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

Good morning.

We’re covering the first moves of Britain’s new Parliament, escalating protests over India’s citizenship law and a telescope that’s hunting for “exoplanets.”

Brexit tops new Parliament’s agenda

Britain’s Parliament convenes today for the first time since the Conservative Party’s landslide victory in the general election last week. On Friday, the new government plans to ask lawmakers to vote on a bill that would enable Britain to leave the European Union on Jan. 31.

Parliament has been gripped in recent months by a series of knife-edge votes, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s minority government struggled to push its Brexit plan through a bitterly divided body. Those days are over. But now that the Conservatives have a huge majority, our London correspondent writes, the party’s rank-and-file members will find themselves with little individual influence.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

The BBC: The prime minister’s apparent antipathy for the British Broadcasting Corporation echoes President Trump’s criticism of the American news media. Some in Britain fear that he will use his new political clout to attack the broadcaster’s funding.

Electoral system: An overview of Britain’s “first past the post” system — in which seats are awarded to the candidate who wins the most votes in each individual race, rather than by proportion of the total national vote — helps explain how the centrist Liberal Democrats won just 11 seats in Parliament despite receiving 3,696,423 votes.

Israel: On Thursday, Mr. Johnson’s new government is expected to announce a proposal to bar local authorities from participating in a boycott-Israel movement that some have criticized as anti-Semitic.

Boeing to suspend production of troubled jet

Boeing’s bad year just got worse: As the company grapples with continuing fallout from two crashes of its 737 Max airliner, it said on Monday that it would temporarily halt production of the plane in January.

The announcement came more than nine months after the Max was grounded following crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. Boeing, the largest manufacturing exporter in the United States, has so far been unable to win approval from global regulators to let the plane fly again.

Impacts: Boeing has already announced more than $8 billion in charges related to the crisis, and its decision to halt production of the jet will likely send shocks through its suppliers and the American economy.

What’s next: Even if the Max eventually returns to the skies, Boeing will face greater scrutiny from global aviation regulators that have historically deferred to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, for example, has said it will take a more proactive role in evaluating Boeing’s next jet, the 777X.

Trade war: Some Boeing customers affected by the Max crisis also buy Airbus planes, and they face the prospect of higher costs linked to tariffs that the United States imposed on European exports in October.

Protests swell in India over citizenship law

Anger over a new citizenship law that is widely seen as anti-Muslim has set off days of widespread protests in several major cities. And on Monday they reached the capital, where the police beat unarmed students with wooden poles.

The law easily passed both houses of Parliament last week. Critics fear that Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who was re-elected in May, partly on promises to introduce the law — is trying to wrench the nation of 1.3 billion people away from its secular, democratic roots by turning it into a homeland for Hindus.

Response: Indian officials have denied the law is discriminatory, saying it will help persecuted minorities migrating from neighboring Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, all of which are predominantly Muslim.

Background: The worst bloodshed India has seen in recent years came in 2002, when Mr. Modi was the top official in a state where clashes between Hindus and Muslims killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Courts have cleared him of wrongdoing, but critics say he’s at least partly responsible for the brutality.

If you have 5 minutes, this is worth it

‘I’m not an Easterner who has to apologize’

Soon after Holger Friedrich and his wife Silke Friedrich, both pictured above, bought a Berlin newspaper, they caused a stir by arguing in an editorial that East Germans should wrest back control of their own narrative from the West.

A rival newspaper later reported a key detail about Mr. Friedrich: He had been an informant for the Stasi, the feared secret police of Communist East Germany, in the late 1980s.

Mr. Friedrich recently granted The New York Times access to his Stasi files, most of which relate to surveillance of him, rather than by him. He argues that he was coerced into being an informant and that he has little, if anything, to be sorry for.

Here’s what else is happening

France: More strikes are expected to disrupt travel across the country today, driven by labor unions angry over President Emmanuel Macron’s planned pension reforms. Jean-Paul Delevoye, the politician that Mr. Macron had picked to lead the reforms, resigned on Monday.

U.S. impeachment: The House of Representatives is all but certain to pass two articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump on Wednesday on a mostly party-line vote. Moderate Democratic lawmakers who represent conservative-leaning districts said on Monday that they would toe their party’s line, even if it costs them their congressional careers.

Hong Kong: President Xi Jinping of China backed Carrie Lam, the territory’s chief executive, despite monthslong protests that have rocked the city and a landslide defeat in local elections for political parties aligned with her.

Espionage: China denounced the United States’ recent secret expulsion of two Chinese Embassy employees who drove without approval onto a sensitive military base in Virginia. (See our Back Story for more on the diplomatic spat.)

Italy: Anti-racism initiatives unveiled by the organization that oversees Italy’s highest soccer division were themselves criticized as racist. Case in point: a series of images of monkeys in club colors.

Snapshot: Above, an artist’s rendering of Kepler-62f, a planet that orbits a star other than the sun. The European Space Agency is continuing the search for such “exoplanets” with the scheduled launch today of Cheops, a new telescope that will orbit about 500 miles above Earth.

How tech lost its way: Ten years ago, technology meant promise. Now its flaws are abundantly clear.

Hit song: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time on Monday — 25 years after its release. Our reporter looked at the song’s remarkable history.

In memoriam: Goar Vartanyan, 93, a highly decorated Soviet agent who worked on secret missions for 30 years in Europe, Asia and the United States. (Her code name was Anita.)

What we’re looking at: This Twitter thread from a reporter for The Post and Courier in South Carolina, highlighting blockbuster reports from U.S. local news outlets in all 50 states this year. Melina Delkic, on the Briefings team, calls it a “welcome reminder of the crucial work happening in Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, California and beyond.”

Now, a break from the news

Cook: These panko-crusted pork cutlets have a simplified, one-step breading procedure. (Our Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter has more recommendations.)

Go: The Prado museum in Madrid brings together dozens of works by two female Italian artists from the 16th century — Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana — who were celebrated in their lifetimes but rudely forgotten after their deaths.

Smarter Living: Do you suffer through encounters with compulsive talkers? Or are you, just possibly, one of them? We have help.

And now for the Back Story on …

A secret diplomatic incident

We wanted to take a deeper dive into the surprising news this week that the U.S. secretly expelled two Chinese Embassy employees months ago on suspicion of espionage, after they drove without approval onto a U.S. base near Norfolk, Va., that is home to Special Operations forces. Such expulsions haven’t happened in decades.

Edward Wong, our former Beijing bureau chief who now covers U.S. foreign policy, wrote the story with Julian Barnes, who covers intelligence and national security. Edward responded by email.

Can you say anything about how you got the story?

I first heard about the expulsions in October, a couple of weeks after the episode. My original source said diplomats in the Chinese Embassy were shocked because it was the first time in their memory that this had happened. The story took me two months to report, in part because I traveled to Hong Kong for two weeks last month to cover the protests, and I’ve been involved in coverage of the impeachment inquiry of President Trump.

By last week, I had spoken with enough people briefed on the expulsions and gathered enough details to give us confidence. Julian then spoke to a couple of sources who gave us final confirmation.

Had you already been aware of episodes of Chinese officials showing up uninvited at secure locations?

American intelligence and counterintelligence officers have been tracking such appearances for some time. And on Oct. 16, the State Department announced new rules on visits to official sites by Chinese diplomats — a sign that Chinese officials had been doing things in their travels that were making the administration uncomfortable.

What would they gain by being able to enter the Virginia base?

Some American officials think that at least one of the two detained Chinese men was an intelligence officer, and that they were doing a test run at the base, to see if they could penetrate far into the perimeter without consequences. If they had gotten away with it, then a more senior intelligence officer might have tried to get onto the base using a similar tactic.

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

— Mike

Thank you
To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. You can reach the team at [email protected].

P.S.
• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about a secret history of the war in Afghanistan.
• Here’s today’s Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: “Beats me” (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
• Our photo editors explained the painstaking selection process that produces the Year in Pictures.

Source: Read Full Article