The New York Times - Your Thursday Briefing

By Melina Delkic

Writer, Briefings

Good morning. We’re covering a trial that’s a test of Hong Kong’s security law and new baby panda twins in a Tokyo zoo.

Hong Kong’s first security law trial

A protester in Hong Kong on Wednesday became the first person to stand trial under the new national security law.

Tong Ying-kit, 23, drove a motorcycle while flying a protest flag, and crashed into several riot police officers as they tried to stop him. He faces life in prison.

He is the first to stand trial among the more than 100 people in Hong Kong who have been arrested under the sweeping new rules. His case is a test of how the city’s judicial system, based on British common law principles of fairness and independence, will interpret and enforce Beijing’s far-reaching security law.

Press crackdown: Apple Daily, the pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper, will print its last issue on Thursday and is officially closing. It comes days after the police froze its accounts, raided its offices and arrested top editors.

“Apple Daily showed we have a vibrant society, with freedom of expression and freedom of the press,” said Emily Lau, a former pro-democracy lawmaker. “But after tomorrow, Apple Daily will be no more.”

Scientist finds early, deleted coronavirus sequences

About a year ago, genetic sequences from more than 200 viruses that caused early cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, disappeared from an online scientific database.

Now, by rooting through files stored on Google Cloud, a researcher in Seattle reports that he has recovered 13 of those original sequences — intriguing new information for discerning when and how the virus may have spilled over from a bat or another animal into humans.

The new analysis, released on Tuesday, bolsters suggestions that a variety of coronaviruses may have been circulating in Wuhan before the initial outbreaks linked to animal and seafood markets in December 2019. It has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.

The study neither strengthens nor discounts the hypothesis that the pathogen leaked out of a Wuhan lab, but it does raise questions about why the original sequences were deleted.

Context: The virologist who wrote the report, Jesse Bloom, belongs to an outspoken group of scientists who have called for more research into how the pandemic began.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In other developments:

• E.U. residents should be fully vaccinated as quickly as possible, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control warned, as the Delta variant threatens to sweep across the bloc.
• Organizers of the Tokyo Olympics said on Wednesday that they would ban alcohol at the Games.
• The U.S. territory of Guam is trying to entice tourists by offering Covid vaccinations to travelers from any country.

Saudi operatives who killed Khashoggi trained in the U.S.

Four Saudis who were involved in the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the U.S. the year before under a contract approved by the State Department, according to documents and people familiar with the arrangement.

The training was provided by Tier 1 Group, a security company based in Arkansas. The company says the training was defensive in nature and devised to better protect Saudi leaders.

There is no evidence that American officials who approved the training or Tier 1 Group executives knew that the four Saudis were involved in a crackdown to crush dissent inside Saudi Arabia. But the fact that the government approved high-level military training for operatives who went on to carry out the grisly killing shows how intensely intertwined the U.S. has become with an autocratic nation.

THE LATEST NEWS

• The Russian Defense Ministry said that one of its ships fired warning shots at a British destroyer and that a Russian jet dropped bombs in the destroyer’s path after it entered Russian waters near Crimea, claims denied by Britain.
• An airstrike hit a busy market in the Tigray region of Ethiopia on Tuesday, killing dozens. A U.N. official told The Times that ambulances operated by the Ethiopian Red Cross were denied access to the scene by troops.
• Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, met with Myanmar’s junta leader in Moscow and promised that Russia would strengthen military ties with the country.
• Human Rights Watch accused the U.A.E. of detaining and deporting Pakistani Shiite Muslim men because of their religious backgrounds, Reuters reported.

• Twin pandas were born at a zoo in Tokyo. Nearly four years had passed since Ri Ri, a 15-year-old male, last mated with his partner, Shin Shin, also 15.
• Warren Buffett resigned as a trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, weeks after the couple announced their divorce. He did not give a reason.
• The U.S. will search federal boarding schools for possible burial sites of Native American children — hundreds of thousands of whom were forcibly taken from their communities over more than a century to be assimilated in the institutions — the interior secretary announced on Tuesday.
• The first person to be sentenced in connection with the riot at the Capitol — a 49-year-old woman from Indiana — will serve no time in prison after reaching an agreement with the government and pleading guilty on Wednesday to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge.

For years, Nigeria’s artists, historians, activists and royals have been clamoring to get back the stolen Benin Bronzes — more than 3,000 works, many of them religious objects, looted by British soldiers in 1897. Some institutions are beginning to respond. Artists there wonder if their meaning can be restored, too.

“They were made to tell stories, to keep memories,” said Enotie Ogbebor, an artist from Benin City. Western institutions had turned these pieces into “objects of admiration, when these were objects holding information,” he added.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

Inside a Chinese Propaganda Campaign

Thousands of videos, in which Chinese citizens deny abuses in the Xinjiang region, migrated from a regional Communist Party news app to YouTube, Twitter and other global sites. Meant to look like unfiltered glimpses of life in Xinjiang, most carry no signs they are official propaganda.

But taken together, the videos reveal clues of broader coordination, and in a monthslong analysis of more than 3,000 of them, The New York Times and ProPublica found evidence of one of China’s most elaborate efforts to shape global opinion.

Western internet platforms are playing a key part. Those platforms serve as high-speed propaganda pipelines for Beijing. In just a few days, videos establishing the Communist Party’s version of reality can be shot, edited and amplified across the global internet.

For Western platforms, the fact that they are not immediately obvious as state propaganda poses a challenge. Twitter suspended many of these accounts in March and April, before ProPublica and The Times inquired about them, for violating its policies against platform manipulation and spam. YouTube said the clips did not violate its community guidelines.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

Try making sweet and sour pork, and read about the new generation of chefs celebrating the inventiveness of American Chinese food.

Our Books editors compiled 14 new books coming in July, including an account of how Jeffrey Epstein was brought to justice and a story of a southern Indian community built on utopian ideals.

With people splitting work hours between office and home, it can be a challenge to figure out what tools to use in which situation. Here’s a guide to making tech work for you in the hybrid workplace.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Kick back (five letters).

And here is today’s Spelling Bee.

You can find all our puzzles here.

That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — Melina

P.S. The word “pseudonormalcy” — from an Opinion essay about pandemic reopenings — appeared for the first time in The Times this week.

The latest episode of “The Daily” is about the failure of a voting rights bill in the U.S.

You can reach Melina and the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

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