Your Thursday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/briefing/brexit-syria-president-trump.html

Version 0 of 1.

Good morning.

We’re covering the winding road to Brexit and the last-minute talks that could make or break an Oct. 31 departure. We also look at President Trump’s lashing-out over Syria and a place where pugs rule.

Brexit talks continued late into the night, with Donald Tusk, the European Council president, and Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, offering different takes on whether an agreement might be reached.

Little time remains to strike a deal that can be voted on when European heads of state arrive in Brussels today, and then be approved by Britain’s Parliament in a special session on Saturday — if the country is to leave the bloc by Oct. 31, as Mr. Johnson insists will happen.

Progress: Hopes rose as Mr. Tusk said the “basic foundations of an agreement are ready” and President Emmanuel Macron of France voiced optimism as well.

But there were mixed signals, with the leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party saying there was much work to be done. (Mr. Johnson needs the party’s support to get a deal through Parliament.) Mr. Johnson himself compared the negotiations to climbing Mount Everest, saying the peak was still “shrouded in mist.”

Strategy: The E.U. may be extracting concessions from Mr. Johnson with the knowledge that his worst-case scenario would be a delay (he once said he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than postpone Brexit).

Democratic leaders walked out of a White House meeting about the worsening situation in Syria on Wednesday, after President Trump repeatedly insulted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Separately, The Times obtained a letter from last week in which Mr. Trump warned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey against an invasion: “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!”

Bipartisan rebuke: Earlier Wednesday, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats in the House in condemning Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria.

Mr. Trump, for his part, essentially washed his hands of the Turkish assault on America’s Kurdish allies there, saying, “That has nothing to do with us. The Kurds know how to fight, and, as I said, they’re not angels, they’re not angels.”

On the ground: Mr. Erdogan urged the Kurds to lay down their arms. And Vice President Mike Pence will lead a delegation today to Turkey, where he hopes to convince the president to pull back his offensive.

Closed-door testimony to House investigators this week has a theme: President Trump went his own way on Ukraine, whose leaders he urged to investigate his Democratic rivals.

Today, Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, testified that he quit because career diplomats had been sidelined, and said he was disappointed with how politicized the State Department had become under Mr. Trump.

And we learned that Fiona Hill, a former top White House foreign policy adviser, testified on Monday that she saw Gordon Sondland — a Trump donor who was named ambassador to the European Union — as a potential national security risk because of his inexperience.

Mr. Sondland, who played a role in the administration’s dealings with Ukraine, is scheduled to meet with impeachment investigators today.

President Rodrigo Duterte refers to journalists as “spies,” “vultures” and “lowlifes.” His wish, he has said, is to “kill journalism” in the Philippines. Maria Ressa, above, the editor of the independent news site Rappler, has incurred much of the president’s wrath, becoming the target of almost a dozen civil and criminal cases in the past year and a half.

“It’s a strange time,” she said. “It’s definitely existential.”

Russia: Three American diplomats were removed from a train heading to an Arctic town near the site of a recent nuclear accident, Russian news agencies reported on Wednesday.

Big tech: The E.U.’s top antitrust regulator ordered Broadcom to halt potentially anticompetitive practices while an investigation is underway, applying a rarely used rule.

Opioids: The three largest drug distributors in the U.S. are in negotiations to settle thousands of cases related to the opioid epidemic. They agreed on a framework that includes a settlement worth nearly $50 billion in cash and addiction treatments.

Harry Dunn: The parents of the British 19-year-old killed in an August crash went to the White House, where President Trump apparently surprised them with the news that the American driver involved — Anne Sacoolas, a diplomat’s wife — was in a nearby room and wanted to meet with them. (They declined.)

Snapshot: Above, a pug running a race in Hamburg. Known as “mops” in Germany, the dogs have a cultlike status there. Owners gather regularly to swap stories and let the dogs compete to see who’s fastest — or slowest.

What we’re listening to: This episode of the podcast “The Cut on Tuesday,” about a young woman’s late-night Lyft ride that went horribly, mysteriously wrong. “Our lives feel more convenient and polished with apps like Uber, Lyft and Seamless,” writes Jenna Wortham, a co-host of our “Still Processing” podcast. “But they can also make us susceptible to harm in more ways than we can imagine.”

Cook: Make burritos in the style of San Francisco’s Mission District, in the comfort of your home.

Read: In her satisfying new novel, “Olive, Again,” Elizabeth Strout brings back her irascible character Olive Kitteridge, as she revisits a town full of Yankee souls pondering lives of quiet desperation.

Listen: Best friends in real life, the actors Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey came up with the idea for a podcast about “The Office” so they could work together again.

Watch: With a new “Addams Family” movie in theaters, here’s a look at how Wednesday, one of the family’s most popular members, has been depicted over the years.

Smarter Living: Cancer treatments have advanced, but many still take a serious toll on patients. New guidelines published this week suggest a little exercise — brisk walks and moderate weight lifting — can go a long way to helping people feel better. Exercising during and after treatment is associated with longer life spans, researchers found, and also seems to decrease anxiety and depression.

And we have five tips for keeping it together as a digital nomad.

The Korean Central News Agency is North Korea’s media producer, controller and disseminator.

One of its main roles is keeping the country’s 25 million people informed about exactly what the totalitarian leadership wants them to know.

It portrays the North as powerful, well regarded and prosperous, while insulting and threatening perceived enemies in sometimes bizarre wording involving boiled pumpkins and seas of fire.

And it showcases no end of heroic images of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, like the one of him on horseback released Wednesday.

KCNA was founded in 1946, the year after Korea was divided along the 38th parallel at the end of World War II. U.S. forces occupied what became South Korea, and Soviet forces moved into what became the North.

The Soviet propaganda machine, well practiced at lionizing Joseph Stalin, polished up the image of the leader installed in the North: Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un.

KCNA followed the model and has been instrumental in creating a cult of personality around each of the leaders from the Kim dynasty.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Melina

Thank youTo Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. Andrea Kannapell, the Briefings editor, wrote today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S.• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is on the Democratic presidential debate. • Here’s today’s Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: Woman “with the good hair” on Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • “I actually hate the word content,” A.G. Sulzberger, The Times’s publisher, said in a profile in Time magazine. “What we do is journalism.”