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Asia and Australia Edition

North Korea, Amazon, Republicans: Your Friday Briefing

Good morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

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Credit...Yonhap, via Reuters

North and South Korea’s sudden solidarity over the Winter Olympics has complicated the longstanding White House strategy of pressuring the North with sanctions and threats of military action. And it comes as the world’s confidence in America’s leadership has hit a new low.

Just 30 percent of people interviewed in 134 countries last year approved of U.S. leadership, a drop of nearly 20 percentage points since President Obama’s final year. The U.S. is now behind China, and barely ahead of Russia.

The survey concluded that Mr. Trump’s foreign policy and his words “have sowed doubt about the U.S. commitment to its partners abroad.”

Above, President Moon Jae-in with the South Korean ice hockey teams.

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• President Trump upset a Republican plan to keep the government open past Friday when he said an extension of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program should not be part of a stopgap spending bill.

Mr. Trump further complicated the shutdown calculus by contradicting his own chief of staff, John Kelly, who told lawmakers that the president’s campaign promise to build a border wall with Mexico was not “fully informed.”

“The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it,” he wrote on Twitter.

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Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters

• China’s economy grew 6.9 percent last year, its first acceleration in seven years as exports, construction and consumer spending all climbed strongly.

At least, as our Shanghai bureau chief points out, that’s what the government says.

In reality, the pace of growth in the world’s second largest economy is anybody’s guess. Various signals suggest China’s growth did speed up last year, but its official figures are at times implausibly smooth and steady.

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Credit...David Goldman/Associated Press

• Earth’s long-term warming trend continued in 2017, with NASA declaring it the second warmest year on record, even without El Niño, which helped make 2016 the hottest recorded yet.

Overall, as this interactive graphic shows, global temperatures have increased more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century. To avoid the worst consequences of climate change, scientists warn that temperatures must not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Climate change is being felt in geopolitics, too. A water crisis — whether caused by nature, human mismanagement, or both — can be an early warning signal of conflict. Iran is the latest example.

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Credit...David Gray/Reuters

• And Novak Djokovic defeated Gaël Monfils in a scorcher at the Australian Open.

The temperature on the court felt like 68 degrees Celsius (154 Fahrenheit), according to Australian television, and Mr. Djokovic called the conditions “brutal.” Here’s our full coverage of the tournament in Melbourne.

And the results are in for another epic challenge. This week’s Australia newsletter thanks the readers who helped add more new sign-ups than its competitor, the Canada Letter.

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• Amazon whittled contenders for its second headquarters down to 20 from 238, mostly in the Midwest and on the East Coast. The company, based in Seattle, says the move will bring 50,000 high-paying jobs.

• Four high-profile restaurateurs who have been accused of sexual harassment have stepped away from their empires. For the companies, the hard part lies ahead.

• A lifeline for the Airbus A380: The airline Emirates put in a $16 billion order just days after Airbus said it might stop production of the passenger jet.

• President Trump announced his long-promised “Fake News Awards” on Wednesday. The Times “won” two.

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

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Credit...Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images

• India successfully tested a long-range missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons, paving the way to join a handful of countries with intercontinental ballistic missiles. [The New York Times]

• In California, the parents accused of holding their 13 children in captivity were formally charged with torture and abuse. If convicted, they could face life in prison. [The New York Times]

A girl’s murder in a small German town has become Exhibit A for those arguing that the country’s migration policy has increased the risk of violent crime. [The New York Times]

• A businessman nicknamed “King of Steel” in the news media was one of three Australians arrested in Serbia, over a $500 million cocaine shipment to Sydney last year. [ABC]

• In 2013, U.S. agents allowed an ex-C.I.A. officer with classified information to return to Hong Kong. Here’s how that gamble helped expose China’s destruction of a U.S. spy network. [The New York Times]

• In Kazakhstan, 52 Uzbek citizens were killed when a bus caught fire in the remote Aktobe region. The cause is unknown. [Reuters]

• Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, speaking in Japan, cautioned that North and South Korea marching together at the Winter Olympics wouldn’t denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. [AP]

• The police in Macau are hunting for a casino dealer accused of stealing more than $6 million in chips from a VIP room. [Macau News]

• Scientists identified bacteria that caused a mass die-off of endangered antelopes in Kazakhstan in 2015. But the mechanism that made the bacteria so deadly eludes them. [The New York Times]

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

• It’s still worth getting a flu shot.

• Is there a downside to going gluten-free?

• Recipe of the day: Round out the week with the sweet and satisfying Canadian butter tart.

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Credit...Susana Vera/Reuters

• The daily barrage of hard news can be heavy. But it isn’t all bad out there. Here are seven great things we covered this week, from art doppelgängers to a blessing of pets, above.

• Motherhood, in six animated videos. We set out to uncover stories that were less about parenting and more about the fundamental shift in identity that women experience. In the first episode, meet Laurin.

• Our Australia Fare series continues with a review of Saba’s, an Ethiopian restaurant in Melbourne run by a mother and daughter whose home style cooking is the stuff of legend.

• And are earthquakes more likely during full moons? A seismologist scrutinized hundreds of strong earthquakes over four centuries and found no relationship to lunar cycles.

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Credit...Photofest

Long before the world got hooked on “Game of Thrones,” “I Love Lucy” was almost unprecedented in popularity — and daring in content for the time.

Lucy was one of the first pregnant characters shown on U.S. television, and 44 million viewers tuned to CBS 65 years ago today to see Lucille Ball’s character become a mother.

(Lucy gave birth to Ricky on the air the same night, it turns out, that Ms. Ball gave birth to her second child.)

Audience numbers like that episode’s have since been far surpassed — the Super Bowl, for instance, has drawn more than 100 million viewers for each of the past eight years. But almost 72 percent of TVs in the U.S. were tuned in to “I Love Lucy” that day, an astonishing feat.

According to Nielsen’s, the final episode of “M*A*S*H,” in 1983, had the highest rating of any fictional show in U.S. history, 125 million. But few shows can rival the positive response that the “I Love Lucy” birth episode, and the arrival of Ms. Ball’s second child, elicited.

“One million viewers responded with congratulatory telephone calls, telegrams, letters or gifts,” The Times noted in Ms. Ball’s obituary in 1989.

Anna Schaverien contributed reporting.

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Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online. Browse past briefings here.

We have briefings timed for the Australian, Asian, European and American mornings. And our Australia bureau chief offers a weekly letter adding analysis and conversations with readers. You can sign up for these and other Times newsletters here.

What would you like to see here? Contact us at asiabriefing@nytimes.com.

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