two days of talks in Moscow, the Taliban and prominent Afghan politicians said they had charted a course for ending the country’s war, which is in its 18th year. But the Afghan government was not represented in the talks, which may limit their effectiveness. Greece: Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was welcomed to a renowned Orthodox seminary near Istanbul that Turkey forced to close 48 years ago, a visit that raised hopes for a broader thaw between the usually antagonistic Greece and Turkey. 21 Savage: As Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved to deport the detained rapper from the U.S. — a country to which his lawyer said he was brought at 7 — the internet homed in on his status as a native of Britain. Britain: A judge ordered suspended sentences and community service for a group known as the Stansted 15, who were charged last year after breaking into Stansted Airport, north of London, to ground a flight deporting migrants. Real doctor, or fake? Matteo Politi, going under the name Matthew Mode, posted videos of himself appearing to be a high-rolling plastic surgeon in Romania. Now he is under arrest there amid accusations that he is not a real doctor. Did a seal eat your thumb drive? A biologist in New Zealand discovered a USB drive in the feces of a leopard seal and is trying to find the owner of the vacation photos and videos on the memory stick. Tips for a more fulfilling life. Recipe of the day: Treat yourself to a homemade bistro dinner with blue-cheese hanger steak and endive-herb salad. Pillows, throws, trays and bowls make a more inviting living room. Strenuous exercise may protect our heart from some of the problems it helps cause. A recent letter to the editor took The Times to task for not running enough letters from women. We asked one of the letters editors, Sue Mermelstein, to explain how The Times responded. The fact that our letters page skews male is something we’ve struggled with. A letter from Kimberly Probolus gave us a perfect opportunity to address it. When we published it, we also urged more women to write, and committed to work toward parity. We’ve already seen an uptick in correspondence from women that has been thoughtful and telling. “It has never occurred to me that someone would want to hear my voice,” one said. Women and men alike expressed concern that we might begin selecting letters on the basis of gender rather than merit. We won’t, but we are inviting letters from a broader range of readers, via newsletters like this one, the Reader Center and The Times’s social media. This weekend we plan to publish readers’ thoughts on why women are underrepresented in opinion pages. Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings. Check out this page to find a Morning Briefing for your region. (In addition to our European edition, we have Australian, Asian and U.S. editions.) Sign up here to receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights, and here’s our full range of free newsletters. What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes.com. |