Good morning. We’re covering a worsening outbreak in Russia, hurdles in the way of a TikTok deal and conservationists working to save the jaguars. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | A coronavirus test at a Moscow medical facility in July. Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | The number of coronavirus cases passed 1 million on Tuesday, the Russian government said, despite an official declaration in early August that the country had a vaccine. About 5,000 new infections are reported daily. | | | Experts blamed spread in hospitals, haphazard social distancing, and a faulty early test kit that produced false negatives and obscured the initial scale of the problem. The timeline for vaccinations has been pushed back to November or December, rather than October. | | | Despite a steady rise in cases, schools reopened on Tuesday with few precautions. Teachers were not required to wear masks. Russia now ranks fourth in the world for reported total infections after the United States, Brazil and India. About 17,300 people have died. | | | Beijing’s sudden imposition of new technology export rules may delay or even kill the sale of TikTok to an American buyer. It’s a new front in China’s economic battle with the U.S., and other companies are preparing for collateral damage. | | | China is demanding that technology like the algorithms that underpin TikTok be licensed for export — a move that would give Beijing the final say in the deal. The groups vying to buy TikTok’s U.S. business are discussing how to interpret China’s move and how to move forward, according to people close to the talks. | | | The result could be an endless cycle of escalation from each side, with the Trump administration already planning its retaliation. The new regulation was seen as a “potential poison pill for the TikTok deal,” our reporters write. | | | Context: Those involved say the talks are some of the most complicated they’ve seen, for three reasons, our DealBook reporters write: the difficulty of cleaving TikTok from its parent company; the number of parties involved; and unpredictable, sudden political impositions. | | | The Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong at the Seoul Central District Court in June. Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Prosecutors could not arrest him because a court refused to issue an arrest warrant. Mr. Lee has been running Samsung since a heart attack incapacitated his father, Lee Kun-hee, in 2014. | | | Successive leaders of South Korea, including President Moon Jae-in, have vowed to eradicate corruption at the chaebol, or family-controlled conglomerates, that dominate the economy. But the courts have proved lenient toward chaebol executives. | | | Victor Moriyama for The New York Times | | | Miners, loggers and farmers have turned vast parts of the Southern Cone of South America into grassland, driving jaguars to extinction in several of their former domains. Our reporter visited Iberá National Park in Argentina, where conservationists are working to bring back the top predators after more than seven decades of absence. | | | The five felines chosen for rewilding came from zoos and had troubled pasts. Getting them to mate and hunt takes teams of people working untold hours from a distance. If all goes as planned, the jaguars will be fully released into the wild later this year or early in 2021. | | | 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 | | | | Lebanon crisis: Making his second visit to Beirut since the deadly explosion on Aug. 4, President Emmanuel Macron of France met with political leaders and urged them to back an overhaul of government and measures to curb corruption. He warned that they could face international sanctions unless measures were taken. | | | Vyacheslav Oseledko/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | What we’re reading: This Wired profile of BERA, the Georgian musician who is also the son of the country’s richest man and former prime minister. It’s a delight. | | | Andrew Purcell for The New York Times | | | Read: Sales of tell-all books about President Trump are soaring. With just two months to go before the U.S. elections, a new bumper crop of Trump books is landing, including a memoir by his former lawyer Michael Cohen. | | | Yesterday, we featured a discussion by Times reporters about the Democratic National Convention. Here, in part 2, John Eligon, who covers race; Annie Karni, who covers the White House; and Jonathan Martin, who covers politics, talked about the themes at the Republican National Convention and the strategies in play to help President Trump get re-elected. | | | Jonathan, talk about how President Trump and the Republicans chose to frame the events in Kenosha, Wis. What distinction are they drawing with Democrats about law and order? | | | The president is running in a moment where the country is suffering from a pandemic that has killed more than 180,000 people and thrown millions out of work, so Republicans see the Kenosha event as an opportunity to recast the campaign and make it more about disorder in American cities and charging that Joe Biden would tolerate or enable that. Obviously, it’s tough to drive that message when Mr. Biden is not the president when this is happening, but this is a matter of political necessity. | | | Doug Mills/The New York Times | | | Annie, we heard a lot about women, about suffrage. There was a lot of programming that hit that message. What do you think the aim of that was? | | | The phrase I was tracking went like, “I wish you could see what I see”: this empathetic president who is kind. This was a theme over and over. It was an acknowledgment that he needs to increase his support with suburban women. That’s the best path he has to re-election, and it was a clear acknowledgment that just the base is not going to be enough. | | | How was this convention aimed at the swing states that were fundamental to his 2016 win? | | | Jonathan: If you look at the polling, the president has been trailing Biden consistently, but the margins got worse over the summer, and there’s been some analysis about what happened. You can basically trace it back to June and July, when two things happened. He responded to the Black Lives Matter protest in a way that was incendiary and turned off a lot of voters, including center and center right voters, and then the coronavirus flared back up and he wasn’t showing urgency in his response. | | | Those two issues have given Biden a larger lead that may be temporary, so I think the mission in this convention was looking to places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and trying to get back some of those voters they lost. | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Melina | | Thank you
To Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | P.S.
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