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Asia and Australia Edition

Tariffs, Facebook, Joe Biden: Your Friday Briefing

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Good morning.

Australia dodges U.S. tariffs, prominent septuagenarians trade schoolyard taunts, and the great Pacific garbage patch may now be the size of Mongolia. Here’s what you need to know:

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Credit...Dean Lewins/European Pressphoto Agency

Australia and South Korea made the list of American allies that will be spared, for now, from steep U.S. tariffs on aluminum and steel that go into effect today. Above, a steel mill in Wollongong, south of Sydney.

The U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, also said Argentina, Brazil and the European Union would join Canada and Mexico as exempt, at least temporarily.

Those countries accounted for more than half of the total volume of steel sold to the U.S. in 2017, so the exemptions could undercut the tariffs’ impact on domestic steel mills.

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Credit...Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

• Banishing any possible doubt about the focus of his sweeping tariffs, President Trump announced plans to impose about $60 billion worth of annual tariffs on Chinese imports and to exact other penalties from an “economic enemy.”

Some 1,300 lines of goods to be affected are to be named within 15 days.

Mr. Lighthizer, the trade representative, said he was pushing to target products from the advanced industries in Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” plan, including electric vehicles, high-tech shipping and aerospace technology.

Our Beijing correspondent looks at the challenges China’s president, Xi Jinping, must now confront.

President Trump’s national security adviser is out. H. R. McMaster, will be replaced by John R. Bolton, a hard-line former U.S. ambassador.

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How the Las Vegas Gunman Planned a Massacre, in 7 Days of Video

Using exclusive surveillance footage obtained from MGM Resorts, we pieced together the last days of Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas gunman. He plays video poker, laughs with hotel staff and hauls bag after bag of weapons into his suite.

The surveillance footage is remarkable in its banality. It shows Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas gunman, in the days before his mass shooting. He cuts a lonesome figure as he moves through the Mandalay Bay hotel — playing video poker for hours in the casino; buying snacks at a newsstand; watching a LeBron James interview in a restaurant; and at times, chatting with hotel staff. But this picture of an ordinary gambler disguises a far more sinister intent. Through this previously unseen footage, we’ll show how Paddock methodically planned his attack, and how, over seven days, hotel staff unwittingly helped him to move bag after bag of weapons to his room. The videos, obtained exclusively by The New York Times from MGM Resorts, begin on Monday, Sept. 25. At the V.I.P. counter, he checks into a suite on the 32nd floor, and books an adjoining room, which he will check into four days later. He doesn’t immediately bring in suitcases. Instead, he spends two hours in the hotel, going to his room and eating at a sushi restaurant downstairs. Just before 5 p.m., he drives his Chrysler Pacifica minivan to the valet area, where a bellman loads the luggage cart with five suitcases. Paddock asks to stay with his luggage, so the bellman brings him through the service elevators to his room — something hotel management says is not unusual. Paddock spends the next four hours in his room, and at 9:40 that night, he leaves the hotel, bringing two suitcases with him. He drives one hour to Mesquite, where he lived. Cellphone records show that he stays the night and spends most of Tuesday here. Around 8 p.m., Paddock returns to Las Vegas, but he stops at the Ogden, a downtown condominium complex. This is interesting for a few reasons. Paddock was also renting rooms here for the entire week. He checked in the previous Friday, when a music event called the Life Is Beautiful festival was being held in the surrounding streets. Internet records recovered by the police show that he searched for that festival’s lineup and its expected attendance. This was similar to his research of the Mandalay and the Route 91 Harvest Festival, which he would later attack. So, the Ogden and the Life is Beautiful festival could have been used for planning, or may even have been a target. Later Tuesday night, Paddock returns to the Mandalay and a different bellman helps him to move seven more suitcases to his suite. Again, he uses the service elevator. He tips the bellman, who had no way of knowing these cases were packed with guns and ammunition. He gambles for eight hours until morning. Paddock was a regular at the Mandalay, and several casino hosts knew him. The videos show their interactions as being completely normal and in no way alarming. Remember, in two days, Paddock has brought 12 cases upstairs. He spends most of Wednesday in his room, and that evening repeats a similar pattern. He leaves the Mandalay, again carrying two suitcases. He stops at the Ogden and drives home to Mesquite. On Thursday, he buys a .308 bolt-action rifle from a gun store and visits a nearby gun range before driving back to the Mandalay. That night, he again uses the valet service and a bellman to carry a white container and three suitcases to his room. His arsenal of weapons is growing. Again, he gambles through the night. It’s now Friday, and at 8 p.m., the Route 91 Harvest Festival will open in the fairgrounds across from the Mandalay. Paddock stays in his room until around 3 p.m. and uses his laptop while the suite is cleaned. He checks into the adjoining room, 134, using the name of his girlfriend, Marilou Danley. He also tells cleaning staff to leave behind the food-service cart. Two days later, Paddock would use this, and one other service cart, to create a surveillance ring during his attack. Overnight, he makes a brief trip to Mesquite. Arriving back at the Mandalay at 6 a.m. with two more suitcases. Soon after noon on Saturday, he places do not disturb signs on both room doors. He declines housekeeping. He takes an elevator to the valet area and sits, waiting for his car. He carries two more bags to his room. He gambles some more, and that night he makes a final trip to Mesquite, returning to the Mandalay at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. He gambles through the night in the high-limits slots area, and returns to his room at 7:37 a.m. It’s 12:16 p.m. when we see Paddock going back to the parking garage. The guests exiting the elevator have no idea that in 10 hours, this unremarkable figure would commit the worst mass shooting in modern American history. He returns from his car, bringing two suitcases and a smaller bag inside. Since Monday, he has brought at least 21 cases, two smaller bags, a laptop bag and a container to his room. This is the last time we see Paddock, arriving at the 32nd floor. Through the day, he opens, closes and locks both rooms repeatedly. At thirty-six minutes after 9, he locks the deadbolt to room 135 for the last time. Four minutes later, Jason Aldean, who’s headlining the Route 91 festival, begins his act. Paddock then turns the deadbolt to room 134. At 10:05, his shooting rampage begins. In under 10 minutes, he would kill 58 people and injure over 700, before taking his own life. He had amassed 23 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Almost six months since the attack, Paddock’s motive remains unknown.

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Using exclusive surveillance footage obtained from MGM Resorts, we pieced together the last days of Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas gunman. He plays video poker, laughs with hotel staff and hauls bag after bag of weapons into his suite.

• Before the massacre.

Using exclusively obtained surveillance footage, we pieced together the last days of Stephen Paddock, the gunman who rained lethal fire on a music festival in Las Vegas last October, killing scores.

He plays video poker, laughs with hotel staff — and hauls bag after bag of weapons into his suite.

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Credit...Manu Fernandez/Associated Press

“The most important thing is that we fix this system.”

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, gave an unexpected interview to two of our reporters about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Not everyone was impressed by Mr. Zuckerberg’s statements, days after we broke the story that data from over 50 million profiles had been secretly scraped. “He avoided the big issue,” an analyst said, “which is that for many years, Facebook was basically giving away user data like it was handing out candy.”

On “The Daily” podcast, one of the reporters who interviewed Mr. Zuckerberg described how it went. (Facebook’s outreach was so sudden, they had to ask him to hold the line while they read his just-posted public statement.)

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Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

Septuagenarian schoolyard taunts.

Joe Biden started it. T he former vice president — who may be considering a 2020 challenge for the presidency — said that if he were younger (he’s 75), he would “beat the hell” out of President Trump for disrespecting women.

Mr. Trump, 71, countered that Mr. Biden “would go down fast and hard” if the two brawled.

Separately, Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer for the special counsel investigation resigned after concluding that his advice was being ignored.

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Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times

• The Australia newsletter.

This week’s edition asks: Where is integration working in the country, and where is it failing? (A big inspiration for the piece was an Uber driver who turned out to hold a Ph.D. in literature.)

And many of you connected with the reflection on Nippers in our last newsletter. Here are some of your responses on why you love — or hate — the lifesaving surf program for kids.

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Credit...Emily Berl for The New York Times

• “Make happy those who are near and those who are far will come”: Peggy and Andrew Cherng spent 45 years building Panda Express into a restaurant empire with more than $3 billion in sales last year.

• Tencent Holdings, Asia’s most valuable company, lost more than $26 billion of market capitalization after it warned that it would be reducing spending on content and technology to pursue sustained growth.

• Citigroup is setting restrictions on the sale of firearms by business customers, making it the first Wall Street bank to take a stance in the divisive U.S. gun control debate.

• Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money are up for sale.

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

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Credit...NOAA

• The great Pacific garbage patch contains at least 79,000 tons of material spread over 1.6 million square kilometers, according to a new study. That’s about the size of Mongolia or Iran, and as much as 16 times larger than past estimates. [Science News]

• The Queensland police confirmed that two Americans died in a helicopter crash off the Great Barrier Reef on Wednesday. [The New York Times]

• A Perth department store was accused of racial profiling after staff members called security on an Indigenous teenager shopping with his father. [ABC]

• “Dead to me.” The immigration minister Peter Dutton denounced the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Guardian after they criticized his plan to fast-track visas for white South African farmers. [The Guardian]

The ashes of Stephen Hawking, the renowned cosmologist, will be interred next to the grave of Sir Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey. [The New York Times]

• Honey Popcorn, a K-pop group made up of Japanese adult video actresses, released its debut mini-album, “Bibidi Babidi Boo.” (Watch the video.) The backlash in South Korea has been intense. [Yonhap]

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

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Credit...Craig Lee for The New York Times

• Recipe of the day: End the week with the perfect snack: chips and creamy queso.

• Considering a “green” funeral? Here’s what you need to know.

• Encourage great hotel service by following these tips.

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Credit...U.S. National Archives, via Associated Press

• The Juneau, a long-lost Navy cruiser blasted apart by a Japanese torpedo in World War II, was discovered off the coast of the Solomon Islands by a team funded by the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen. Among the hundreds of dead were five brothers from one Iowa family.

• In praise of Grandma. As the Overlooked project started, we asked readers to suggest women they felt deserved, but didn’t get, obituaries in The Times. Here are the stories you told us about your grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

• And a team of scientists spend time in the streets of Tokyo and the shark-filled waters of Asia in “The Rising Sea,” a thriller by Clive Cussler and Graham Brown that’s No. 1 on our hardcover fiction and combined print and e-book fiction lists.

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Credit...Frank Duenzl/Picture-Alliance, via Associated Press

It’s a shortcut used the world over — and even beyond, having been uttered at least once during a space mission.

On this day in 1839, The Boston Morning Post published “O.K.” for the first known time, using the abbreviation next to the words “all correct.” (It’s not written “okay,” The Times stylebook says.)

There have been many theories about its origin, but the most likely is that O.K. was an abbreviation for the deliberately misspelled “orl korrect” (all correct), and the expression gained prominence in the mid-19th century.

Allen Walker Read, a longtime English professor at Columbia University, debunked some theories in the 1960s, including that the term had come from Andrew Jackson’s poor spelling, a Native American word or an Army biscuit.

Today, O.K. is “an Americanism adopted by virtually every language, and one of the first words spoken on the moon,” the Times obituary of Mr. Read noted in 2002.

The professor didn’t “appreciate having ‘O.K.’ overshadow the hundreds of other etymologies he divined,” it continued. He also tracked early uses of Dixie, Podunk and the “almighty dollar.”

In the 1920s, Mr. Read hitchhiked through western Iowa hunting down the word blizzard.

“A man called Lightnin’ Ellis had first used the word for a snowstorm in 1870,” he learned. “Within 10 years, it had spread throughout the Midwest.”

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Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning. You can also receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights.

And our Australia bureau chief offers a weekly letter adding analysis and conversations with readers.

Browse our full range of Times newsletters here.

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