Good morning. We’re covering an approved coronavirus vaccine in Britain, protesters sentenced to prison in Hong Kong and a social media scuffle over kimchi. | | | The British government has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Hospitals have already begun emailing staff members to schedule vaccinations. Andrew Testa for The New York Times | | | Britain has pre-ordered 40 million doses of the vaccine made by the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a small German company, BioNTech. | | | Nursing-home residents are the priority to receive the first shots, but officials have indicated that frontline hospital workers may be quicker to receive vaccines because of the difficulties of storing and moving the vaccine to nursing homes and other sites. | | | What’s next: British hospitals have already begun emailing staff members to schedule vaccinations. In London, the first doses will be given at 7 a.m. on Monday. Each person needs two shots, a month apart. The doses will be packaged in boxes, with dry ice keeping them at the South Pole-like temperatures they require. | | | Joshua Wong, center right, and Ivan Lam, center left, were led into a prison van before their court appearance in Hong Kong on Wednesday. Kin Cheung/Associated Press | | | Hong Kong’s political opposition was dealt another blow after three pro-democracy activists were sentenced on Wednesday. Among them was Joshua Wong, one of the most globally recognized figures of the city’s resistance to Beijing. | | | Mr. Wong was sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison for his role in protests last year. A fellow activist, Alice Chow, who has been called the “Mulan” of the pro-democracy movement, received 10 months. Ivan Lam, a member of their disbanded political group, Demosisto, was sentenced to seven months. | | | Their sentencing points to the wide-ranging nature of Beijing’s increasingly aggressive crackdown on political opposition in Hong Kong. | | | Quotable: “All these judicial prosecutions amount to persecution of our young,” said Claudia Mo, a former lawmaker from the pro-democracy camp. “They’re using Joshua Wong as an iconic figure in particular to issue this chilling message.” | | | Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban chief negotiator, last month in Doha. Pool photo by Patrick Semansky | | | The government and Taliban negotiators in Qatar have agreed on how to proceed with peace negotiations. The next phase of the talks will most likely focus on a political road map and a long-term nationwide cease-fire. | | | The announcement of the agreed-upon procedure on Wednesday came after negotiations had been stonewalled since early November over the official name to be used to refer to the government. The agreement was reached without the inclusion of the name. | | | On the ground: The months of talks in Doha, Qatar’s capital, have been marked by near-constant violence in Afghanistan as the Taliban moved to take territory in the south and north before winter. | | | Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times | | | More than a millennium later, the shop’s resilience offers lessons for businesses worldwide. Our reporters spoke with the family who runs the shop, Ichiwa, above, about how their store has survived crisis after crisis. | | | 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 | | | | Moon landing: China released video footage on Wednesday showing the arrival of its Chang’e-5 robotic spacecraft on the moon’s surface. You can watch it here. | | | Jean Chung for The New York Times | | | What we’re reading: This Esquire profile of BTS takes a look at how the supergroup reached global stardom, and the pressures and challenges that went into making its new album, “Be.” | | | Photograph by Heami Lee. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky. | | | Listen: Our pop music critics picked the best albums of the year. The Japanese-British singer Rina Sawayama’s album,“Sawayama,” is on the list for what our critic describes as “ecstatic, knowing” pop. | | | This wasn’t remotely a normal year. How did the circumstances of 2020 change your reading lives, both professionally and recreationally? | | | Jennifer: Professionally, it made the question of why I was reviewing something in any given week feel heavy, almost existential — which I realize sounds ridiculous, but it really did. Not to mention that the publication dates of books, at least during the first few months of the pandemic, were suddenly moved around and actual hard copies weren’t easy to come by. | | | As for my recreational reading this year, there was way too little of it. I imagine other parents of young kids may have felt similarly. I recently heard an interview with the therapist and author Esther Perel, who said that the demarcations we previously took for granted — now we’re working, now we’re picking up our children from school, now we’re carving out some time for ourselves — have all collapsed. It’s a pandemic blur. | | | It was a year when the best-seller lists often directly reflected what was going on in the country. How much of your own personal reading these days — or ever — is “pegged to the news”? | | | Parul: I have never read anything quite like the brilliantly pessimistic fiction of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic; her treatment of historical amnesia, of political despair and shame, felt blazingly new. When it comes to watching writers metabolize “this moment,” I was impressed by Megha Majumdar’s novel “A Burning,” on rising extremism in India. I was also moved by novelists grappling with how to write most effectively about climate change — Emily Raboteau, Lydia Millet, Amitav Ghosh and Jenny Offill come to mind. | | | What’s the book on each of your lists of 10 favorites that most surprised you? | | | Dwight: Philippe Lançon, who wrote criticism for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, was in its offices on the morning of Jan. 7, 2015, when two gunmen claiming allegiance to ISIS forced themselves inside and slaughtered 12 people. Eleven others were wounded, including Lançon, who essentially had the lower part of his face shot off. His memoir, “Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo,” is extraordinary. It’s about his long road to recovery, but it’s also about his life and loves and his wide-open senses. | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Dani | | 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.
• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is on Anthony Blinken, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of state.
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• Nicholas Casey, who led one of our most challenging assignments as Caracas bureau chief, has been named to be our new Madrid bureau chief. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
