| Wednesday, July 15, 2020 | | | Good morning. We’re covering a low point for relations between the U.S. and China, Britain’s reversal on Huawei and uncertainty in the global economy. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at the G20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan, last summer. Erin Schaff/The New York Times | | | Sanctions over Hong Kong and Xinjiang. A campaign against Huawei. Challenges to Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea. | | | The disagreements span cyberspace and outer space, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, and even the Persian Gulf. Beijing and Washington are pushing other countries to take sides. The coronavirus pandemic has turned existing fissures into chasms that could be difficult to overcome, no matter the outcome of this year’s U.S. presidential election, our correspondents write. | | | Quotable: U.S. policy toward China is “fraught with emotions and whims and McCarthyist bigotry,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said last week. “It seems as if every Chinese investment is politically driven, every Chinese student is a spy and every cooperation initiative is a scheme with a hidden agenda.” | | | Huawei's newest flagship store in Shanghai on Tuesday. Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock | | | Prime Minister Boris Johnson had faced growing political pressure at home to take a hard line against Beijing, and the move signals a new willingness among Western countries to confront China. | | | The announcement came as President Trump’s national security adviser was in Paris for meetings about China with representatives from Britain, France, Germany and Italy. | | | Response: Huawei has long rejected claims that the Chinese government could use the equipment for espionage. The company described the announcement on Tuesday as “bad news for anyone in the U.K. with a mobile phone.” | | | Reopenings have happened in fits and starts, and the U.S. earnings season, which kicked off on Tuesday, is a first chance for investors to hear from businesses about how the coronavirus pandemic has hurt profits. | | | The reports showed struggles: Banks and airlines reported losses. More shutdowns are likely to come in the next months amid a recent surge in coronavirus cases across the U.S. | | | In Britain, new data showed that the economy did not grow as much as expected in May, which was supposed to be the first month of the country’s economic recovery. Some economists had predicted the economy would grow by 5.5 percent, but the data showed just a 1.8 percent increase from the month before. The outlook for the rest of the year is bleak. | | | Details: JPMorgan reported that its earnings had halved in the second quarter, while Wells Fargo had its first quarterly loss since 2008, and Delta Air Lines said revenue plunged by 88 percent. | | | In other virus developments: | | | Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times | | | With an eye on the U.S., children of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are bringing race into the public discourse. “Here, they want us to melt into a single body and put aside our cultural diversity,” said Almamy Kanouté, above, who is leading protests against police violence in France. “With us, that’s not possible. We’re French, but we don’t forget what makes us whole.” | | | 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 | | | | U.S. death penalty: Hours after a last-minute legal challenge was rejected by the Supreme Court, a 47-year-old man was put to death by lethal injection for his role in the 1996 murder of a family of three, the first federal execution in more than 17 years. | | | Snapshot: Above, French Air Force jets fly over the Arc de Triomphe during a Bastille Day celebration in Paris on Tuesday. The traditional parade was canceled because of the pandemic, but public health workers were honored as heroes and will soon receive pay raises. | | | What we’re reading: This Interview magazine Q. and A. with the writer Jia Tolentino. “What really struck me about this interview is Jia’s ability to synthesize such broad, weighty topics and current events into crystal clear, thoughtful responses,” says Sanam Yar, from the team at The Morning briefing. | | | Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne. | | | Read: In “Blue Ticket,” Sophie Mackintosh presents us with a dystopian tale of a woman desperate to have a child in a place that affords only certain women that privilege. | | | Edgar Sandoval, a reporter on our Metro desk, wrote about the calamitous sweep of the coronavirus through New York City before volunteering to cover the outbreak in his hometown on the Texas-Mexico border. In that outbreak, it turns out, his family became part of the story. Here’s what he wrote. | | | The day before I boarded a plane from New York, my youngest sister sent me a text message that froze me in place. “Brother, it looks like all of the Sandovales have Covid,” it read in Spanish. | | | Five in my family, including my mother, Arcelia; my father, Filiberto; two sisters; and a nephew all had symptoms, she said. By the time my plane landed the next day, that number had doubled. | | | I did not worry much for myself — I had come down with the virus earlier in New York, and had antibodies that might fend it off. | | | On July 1, I hurried to my parents’ home and found my mother — I usually call her “Ama” — in the living room, gasping for air. | | | By the time my sister and I got her into the emergency room at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in McAllen, her blood oxygen level had reached a paltry 80 percent, and a nurse quickly connected her to an oxygen supply. X-ray images showed her lungs nearly covered in what resembled pale spider webs. | | | Less than an hour after a nurse administered a coronavirus test, he announced that she was positive. “No surprise there,” Ama said. | | | Two attendants arrived with a stretcher to transport her into a Covid wing at another location, where she would not be allowed to have visitors, I knew. My throat tightened. | | | I fought the urge to reach for her and say something profound. Should I say I love you? Was it time for a heartfelt farewell? What if this was the last time I would see her alive? | | | I decided that if I said something poignant, she might interpret it as a final goodbye and give up. Instead, I decided to act as casual as possible. | | | Nearly a week after I had dropped her at the emergency room, her mood and breathing had significantly improved. She was able to sit upright and hold a phone conversation for five minutes. We began talking about preparations for her eventual return home. | | | I wanted to say I loved her. But again I choked. Don’t make it sound like you’re saying goodbye, I told myself. | | | After we hung up, I sent her a GIF of a white bunny that shoots hearts every time it hugs. | | | “I love you,” the message flashed, over and over. | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Melina | | Thank you
Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh wrote the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | P.S.
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• “Father Soldier Son,” The Times’s first feature documentary on Netflix, debuted its trailer last week and will premiere this Friday, July 17. It follows a single father injured in combat and his sons as they try to heal. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
