| We’re covering more testimony in the impeachment inquiry, an eccentric jungle prince in India, and the enduring stardom of Dolly Parton. | | | Fiona Hill said a theory embraced by President Trump that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election was a "fictional narrative." Doug Mills/The New York Times | | | At the end of two weeks of public hearings, it appears all but certain that the House will soon vote to impeach President Trump, probably along party lines. | | | During the inquiry, the Democratic strategy has emerged: move quickly and keep the argument simple. That’s a “calculated gamble,” according to our chief White House correspondent, because it could leave the case open to criticism that it’s incomplete. | | | To maintain momentum, Democrats decided to forgo hearing from key figures — including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Rudy Giuliani — to avoid waiting for courts to rule on whether they should testify. | | | Yesterday: Fiona Hill, a Russia expert and former top White House aide, told lawmakers that Mr. Trump’s demands on Ukraine to announce investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden amounted to a “domestic political errand.” Here’s what we learned from Thursday’s testimony. | | | Another angle: The career professionals testifying before the House Intelligence Committee this month “have put faces on a Washington bureaucracy often dismissed and disparaged,” our reporter writes. | | | Mr. Netanyahu, who has twice failed to form a new government this year, has denied allegations that he gave or offered lucrative official favors to several news media tycoons in exchange for favorable coverage or expensive gifts. | | | Closer look: The long-running corruption cases against Mr. Netanyahu have created a legal quandary. A prime minister can remain under indictment and even stand trial while in office. | | | Andrea Bowling of Portsmouth, Ohio, is among those to have fostered children whose parents fell victim to opioid addiction. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times | | | Scioto County has Ohio’s highest rate of babies born with an opioid withdrawal condition. Nearly everyone there seems to know someone who has struggled with drug dependency. | | | The recent death of a child highlights lapses in a patchwork system of child welfare agencies and underscores the devastating consequences of the nationwide epidemic, our reporter writes. | | | Voices: “The system has been broken on many levels,” said Bryan Davis, a county commissioner. | | | For 40 years, journalists have chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined, overgrown palace in India. Bryan Denton for The New York Times | | | Tales of the royal family of Oudh have circulated for years among tea sellers and rickshaw drivers in India’s capital. It was said that a prince, a princess and a queen — the last of a storied Shiite Muslim royal line — lived in a ruined palace cut off from the city of 20 million people. | | | The Oudhs didn’t want company: Their 14th-century hunting lodge was surrounded by thick woods and protected with razor wire, dogs and signs warning, “INTRUDERS SHALL BE GUNDOWN.” | | | But the Times reporter Ellen Barry met the prince and spent years tracing the family’s story across continents — eventually finding the secret that they had tried so hard to keep. Here’s her captivating dispatch. | | | Five decades into her career, the 73-year-old country star has “ascended to a rarefied level of intergenerational celebrity: a saucy grandmother of social media,” our profiler writes. | | | Among other projects, the singer is the subject of a celebrity-studded podcast, “Dolly Parton’s America,” and stars in “Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings,” a Netflix anthology series that premiers today. | | | But in some ways, our writer notes, it’s an odd time for a “Dolly renaissance” because she has remained reluctant to make the slightest hint of a political statement, even in these divided times. | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM LINCOLN FINANCIAL | | The More You Talk, The Better You Plan | | Talking about your retirement goals is the first step towards building a more secure financial future for you and your loved ones. Our new conversation kit can help you get the conversation started. | | | Download Conversation Kit | | | | Politics on Facebook: The social network’s position — that it will run all political ads in the interest of free speech — is under fire. | | | Tesla unveils electric pickup: The angular “Cybertruck,” which the company hopes will rival Ford’s best-selling F-150 line, has a stainless steel exterior and a triangular roof. Production begins in 2021. | | | Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | No news quiz: The quiz will return next Friday. | | | Late-night comedy: Stephen Colbert joked that Rudy Giuliani “seems more like a Molotov cocktail — used by Russians and full of alcohol.” | | | What we’re reading: This article in The Atlantic about the stutter that still shapes Joe Biden’s delivery. Our reporter Matt Flegenheimer says it’s “a fantastic, affecting, deeply revealing piece. Make the time.” | | | Linda Xiao for The New York Times | | | Watch: “Varda by Agnès,” our film critic says, is “a perfect introduction and a lovely valediction” to the filmmaker’s six-decade career. | | | This week, The Times adopted a new spelling for Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, the Romanization of the Ukrainian Київ. | | | The previous version, Kiev, is a transliteration from the Russian: Киев. | | | The Times is rarely an early adopter in altering place names, waiting until there is a sense that most readers would be familiar with the new word. For instance, the paper quit using Bombay only in 2004, almost a decade after the Indian authorities officially recognized the city as Mumbai. | | | Craig Whitney, a former foreign correspondent who went on to become our standards editor, recalled that airline flight information had been listed as Mumbai for years. “Clearly,” he said, “we waited long enough to see if it was sticking.” | | | Most Americans were introduced to Ukraine’s capital during the Soviet era, so they’ve seen “Kiev” for decades. But the U.S. Board on Geographic Names switched to Kyiv in June, and U.S. diplomats have been widely heard in the impeachment hearings in Washington using the Ukrainian pronunciation (or at least coming close with “Keev”). | | | Chicken kiev, a classic. Agaton Strom for The New York Times | | | That’s it for this briefing. Have a good weekend. | | Thank you
Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford provided the break from the news. Will Dudding and Rogene Jacquette, from the standards department, wrote today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
