| |
| Good evening. Here's the latest. |
 Mark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
| 1. The trade war with China is back on — not that it was ever really off. |
| President Trump said he would impose a 10 percent tariff on another $300 billion of Chinese goods on Sept. 1, after a meeting of U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators in Shanghai failed. Above, the Port of Long Beach in Los Angeles. |
| Mr. Trump said China had failed to follow through with promises to purchase more American agricultural products, and to stop the sale of the powerful opiate fentanyl into the U.S. The escalation of the long-running trade dispute triggered a sharp sell-off in U.S. stocks. |
| Separately, the Senate gave final approval to a budget deal that would raise federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. It now heads to Mr. Trump for his expected signature. |
| _____ |
 Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times |
| 2. The trickle of Democrats coming out in favor of opening a full impeachment inquiry into President Trump is threatening to turn into a flood. |
| The backers of an impeachment probe now number 116 — more than halfway to the 218 votes they would need. This week alone, a dozen Democrats have announced their support for the measure. |
| The House's summer break was expected to lower the temperature around impeachment. Instead, the pressure is rising on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to take the full House vote she has tried to avoid all year. Above, members of the House leadership last week after special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony. |
| _____ |
 Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
| 3. Two rounds of Democratic debates could (finally) be whittled down to one next time. |
| It will be twice as hard for the 2020 Democrats to qualify for the next debate in mid-September. A Times analysis of polls and donor numbers shows that only 10 to 12 candidates are likely to make the cut. We can't promise when the sprawling field of 24 candidates will shrink, but we can say it will. It's just a matter of time. |
| The July debates showed a widening rift between the party's populist and centrist wings. Here's what we learned from the past two nights. And after her stronger-than-expected showing on Tuesday, Marianne Williamson told reporters that she wanted to "see the memes." The internet answered the call. |
| _____ |
 CIA |
| 4. What do we really know about Hamza bin Laden? |
| Even when American officials announced on Wednesday that Osama bin Laden's son had been killed in a U.S. strike, many details of his life remained shrouded in uncertainty. Our journalists pieced together what was known about a young man who tried to continue his father's violent legacy. |
| He is believed to have been born in 1989 and was one of 23 children fathered by Osama bin Laden, according to Western intelligence agencies. And vowing to seek vengeance for his father's death, Hamza bin Laden was placed on a U.S. terrorist watch list in 2017. Above, a photo of the younger bin Laden released that year. |
| _____ |
 Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times |
| 5. The New York police are adding children as young as 11 to a facial-recognition database, adopting a controversial technology with little public scrutiny. |
| Internal records show the department has used the technology to compare crime scenes images with juvenile mug shots for about four years. Police Department officials said it was just the latest evolution of a longstanding policing technique. |
| In June, the New York police commissioner, James O'Neill, made the case for facial recognition in an OpEd. Used properly, he wrote, the software effectively identifies crime suspects without violating rights. |
| _____ |
 Tim Gruber for The New York Times |
| 6. What would your community look like without a hometown paper? A growing number of Americans are finding out. |
| We were with the staff of The Warroad Pioneer, a pillar of its small Minnesota town, as it ended a 121-year run with bloody marys, bold type and gloom about the void it would leave behind. Roughly 2,000 newspapers have closed in the U.S. over the last 15 years. |
| It's the latest in our series examining the collapse of local news and what comes next. Has your local newspaper closed? We want to hear from readers living in "news deserts." |
| _____ |
 Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times |
| 7. John Looker was the face of a bike-a-thon to fight cancer that raised millions of dollars. He was also a fake. |
| Something wasn't right about the star fund-raiser and the heart of Pelotonia, a charity event in Ohio. A Facebook exchange with a mother of a cancer patient ultimately revealed the deception. |
| Also from our Sports desk: The biggest splash of baseball's trading deadline was Houston acquiring a Cy Young Award winner born in 1983. Sound familiar? With Zack Greinke, the Astros are returning to what worked in the past. |
| _____ |
 Mike Groll/Associated Press |
| 8. It may shock you to learn that we do like fun and games here at The Times. Yes, there's a news hook. |
| Are you having trouble picking your favorite 2020 Democratic candidate? We've made it easy. Just swipe left or right as Opinion plays matchmaker. |
| Also, have you ever wondered if you might be rich? Answer these five questions, based on how much you make, where you live, and other factors to find out. Just a warning: Most of us prefer to call our incomes "average," even when, statistically speaking, they're not. |
| _____ |
 Paramount Pictures |
| 9. America loves to hate Tracy Flick, the know-it-all high school student at the center of the 1999 comedy, "Election." But our film critic took another look: Was the film's real villain hiding in plain sight? |
| Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon, was preyed upon by a predatory teacher and almost cheated out of her rightful victory. But Flick, he writes, has been egregiously misunderstood — and A.O. Scott counts himself among those who got it wrong. He re-examines the film 20 years later. |
| "The Blair Witch Project" holds a similar cultural grip. The makers capitalized on the rise of reality TV and internet culture in promoting its fictional story as true. Here's why it can't be replicated. |
| _____ |
 Random House |
| 10. And finally, Herman Melville at 200. |
| On the bicentennial of Melville's birth, we looked back at The Times's coverage of him dating back to the 19th century. It wasn't always kind: "Moby-Dick" never received a full review; The Times barely noted his death in 1891; and we once misspelled his most notable work, referring to it as "Mobie Dick." |
| The whale tale finally got its Times review, of sorts, when the collected "Works of Herman Melville" was published in 1924. Noting the author's long silence during the last three decades of his life, the paper noted, "After 'Moby Dick' there was nothing, in a sense, to be said." |
| Have a whale of a night. |
| _____ |
| Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
| And don't miss Your Morning Briefing. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning. |
| Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here. |
| What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com. |
