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Asia and Australia Edition

Google, North Korea, Paul Manafort: Your Thursday Briefing

Good morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

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Credit...Kim Won-Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

• With alarm spreading across Asia, some U.S. officials continued to follow President Trump’s tough — and apparently improvised — line against North Korea’s nuclear belligerence.

But Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, sought to ease the sense of crisis as he returned from a regional trip. “Nothing I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours,” he said at a refueling stop on Guam, the very island the North threatened to attack.

Pyongyang said it was drawing up plans to launch missiles into waters near Guam to teach President Trump a lesson. Here’s a video that explains more about the island, which is home to a U.S. air base. If you live there, we’d like to hear how you feel about the threat.

Here are answers to four crucial questions about the standoff, and five reasons the danger may not be as scary as it seems.

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Credit...Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

One of our most read stories today is about Michael Deng, a New York college freshman who joined an Asian-American fraternity looking for a sense of belonging. Two months later he was dead.

Our magazine writer spent a year and a half reporting on the story of his death and the trial that followed, and what it all reveals about the painful search for Asian-American identity.

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Credit...Francois Lenoir/Reuters

• “I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment.”

James Damore, the 28-year-old software engineer who was fired by Google for writing an anti-diversity manifesto, has come back swinging.

The memo has put a spotlight on the U.S. tech industry, and is also serving as a rallying cry for conservatives and the alt-right who view Silicon Valley as a bastion of liberal groupthink. In a Facebook Live conversation, two technology reporters discussed the memo and responded to questions.

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Credit...Hunter McRae for The New York Times

• New research shows how rapidly tidal flooding has worsened in the Southeastern U.S.

The details emerged as President Trump is faced with a tough choice, between accepting the conclusions of administration scientists that the U.S. is already suffering powerful effects of global warming or the rejecting it to placate conservative supporters.

Here are our nine takeaways from that report.

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Credit...Keri Megelus/European Pressphoto Agency

And the global war on plastic may have a new leader.

The City Council in the Tasmanian city of Hobart is drafting legislation that would phase out single-use plastic containers and cutlery by 2020.

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Credit...Yuya Shino/Getty Images

• U.S. markets fell less than global markets amid the saber rattling over North Korea. Here’s a snapshot.

Some currency traders see the continuing fall of the U.S. dollar as a possible sign of long-term damage from an unorthodox presidency.

• Fox News and 21st Century Fox, which paid tens of millions of dollars to settle discrimination lawsuits, declined to settle several more for a combined $60 million, The Times has learned.

21st Century Fox reported quarterly earnings that beat expectations, but were still down from a year ago.

• The danger that the U.S. faces with low-skilled immigrants? Not having them, our economics columnist writes.

Netflix will produce its first Chinese-language series, a Taiwanese-directed jailbreak thriller called “Bardo.”

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Credit...Wang Qin/Chengdu Economic Daily, via Reuters

• Two areas of China, in Sichuan Province and the northwestern Xinjiang region, are bracing for aftershocks, landslides and the possibility of more tremors after two lethal earthquakes struck within 10 hours. [South China Morning Post]

• New Zealand Green Party is heading into September’s election under the sole leadership of James Shaw, after Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader over the fallout from her disclosure that she lied while on welfare. She will retire from Parliament after the vote. [The New York Times]

• In Kenya, early election results were thrown into doubt after the opposition leader claimed the electoral commission had been hacked. [The New York Times]

• Dick Cheney, the former U.S. vice president, met with the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, during a four-day visit to the island. [Taiwan News]

• The F.B.I. raided the home of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, last month as part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, searching for documents that suggest a broadening investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller. [The New York Times]

• Public outcry in France sank proposals to enshrine in law the role of the first lady. [The New York Times]

Investigations into bribery, fraud and breach of trust are forcing Israelis to contemplate the end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s durable political career. [The New York Times]

• Posted photos of a black man being arrested in the Chinese city of Hefei unleashed waves of racist comments against Africans. [What’s on Weibo]

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

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Credit...Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

• Recipe of the day: Fire up the grill and go with grilled halibut and corn relish.

• Negativity prevents us from bouncing back from life’s inevitable stresses.

• Want to change careers? Some seemingly dissimilar jobs overlap in required skills.

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Credit...The New York Times

• Fan maps show you what music Americans love and where. BTS, the K-pop boy band, is popular in Hawaii, parts of California and a curious pocket of fandom in northern Wisconsin.

• A Chicago math professor explains the dazzling achievements of Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani, two great mathematicians who died recently.

Ozploitation is the focus of a New York film festival, “Deranged Down Under: ‘To Hell and Outback,’” that feasts on Australia’s obsessions with survival, psychopaths and tricked-out vehicles.

• And Bill Murray attended a performance of “Groundhog Day,” the Broadway musical based on his 1993 movie, for the first time. Or did it just feel that way?

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Credit...Drew Angerer for The New York Times

The Smithsonian Institution, which Congress created on this day in 1846, is now composed of 19 museums and galleries that are devoted to “the process of developing an American national identity.”

It is intriguing, then, that the Smithsonian’s founding patron, James Smithson, never set foot in the U.S.

Smithson was born in Paris as Jacques-Louis Macie, the illegitimate son of a wealthy English duke. He eventually changed his name, became a British citizen and built a solid reputation as a scientist. (A mineral, smithsonite, is named for him, and he is credited with coming up with the term “silicates.”)

When Smithson died in Italy in 1829, he left behind an unusual will, above: If his nephew, his sole heir, died without children, his entire estate would go to the U.S. to found “at Washington, under the name Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”

Only theories exist to explain why Smithson gave the U.S. his wealth, which amounted to more than $500,000, about 1/66th of the U.S. budget at the time.

Even the Smithsonian concedes that “we are left to speculate on the ideals and motivations of a gift that has had such significant impact on the arts, humanities and sciences of the United States.”

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We have briefings timed for the Australian, European and American mornings. You can sign up for these and other Times newsletters here.

Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online.

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

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