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Asia and Australia Edition

Billy Graham, Gun Control, North Korea: Your Thursday Briefing

Good morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

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Credit...Reuters

They almost met.

The U.S. State Department revealed how close Vice President Mike Pence came to sitting down with the high-level delegation of North Koreans at the Winter Olympics.

The North Koreans canceled at the last minute, adding a new level of meaning to the photographs of Mr. Pence and Kim Yo-jong, the sister of the North Korean leader, ignoring one another in the stands.

Elsewhere in Asia, a U.S. congressional delegation from the Senate and House Committee on Armed Services is visiting Taiwan, meeting there with President Tsai Ing-wen and her senior ministers, a dialogue likely to irritate Beijing officials.

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Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

• “This shooting is different.”

That was Daniel Bishop, 16, one of the survivors of the Florida school shooting who went to the state capital to demand gun control measures, above.

The Republicans who dominate the state’s government are facing pressure unlike any they have experienced before. But even so, the students made little headway.

And we spoke to a former assistant principal who held a school shooter at gunpoint — and who believes the national effort now underway to arm and train school staff members is misguided.

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Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

• At the Games, the loudest local fans are out in force for the Garlic Girls, as the Korean press has nicknamed the South Korean women’s curling team. (“I lost my voice from cheering so hard,” said one.)

Here’s our full coverage, plus the medals table, results and schedule.

And we went back to the 1930s for this: Maribel Vinson was The Times’s first female sportswriter and an Olympic figure skater — at the same time.

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Credit...Keystone/Hulton Archive

• The Rev. Billy Graham died at the age of 99. He was a farmer’s son who became a pastor to presidents and America’s best-known Christian evangelist.

His reach was global, and he was welcomed even by repressive leaders like Kim Il-sung of North Korea, who invited him to preach in Pyongyang’s officially sanctioned churches. Mr. Graham traveled to China for the first time in 1988, meeting Prime Minister Li Peng at the headquarters of the Communist Party.

“This is not mass evangelism,” Mr. Graham liked to say, “but personal evangelism on a mass scale.” You can hear his fiery preaching in this video.

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Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

• Julian Assange remains ensconced in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. But a fellow Australian, the lawyer Melinda Taylor, above, hasn’t stopped trying to restore his freedom.

A defense lawyer at the International Criminal Court, she has earned a reputation for defending unpopular individuals, like Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the deposed Libyan strongman.

She has tried to bolster Mr. Assange’s case with a brief for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which is expected to issue a ruling, at Ecuador’s behest, in coming months.

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Credit...Illustration by Franziska Barczyk

• Sex in the gray zone.

As stories of sexual misconduct continue to dominate the news, a debate has erupted over encounters that may not be viewed as sexual assault, but constitute something murkier than a bad date.

We’d like to hear from college students worldwide about the experiences you go back to, and how you handle consent — and apprehension — in intimacy.

Here’s how to share your story.

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• Social media companies often fail to enforce their policies against impersonation, an examination by The Times found, enabling the spread of fake news and propaganda — and allowing a global black market in social identities to thrive.

• Much of China’s economy may soon be managed by Liu He, 66, a Harvard-educated Politburo member expected to be promoted to vice premier next month.

• Venezuela became the first nation to launch its own virtual currency. The oil-backed petro could give investors a way of skirting U.S. sanctions.

• Investors are seeking an alternative edge in Japan’s stock market by studying eyebrow trends.

• Yields on U.S. government debt jumped after the Fed released its January minutes, and U.S. stocks were up. Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

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Credit...David Moir/European Pressphoto Agency

• Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia meets President Trump in Washington tomorrow. The two leaders are said to have become closer after an infamous first phone call. Issues to discuss include trade, immigration and China. [The New York Times]

• In Myanmar, a bomb exploded at a bank in the often lawless city of Lashio, in northern Shan State, killing at least two people and wounding 22 others. The area is rife with ethnic tensions and drug smuggling. [The New York Times]

• A journalist has been jailed for months in Indian-controlled Kashmir as a terrorist. The authorities’ evidence: His work has focused on explosive antigovernment protests and militant activity, rather than government developmental projects or the inaugurations of hospitals, schools or bridges. [The New York Times]

• A top adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was accused of seeking to bribe a judge into dropping an investigation of Mr. Netanyahu’s wife. [The New York Times]

• A Singaporean man convicted in a high-profile fraud case at a megachurch was caught trying to flee the city by boat [A.F.P. via New Straits Times]

• Inmate upgrade: Cambodia is considering more luxurious “hotel-like” prison blocks for wealthy prisoners. [The Phnom Penh Post]

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

• “All natural” sounds great on a food label, but it doesn’t always mean what you think it means — and it’s not necessarily better for you, either.

• Want a break? Here are 10 affordable European getaways.

• Recipe of the day: Pasta with bacon, cheese, lemon and pine nuts feeds many tastes with a single dish.

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Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

• The closing of Macau’s famous, and infamous, greyhound racetrack is one reflection of the transformation of China’s gambling hub from a colonial backwater into a popular tourist destination for the mainland’s fast-growing middle class.

• Animals are losing vagility — their ability to roam freely — because of human encroachment and development, spawning a new and growing field called “movement ecology.”

• And beyond BFF. Friendships have become so central to some women that they justify new titles, the author of a new book on friendship writes.

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Credit...Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images

It’s easy to spot members of the Dutch delegation at the Winter Olympics as they travel around on orange bicycles, 132 of which were shipped to South Korea by boat.

The bikes are helping athletes feel at home. In the Netherlands, bikes outnumber people 22.5 million to 18 million.

But the Netherlands wasn’t always a biker’s haven. In the 1950s and ’60s, as people started buying more cars, two-wheelers were beginning to be pushed off the road.

Literally. Bicycle deaths, like traffic deaths as a whole, increased.

In 1971, about 3,300 people died in traffic accidents, including 400 children. Activist groups sprang up. Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murder) was among the most prominent.

The number of traffic deaths has dropped since that period. In 2016, the Netherlands saw 629 traffic casualties, about a third of which were bike deaths. Only 12 were children.

Part of the success story: the country’s bike lanes, a network now measured at about 22,000 miles (or 35,000 kilometers).

Claire Moses contributed reporting.

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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, or to receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights.

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