December 22, 2019

Your Weekend Briefing

By remy tumin and judith levitt

Here are the week’s top stories, and a look ahead.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

1. It was a week of constitutional consequence and raging partisan tension, a course that is all but assured to continue into the new year.

The Senate trial to determine whether President Trump will be removed from office remains uncertain. Lawmakers left Washington for the holidays as a showdown over trial procedures and witnesses intensified.

At the center of it is Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who is devising a strategy for the Republican-led Senate to make short work of any trial of Mr. Trump on the two House-passed articles of impeachment.

Mr. Trump enters 2020 as the first sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached. But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P. activists and their representatives in Congress.

Have you been keeping up with the headlines? Test your knowledge with our news quiz. And here’s the front page of our Sunday paper, the Sunday Review from Opinion and our crossword puzzles.

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Erin Schaff/The New York Times

2. U.S. military and intelligence officials tracking North Korea’s actions by the hour say they are bracing for an imminent test of a missile capable of reaching American shores.

Amid a diplomatic vacuum, North Korea has bolstered its arsenal of missiles and its stockpile of bomb-ready nuclear material. If the North goes ahead with the test — Pyongyang promised a “Christmas gift” if no progress had been made on lifting sanctions — it will be a glaring setback for President Trump’s boldest foreign policy initiative.

American officials are playing down the missile threat. Above, Mr. Trump and Kim Jung Un in June.

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Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

3. Rarely are presidential primary debates as clarifying about the political stakes for candidates as Thursday’s Democratic face-off.

Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, above, all traded jabs as they tried to knock one another out in the Iowa caucuses, where they would need strong finishes to stay viable in the 2020 race. Here’s what the latest polling data suggests.

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The D.N.C. increased the qualification standards for its next debate in January, making it most likely that the lineup of candidates would be winnowed even further. Here’s what else happened in the 2020 race this week.

Yoshi Sodeoka; Getty Images

4. An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry reveals surveillance so omnipresent in our digital lives that it seems impossible to avoid.

The Times’s Opinion section obtained the largest known leak of phone tracking data. It included more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities. It’s the latest from The Times Privacy Project.

The trove, a random sample from 2016 and 2017, allowed our Opinion writers to track the whereabouts of President Trump, follow the every move of people in Pasadena, Calif., and more. The series will continue to roll out in the coming days.

Freaked out? You should be, our columnists Farhad Manjoo and Kara Swisher write. Here are three things you can do to protect your phone.

Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik, via Reuters

5. A secret group of Russian assassins operated without Western security officials having any idea about their activities. This was how one attack helped blow their cover.

The specialized group, known as Unit 29155, was made up of Russian intelligence operatives and had for years been assigned to carry out killings and political disruption campaigns in Europe. It’s the same unit responsible for the 2018 assassination attempt against Sergei Skripal, a Russian former spy in Britain, officials say, among other operations.

Now, Western security and intelligence officials say that the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria is a critical clue that has helped expose a campaign by the Kremlin and its sprawling web of intelligence operatives to eliminate Russia’s enemies abroad and to destabilize the West. Above, President Vladimir Putin of Russia this month.

Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times

6. The International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas is facing an identity politics crisis.

The largest membership organization of Santas in the world was open only to men with whiskers long enough to be styled like St. Nick’s. (The ones pictured above in 1959 wouldn’t pass the test.) Then, in 2016, Mrs. Clauses were admitted.

But elves, Grinches, reindeer handlers and Santas with designer beards? Not so fast. The measure was voted down last year.

Ernie Sisto/The New York Times

7. The N.F.L. is preparing to turn 100.

The game has never stopped changing. But a few things remain constant, including the league’s popularity and brutality. It’s a game that “taps into deep and abiding strains of dominant American culture,” the journalist and author James Surowiecki writes in an essay looking back at 100 years of play. Above, the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants in 1958.

We also looked at the N.F.L.’s inconsistent embrace of black players, and how the future of the sport might largely be in the hands of women.

With two weeks remaining in the regular season, we mapped each team’s possible postseason path.

Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

8. “This book has defied the new laws of gravity.”

That’s one book industry expert’s take on Delia Owens’s debut novel, “Where the Crawdads Sing,” about a lonely girl’s coming of age in the marshes of North Carolina. The book has sold more than four and a half million copies. In print, it has outsold every other adult title in 2019.

It’s an astonishing trajectory for any new writer, much less for a 70-year-old wildlife scientist.

“I have never connected with people the way I have with my readers,” Ms. Owens said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

NBC, via YouTube

9. It’s been 35 years since Eddie Murphy put away his Gumby costume and bid farewell to the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” Last night, he returned to Studio 8H.

Mr. Murphy, who was a regular cast member on the show in the early 1980s, told “S.N.L.” viewers: “This is the last episode of 2019. But if you’re black, this is the first episode since I left back in 1984.”

On last night’s show, he resurfaced old beloved characters like Buckwheat, Gumby and Mr. Robinson. He also received tributes from a few surprise guests, including Tracy Morgan, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock (pictured above). Lizzo was the musical guest. Here’s our full recap.

In light of Mr. Murphy’s long-awaited homecoming, we plotted the tenures of all 153 comedians who had been officially credited as cast members — those who lasted, and those who flamed out.

Romulo Yanes for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Vivian Lui.

10. And finally, check out one of our Best Weekend Reads.

This week we examined how Amazon squeezes the businesses behind its store, talked to one of Mexico’s deadliest assassins and looked at how Mariah Carey’s Christmas standard finally hit No. 1 after 25 years.

For more ideas on what to eat, read, watch and listen to, may we suggest these five weeknight dishes, 10 new books our editors liked, a glance at the latest small-screen recommendations from Watching and our music critics’ latest playlist.

With the shortest day of the year now behind us, tonight marks the first night of Hanukkah. We rounded up 21 latke recipes. (Because why stop at one?)

Have a bright week, and happy holidays to those who are celebrating.

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