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Asia and Australia Edition

Indonesia, Cambodia, Imran Khan: Your Monday Briefing

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Good morning. Elections in Cambodia, an earthquake in Indonesia and a meat pie controversy in Australia. Here’s what you need to know:

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Credit...Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

• Changing the narrative.

In Pakistan, some political parties began to throw their support behind Imran Khan, paving the way for him to form a majority in the National Assembly and become prime minister.

The stakes are high: Mr. Khan, the cricket star whose political party won last week’s elections, could reset Pakistan’s troubled relations with the West. He may also move Pakistan much closer to China, a neighbor he has praised as an economic role model.

Western governments are watching closely. Pakistan, a nuclear power and the world’s sixth-most populous country, continues to struggle with violent extremism.

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Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

• Beijing’s audacious expedition.

China is going to the dark side of the moon — from Argentina. Our correspondent went to Patagonia to examine a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.

The isolated base, our reporter writes, is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future — often in ways that directly undermine Washington’s strategic power in the region.

Separately, a series of abuse and harassment accusations by journalists, intellectuals and charity leaders has enlivened China’s nascent #MeToo movement.

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Credit...Ben C. Solomon/The New York Times

• Laos is under pressure.

The deadly collapse of a billion-dollar hydroelectric project last week has exposed the default agenda of the country’s Lao People’s Revolutionary Party government: selling natural resources to foreign companies while evading scrutiny for projects that exacerbate rural poverty — or, in this case, kill innocent villagers.

The government may now face more calls to incorporate social and environmental protections for rural people. “Their response could either build confidence in the government,” one analyst said, “or undermine it.”

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Credit...Darren Whiteside/Reuters

• Cambodia’s one — and only.

The Cambodian People’s Party declared victory in national elections on Sunday night, with the official poll watchdog putting voter turnout at more than 82 percent.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge cadre and Asia’s longest-serving leader, did practically everything to stack the odds in his favor.

Many Cambodians shrugged at what was considered a foregone conclusion. “It’s pointless to vote,” one Phnom Penh resident said. “It won’t make any difference to our lives.”

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Credit...Mick Tsikas/EPA, via Shutterstock

• A meat pie faux pas?

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did the unthinkable: During a stop in Tasmania, Mr. Turnbull used a knife and fork as he dug into a savory meat pie, which is more commonly devoured with one’s hands.

Mr. Turnbull’s move, seen by some as an upper-crust approach to a simple (but revered) meal, set off debate on social media. And a new hashtag: #piegate.

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Credit...Jean Chung for The New York Times

• South Koreans work longer hours than the Japanese, and put in 240 more hours per year than American workers. The authorities are trying to change that, saying that work pressure plays a role in more than 500 suicides a year.

• Thousands of Australia’s drought-hit farmers eligible for a government assistance program have not applied for it.

• Headlines to watch this week: Apple and Tesla report earnings and the Federal Reserve is not expected to raise interest rates.

• Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” starring Tom Cruise, took in $61.5 million over its first three days in North America, and an additional $92 million overseas. “Skyscraper,” the Dwayne Johnson vehicle, made up ground in China, where it has taken in $85.3 million.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

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Credit...Antara Foto/Reuters

• A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Lombok, killing at least 12 people and damaging buildings. [The New York Times]

• A family’s “agonizing wait.” A hearing in Sydney on the death of David Dungay Jr., an Indigenous man who died after being pinned by correctional officers, was adjourned until March. [The New York Times]

• A Turkish teacher in Mongolia was briefly abducted in what appeared to be part of Turkey’s campaign against allies of the self-exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen. [The New York Times]

• In India, a wave of public fury shot through Chennai last week after the police arrested 17 men, ages 23 to 66, accused of raping an 11-year-old girl. Then blame shifted to the victim and her family. [The New York Times]

• President Trump thanked North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, for the return of remains believed to be of 55 American servicemen killed during the Korean War. [The New York Times]

• Wrong direction: Typhoon 12, a powerful storm that made landfall in Mie Prefecture, is the first typhoon to cross Japan from east to west since weather recording began in 1951. [The Asahi Shimbun]

• The New York Times’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, disputed President Trump’s account of a meeting between the two and said he told Mr. Trump that his attacks on journalism were dangerous. [The New York Times]

Tips for a more fulfilling life.

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Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

• Recipe of the day: Keep things simple tonight with a lovely dinner of pasta, green beans, potatoes and pesto.

• Are you using that sunscreen correctly?

• Five cheap(ish) things every home should have.

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Credit...Amanda Mustard for The New York Times

• Pet nirvana: In Bangkok, residents try to create pet havens in an urban jungle. Their pets aren’t just spoiled in life — they’re often cremated in a lavish Buddhist ceremony when they die.

• Silence on Hong Kong’s singing street. For more than 20 years, a Mong Kok pedestrian zone has been a cacophony of street performers. Last weekend was their final show.

• And Chen Shi-Zheng, the veteran opera and theater director who lives in New York, has two major shows planned for Beijing, his first in his homeland since 1996. He sees a chance to create a cultural bridge as China-U.S. relations fray.

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Credit...Val Doone/Getty Images

“We rise from the perusal of ‘Wuthering Heights’ as if we had come fresh from a pest-house,” an appalled critic wrote when the book was published in 1847.

Other reviewers deemed it “coarse” or “repulsive.”

Its author, Emily Brontë, born 200 years ago today in Thornton, England, died of tuberculosis at 30, a year after publishing her tale of quasi-incestuous love between the savage (yet irresistibly compelling) Heathcliff and the selfish (but beautiful) Catherine. She would never see her novel, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, become the template for a thousand future romance stories.

Today there are some 60 translations and multiple film versions of “Wuthering Heights,” including in Japanese and Spanish (directed by Luis Buñuel).

Emily, the middle of three literary Brontë sisters (Charlotte wrote “Jane Eyre”), rarely left home and had few friends. Naïve, stubborn and prickly, she gravitated to animals and the Yorkshire moors where “Wuthering Heights” is set. She was both a novelist and poet.

She was also, noted Virginia Woolf, a genius on a par with Jane Austen, writing without fear of what the male-dominated literary world might think.

“I have never seen her parallel in anything,” Charlotte Brontë reflected after Emily died in 1848. “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.”

Nancy Wartik wrote today’s Back Story.

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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.

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