| We’re covering President Trump’s challenges in the U.S. and abroad, shifting views toward Huawei at home and a mysterious North Korean threat. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | Constitutional scholars were sworn in to testify in Washington on Wednesday. Erin Schaff/The New York Times | | | As President Trump left a tense NATO meeting in London, the impeachment process at home entered a new phase. | | | Mr. Trump abandoned plans for a final news conference after the NATO meeting, and he called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada “two-faced” after a video surfaced in which Mr. Trudeau and other world leaders appeared to mock Mr. Trump. | | | He returns to Washington, where the House Intelligence Committee’s inquiry has concluded, and the House Judiciary Committee is taking up the question of whether to recommend his impeachment. | | | At the hearings: Three scholars of the U.S. Constitution said that Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine for political gain clearly met the historical definition of impeachable offenses. But a scholar invited by Republicans offered a dissent, calling the Democrats’ case “slipshod.” | | | What’s next: More hearings are scheduled for next week. House Democrats hope to push the process through to vote on impeachment before their holiday recess begins on Dec. 20, opening the way to a Senate trial in the new year. Read our step-by-step guide to the process. | | | Much of the public was not sympathetic when Meng Wanzhou, the Chinese telecom giant’s chief financial officer, posted a letter this week about her life since being arrested in Canada a year ago. | | | In comments on the social media platform Weibo, many users posted numbers that were coded references to a recent scandal in which a Huawei worker was jailed for 251 days after he demanded severance pay. When his story went viral, articles and comments were censored. | | | But some direct comments came through. “One enjoyed a sunny Canadian mansion while the other enjoyed the cold and damp detention cell in Shenzhen,” wrote a user on the question-and-answer site Zhihu. | | | Big picture: The responses were a sign that China is starting to sour on Huawei, and that the middle class is growing insecure about its protections from economic downturn. In the wake of the censorship, people are worrying, too, about the degree to which their complaints are quashed. | | | Quotable: “A company that’s too big to criticize is even scarier than a company that’s too big to fail,” said a professor in Beijing. | | | Saudi Aramco's crude-oil processing facility, in Abqaiq, in October. Dina Khrennikova/Bloomberg | | | It could be the largest initial public offering ever, potentially eclipsing the amount generated by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014. Trading on the Saudi stock market, the Tadawul, is expected to start around Dec. 12. | | | Changes: Saudi Aramco’s offering is a fraction of the size originally envisioned. It could raise around $26 billion, well short of the prince’s original goal of about $100 billion. | | | And although it was billed as a way to inject foreign investment into an economy still built around being the world’s chief oil exporter, shares will be sold almost exclusively to domestic investors. | | | Scientists say disasters like the recent wildfires in Australia are made worse by climate change. Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Seas are warming and rising faster, putting more cities at risk of flooding, and glaciers are melting at a pace that many researchers didn’t expect for decades. | | | The report, released at the United Nations’ annual climate conference in Madrid, said that this past decade will almost certainly be the warmest on record. (Read the report here.) | | | Amani Willett for The New York Times | | | When Ken Liu, above, started translating science fiction into English, he did something unusually invasive for a translator — suggested editing the story’s structure and changing its timeline. He began to repeat that pattern, opening the floodgates for new translations of Chinese science fiction and becoming as sought-after as the bestselling authors he translates. | | | “Usually when Chinese literature gets translated to a foreign language, it tends to lose something,” the author Liu Cixin said. But with his novel “The Three-Body Problem,” he said, “I think it gained something.” | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR | | TEST: Email Marketing 101: Never Sacrifice Beauty for Simplicity | | A drag-and-drop email builder, a gallery of templates and turnkey designs, personalized customer journeys, and engagement segments. It's everything you need to create stunning, results-driven email campaigns in minutes. And with Campaign Monitor, you have access to it all, along with award-winning support around the clock. It's beautiful email marketing done simply. | | | Learn More | | | | Germany: Two Russian diplomats were expelled after the authorities declared that Russia was suspected of being behind the daylight assassination in Berlin of a Chechen separatist. Moscow promised responding measures. | | | Google: An era is ending with the announcement that the tech giant’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are stepping down from executive roles at its parent company, Alphabet. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, will become the chief of both companies. | | | Afghanistan: Tetsu Nakamura, a Japanese doctor who introduced life-changing canal building techniques to the country in the 1980s, was fatally shot while driving to work in Jalalabad. He was 73. It was the latest case in a series of attacks targeting humanitarians. | | | Korean Central News Agency | | | Snapshot: Above, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, with his wife, Ri Sol-ju, in a photo provided by the country’s official news agency, which said they were visiting the sacred Mount Paektu. His previous such journeys have been followed by major policy shifts. | | | What we’re reading: The Daily Suffragist on Twitter. Our reporter Jennifer Schuessler says, “Love this account, which gives a concise daily snapshot from the history of the women’s suffrage movement.” One example: a look at a 21-year-old woman who publicly dressed down Abraham Lincoln in 1864 for inadequately protecting former slaves. | | | Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Susan Spungen. | | | Watch: The rise of streaming platforms has disrupted the cinematic medium, but our critics still found a lot to like at the movies. They named their top 10 films of the year. | | | This week, The Times published a different kind of story about the opioid crisis, drawing from the pages of an Ohio high school yearbook to describe the human toll. | | | We asked Dan Levin, the National reporter who wrote the story, about the months he spent tracking down the students from the Class of 2000, and conducting sometimes heartbreaking interviews. | | | “I was honored that people were willing to talk with me about these very intimate details of their lives, in incredibly nuanced ways,” Dan said. | | | Dan Levin, who reports on American youth for The Times, in the Yukon. Aaron Vincent Elkaim for The New York Times | | | “It’s almost something out of a Stephen King story,” he said. “You have this small town, and a dark force that clandestinely creeps in. It’s not vampires, it’s not supernatural, but it’s just as horrific.” | | | For many of the former students, he said, “There was a feeling that, had they only been a few years older, they would have been spared. | | | “One had a brother, four or five years older. He’d grown up before opioids hit — he was lucky enough to escape.” | | | And he’s noticed a way the reporting has changed him: “Since working on this, when I see people who are struggling with drugs, on the street, I think to myself, there’s probably a yearbook with them smiling.” | | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. | | Thank you
To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. Andrea Kannapell, the Briefings editor, wrote today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
