Huawei, France Protests, Mascot Mayhem: Your Thursday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/briefing/huawei-france-protests-mascots.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. The arrest of a top technology executive at the Chinese telecom giant Huawei threatened to upend a fragile trade truce with the U.S. — and put the Trump administration’s national security and trade policies on a collision course.

Huawei’s chief financial officer, the daughter of the company’s founder, was arrested in Canada. Washington is seeking her extradition, and U.S. officials said her arrest was the culmination of a monthslong investigation into whether Huawei violated Iran sanctions.

Chinese officials demanded her immediate release, and state media described the move as a “declaration of war.” Above, in Beijing.

The trade war has set investors on edge. Markets around the world dropped, with Apple, Amazon and Facebook all tumbling by more than 2 percent. The S&P 500-stock index is now in negative territory for the year.

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2. Fallout continues from last month’s elections.

In North Carolina, a top Republican said fraud allegations might make a new election appropriate in the state’s Ninth Congressional District. Investigators are looking into whether absentee-ballot fraud gave an advantage to Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, who is 905 votes ahead of his Democratic opponent in preliminary results.

California Republicans now hold just seven seats in the state’s 53-member congressional delegation after the final still-undecided district, in the Central Valley, went to the Democrat.

And Senator Elizabeth Warren, above, the Massachusetts Democrat, once again defended her decision to release results of a DNA test to support her claim of Native American heritage.

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3. Hundreds of severely mentally ill New York City residents have been moved out of institutions and into private apartments over the past four years, under a landmark 2014 settlement that was meant to be a national model.

With assistance from social workers and others, many of those people have been able to flourish. “This is a chance that otherwise, I would never have,” one man said. Above, at home in Brooklyn.

But more than 200 interviews and thousands of pages of records show that the program has also proved perilous, and even deadly, for others who weren’t ready to live on their own.

Our journalists, working with ProPublica and Frontline on the investigation, uncovered a number of deaths, and more than two dozen cases in which people in supported housing were not able to care for themselves, leaving them in unsafe or inhumane living conditions.

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4. No one has shaped today’s Europe more than Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has led her country for 13 years and steered the continent through successive crises.

But Ms. Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats, gathers this week to choose her successor as party leader. And some are asking whether her decisions to embrace more than a million asylum seekers and impose harsh economic austerity on European neighbors — especially Greece — helped plant the seeds of the forces now tearing Europe apart. Above, at a meeting in Brussels.

“I know my face is polarizing,” she said during a recent visit to an eastern German city where far-right protests broke out this year.

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5. French protests against gasoline tax hikes worry environmentalists who say the taxes are desperately needed to help wean us off fossil fuels and slow climate change.

But France’s effort to impose new taxes backfired. The taxes angered lower-income workers, leading to violent protests across the country. Fossil fuel champions — including President Trump — jumped on the issue. And the protests erupted during the U.N. climate change negotiations underway in Poland, causing France’s prime minister to skip the conference. Above, in Paris.

A critical question, our climate reporters write, is how to design an effective carbon tax while cushioning the blow for the most vulnerable.

Separately, the Trump administration provided details of a major rollback of protections for the habitat of the greater sage grouse, a bird nearing endangerment. The plan would effectively open nine million acres of Western land to drilling, mining and other development.

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6. Yemen’s warring sides agreed to exchange at least 5,000 prisoners as peace talks began in Sweden, aimed at ending a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and pushed millions to the brink of famine. Above, ruined housing in the northwestern city of Saada.

The exchange is the first of several moves planned to draw the Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition that supports the country’s president into further negotiations.

Also on the table is a proposal to reopen the airport in the capital, Sana, which has been under a Saudi blockade since 2015 — one of several punishing measures that have fueled what the U.N. calls the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

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7. Uber’s self-driving cars will soon be back on the road.

Autonomous cars were supposed to help cut the ride-share company’s losses by eliminating human drivers, perhaps its biggest expense. But expectations were well ahead of the technology, and a fatal crash raised safety questions.

For now, the cars will be limited to a one-mile loop in Pittsburgh, at speeds no higher than 25 m.p.h. And they won’t operate in the dark or in wet conditions. Above, in Pittsburgh.

Separately, Lyft, the ride-hailing app that has been racing Uber, its main rival, to go public, filed a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a crucial step toward an I.P.O.

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8. She made the president’s bed. She cleaned his toilets. She dusted his crystal golf trophies.

President Trump has made border security against undocumented immigrants a top priority, from the earliest days of his campaign.

But at the golf club he owns in New Jersey, current and former workers told us, undocumented immigrants have been on the payroll for years — including a housekeeper, above, who cleaned his room.

And now she and others are speaking out. “We are tired of the abuse,” she said, “the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money.”

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9. A tale of a killing, sexual abuse — and a podcast.

It was a cold but memorable case: Decades ago, a woman vanished from her Sydney suburb. Days later, her husband moved in with the family’s 16-year-old babysitter. The girl was his student, and they were having an affair.

That man — Chris Dawson, 70 — has been arrested in connection with his wife’s death 36 years ago. A popular Australian true-crime podcast about the case, called “The Teacher’s Pet,” helped the police to uncover new evidence. Above, searching for clues.

The podcast has also sparked a conversation for women and men who came of age in the 1980s about a culture of impunity around sexual abuse in high schools, with many victims finally breaking their silence.

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10. Finally, the Army-Navy football game is Saturday, and that means the service academies’ animal mascots will be on lockdown.

That’s because of an officially forbidden but unofficially applauded tradition: cadets making daring raids to abduct an Army mule or a Navy goat before a big game. Above, Aurora, the Air Force Academy’s falcon.

Over the years, tighter security has only made the raiders bolder, and the missions more elaborate. They can involve months of preparation, choreographed assault teams, and even military aircraft.

Have a peppy evening.

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