Europe Edition

Khashoggi, Russia, Italy: Your Monday Briefing

Oct. 22, 2018

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Good morning. The Khashoggi drama deepens, tensions with Russia rise and Italy faces its critics.

Here’s the latest:

CreditOzan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

• The Khashoggi murder mystery deepens.

President Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this week for meetings on terrorism and economic issues. The timing could not be more awkward.

Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia admitted that the writer Jamal Khashoggi had died, calling his death an accident after a fistfight in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, above. But we still don’t know where Mr. Khashoggi’s body is, or whether Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman directly ordered his killing.

Western politicians (except Mr. Trump, whose position has oscillated) have dismissed the Saudis’ shifting explanations over the episode as lies. And on Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey promised to reveal intelligence and evidence on the case “in full nakedness.”

The crisis has rattled Saudi royalty and brought the country’s disastrous war in Yemen into sharp focus.

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• A farewell to arms control?

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CreditSputnik Photo Agency, via Reuters

During a trip to Moscow that begins today, President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, above right in June with President Vladimir Putin, is expected to tell Russia that the U.S. is withdrawing from a 1987 treaty that barred both countries from producing, testing or possessing certain missiles.

Russia has been violating the treaty since at least 2014, and a U.S. pullout would allow it to better counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific. But it may also accelerate Cold War-like behavior among the three powers. (Mikhail Gorbachev, who signed the treaty along with Ronald Reagan, on Sunday called the decision a threat to peace.)

Politics in your compost: A politically connected Russian fertilizer company is eyeing the European market, raising questions over how close Russian businesses are to the Kremlin’s political agenda.

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CreditJakub Kaminski/EPA, via Shutterstock

• A referendum on Poland’s leaders.

Poland’s governing populist party — steeped in religion and animated by historical grievance — won about 32 percent of the votes in local elections on Sunday, besting other parties and showing strong support in rural areas.

But for the Law and Justice party, the result was a decline from national elections in 2015, when it tallied almost 38 percent support. And its message also fell flat in Warsaw, the capital, in a sign that it may not have broadened its support among more moderate voters. Above, the party’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Separately, Europe’s top court ordered Poland’s leaders on Friday to suspend a law that had cleared the way for a sweeping purge of the nation’s Supreme Court.

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CreditRemo Casilli/Reuters

• Debt brinkmanship in Italy.

Italy is expected to respond today to criticism by the European Commission that its new budget would amount to an unprecedented breach of the European Union’s budgetary rules. Above center, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

The budget — which includes plans to introduce a basic income for poor Italians and to lower the retirement age — prompted Moody’s Investors Service to slash its rating on Italy’s sovereign debt to one level above junk. But the leaders of Italy’s populist government said over the weekend that they would stick by their spending plans.

Redux: Here’s why Italy could be the epicenter of the next financial crisis. (Think weak banks, an erratic government, questionable debt and an economy that accounts for 11 percent of the E.U.’s gross domestic product.)

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CreditMiranda Barnes for The New York Times

• Pregnant while working.

For women who work physically demanding jobs in the U.S., pregnancy discrimination is sometimes a matter of life and death.

Our investigation — based on thousands of pages of court and other public records — profiled workers who said they had had miscarriages or gone into premature labor after employers rejected their pleas for lighter workloads. “It was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life,” said a woman who miscarried after hoisting boxes in a mobile-phone warehouse.

Yet the only federal law aimed at protecting expecting mothers at work in the U.S. is 40 years old — and just four paragraphs long.

Above, Chasisty Bee, who in 2014 collapsed at work and later miscarried.

Business

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CreditBandar Algaloud/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images

• Will Saudi Arabia lose business in the wake of the Khashoggi crisis? Perhaps, especially if the United States imposes sanctions. Then again, our correspondents write, “Riyadh is simply too big a customer to ignore.” Above, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, at Lockheed Martin.

• Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister in Britain, starts at Facebook today as a vice president. (Meanwhile, a British parliamentary panel is investigating the company’s influence on the 2016 Brexit vote.)

• Coming this week: Earnings reports from Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter and Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

In the News

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CreditFrancisco Seco/Associated Press

• Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, above, was expected to tell Parliament today that “95 percent” of the Brexit withdrawal agreement and its protocols had been settled. Hundreds of thousands marched in London over the weekend to demand a new referendum on the exit from the E.U. [The Guardian]

• Thousands of Central American migrants continued their journey toward the United States through southern Mexico — in open defiance of both countries’ governments. [The New York Times]

• In Nigeria, more than 55 people were killed in a new eruption of communal violence. Security has become a key campaign issue ahead of a presidential election there in February. [The New York Times]

• Officials in Moscow withdrew permission for an annual commemoration of the victims of Stalinist repression. [The New York Times]

• Swedish prosecutors indicted a woman who tried to prevent the deportation of an Afghan man by refusing to take her seat on a flight. He was eventually deported, and the woman could face up to six months in prison. [The New York Times]

• King Abdullah II of Jordan said he would cut off Israelis’ free access to two tracts of land where Jews have had land-use rights under a 1994 peace treaty. [The New York Times]

• The Trump administration is considering narrowing a legal definition of gender as an immutable condition assigned at birth. That could roll back protections for transgender people. [The New York Times]

• The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona received a building permit … 136 years after the church’s construction began. [The New York Times]

Smarter Living

Tips for a more fulfilling life.

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CreditCon Poulos for The New York Times

• Recipe of the day: roasted carrots over a bed of tangy Greek yogurt combined with cilantro and lime juice.

• Uncomplicated tech gadgets are worth the money. Here’s what to look for.

• Which foods cause obesity? Hint: It isn’t sugar (at least in mice).

Noteworthy

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CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

• Mount Athos, a male-only monastic outpost in Greece, is the spiritual heartland of the Eastern Orthodox Church. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has shown a keen interest in the place — and that has Greece worried.

• We asked men whether they had ever treated girls or women in ways they now regret. We heard from hundreds of them. Here are some stories of intimidation, coercion and shame.

• “If all your dreams don’t work, you still have a craft.” Meet the siblings behind Copenhagen’s coolest food and jewelry.

• In memoriam: Evelyn Anthony, a best-selling British novelist — and one of the first female writers to explore the spy genre.

Back Story

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CreditAssociated Press

“Je refuse le prix,” Jean-Paul Sartre said on this day in 1964.

With these words, the French writer and philosopher, above, became the first person to freely decline the Nobel Prize.

But the Swedish Academy wasn’t the first to hear them.

A young journalist landed the scoop after tracking down Sartre at a Paris bistro. The 59-year-old “pope of existentialism” was lunching with Simone de Beauvoir, his longtime partner.

Interrupted before the cheese course, Sartre was stunned to hear that he had just been named the academy’s literary laureate. (A week earlier, after learning that he had been nominated for the honor, he wrote to the jury asking not be chosen. His letter didn’t arrive in time.)

That evening, Sartre read a statement to the Swedish press to explain why he refused the prize — and the $53,000 that came with it.

Official honors, he said, exposed his readers “to a pressure I do not consider desirable.”

The jury did not change its decision.

More than a decade later, Sartre, or someone related to him, allegedly asked for the money that he had turned down, according to the Swedish Academy’s former secretary.

This time, it was the academy that declined.

Lara Takenaga wrote today’s Back Story.

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