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Asia and Australia Edition

North Korea, Amazon, World Cup: Your Friday Briefing

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.)

Good morning. Retaliatory trade measures, monsoon season in Bangladesh and China’s World Cup reach. Here’s what you need to know.

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Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

More countries are readying trade retaliation against the U.S.

U.S. tariffs go into effect on metals from the European Union, Canada and Mexico today, and some have already hit back. Combined with similar measures being prepared by China, Russia and Turkey, the impact of the penalties on American goods could be severe. (Australia appears to expect that its own exemption from the U.S. tariffs will hold.)

Ahead of a weekend visit to Beijing by the U.S. commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, China said it would cut tariffs sharply on July 1 for an array of imported goods, few of which are American.

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Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

• President Trump said he was expecting a visiting North Korean delegation to give him a letter from their leader, Kim Jong-un, as officials tried to salvage the June 12 summit meeting.

His comments came right after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began formal talks with Kim Yong-chol, the senior North Korean official who arrived in New York on Thursday. His visit signals that talks between the two countries are reaching a critical point.

In a video, we look at what is known about that controversial official, who is North Korea’s top nuclear weapons negotiator.

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Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

“What if we were wrong?”

Shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama struggled to understand Donald Trump’s victory, according to a new book by a longtime adviser, Benjamin Rhodes.

Mr. Rhodes reveals the emotional stages Mr. Obama went through at the time, including wondering if he had misjudged his own place in history.

“Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said at one point. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

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• Monsoon season could mean catastrophe for Rohingya refugees.

Our reporter visited parts of southern Bangladesh most at risk for flooding, landslides and disease. His report documents, in video and still images, the enormous effort to rebuild the world’s largest refugee camp.

And in the Andaman Sea, our Southeast Asia bureau chief boarded a search-and-rescue boat scouring the high seas for Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar on rickety vessels.

A request submitted this week urged the International Criminal Court to open a criminal investigation into continuing atrocities against the Rohingya in Myanmar. The filing included an unusual annex: 20 pages of purple thumbprints — the equivalent of signatures of 400 Rohingya women and girls.

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Credit...Cole Wilson for The New York Times

• The Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez described himself as “a small god” and an “enlightened artist of new horizons.” However immodestly, our critic writes, he spoke the truth.

A euphoric exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is the first Kingelez retrospective in the United States. The artist’s fantasy architectural models are strong in color, eccentric in shape and glowing with futuristic visions for Congo’s transition after independence from Belgium in 1960.

And as objects, the works are among the most distinctive and ambiguous creations in the histories of sculpture, architectural model-making and the decorative arts. They celebrate, criticize and satirize.

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Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

• China didn’t qualify for the World Cup this year, but the sudden appearance of Chinese companies as top corporate sponsors hints at the country’s opportunistic rise in the soccer world.

• Amazon warned its Australian customers that they would lose access to its main website, setting off a backlash from consumers worried about price increases and product availability.

• A SoftBank fund plans to invest $2.25 billion in General Motors’ driverless-technology division to help the automaker ramp up a ride-hailing service and other new ventures.

• Tesla earned a “recommended” rating from Consumer Reports for its first mass-market electric car, after a software update fixed what the magazine had called “big flaws.”

• U.S. stocks were down. Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

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Credit...Antara Foto/Reuters

• Indonesia’s most celebrated Islamic fashion designer, pictured above with her husband, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for defrauding customers who booked pilgrimages to Mecca through the travel agency the couple owned. [The New York Times]

• The American Institute in Taiwan — the U.S. Embassy in all but name — is getting a $250 million upgrade as the U.S. slowly elevates its ties with the self-governing island, angering China. [The New York Times]

• The U.S. military renamed its Pacific Command the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, a symbolic move that shows the growing importance of India to the Pentagon amid tensions with China. [Reuters]

• Harvey Weinstein was indicted on two counts of rape and one count of criminal sexual act by a grand jury in Manhattan. If convicted, he could face 25 years in prison. [The New York Times]

• A severe water shortage has prompted residents in Shimla, India, to warn tourists to stay away. [The Guardian]

• The N.B.A. finals begin with an unprecedented fourth straight year of the same finals matchup: the Golden State Warriors versus the Cleveland Cavaliers. [The New York Times]

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

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Credit...Melina Hammer for The New York Times

• Recipe of the day: End the week with a simple strawberry and mascarpone tart.

• Here’s what should — and shouldn’t — happen during gynecological exams.

• You’ve been recycling these six things all wrong.

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Credit...William E. Crawford

• A photographer’s curiosity brought him to postwar Hanoi, where he documented the transformation of the city and its people over three decades. Above, an image from 1987.

• The Times’s recent publication of an investigation into thousands of internal Islamic State documents led to a thoughtful conversation with readers on the ethical and legal considerations of reporting in a war zone. (The original documents are to be given back to Iraq.)

The pyramids of Giza are near a Pizza Hut. Movies and textbooks (and our imaginations) tend to depict ancient world landmarks in an idyllic light, but our visual tour shows that the reality is often quite different.

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Credit...Gene Arias/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images

It’s now a widely known way to save someone from choking: Wrap your arms around them from behind, squeeze and push their abdomen to create air flow to the lungs.

The Heimlich maneuver was first described in June 1974, in an article published by its creator, Dr. Henry Heimlich. Above, Dr. Heimlich demonstrated the maneuver on Johnny Carson in 1979.

In the early 1970s, almost 4,000 Americans died annually from choking on food or small objects. It was the sixth-leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. By some estimates, more than 100,000 people have been saved because of the technique.

A thoracic surgeon, Dr. Heimlich developed the method that compresses the lungs, causing a flow of air that carries the stuck object out of the airway and then the mouth. It has become a safety icon that is taught in schools, portrayed in movies and endorsed by medical authorities. At first, however, Dr. Heimlich found himself at odds with a skeptical medical establishment.

In May 2016, shortly before his death at the age of 96 and after decades of showing people how to correctly use the maneuver, he saved an 87-year-old woman’s life with his own invention. “I felt it was just confirmation of what I had been doing throughout my life,” he said.

Claire Moses wrote today’s Back Story.

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