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Asia and Australia Edition

Korea, Volcano, Cuba: Your Friday Briefing

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Good morning. Irreversible damage to the Great Barrier Reef, a volcano erupts in Japan and Saudi Arabia screens “Black Panther.” Here’s what you need to know:

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Credit...Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

• Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, is no longer demanding that American troops be removed from South Korea as a condition for denuclearization, the South said. That removes a major obstacle to talks with the United States.

“The North Koreans did not present any conditions that the United States could not accept,” President Moon Jae-in of South Korea told journalists in Seoul.

If confirmed, the reversal could affect long-term U.S. military plans in the region and ease Washington’s reluctance to strike a deal with North Korea. The U.S. is also “fighting very diligently” to negotiate the release of three Korean-American prisoners in North Korea, President Trump said.

Above, South Korean and U.S. Marines in a joint drill in July 2016.

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Credit...Shawn Thew/European Pressphoto Agency, via Rex

If the world economy is looking so great, why are global policymakers so gloomy?

Worries about trade and debt are chief among the concerns of top officials gathering in Washington for the I.M.F. and World Bank meetings. President Trump tweeted last month that trade wars are “good, and easy to win,” but policymakers disagree.

Farmers in the Midwest are also stewing about how much they stand to lose in a trade war with China, which has proposed retaliatory tariffs on soybeans. And China is weighing a boycott of American goods, which could backfire.

The Trump administration’s policies have effectively crippled the Export-Import Bank, an 84-year-old Washington institution.

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• “Mission accomplished!” declared President Trump after the airstrikes on Syrian chemical facilities last week. But a new military intelligence report says President Bashar al-Assad’s government is expected to continue developing chemical weapons.

We have more details on how the strike unfolded, with 105 missiles raining on three targets — chemical weapons storage and research facilities near Damascus and Homs.

Meanwhile, Washington announced a new policy that could vastly expand armed drone sales, a day after Mr. Trump promised to slash the red tape around weapons sales.

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Credit...Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press

• Cuba’s new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, above left, is the first person outside the Castro dynasty to lead the island nation in decades. He has spent his entire life in the service of a revolution he did not fight, and now he must find a way to manage the frustrations of a population impatient with the pace of change.

In Miami, there’s a sense of wistfulness among aging Cuban exiles: They’ve waited long to see the Castros go, but they don’t expect real change anytime soon.

Meanwhile, other members of the Castro family hold influence behind the scenes.

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Credit...David Maurice Smith for The New York Times

The Great Barrier Reef may never recover. Extensive damage from a mass bleaching event caused by a 2016 heat wave may be irreversible, a new report says. Nearly a third of the reef’s coral was killed, radically altering the ecosystem.

Speaking of oceanic change, the Bajau, a sea-dwelling people in the Asia Pacific, are among the best divers in the world. And evolution is making them even better. Scientists say they have an unusually strong diving reflex — their heart rates slow and their blood vessels constrict, allowing them to go deeper and stay longer underwater.

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A robot conquered one of humanity’s most difficult tasks: assembling Ikea furniture. The researchers behind the technological marvel explain how they did it.

• Qualcomm, the American chip maker, is finding itself in the cross hairs of a looming U.S.-China trade war that threatens its operations and future growth in both markets.

• Advertisers have long had a symbiotic relationship with Facebook. But user concerns about privacy are forcing companies to re-examine how they work with the social network.

• The German authorities raided the offices of Porsche, one of Volkswagen’s most profitable units, in a widening investigation into an emissions-cheating scandal.

• Southwest’s fatal accident this week is renewing scrutiny of inspections. No problems were detected when the plane was checked two days before the explosion.

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

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Credit...Daphnee Cook/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, via Save the Children

Rohingya camps in Bangladesh have flooded, raising fears before the monsoon season. Nearly one million people arrived there fleeing violence in Myanmar. [Agence France-Presse]

• Marriage to a U.S. citizen used to be a virtual guarantee of legal residency. That is no longer the case under the Trump administration. [The New York Times]

• A Chinese doctor was jailed for an essay criticizing a popular tonic liquor as quack medicine. Now he has been freed — and applauded. [The New York Times]

• A volcano in southern Japan erupted for the first time in 250 years, prompting the meteorological agency to raise the alert level to 3 out of 5. [Asahi Shimbun]

• A freak accident caused an islandwide blackout in Puerto Rico, seven months after Hurricane Maria plunged it into darkness. [The New York Times]

• Australia’s banking commission has uncovered disturbing stories of financial advisers charging fees to dead clients. [The Guardian]

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Credit...Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

In Saudi Arabia, a V.I.P. screening of the Hollywood blockbuster “Black Panther” signified the end of a decades-old ban on movie theaters, part of a wider social opening in the kingdom. [The New York Times]

• A record number of Nepalese women are climbing Mount Everest this season. [BBC]

• Lost and found: An Indian man missing for 40 years will reunite with his family after a YouTube video of him singing on a Mumbai street went viral. [Agence France-Presse]

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Credit...Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Michelle Gatton. Prop stylist: Amy Wilson.

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

• Leftovers? Make a savory tart.

• Here’s how to help a resistant colleague.

• Recipe of the day: Close out the week with a sheet-pan meal of roasted chicken, potatoes, arugula and garlic yogurt.

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Credit...Jonno Rattman for The New York Times

• Can dirt save the earth? Farming could pull carbon out of the air and into the soil, but that would mean a new way of thinking about how to tend the land.

• A hip-hop duo whose album features anti-Jewish lyrics won an award at the German equivalent of the Grammys, setting off a debate about the rise of anti-Semitism.

• The Times publishes nearly 30 film reviews a week. Here’s a selection of what to see (or skip) for Australian viewers.

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Credit...Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, above center, took those words from an old Army ballad and made them famous 67 years ago this week in his farewell address to Congress.

Little did that five-star American general know that he had just given rise to an army of so-called snowclones, a relatively new linguistic phenomenon that’s tougher to explain than it is to use.

A snowclone, as defined by the linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum in 2003, is a “customizable, instantly recognizable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants.” (Mr. Pullum also called them “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists.”)

Let’s try one. Using General MacArthur’s template, “Old golfers never die, they just lose their drive,” would be a snowclone. Using X and Y as stand-ins, snowclones are easy to spot: X is my middle name, a few Xs short of a Y, and so on.

It’s unclear who first said “pink is the new black,” but it is now one of the most popular snowclone templates, notably producing the title of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black.”

Study of the subject appears half-serious: One article was titled “Snowclone Is the New Cliché.”

Charles McDermid wrote today’s Back Story.

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A correction was made on 
April 19, 2018

An earlier version of this briefing gave an incorrect location for a volcano that erupted in Japan. It is in southern Japan, not the north.

How we handle corrections

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