Good morning. We’re covering President Trump’s planned discharge from the hospital, Chinese propaganda that invokes war and protests in Israel. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | A supporter of President Trump leaves flowers outside Walter Reed medical center on Sunday. Oliver Contreras for The New York Times | | | Mr. Trump tweeted: “Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” His physician, Dr. Sean Conley, later said that the president’s health had improved and that he would return to the White House. | | | The president has been eager to leave the hospital and show the country that he has not been sidelined by the virus. His medical team has presented mixed messages, saying that he was feeling well but also that his blood oxygen levels had dropped at least twice and that he had been prescribed a drug normally reserved for patients with severe cases of Covid-19. | | | White House outbreak: On Monday, the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, became the latest person in the president’s inner circle to announce that she had tested positive for the virus. Ms. McEnany said she would be quarantining. Two other press team members tested positive. | | | Chinese People’s Liberation Army officers at the celebrations for National Day last week. Wu Hong/EPA, via Shutterstock | | | Chinese propaganda is rarely subtle, but the torrent of bombast online and in state media in recent weeks is potentially ominous. | | | The prospect of war remains remote, but the risk is that the propaganda could translate into more provocative actions. Recent military moves in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait raise the possibility of actual clashes, intended or not. | | | Beijing seems particularly alarmed by debate in Washington about whether the U.S. should explicitly state its willingness to defend Taiwan from a military attack. | | | Details: One of the videos features the chorus “if war breaks out, this is my answer” and shows soldiers running through a forest as bombs explode. Another video featured a simulated airstrike on Guam, the American territory in the Pacific. | | | Yuko Takeuchi during the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images | | | From the outside, Yuko Takeuchi seemed to have a golden life. She had won Japan’s top acting award three times, had recently given birth to her second child and appeared in a box-office favorite last year. | | | The authorities are reporting an alarming rise in suicides within Japan’s general public during the coronavirus pandemic, after a decade of hard-won decline from some of the highest rates in the world. | | | Details: In August, there was a nearly 16 percent increase in suicides compared with a year earlier, with the number spiking by 74 percent among teenage girls and women in their 20s and 30s. | | | Quotable: “As a society, we feel like we cannot show our weaknesses, that we must hold all of it in,” said Yasuyuki Shimizu, director of the Japan Suicide Countermeasures Promotion Center. | | | Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times | | | At the age of 12, the future U.S. vice-presidential nominee moved to Montreal from California and spent her formative years in a multicultural environment typical of many Canadian public schools. She was an extroverted American, who dreamed of becoming a lawyer and liked dancing to Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. | | | Our Canada correspondent looked at how the Montreal high school years shaped Kamala Harris, whose father is from Jamaica and mother is from India. She “melted with everyone,” said one of her former schoolmates. | | | 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 | | | | Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock | | | Snapshot: Above, police arresting a woman at a protest in Tel Aviv over the weekend. As the number of coronavirus cases surged and a second lockdown was imposed, many residents lashed out at the government and took to the streets, building on a movement calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resignation. | | | Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich. | | | Watch: “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” traces the naturalist’s decades-long career, mapping how steeply the planet’s biodiversity has degenerated before him. Our critic calls it a “majestic documentary.” | | | Do: Whether you want to relax, entertain or get some work done, a footstool is one piece of furniture you should add to your living room. Here are some tips to help you choose the perfect one. | | | The virus is still lurking and we are still safest inside. At Home has ideas on what to read, cook, watch, and do while staying safe at home. | | | 52 Places to Go, a special feature from The Times’s Travel section, traditionally draws on editors, reporters and contributors for recommendations on the most timely sights and delights on offer in the upcoming year. It’s our annual guide to the world’s most awe-inspiring destinations. | | | During the pandemic, travel, as we knew it, has changed. | | | In that vein, our 52 Places list will be different in 2021. While we can’t know what lies ahead, we can still share the places we’ve loved, and continue to inspire curiosity, open-mindedness and awe for the wider world. | | | That’s why we’re turning to you for next year’s list, which we are calling 52 Places We Love. We want 52 love letters to travel, all penned and photographed by you, our readers around the world, each about one place in the world that is special to you. It can be a popular tourist destination, or a place that’s largely overlooked. You might inspire someone else to go there one day, or to reconsider their assumptions, or to spark their inquisitiveness about a new piece of the world — all the empowering things that travel brings to our lives. | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Melina | | Thank you
To Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
