North Korea, AT&T, World Cup: Your Wednesday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/briefing/north-korea-att-world-cup.html

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Good morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

• “As skimpy as the summit meeting was extravagant.”

That’s how one of our White House correspondents described the joint statement that President Trump and Kim Jong-un signed after their talks in Singapore on Tuesday. It calls for the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, but provided neither a timeline nor details about how the North would give up its weapons. Read the joint statement here.

Mr. Trump made a concession, saying he would suspend joint military exercises on the Korean Peninsula, to the surprise of South Korea and the Pentagon. And “the simple act of talking” makes conflict far less likely, one of our Interpreter columnists notes in his 10 takeaways.

• The president played a faux movie trailer for Mr. Kim, showing North Korea’s economic potential — beaches and condos included. We analyzed the video, and came up with our own (dare we say better?) version.

• Expect a wave of takeovers in corporate America.

That’s a key takeaway from a federal judge’s decision on Tuesday that AT&T’s $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner can proceed, despite the government’s efforts to block the deal.

AT&T may soon control a mammoth portfolio — CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. and much else — and the deal underscores how established news and entertainment companies are trying to compete with the likes of Amazon, Netflix and YouTube.

• The ruling could also intensify a battle between Comcast and The Walt Disney Company for control of 21st Century Fox.

• The House speaker, Paul Ryan, narrowly defused a rebellion by Republican moderates Tuesday night by promising to hold high-stakes votes on immigration next week. He’s expected to present details this morning, but the move will most likely thrust a divisive issue to the foreground during the campaign season.

Our correspondents met asylum seekers from Central America, many of them children, who are camping along Mexico’s northern border — and waiting. “Our fate rests in God’s hands,” one said.

• And despite escalating trade threats between Canada and the U.S., the connections run deep between two towns on the Vermont-Quebec border.

• Five states — Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina and Virginia — held primaries on Tuesday, and Republicans aligned with President Trump did well. (Follow the election results here.)

Representative Mark Sanford lost in South Carolina after Mr. Trump urged voters to support the candidate’s rival. The political unraveling of Mr. Sanford, a former governor and a prominent critic of the president, “seemed both impossible and inescapable,” our reporter writes.

• And in Virginia, Republicans nominated Corey Stewart, a local official who has verbally attacked illegal immigrants and embraced emblems of the Confederacy, to challenge Senator Tim Kaine, a former Democratic vice-presidential candidate.

• North America wins! Global soccer officials picked the U.S., Mexico and Canada this morning to host the 2026 World Cup, bringing the tournament to North America for the first time since 1994.

The three countries put in a joint proposal that pledged record crowds and revenues, not to mention $11 billion in profits for FIFA, soccer’s governing body.

This year’s World Cup, hosted by Russia, starts on Thursday. We have a guide to all 32 teams.

• To get soccer updates and analysis in your Inbox twice a week, sign up for our Offsides newsletter. And to receive direct messages from Times journalists on the ground in Russia, sign up for World Cup Messenger.

• Why is the agreement signed in Singapore being dismissed by critics as meaningless?

Listen on a computer, an iOS device or an Android device.

• The “Rocket Man rally”: Some intrepid businesses and investors have begun considering the (outside) possibility of doing business in North Korea.

• Seattle’s City Council scuttled a corporate tax that would have raised about $50 million a year for affordable housing and the homeless. It had faced heavy opposition from Amazon and Starbucks, among other companies.

• Bird, an electric scooter start-up, is said to be raising an additional $300 million, potentially raising its value to $2 billion.

• U.S. stocks were mixed on Tuesday. Here’s a snapshot of global markets today.

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

• Eight new books we recommend.

• For a cool escape from summer, here are five ski vacations in the Southern Hemisphere.

• Recipe of the day: Green beans with herbs and olives are a quick and flavorful side.

• Japanese-style hot pot, known as shabu shabu, is normally a do-it-yourself affair. But at Shabushabu Macoron in New York, our restaurant critic writes, the tradition becomes a refined meal.

Read more from our Food section.

• Many French soccer stars hail from the tower blocks of the banlieues, areas on the fringes of Paris that have many working-class and nonwhite communities. “When you work with young players here,” a scout said, “you do not want to miss the next great one.”

• How much do you know about gun rights and laws in America?

Take our quiz.

• Best of late-night TV

Stephen Colbert ridiculed President Trump’s comment about Kim Jong-un becoming leader of North Korea at 26. “You don’t give dictators points for being young!” Mr. Colbert said.

• Quotation of the day

“No one should be forced to live like animals just to cross into the United States.”

— Aridaid Rodríguez, an American citizen in Mexico who often walks past Central American families seeking asylum as she crosses the border for work.

• The Times, in other words

Here’s an image of today’s front page, and links to our Opinion content and crossword puzzles.

• What we’re reading

Gina Lamb, an editor for Special Sections, recommends this piece from The Marshall Project: “I was a debater in high school, so I couldn’t resist a headline on Twitter about a prison debate team. In a vivid first-person account, Daniel Throop, a Massachusetts inmate, recalls how the famed Norfolk Prison Debating Society returned to competition against college teams after a 50-year hiatus, defeating doubt and skeptics along the way.”

Today, in honor of William Butler Yeats (born on this day in 1865), we explore the lasting influence of his most ubiquitous poem, “The Second Coming.”

Written in 1919, the poem is considered a towering achievement of Modernist poetry. Yeats drew on Christian apocalyptic imagery to capture the violent chaos of the political turmoil in Europe at the time, and to warn of further dangers on the horizon.

So often have the poem’s phrases been incorporated into other works of art and literature that The Paris Review has called it “the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English.”

There is, of course, Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart,” and Joan Didion’s book of essays “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” but lines from the poem have proliferated in many more book titles, speeches, folk albums, video games and tweets, as well.

An episode of “The Sopranos” called “The Second Coming” features the poem, as does a Batman comic book series called “The Widening Gyre.”

There was an uptick in references to the poem in 2016, as writers and pundits grasped for language to describe the series of dramatic political shifts in Europe and the U.S.

Emma McAleavy wrote today’s Back Story.

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