Your Thursday Briefing – The New York Times

Terrorist threat persists in Sri Lanka

The American ambassador warned of “ongoing terrorist plots,” following the deadly bombings in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday that killed at least 359 people.

Officials said that the nine suicide bombers were all Sri Lankans, from mostly educated, middle-class backgrounds, and that other people involved remained at large. The authorities are investigating whether the Islamic State, which on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the blasts, had provided more than symbolic support.

Sri Lanka’s president asked two top security officials to resign, amid anger that the government had ignored multiple warnings that churches could be attacked.

Go deeper: For older residents of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, the security measures after the bombings are a flashback to the country’s dark days of civil war, and for a younger generation, they are entirely disorienting.

Listen: In the latest episode of “The Daily,” Jeffrey Gettleman, the South Asia bureau chief, discusses the terrorist attack.

Kim Jong-un prepares to meet with Vladimir Putin

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is scheduled to meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Thursday, as part of an effort to counter American pressure to give up his nuclear weapons arsenal.

After a daylong journey in an armored train from Pyongyang, Mr. Kim, who arrived in the Russian port city of Vladivostok wearing a black fedora and black overcoat, gave a rare, short interview to the Russian television network Rossiya 1.

Notable quote: “I hope this visit will be successful and fruitful,” Mr. Kim said. “I hope that during talks with esteemed President Putin, I will have a detailed discussion of the settlement process on the Korean Peninsula and the development of our relations.”

Background: By securing a meeting with Mr. Putin this week, Mr. Kim sought to reaffirm his image as a global player despite his failure to reach an agreement with President Trump during a meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February. It also sent a signal to Washington that Mr. Kim was expanding his diplomatic chess game.

Democrats are divided on impeachment

House Democrats are wrestling with duty and politics in the wake of the report from the special counsel Robert Mueller. Prominent left-leaning members are pressing for action.

“I don’t ever want to look back — and I think a lot of my colleagues feel the same way — to say that we didn’t do everything in our power to stop this lawless president from jeopardizing our democracy,” said Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with swing-district lawmakers in mind, has urged caution.

Coming soon: President Trump’s advisers have signaled that the administration will resist efforts to obtain his tax returns and to force his former aides to testify. The refusals could lead to constitutional clashes in court as Mr. Trump seeks to stave off further inquiries into his personal and political matters.

Ecuador’s surveillance state: Made in China

In Ecuador, police officers spend their days poring over computer screens, watching footage from 4,300 cameras across the country and scanning the streets for drug deals, muggings and murders.

A Times investigation found that this footage also goes to Ecuador’s feared domestic intelligence agency, which under a previous president was known for intimidating and attacking political opponents.

Ecuador is one of 18 countries using Chinese-made monitoring systems that are increasingly sophisticated and cheap. After vastly expanding its domestic surveillance, Beijing is now sharing its know-how and equipment with other governments, which critics warn could lead to a future of tech-driven authoritarianism.

Watch: Is Chinese-style surveillance becoming normalized? “China’s goal is political control; that’s what these systems were designed for,” our reporter says in a video analysis. “In effect, China is exporting more than cameras. They are exporting the way they use their cameras.”

If you have 7 minutes, this is worth it

The big, bad wolves of Germany

Germany’s wolves, extinct for the best part of a century, have returned, slipping into the country from Poland.

Snapshot: Above, a giant cassowary. One of the hulking, flightless birds — indigenous to Southeast Asia and Australia, with daggerlike claws on their feet — killed its owner in Florida this month. Now it’s up for auction.

I think, therefore I speak: Scientists have developed a virtual “voice prophylactic,” a system that decodes brain signals and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth.

What we’re watching: This TED Talk by Mariah Gladstone, a member of the Blackfeet nation. “She’s also a cook with a degree from Columbia,” says our national food correspondent, Kim Severson, “who started a cooking show called Indigikitchen to help people remember what food was like before colonization: locavore paleo.”

Now, a break from the news

Listen: In his “Ring” cycle, Wagner uses musical themes to create a world of gods, heroes, dwarves and giants. Here’s how.

Eat: At Wayan in New York City’s NoLIta, Ochi and Cédric Vongerichten (the son of Jean-Georges) nudge Indonesian cuisine in new directions. Read our review.

Smarter Living: Apologies are complicated. The urge to be polite undermines your confidence, critics say, and underscores your own insecurity. But, context matters and saying sorry isn’t always a bad thing.

And know that there’s nothing to be sorry about when eating what you want. Especially if it can change your mood.

And now for the Back Story on …

He-he-helium

This is the International Year of the Periodic Table, so named by the U.N. to honor what is considered the 150th anniversary of a crucial discovery by a Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev.

In 1869, he published the first recognizable periodic table, arranging the 63 elements then known by increasing atomic number — the total number of protons in an atomic nucleus — and in vertical stacks that corresponded to recurring patterns or properties.

That concise organization revealed and predicted many elemental dynamics, and the table became the foundation for chemistry, nuclear physics and other sciences. The periodic system is considered one of modern science’s most important achievements.

But it can also help to explain the chemistry behind a popular party trick: inhaling helium from a balloon to make your voice sound funny.

Helium is lighter than oxygen, enabling the vibrations of your vocal cords to travel more quickly, which shifts the resonant frequencies in your vocal tract to the higher end.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. (And don’t worry: We won’t be bidding on the cassowary. It’s all yours.)

— Stephen and Katie

Thank you
Chris Stanford helped compile today’s briefing. Mark Josephson, Eleanor Stanford and Kenneth R. Rosen provided the break from the news. Katie Van Syckle wrote today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at [email protected].

P.S.
• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about the attacks in Sri Lanka.
• Here’s our mini crossword puzzle, and a clue: Tapped, as a cigarette (5 letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
• “Caliphate,” a New York Times podcast series that followed our reporter Rukmini Callimachi’s work on the Islamic State into Iraq, won a 2018 Peabody Award.