Trade War, Brazil, Taylor Swift: Your Friday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/briefing/trade-war-brazil-taylor-swift.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. President Trump demanded that U.S. companies leave China after Beijing threatened new tariffs on $75 billion of American goods. He also said he would increase tariffs on all Chinese products.

In a series of angry tweets, Mr. Trump said American companies are “hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing our companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” It was not clear how the president planned to enforce his demands.

U.S. stocks fell more than 2 percent over Mr. Trump’s comments, highlighting the uncertainty stoked by the escalating trade war. The Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, said the central bank was limited in its ability to offset Mr. Trump’s trade policies. The president responded, “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?”

Mr. Trump heads to France tonight for the Group of 7 meeting, where protesters are already active, above.

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2. Brazil’s president said he would send in the military to contain a rash of fires in the Amazon after being largely dismissive about the blazes, amid intense domestic and international scorn.

The president, Jair Bolsonaro, received a rare rebuke from President Emmanuel Macron of France in which he accused Mr. Bolsonaro of lying about climate change. Mr. Macron also threatened to walk away from a Europe-South America trade agreement over the matter.

Mr. Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany both said that the Amazon fires should be added to the agenda of the Group of 7 summit this weekend. Summit organizers tried to avoid any reaction from President Trump by prewriting the meeting’s formal policy agreement and keeping it from the American president until the last minute.

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3. The billionaire David Koch, who helped reshape American politics with a money-fueled brand of libertarianism, has died at 79.

Mr. Koch was worth about $42 billion, including a 42 percent stake in his family’s chemical and fossil fuels conglomerate. He and his brother Charles Koch helped to bankroll the Tea Party movement, funded initiatives to undercut climate science, and strengthened the far-right wing of the Republican Party.

Within cultural circles, he was known for his generous support for the arts and various New York institutions, like Lincoln Center, above, donating hundreds of millions of dollars. But it’s no longer clear that cultural boards will remain such safe zones, given the recent debates over donors who made fortunes selling opioids and munitions.

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4. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was treated for a malignant tumor on her pancreas, the Supreme Court said. The health of the 86-year-old justice, the senior member of the court’s four-member liberal wing, has been a subject of concern over the past year.

Justice Ginsburg’s most recent treatment lasted three weeks. “The tumor was treated definitively and there is no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body,” the court said in a statement, adding that no further treatment was needed at this time.

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5. In one of the most conservative regions of the country, the fight against abortion is personal, not political.

As the anti-abortion movement wields more power than it has in decades, we visited East Tennessee to see how one anti-abortion Christian pregnancy center reaches out to pregnant women and parents of young children.

“When I see people that are living in poverty, I don’t look at it like, those people shouldn’t have a kid because they aren’t going to take care of it,” the director of the center said, pictured above left. “I look at it as, those people aren’t in a good situation, how can we help them be in a better situation, with or without a kid.”

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6. “They had been made black by those who believed themselves to be white. And where they were headed, black equaled slave.”

We’re introducing a special audio series, “1619,” which is a companion piece to our exploration about the legacy of American slavery. In our first episode, the Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones goes back to the founding of America on the ideal of democracy — and how black people have fought to make it a reality. Above, the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

Listen here and read more from the project here.

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7. Our Opinion columnist visited 47 sites online. Hundreds of trackers followed him.

For the Privacy Project, Farhad Manjoo installed a special web browser that was created by privacy researchers to monitor how websites track users’ data.

“The big story is as you’d expect: that everything you do online is logged in obscene detail, that you have no privacy. And yet, even expecting this, I was bowled over by the scale and detail of the tracking.”

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8. A rare interleague series between the Yankees and the Dodgers this weekend offers more than fanfare — it’s a potential World Series preview.

Linked by New York history more than recent on-field meetings, the Yankees and the Dodgers will bring the best records in baseball into their weekend series in Los Angeles. The teams have met only 13 times in regular-season games, and last met in the World Series in 1981. Here’s what to expect. Above, Jackie Robinson beat the tag of Yogi Berra in 1955.

We’re also gearing up for coverage of the U.S. Open, which begins on Monday. We still don’t know if Serena Williams will play Maria Sharapova on Monday or Tuesday, but here are the players to watch in this year’s tournament.

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9. Taylor Swift has emerged from darkness.

“Lover,” her “reassuringly strong” seventh album, is “a palate cleanse, a recalibration and a reaffirmation of old strengths,” our music critic writes in his Critic’s Pick review. The pop star released 18 tracks featuring collaborators including the Dixie Chicks and St. Vincent, with production by her go-to collaborator Jack Antonoff.

There’s also new music from Missy Elliott, Thom Yorke and Jay Som. Our critics weigh in on this week’s Playlist.

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10. And finally, in defense of gulls.

Gulls get a bad rap — they may swarm your beaches and steal French fries, some of which you’ve read about in this space. But our science reporter is here to speak for the birds: They co-parent, and are smart and resourceful survivors. That sandwich they took out of your hands? Gulls are pushy for food because they’re such committed parents, one veterinarian said.

“If you give them a little time and devote your attention to them you will see this great intelligence behind that eye and this caginess, and this generalist sensibility that I think is very relatable to a human,” she added. “Because it’s kind of the same way we go through the world.”

Have a high-flying weekend.

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