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Europe Edition

Michael Cohen, Germany, Dubai: Your Wednesday Briefing

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Good morning. Michael Cohen’s dramatic admission, an ex-Nazi’s deportation and two artists’ singular taxidermy creations.

Here’s the latest:

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Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

• President Trump’s difficult day.

His former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, admitted in court that Mr. Trump directed him to pay two women — the adult film star Stormy Daniels and the Playboy model Karen McDougal — hush money “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”

Mr. Cohen, once a loyal ally to the president, pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and multiple counts of tax evasion and bank fraud.

Minutes after Mr. Cohen’s extraordinary admission, a separate courtroom delivered Mr. Trump a second blow: his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was convicted of financial fraud. He faces a second trial next month on charges of obstruction of justice and failure to register as a foreign agent.

Both of the dramatic cases could add momentum to the Russia investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, which has so far produced more than 100 criminal counts against 32 people.

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Credit...Public Prosecutor's Office in Hamburg, via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, via Associated Press

The U.S. deported a former Nazi guard to Germany.

Jakiw Palij, who entered the United States in 1949, is believed to have been an armed guard at the Trawniki labor camp in occupied Poland, pictured above, where more than 6,000 Jewish men, women and children died in one day.

Mr. Palij, now 95, has denied involvement in any killings. He is believed to have been the last surviving Nazi war crimes suspect on American soil.

His arrival in Germany comes as the country is witnessing a disturbing trend of violence against refugees, fueled in part by content on Facebook — highlighting, again, the persistence of the social media platform’s misinformation problem.

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Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

• Another day, another round of potential Russia sanctions.

Lawmakers from both parties are considering punishing the country further after a new report found that hackers connected to the Kremlin were targeting American research groups. Above, a Senate Banking Committee hearing at which sanctions were discussed.

The report, published by Microsoft, detailed how hackers were going after think tanks that want the Trump administration to take a tougher stance toward Russia.

Separately, the Trump administration slapped Russia with economic penalties — for delivering oil to North Korea.

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Credit...Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

Dubai is seen as one of the more liberal places in the Middle East.

But foreign women who move there soon find that only men can be recognized as the head of a household. Husbands must consent to any job offers their wives receive, and only men can open a bank account or approve a credit card. Husbands also determine whether their wives may drink alcohol.

The imbalance can be emotionally unsettling, writes our Baghdad bureau chief, who is in the midst of moving to the city-state.

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Credit...Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images

The Trump administration is set to hit China with more tariffs. For American consumers, that means goods from bicycles to handbags to coffee makers are likely to become more expensive.

Uber hired a new head of finance, Nelson Chai, a former executive at Merrill Lynch and CIT Group, as the company prepares for an initial public offering next year.

Slack, the workplace messaging app, said it raised $427 million in fresh funding, bringing the company’s value up to $7.1 billion.

Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

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Credit...Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press

A powerful earthquake struck Venezuela, shaking buildings in the capital city of Caracas, pictured above. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the tremor, which had a magnitude of 7.3. [The New York Times]

Asia Argento, the Italian actress who became a prominent figure in the #MeToo movement, denied accusations that she paid a young actor who accused her of sexually assaulting him when he was 17. Ms. Argento’s denials, however, will probably do little to change the minds of Italians back home who have already been ridiculing the actress. [The New York Times]

At least 10 hikers were killed and five went missing after flash floods swept through parts of the southern Italian region of Calabria. Rescuers continue to look for survivors and victims. [The New York Times]

Nike stopped selling a face-covering balaclava on its website after a backlash over an image of a model wearing the product. Some Twitter users called it “distasteful” and accused the brand of “endorsing knife crime.” [BBC]

The police in Rome are searching for two male tourists who were filmed skinny-dipping in a fountain dedicated to fallen soldiers and the unification of Italy. [The Guardian]

Tips for a more fulfilling life.

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Credit...Carl Richards

What’s the one thing you want to do most, but won’t talk about?

Using apps to track everything may not be a bad idea.

Recipe of the day: Your turn to bring snacks to the office? Make some lemon meltaways.

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Credit...Frederik Vercruysse

In the Dutch city of Haarlem, just outside Amsterdam, two taxidermists are changing the art form into a more ethically focused pursuit. Instead of employing the typical kill-and-stuff method to make trophies, this studio, above, uses animals that have died of natural causes and sets them in dramatic poses.

She predicted Prince Louis’s birth week, Beyoncé’s wedding year and President Obama’s re-election, and she counts Pharrell Williams, Katy Perry and Lindsay Lohan as fans. Meet Susan Miller, the astrologer whose monthly horoscopes have brought entire TV filming crews to a halt for a “reading break.”

The hit romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” depicts a picture-perfect immigration story with two central characters finding success in America. But in reality, Asian-Americans are the country’s most economically divided racial or ethnic group, with a “crazy” income gap of about $120,000 between the richest and poorest segments.

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Credit...Associated Press

Dorothy Parker, who was born on this day in 1893, once suggested her own epitaph: “Excuse my dust.”

It was a classic, coolly unsentimental remark by Ms. Parker, the acerbic wit whose writing was a mainstay in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker for years. But her other post mortem plans came as a surprise to many.

When she died on June 7, 1967, the bulk of her estate was left to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr., whom she had never met. Ms. Parker, a champion of humanitarian and left-wing causes, admired the civil rights leader’s work, but even Dr. King was surprised.

Her will also stipulated that, if anything were to happen to Dr. King, control of her estate should pass to the N.A.A.C.P., which it did after his assassination the next year. That decision appalled some of her friends.

“She must have been drunk when she did it,” her executor, Lillian Hellman, said in an interview with The Times Book Review in 1973.

Ms. Parker was cremated, and her ashes were finally placed at the organization’s headquarters in Baltimore in 1988, after spending the previous 15 years in her lawyer’s filing cabinet because they were never claimed.

Joumana Khatib wrote today’s Back Story.

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Correction: Thanks to the readers who pointed out our million/billion errors in Tuesday’s Morning Briefing. PepsiCo said it would pay $3.2 billion, not $3.2 million for SodaStream. And the number of Catholics worldwide is 1.2 billion, not just “over a million.”

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A correction was made on 
Aug. 22, 2018

An earlier version of this briefing misstated when Jakiw Palij, the former Nazi guard, entered the United States. He did so in 1949, not 1948.

How we handle corrections

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