Brexit, New Zealand Volcano, Juice WRLD: Your Tuesday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/briefing/Brexit-New-Zealand-volcano-Juice-WRLD.html

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Good morning.

We’re covering peace talks over the war in Ukraine, Finland’s next prime minister and the women shaking up Italian literature.

In their first face-to-face meeting, Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine reached an agreement on Monday to exchange all prisoners by the end of the year, and to fully implement a cease-fire first agreed to in 2015 but repeatedly broken.

Mr. Zelensky has been under mounting domestic pressure from nationalists who accuse him of capitulating to Russia. But Monday’s meeting in Paris “turned out to be less a walkover for Mr. Putin than a draw,” our Moscow bureau chief writes in an analysis.

Details: The five-and-half-year war in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 13,000 combatants and civilians.

Next step: The two presidents — as well as President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, both of whom also attended Monday’s summit — agreed to meet again in four months.

The U.S. Justice Department said in a report on Monday that the F.B.I.’s inquiry into links between Russia and President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was rushed and dysfunctional. But it also said Mr. Trump’s claims about the report — that F.B.I. officials engaged in a politicized conspiracy to sabotage him — were unfounded.

The findings are fodder for both critics and allies of Mr. Trump to claim vindication. Attorney General William Barr, for one, said in a statement on Monday that the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation was based on the “thinnest of suspicions” and should never have been opened.

Impeachment: House Democrats signaled that they would unveil articles of impeachment today that charge President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

The president’s man: We have a profile of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a former mayor of New York City. Without his “push for money and frank yearning for relevance,” our reporters note, Mr. Trump’s Ukrainian initiative might never have amounted to much.

Today: Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, plans to meet with President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. Their conversation could include extending the last major nuclear treaty between the countries.

Two changes in prime minister, two general elections (including one on Thursday) and a parliamentary paralysis: The political shake-ups driven by Britain’s halting march toward Brexit are hard to miss.

But outside Westminster, the prospect of Brexit — and the continuing disagreement about whether a divorce from Europe is a good idea — has quietly brought a new level of uncertainty into ordinary people’s economic lives.

To illustrate this, our reporters spoke with people across the country — from a dairy farmer in Northern Ireland to a Polish software developer in London — to learn about their Brexit-related anxieties.

Sanna Marin, 34, is expected to be confirmed as Finland’s next prime minister as soon as today. That would make her the third woman to hold that office in the country and the world’s youngest sitting prime minister.

Ms. Marin’s new role is not surprising in a place where women’s representation in Parliament has been strong for decades. Analysts say it’s more significant that four of the five women in leading ministerial positions in Finland’s governing coalition are under 35.

What’s next: Ms. Marin, a left-leaning liberal and a former transportation minister, will be tested immediately as the country heads into a season of labor negotiations.

Opinion: A couple that moved to Helsinki from New York City explains why they’ve experienced an increase in personal freedom.

Novels by women have accounted for roughly half of Italy’s top 20 best sellers in fiction over the last two years — nearly double the percentage from 2017, according to one survey.

Some in the industry cite “the Ferrante effect,” a nod to how Elena Ferrante’s best-selling books are inspiring female novelists and shaking up the country’s male-dominated literary establishment.

Another factor, said the author Veronica Raimo, above, is that younger Italians are reading women in translation. “They know there are countries in which having someone like Jennifer Egan or Zadie Smith is normal,” she said.

Afghanistan: Thousands of pages of documents detailing the American war in Afghanistan, obtained by The Washington Post, paint a stark picture of missteps and failures — as well as misleading public statements about how the war was going. We look at what the U.S. got for its $2 trillion investment.

New Zealand: Rescuers were struggling to reach White Island, where a volcano erupted on Monday, leaving at least five people dead and eight more missing.

Russian doping: The World Anti-Doping Agency agreed unanimously to banish Russia from international sports, including next summer’s Olympics, for four years. But it left open the possibility that individual athletes could compete under a neutral flag.

France: More strikes and demonstrations are planned for today against the government’s plan to streamline a complex pension system. Some analysts say that President Emmanuel Macron’s recent attempt to change the subject encapsulates his political challenges.

Sweden: The country’s former ambassador to China has been charged with “arbitrariness during negotiations with a foreign power” after prosecutors said she held unauthorized meetings with two men representing Chinese state interests.

Myanmar: In three days of public hearings at The Hague that begin today, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar — its de facto civilian leader and a onetime democracy activist — is expected to argue that the world has been deceived by reports that the country’s military generals perpetrated mass atrocities against Rohingya Muslims.

India: Protests erupted on Monday as lawmakers began debating a measure that critics say would allow the governing party to turn 200 million Muslims into second-class citizens.

Missing plane: Chilean military aircraft were searching for a cargo plane carrying 38 people that went missing on Monday evening as it flew to a Chilean base on Antarctica.

NAFTA: In Washington, congressional Democrats and the White House are on the cusp of bringing a revised North American free trade deal to a vote before Christmas.

Snapshot: Above, the Labrouste reading room at the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris. It’s one of the 25 rooms that influence the way we design, experts told T, The Times’s style magazine..

Ethiopia: Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is set to collect the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo today, but he won’t take questions from the news media or attend a charity event.

Swine: Our reporter explored how Denmark built a thriving pork industry while sharply cutting back on antibiotic use.

End of an era: Our pop music critic writes that the recent death of Juice WRLD, a 21-year-old American rapper, appears to mark the end of a musical movement: hip-hop that began emerging in 2015 from SoundCloud.

What we’re reading: Vulture’s list of the year’s top 10 comedy specials. “Check it!” writes our comedy columnist, Jason Zinoman.

Cook: This cheesy, fiery, extremely fast chicken dish is inspired by Emily Kim, the Korean web star known as Maangchi. (Our Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter has more recommendations.)

Watch: The Times assessed the year in dance. Older works bristled with fresh energy, Joaquin Phoenix reminded us how the body can speak louder than words, and tap came flying back.

Smarter Living: Are you keeping up with health news? Take our quiz.

When The Washington Post published a U.S. military document trove on Monday, many people drew parallels to the Pentagon Papers, which, when made public in 1971 by The New York Times and The Post, helped turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War.

There are obvious similarities. Most notably, both were leaks demonstrating that the U.S. government had knowingly misrepresented a painful, costly war to the American public for years.

But there are differences, too.

The Pentagon Papers were a secret account of the Vietnam War commissioned by President John F. Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara. They were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who had worked on the study. And they revealed aspects of the war, including the widening of U.S. activity to include the bombings of Cambodia and Laos, that had gone largely unreported by major media.

In contrast, the Afghanistan documents were, according to The Post, drawn from military interviews used to write a series of reports that were publicly released. The Post obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act — though it had to sue twice to get them.

And keen readers of war coverage may find few surprises in the uncertainty of battlefield commanders about strategy, goals and the exact nature of the enemy.

As to the effect on public opinion, that remains to be seen.

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

— Mike

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 about a woman’s journey through China’s detention camps. • Here’s today’s Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: Lines on a music score (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • Jose Del Real, a domestic correspondent for The Times, and Elaina Plott, coming to our Politics team, were named to Forbes’s list of 30 Under 30 in Media.