2019年12月3日星期二

Your Wednesday Briefing

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Wednesday, Dec 4, 2019 | View in browser

Good morning.

We’re covering China’s use of DNA to map faces, global stock market disruptions and life inside a village on the DMZ.

By Melina Delkic

Images from a 2018 study on age estimation and age-related facial reconstruction of Uighur men by analyzing 3-D facial images. Journal of Forensic Medicine

China maps faces using DNA

It sounds like science fiction, but it isn’t.

Scientists in various countries are working on a way to create an image of a person’s face from a genetic sample. But in China, the effort uses blood collected from ethnic Uighurs swept up in mass detentions in China’s Xinjiang region.

Critics say Beijing is exploiting the openness of the international scientific community to harness research into the human genome for questionable purposes. The Chinese have said that they followed international norms that would require research subjects’ consent, but many in Xinjiang have no choice.

And Times reporters were prevented from interviewing residents of Tumxuk, the site of two internment camps, making it impossible to verify consent.

Scope: The police in China turned to Chinese scientists with connections to leading institutions in Europe, which sometimes funded their work. The process, called DNA phenotyping, is also being developed in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Quotable: The Chinese government is building “essentially technologies used for hunting people,” said one professor who tracks Chinese interest in these technologies.

Inside the reporting: Sui-Lee Wee, one of the two reporters on the story, said officials in Tumxuk went to extreme lengths to stop the reporting. “The cops deleted all the photos and videos from our phones,” she wrote on Twitter, “and asked for the passwords to our social media accounts.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Trump in London on Tuesday. Al Drago for The New York Times

Tension at NATO’s meeting in London

The once-cordial relationship between President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France quickly turned cold at a celebration of the alliance’s 70th anniversary on Tuesday.

The leaders sparred about their approaches to terrorism, Mr. Trump’s relationship with Turkey’s president and the future of NATO, after a spat over Mr. Macron’s remarks on the Trump administration’s role in the “brain death” of the alliance.

Hours earlier, Mr. Trump called those remarks “very insulting.”

Big picture: The visit comes as European leaders struggle to combat the rising influence of countries like China, and to contain some of their unpredictable members, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

British politics: Mr. Trump heeded Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plea to avoid entering into political discussions just two weeks ahead of a crucial election. And he extended that silence to the British royal family when he said, “I don’t know Prince Andrew,” even though he has been photographed with him on several occasions.

Trump’s hint at trade-talk delay roils markets

President Trump sent stocks tumbling when he said on Tuesday that he had “no deadline” for a trade deal with China, suggesting that he would wait until after the 2020 presidential election.

In a wide-ranging talk in London, he said that Chinese officials wanted to make a deal but that “we’ll see whether or not the deal’s going to be right, it’s got to be right.”

The Trump administration has also raised the prospect of steep new tariffs on French cheese and wine, prompting Europe to threaten retaliation, and Mr. Trump has said he would impose steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina.

Markets: China’s currency slipped. On Wall Street, the S&P 500 was on track for its worst loss since Oct. 8.

If you have some time, this is worth it

Visualizing pollution around the world

In 2015, pollution was responsible for an estimated 4.2 million deaths worldwide, with a majority concentrated in East and South Asia. Millions more fell ill from breathing dirty air.

We compiled a graphic showing pollution in various cities around the world. New Delhi saw apocalyptic highs last month; Beijing’s air quality improved after it imposed pollution controls. Find out how your city fares.

Here’s what else is happening

The Philippines: At least one person was killed and about 500 flights were canceled as Typhoon Kammuri swept across the country.

Australia: A second person who had been missing in the outback for almost two weeks was found. The search continued for a third.

Trump’s taxes: An appeals court ruled that Deutsche Bank must comply with congressional requests for documents detailing President Trump’s finances, a ruling that is almost certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Measles: The government of Samoa is shutting down all public services for two days to fight an outbreak that has killed more than 55 people and infected thousands in the South Pacific island nation.

U.S. politics: Senator Kamala Harris said she would suspend her 2020 presidential campaign after months of falling poll numbers.

Crashed spacecraft: NASA has found pieces of the spacecraft that India attempted to land on the moon in September. An Indian engineer who had scoured the lunar surface in his spare time pointed to the right spot.

Perspective: In an opinion piece for The Times, the Bollywood star Deepika Padukone discusses being diagnosed with depression and her efforts to reduce the stigma surrounding the disease in India.

Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

Snapshot: Above, Taesung, a South Korean village on the Demilitarized Zone, the buffer between North Korea and South Korea. Residents enjoy 5G, a great school and special tax cuts — a reward for living in what many consider to be one of the most frightening places on Earth.

52 Places traveler: In his latest dispatch, our columnist eats his way across Danang, Vietnam.

Australian whiskey: The country’s distillers are pushing to develop a unique local style as they look to expand where they export the drink. And lax regulations give them the freedom to experiment, making it an exciting time to watch.

R.I.P. Lil Bub: The cat whose droopy tongue and soulful eyes made her one of the internet’s most beloved celebrities has died. She was 8.

What we’re reading: This New Yorker article. “Did you know there was an Airbnb for campers?” writes the Briefings editor, Andrea Kannapell. “There is — and it has its own complications.”

Now, a break from the news

Cons Poulos for The New York Times. Food Styling: Simon Andrews.

Cook: For a dazzling appetizer, try crisp feta with lemon over toast.

Listen: For the music of “Frozen 2,” the songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez found inspiration in a Latin hymn, grief and Bryan Adams.

Read: A translator based in Massachusetts has played a critical role in bringing science fiction from China to American readers.

Smarter Living: If you start practicing your New Year’s resolutions now, your chances of sticking to them will be a cinch in 2020.

And now for the Back Story on …

The real James Bond

His name is Bond. James Bond. But as the trailer for the latest Bond movie comes out today, we wondered where the name came from.

The writer behind the super spy, Ian Fleming, was also an avid bird watcher. On a trip to Jamaica after World War II, he spotted a book, “Birds of the West Indies,” by an ornithologist from Philadelphia. Who happened to be named James Bond.

Daniel Craig as James Bond in "Skyfall." He says the coming "No Time to Die" will be his final Bond film. Francois Duhamel/Columbia Pictures and Metro Goldwyn Mayer

“It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed,” he wrote in a letter to the ornithologist’s wife.

But, as in any good spy story, there’s a twist: Last year, the BBC reported that newly released records showed an intelligence officer named James Bond had served under Fleming in a secret elite unit that led a guerrilla war against Hitler.

That Bond, a metal worker from Wales, had taken his spy past to the grave, his family said — and they suspected Fleming had used the bird-watching Bond as a “classic red herring,” to keep his identity a secret.

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

— Melina

Thank you
To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. Tom Wright-Piersanti 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 deadly crackdown in Iran.
• Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Fermented honey drink (four letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
• Pamela Paul, the editor of our Book Review, discussed how her staff decides the 10 best books of the year.

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The family values time warp

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Continue reading the main story

December 3, 2019

A family gathered in their living room circa 1950s.Bettmann/Corbis, via Getty Images

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

Regular readers know that I’m somewhat obsessed with the economic contrast between U.S. regions, which were becoming more similar for most of the 20th century, but have been diverging again since around 1980. Partly that’s because I have some intellectual capital invested in the subject: Academic papers I wrote about economic geography some three decades ago are my most cited work, and seem more relevant than ever. But regional divergence has been getting attention from many people, because of its social and political importance.

Today’s column delved into a somewhat different aspect of regional divergence: growing disparities in life expectancy. But it also ended up being in part about the remarkable fact that conservatives are still placing blame for all our social ills on the decline of religiosity and its supposed destruction of traditional family values, despite decades of evidence that this whole line of argument was and is totally wrong.

There were several striking things about William Barr’s October speech denouncing “militant secularists” for destroying American society. It was much more partisan than we used to expect from the attorney general, who is after all supposed to serve the nation, not just the president and his party. It also seemed well over the line in violating the separation between church and state.

Continue reading the main story

What really struck me, however, was that Barr seems to be stuck in a time warp, repeating claims about family values and social order that were standard right-wing fare a generation ago but have since been utterly refuted by experience.

Back in the mid-1990s, conservatives pointed to two trends — the decline of traditional families and rising crime — and insisted that the first had caused the second. For example, The Heritage Foundation put out a report titled “The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community.” The report ridiculed claims that rising crime and social breakdown had something to do with declining economic opportunity, and suggested among other things that the reduced influence of organized religion was one of the causes of declining family values.

Some people on the right went even further, arguing, for example, that mass shootings were happening because we were teaching children the theory of evolution — a claim you still see sometimes.

Since then, however, a few things have happened. Traditional families have continued to decline in relative importance: fewer than half of American children now live with two parents in their first marriage. But violent crime has plunged.

Continue reading the main story

And while new social problems have emerged, above all the surge in deaths of despair, they have mainly manifested not among inner-city blacks but among rural and small-town whites — and are heavily concentrated in places that have suffered, yes, a decline in economic opportunity. Oh, and some of the worst-hit states happen to be among the states where an unusually large number of people say that they are “highly religious.”

We might also note that other advanced countries are, without exception, less religious than America, and some places have gone even further than we have in moving away from traditional family structure — but crime is far lower, and there’s nothing like our surge in deaths of despair.

Overall, experience since the 1990s has completely refuted the God-and-family-values theory of American social problems, and confirmed the view — associated in particular with the sociologist William Julius Wilson — that family collapse is mainly a consequence of lost economic opportunity, and that social ills are caused largely by economic forces, not mysterious changes in values.

But here we have the nation’s chief law enforcement officer talking as if none of that had happened, and basically declaring both that faith in God is the answer to our problems and that sinister secularists are our mortal enemies. Then again, why should we be surprised? Facts have a well-known secularist bias.

Quick Hits

In Sweden, traditional marriage is clearly in decline: Young adults there are more likely than Americans to be living with a partner, but are much less likely to be married. Society doesn’t seem to be collapsing.

The Swedes are also only about a sixth as likely as Americans to regularly attend religious services. Again, society doesn’t seem to be collapsing.

States of despair.

Barr’s boss is also living in a time warp; his “American carnage” speech was basically a vision of a country that went away decades ago, where inner-city violence was the big issue.

Feedback

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at krugman-newsletter@nytimes.com.

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