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Good evening. Here’s the latest.
1. Protesting Puerto Ricans paralyzed San Juan.
Filling miles of a major highway, tens of thousands of people demanded that Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló resign.
Organizers hoped the island-wide strikes and rallies would draw a million people — about a third of Puerto Rico’s population. It appears to be one of the largest protests in the U.S. territory’s history.
Puerto Ricans have suffered through years of economic austerity measures and the devastation of Hurricane Maria, but the last straw was the publication last week of hundreds of pages of a group chat between Mr. Rosselló and aides that included crude, offensive comments — and revealed a cozy relationship between the governor and former staff members now representing special interests.
2. The White House and lawmakers reached a budget deal, agreeing to increase U.S. government spending by $320 billion.
The agreement sets out equal growth in domestic and military spending, a key demand of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, offsets by about $75 billion in spending cuts.
If enacted before Congress leaves for its August recess, the arrangement would avert a default crisis this fall, putting the next showdown off until after the 2020 elections.
The federal debt has ballooned to $22 trillion. For this fiscal year alone, it has reached $747 billion with two months to go, a 23 percent increase from the year before. But those who once raised alarm over the growing debt — including President Trump himself — have largely fallen silent.
3. “Why didn’t you subpoena the president?”
Our Washington bureau poses this and 18 other questions for Congress to ask Robert Mueller when he testifies on Wednesday.
He has already said that he won’t go beyond what is in the 448-page report he delivered on his two-year investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Read and search the report.
But whatever he says, his words will be carefully analyzed, from the points he highlights to the inflections of his voice. The Times will be streaming the hearings and providing live commentary.
4. As if Somalia didn’t have enough trouble.
The war-torn nation has emerged as a central battleground for Persian Gulf states competing with guns, cash and terrorism for power and profits across the Horn of Africa.
The United Arab Emirates and Qatar are each providing weapons or military training to favored factions, exchanging allegations about bribing local officials and competing for contracts to manage ports or exploit natural resources.
Our reporters obtained a recording of a phone call with the Qatari ambassador to Somalia, in which a businessman close to the emir of Qatar said that militants had carried out a bombing in the Somalian city of Bosaso — whose port is pictured above — to advance Qatari interests and drive out the U.A.E.
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5. And Britain’s next prime minister …
… will be announced Tuesday. Boris Johnson, the darling of rank-and-file Tories hellbent on Brexit, is the strong favorite over Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt — though not everyone is sure he’s ready to face perhaps Britain’s greatest peacetime crisis. Above, Mr. Johnson today.
Voting among Conservative Party members ended today. The victor takes over from Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday, and will face a new complication: the new leader of the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, Jo Swinson, a 39-year-old Scottish lawmaker, who could become a kingmaker in the topsy-turvy political scene.
Officials in Mrs. May’s government have begun resigning over their opposition to Mr. Johnson’s threat to go through with a no-deal Brexit. Our podcast “The Daily” looks at the making of Boris Johnson.
6. Equifax pays up.
The credit-reporting company agreed to pay at least $650 million in the largest settlement to date for a data breach.
About half is for a restitution fund for the 147 million Americans whose personal information was compromised in 2017 when hackers — still unidentified — got access to names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers.
There is little evidence of fraud directly attributed to the breach, but customers have spent countless hours freezing credit files and watching for signs of illicit activity. Here’s what the settlement means for you.
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7. Microsoft promised $1 billion to OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab, to help build a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
Its chief executive, the Silicon Valley star Sam Altman, above, aims for A.G.I. — artificial general intelligence. It may not arrive for decades or even centuries, if ever.
But the race is on. Elon Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, left the lab last year to concentrate on his own A.I. ambitions at Tesla. DeepMind, a top lab owned by Google’s parent company, is also chasing A.G.I.
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8. The world of Jeffrey Epstein.
The financier, who is charged with sex-trafficking teenage girls, liked to portray himself as an investment wizard, but there is little evidence to support that notion.
Yet he managed to affix himself to a handful of prominent Wall Street veterans, including James Staley, now chief executive of Barclays. We look at the big-money figures with whom he associated and where they stand now.
And we also look at Mr. Epstein’s little black book, which includes listings for quite a few luminaries who say they have no idea why he had their contacts. Above, Mr. Epstein with Ghislaine Maxwell, with whom he had a long and tangled relationship.
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9. India’s turn.
The country’s 142-foot, 700-ton rocket of the Chandrayaan-2 mission blasted off at 2:43 p.m. local time from India’s southeast coast, carrying an uncrewed lunar lander and the dreams of a nation.
If the rest of the mission goes well, India will become the fourth nation — after the U.S., Russia and China — to land on the moon, more than 200,000 miles away. Its target is a region near the south pole, where no other missions have explored.
But that won’t be until September, thanks to a fuel-conserving flight plan that takes the mission in widening orbits around the Earth until the moon’s gravity pulls it into lunar orbit.
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10. And finally, undersea discoveries.
An international team has found a remarkably well-preserved 500-year-old ship in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea.
The maritime archaeologists are calling it Okänt Skepp, Swedish for “unknown ship.”
But don’t go looking for the Renaissance vessel — the location is being kept secret to deter scavengers and treasure hunters.
And the wreckage of the Minerve, a French submarine that sank in 1968 with 52 crew members aboard, was located in the Mediterranean. “I am thinking of the families who have waited for so long for this moment,” France’s minister of armed services wrote on Twitter.
May your evening bring you fair winds and following seas.
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Source : Nytimes