Friday, 19 Apr 2024

President Trump, El Chapo, Kirsten Gillibrand: Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. President Trump said he was “not happy” with a bipartisan border security compromise negotiated by congressional leaders in time to avert another partial government shutdown.

He did not say whether he would veto it.

The deal includes over $1 billion for 55 miles of new border barriers — far from Mr. Trump’s vision of $5.7 billion for more than 200 miles of wall. But it also contains a win for Republicans: a possible sharp expansion of ICE’s detention capacity. Above, Mr. Trump at a rally in El Paso on Monday.

Here are five takeaways from the tentative deal. And in an interactive, we lay out what barriers are already in place on the southern border.

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2. When furloughed I.R.S. workers returned from the record government shutdown, they were greeted by over five million pieces of unanswered mail and 87,000 amended tax returns, according to a government audit, and a “shocking” number of calls had gone unreturned.

The dysfunction came at a very inauspicious time, with taxpayers struggling to navigate a new Republican-promulgated tax code for the first time.

The taxpayer advocate’s office conducted the audit and assessed not just the shutdown but taxpayers’ general experiences with the IRS, distilling them to two words: “extreme frustration.”

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3. Trade war update: President Trump announced that he might delay a March 2 deadline to reach a trade deal with China, saying the U.S. could hold off on imposing higher tariffs if talks with Beijing were promising. Above, a textile factory in China.

Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are in Beijing for two days of talks. Nearly two decades of stalled Chinese promises to open up the economy to foreign investment hang over their deliberations.

To give any deal teeth, American negotiators want a mechanism that would automatically raise tariffs on Chinese goods if its exports to the U.S. keep rising.

But people with knowledge of Chinese economic policy deliberations say Beijing has chafed at a stopgap deal on Dec. 1, which let Mr. Trump’s tariffs stand while keeping China from retaliating. That could explain the lack of much progress in talks.

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4. El Chapo was convicted.

A jury in Brooklyn found the Mexican crime lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera guilty on 10 counts. Above, Mr. Guzmán in 2017.

His three-month trial brought glimpses of the lavish and savage inner sanctums of the drug economy and hints of corruption at the top of the Mexican government. Here are the 11 biggest revelations.

Mr. Guzmán, a master of escape and a sinister folk hero who long sat atop the vast and brutal Sinaloa drug cartel, now faces possible life in prison.

But the Sinaloa cartel remains enormous. And after the kingpin’s arrest in 2016, Mexican heroin production rose by 37 percent, according to the D.E.A.

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5. Proudly feminist.

At a moment when multiple women are serious contenders for president for the first time in the U.S., Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is the only one so far making running as a woman, for women, her central theme. Above, Ms. Gillibrand at a brewer in Des Moines, Iowa, in January.

But earlier in her career, she held views on some issues, like gun control and immigration, to the the right of many Democrats. In her years as a corporate lawyer, her clients included a big tobacco company. She has taken in plenty of donor money from Wall Street.

There is no real precedent for her approach, and it is likely to test how much views have changed on issues like discrimination, sexual harassment and female leadership after the rise of #MeToo and two years of an administration that has fueled many debates over gender bias.

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6. U.S. inequality is at 1920s levels, and a certain conventional wisdom holds that the gap is between big and successful metropolitan areas and left-behind towns and rural counties.

Research complicates this picture. The biggest divides remain within metropolitan areas — across neighborhoods and local jurisdictions. In other words, the differences between people in Los Angeles, above, are a lot sharper than the differences between Californians and Mississippians.

This is seen in the upward mobility of children, given that neighborhood choice largely determines access to schools. And moving to more upwardly mobile neighborhoods is easier for families in small towns, which have lower cost of living — and, as a bonus, higher rates of community satisfaction.

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7. David Bernhardt, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Interior Department, joined as its second in command in 2017, and he has devoted much energy to eliminating protections for a finger-size fish called the delta smelt, above.

It’s a subject he knows well — from his time as a lobbyist.

For years, Mr. Bernhardt fought for a group of California farmers seeking to weaken those fish protections to gain access to water for irrigation, against fierce pushback from environmentalists and commercial fishermen. In his current role, he could make it happen as early as December.

Mr. Bernhardt has also lobbied for oil and gas companies.

In Switzerland, a company called Climeworks thinks it can suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in large enough quantities to make a difference against global warming.

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8. “Something like Red Bull, amplified.”

That’s Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea, describing the ubiquity of crystal meth there. Above, Pyongyang, North Korea last year.

For Lunar New Year this month, the powerful stimulant — which has spawned health and addiction crises around the world — was a popular gift, according to report by Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-funded news outlet.

In the 1990s, the North’s cash-poor government began manufacturing meth for export to the Chinese triads and Japanese yakuza. When government-sponsored production fell off in the mid-2000s, a surplus of people with meth know-how created their own small-scale labs and began selling to the local market.

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9. A new film, “Birds of Passage,” involves the Colombian drug trade from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, but it has no use for narco-drama clichés.

Our critic writes that it was “like nothing I’ve seen before.”

Narrated in part by a blind dancer, it’s set among the Wayuu of northern Colombia, an Indigenous population whose language and customs survived the Spanish conquest and the rise of the modern nation-state.

An American with an airstrip and a plane opens a world of shady deals, double-crossings and miscalculations, unleashing a domestic tragedy and a cultural apocalypse as old mores give way to greed.

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10. Waiting for the winning dog.

The five most commonly owned breeds in the U.S., according to the American Kennel Club, are German shepherds, bulldogs, Labradors, golden retrievers and French bulldogs. But none of the last three have ever won best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. The first two have fared only marginally better. Above, an English bulldog at the show.

We’ll be watching when the winner is named tonight. Meanwhile, consider the canine competitors’ nerves.

And in feline news: A caged tiger was found in an abandoned Houston home by a pot smoker looking for a discreet place to light up. The tiger is safe, according to the Humane Society, and the unknown owner is being sought.

Have a nice evening.

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Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

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