Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Asia and Australia Edition

China, Royal Wedding, Donald Trump: Your Monday Briefing

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.)

Good morning. Australia’s beleaguered farmers, a $200 billion question and triumph with shock at Cannes. Here’s what you need to know:

Image
Credit...Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

• Global currents in small-town Australia.

Today, we’re publishing the first in a two-part series on how global changes are playing out in rural Australian communities.

Part 1 is a tough subject: the alarming number of suicides among farmers. “They just lose their identity,” said Mary Guy, who was left a widow when her husband hanged himself two years ago.

An agricultural bounty from globalization has tended to enrich corporate farms while leaving many family operations struggling with drought, debt and global price swings.

Tuesday’s installment will focus on the opportunities rural communities offer the country.

_____

Image
Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times

“We’re putting the trade war on hold.”

That was the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, above, announcing that new tariffs on Chinese goods would be suspended while bilateral talks progressed.

Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s chief economic adviser, added to uncertainty about the level of concessions China might actually offer. He said the $200 billion in additional Chinese purchases cited by administration officials was a figure that “interests the president a lot,” not an indication that a deal of that size is near.

Chinese officials had denied making such an offer, and economists were doubtful because the figure is nearly half the annual U.S. trade deficit with China.

_____

Image
Credit...Scott Olson/Getty Images

• This time in Texas.

Our reporters reconstructed the timeline of the mass shooting at an American high school on Friday. Survivors told how they fled for their lives, hid in closets, texted their parents, saw their friends die.

The authorities said the 17-year-old suspect, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, had confessed and told investigators he spared certain students “so he could have his story told.” He appears to have been obsessed with violence and evinced neo-Nazism.

One of the 10 victims was a 16-year-old girl who had, according to her mother, been rejecting the suspect’s advances for months. Another was an exchange student from Pakistan.

Across the U.S., students are adjusting to the new reality of these shootings. “It’s like the front lines of a war,” one told us.

_____

Image
Credit...Nanda Andrianta/Associated Press

• Details on Indonesian attacks.

Investigators found direct links between an entire family’s suicide attacks last week in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, and the bombs set off by two other families a day later.

They appeared to be part of one sprawling terrorist plot centered on Dita Oepriarto, the man who, with his wife and four children, killed 12 bystanders in attacks on three Christian churches. The couple had constructed a model existence and befriended people of other faiths.

But Mr. Oepriarto, the authorities say, was a leader in a militant group that instructs followers to camouflage their extremism and is tied to the Islamic State.

_____

Image
Credit...Pool photo by Ben Birchall

• If you were really unplugged over the weekend …

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were married at Windsor Castle in England on Saturday, drawing cheers from around the globe and nudging the royal family into a new era. This video shows the highlights — and we made our own wedding album.

The celebrity-filled ceremony featured a gospel choir and a sermon by the Most Rev. Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. It was a remarkable moment: a relaxed, charismatic African-American bishop, speaking to British aristocrats in the cadence of the black American church. Read his sermon here.

_____

Image
Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

• A gathering in New York last week for a blockchain-themed event had all the trappings of a modern business conference — a sign that the once-fringe world is entering the mainstream. Another sign: high prices for blockchain-themed art, such as the jewelry above.

• Richer and richer: There are now 784 billionaires in Asia, more than the number in North America.

• The chairman of South Korea’s LG Group, Koo Bon-moo, died after a yearlong battle with brain disease. A son is expected to take over, as the authorities investigate the family for possible tax evasion.

• Among the headlines to watch for this week: On Friday, the world’s most sweeping data privacy rules go into effect across the European Union.

• “Deadpool 2”: The well-reviewed sequel took in $301 million in global sales, handing 20th Century Fox its biggest opening weekend in two years (which was when “Deadpool” first opened).

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets. (Exchanges are closed in Frankfurt and Toronto.)

Image
Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

• An envoy of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates offered help to the Trump campaign in a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other advisers in August 2016. [The New York Times]

• President Trump demanded that the Justice Department investigate whether the department or the F.B.I. “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign at the behest of the Obama administration. [The New York Times]

• More than 200 boxes of handbags were among the cash and luxuries seized from the former Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, during police searches of three residences. [The New York Times]

• Explosions at a cricket match killed at least eight people in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The Taliban denied any role in the attack on a sport that has become a rare point of unity in the country. [The New York Times]

• The archbishop of Osaka, Japan, and prelates in Iraq and Pakistan are among the 14 men Pope Francis has selected as cardinals. [The Associated Press]

• Only one new polio case has emerged in Pakistan this year, a historic low. [The New York Times]

• A Chinese doctor who spent three months in jail for criticizing a tonic marketed by a traditional medicine company publicly apologized for “not thinking clearly.” [The Guardian]

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

Image
Credit...Alamy

• Working from home is fun until it consumes your life. Here’s how to set and defend your boundaries.

• Get more out of travel: Hire a solid local tour guide.

• Recipe of the day: Try namoura, a syrup-soaked Lebanese cake, for dessert.

Image
Credit...Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

• The director Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Palme d’Or, the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival, for his “Shoplifters,” about a Japanese family on the margins. But the festival was shaken when the Italian director Asia Argento accused unnamed people in the audience of protecting Harvey Weinstein.

• Two years ago, Wong Ping had no idea what the Guggenheim Museum was. Now he’s one of five Chinese artists featured in the museum’s exhibition “One Hand Clapping.”

• “The past five years have been really, really stifling.” The Chinese rights lawyer He Weifang says despite being largely silenced as President Xi Jinping’s has consolidated power, he’s not giving up his teaching post, his following or his hope.

Image
Credit...Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Royal fever’s not over yet. (At least for us.)

Today, we take a look inside Temperate House, the largest Victorian greenhouse in the world, which recently reopened at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London after a multiyear renovation that cost £41 million ($55.2 million).

The greenhouse was designed by Decimus Burton and opened in 1863. Today it houses over 10,000 plants, including some of the rarest and most threatened, from temperate regions of Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific islands.

For example: Taxus wallichiana, a Nepalese plant that is used to make a chemotherapy drug called Taxol. Researchers are now cloning it to help conserve it in the wild.

The renovation was done by the firm Donald Insall Associates, which sought to adapt the building with modern technology to improve environmental control, optimizing air and light for the plants.

A reviewer for The Guardian noted how painstaking the work was. Tens of thousands of items were removed and repaired, and 15,000 panes of glass were replaced.

“It has been a mammoth undertaking, and the result is suitably breathtaking,” the critic Oliver Wainwright concluded.

Karen Zraick wrote today’s Back Story.

_____

Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning. You can also receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights.

And our Australia bureau chief offers a weekly letter adding analysis and conversations with readers.

Browse our full range of Times newsletters here.

What would you like to see here? Contact us at asiabriefing@nytimes.com.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT