Thursday, Sep 26, 2019 | View in browser

Good morning.

The Trump impeachment inquiry continued to dominate the headlines. We’ll break it all down for you.

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a meeting on Wednesday. Doug Mills/The New York Times

New details emerge in Trump impeachment inquiry

Less than a day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry against President Trump, the story shifted quickly. Here’s the latest:

■ On Wednesday morning, the White House released a call log that shows Mr. Trump urging the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to consider investigating Joe Biden, the former vice president and a leading Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential race.

■ Mr. Trump alluded to American aid to Ukraine, according to the five-page reconstructed transcript, while not explicitly linking his request for a favor to the finances. The document contains a footnote saying it is not verbatim.

■ A Justice Department official also told The Times that after a whistle-blower raised concerns, two top intelligence officials referred the complaint for a possible criminal investigation into the president’s actions. The Justice Department concluded that there was no basis for a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s behavior.

■ Later in the day, Mr. Trump appeared alongside Mr. Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. “We had, I think, a good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things,” said Mr. Zelensky of their controversial conversation in July. “Nobody pushed me,” he added. Then Mr. Trump jumped in, “in other words, no pressure.”

What’s next? The full whistle-blower complaint that set off the scandal was sent to the House on Wednesday and the acting director of national intelligence will testify before a House committee on Thursday. Here’s an explainer of how the impeachment process works.

If you have some time, this is worth it

Follow us to the ends of the earth

U.S. Department of Defense

If the news has you feeling like you need a getaway, turn to the latest edition of The Times Magazine.

We sent photographers around the world and combed through our archives to celebrate the yearning to explore. Above, an invention of the mid-1940s: a “pressurized suit for airmen of tomorrow,” which was designed to let pilots fly safely up to 62,000 feet.

Here’s what else is happening

Climate change: Rising temperatures are disrupting seafood harvests, posing risks to important marine ecosystems and threatening the well-being of hundreds of millions of coastal residents, according to a new United Nations report.

Hong Kong: In an Opinion piece for The Times, Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, asserts that the semiautonomous city does still have a future and that she hopes to resolve the weeks of social unrest by hosting various community dialogues.

Britain: Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who flew back to London from the United Nations General Assembly, said the Supreme Court was “wrong” to deliberate on a political question during his address to Parliament, capping a combative day of shouting and finger pointing.

Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been tapped to try to form the country’s next government, the president’s office announced on Wednesday, offering the longtime leader a lifeline as he faces corruption charges. If Mr. Netanyahu can’t stitch together a coalition in 28 days, his chief opponent, Benny Gantz, will have a go.

U.S.-Japan trade: The countries signed a limited deal on Wednesday that would lower barriers to American agricultural goods while cutting U.S. tariffs on some Japanese products, including turbines, green tea and flowers.

China: Beijing has leveraged its economic might to convince other countries to remain silent over its Uighur detention camps. In a speech on religious freedom before the United Nations General Assembly this week, President Trump didn’t mention the Uighurs.

Juul: The chief executive stepped down amid a growing backlash against the firm. Kevin Burns will be replaced by an executive from Altria, a major tobacco company that owns a 35 percent stake in Juul.

Australia: The capital territory, which includes the city of Canberra, became the country’s first jurisdiction to legalize recreational marijuana, despite federal laws that carry prison terms for personal use of the drug.

South Korea: An expectant mother who visited a clinic in Seoul last month to receive a nutritional shot woke up hours later to learn she had mistakenly been given an abortion, the police said.

Indonesia: As President Joko Widodo starts his second term, he is faced with protests in major cities over a controversial corruption bill, the country’s raging forest fires and deadly violence in the eastern province of Papua.

Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times

Snapshot: Above, a man tries to save his home in Indonesia from an encroaching wildfire. Smoke from nearly 2,000 blazes across the country has turned the sky blood red and caused respiratory problems for nearly a million people.

The Anne Frank of Poland: A journal kept by Renia Spiegel, a Jewish girl who lived in Poland and was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, has been released in English.

What we’re reading: This piece from The Bitter Southerner about Zora Neale Hurston, a giant of United States literature, told largely through the people dedicated to making sure she is properly commemorated. “It’s a very American story, for reasons both good and tragic,” says our national correspondent, Campbell Robertson.

Now, a break from the news

Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Cook: Canned ingredients sometimes have their place, as in this cheesy pasta baked with artichokes and fried onions.

Watch: The director James Gray narrates a sequence from “Ad Astra” that uses real images of the moon as a setting for a harrowing action scene.

Go: New York City Ballet returns with two sides of George Balanchine: the lustrous “Jewels” and a haunted-house fright.

See: “For Forest,” an installation of 299 trees in the Wörthersee stadium in Klagenfurt, Austria, aims to remind people about humanity’s impact on the environment.

Smarter Living: Apparel and footwear account for more than 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, so one way you can help the environment is to buy clothes that are built to last. Some tips: If you can see your hand through a T-shirt, it’s probably too thin. And when buying a patterned shirt, check whether the pattern on the pocket lines up to that on the body — it’s a subtle sign that the garment was made with care.

T, The Times’s style magazine, has a guide on how to dress for fall without looking stuffy.

And now for the Back Story on …

Transcript troubles

The transcript of a presidential conversation is making front-page headlines — and not for the first time.

During the impeachment investigation of President Richard Nixon, he released 1,200 pages of edited transcripts of taped White House conversations. He intended them to show that he was not involved in any cover-up of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington.

Rose Mary Woods, President Richard Nixon's secretary at her White House desk in 1973, who testified that she accidentally erased parts of the Watergate tapes. Associated Press

But Nixon had spent months excising sections of the tapes from the transcripts, according to “The Final Days,” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Thousands of passages were marked “(unintelligible),” “(inaudible),” “(expletive deleted)” or “(materials unrelated to presidential actions deleted).”

Eventually, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the tapes of 64 of his conversations, one of which — “the smoking gun” — implicated him.

Infamously, one tape in the Nixon collection had an 18 1/2 minute gap during a critical conversation between the president and his chief of staff. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s deeply loyal personal secretary, testified that she had accidentally erased part of the tape.

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

— Alisha

Thank you
To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. Victoria Shannon 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 the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
• Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Knight’s horse (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
• A news assistant in our Washington bureau became a U.S. citizen this month. He wrote about the naturalization process.