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They are back at the usual squabbles as the clock ticks toward a Catalan independence referendum on Oct. 1. Our correspondent notes that these divisions also have practical security implications that the attack plotters perhaps managed to exploit.

A march in Barcelona planned for tomorrow could show how much these divisions are reflected in the broader public.

(Above, King Felipe VI stood between the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, and the Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, at a vigil last week.)

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In Washington, our reporters look at the efforts by the new White House chief of staff, John Kelly, to impose an order on the information flow to Mr. Trump.

The changes Mr. Kelly, a retired general, have put in place have resulted in a more functional government, administration officials said.

Separately, heres a profile of Mr. Trumps top soldier in Afghanistan: Gen. John Nicholson, above, is a combat veteran described by peers as a thinker warrior. He has not yet met Mr. Trump.

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Roger Federer, the Swiss tennis star, discussed his late-career resurgence, a rarity for any sport, with our magazine writer. Im long past the thing that you have to end your career in a fairy tale, he said of his expectations.

Mr. Federer could win his third major of the year at the U.S. Open, and fans are hoping for a face-off with his archrival, Rafael Nadal. Meanwhile, with Serena Williamss absence, womens tennis for once lacks its traditional rivalries.

In soccer news, the draw for the group stage of this seasons UEFA Champions League put Real Madrid, Tottenham and Dortmund in the same group. Barcelona gets a chance for an early revenge against Juventus. (Heres the full list.)

And the four-time British Olympic champion Mo Farahs track career ended with a thrilling win in Zurich.

President Trump must soon decide whether to renominate Janet Yellen, above, as the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve. She is speaking today at the Jackson Hole gathering of central bankers, as is the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi.

In Croatia, Uber is taking to the sea, offering an (expensive) new boat service. It could soon be available in Greece and Spain.

There are new questions about the corporate structure of HNA, the Chinese conglomerate that is Deutsche Banks largest shareholder. We uncovered undisclosed deals and relationships that could heighten regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe.

Networking is overrated, a business school professor writes in this much-read Op-Ed. Its better to focus on achieving great things.

Heres a snapshot of global markets.

At least eight people remain missing after a landslide swept through a small village in the Swiss Alps on Wednesday. [The New York Times]

Prosecutors in Denmark seek murder charges against Peter Madsen, the Danish inventor arrested in the death of a Swedish journalist onboard his submarine. [The New York Times]

The police in Rome clashed with hundreds of migrants, scattering them from a square they had camped on for days after they had been evicted from a building they had occupied for years. [Los Angeles Times]

When the French interior minister tied terrorism to mental illness, he started a debate about whether such a link existed. [France 24]

The Dutch police said there was no longer an imminent terrorist threat after they arrested a 22-year-old man in Rotterdam in an investigation into plans for an attack on a concert site. A Spanish man, detained earlier, has been released. [The New York Times]

The Czech authorities extradited a Vietnamese man to Germany over the abduction of an asylum-seeking Vietnamese executive in Berlin last month. [The New York Times]

In Thailand, the lawyer of Yingluck Shinawatra, the former prime minister ousted in a coup, said he was unaware whether she was still in the country. A court said it would issue an arrest warrant after she failed to appear before it. [The NewYork Times]

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

Recipe of the day: Make your own blueberry jam.

Protect your digital accounts by text or app.

In what should you invest? Ask yourself these tough questions.

We have plenty of European travel advice today: Theres our latest 36 Hours guide that finds daring cuisine and avant-garde art and design in Brussels. And heres an ode to family holidays in Romania.

In Marrakesh, Yves Saint Laurent discovered light and color, draping and caftans. A new museum in Morocco will soon celebrate his work.

In Britain, an 800-year-old coffin was damaged after a family put a child in it for a photo and knocked off a small piece. It happens.

Finally, a geobiologist in Norway reflects on how Scandinavian summers taught her as a young woman to savor time.

It all began with a question about L. Frank Baums off-the-cuff story about a faraway magical land. What, a child asked, was the name of this extraordinary place? Baum looked at a filing cabinet label, rejected A-G and went with O-Z.

Thats one origin story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the childrens book that became a celebrated movie, which opened in wide release in the U.S. on this day in 1939.

It took more than a few screenwriters (11 by one count) to adapt Baums vision into a girls dream of a land over the rainbow from Depression-era Kansas.

Theories about the story abound. Is the yellow brick road a metaphor for the gold standard in the late 1800s? Does the movie sync up with Pink Floyds album The Dark Side of the Moon?

Some scholars are skeptical that Baum set out to write a populist allegory. (Youre on your own testing the Pink Floyd claim.)

But the charms of Baums tale endure. As a Times film critic wrote after the films debut, It is all so well-intentioned, so genial, and so gay that any reviewer who would look down his nose at the fun-making should be spanked and sent off, supperless, to bed.

Tim Williams contributed reporting.

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This briefing was prepared for the European morning. You can browse through past briefings here.

We also have briefings timed for the Australian, Asian and American mornings. You can sign up for these and other Times newsletters here.

Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online.

What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes.com.

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Ukraine, Catalonia, Champions League: Your Friday Briefing - New York Times

Mattis attended a Ukranian Independence Day parade in the capital before sitting down with his Ukrainian counterpart, Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak, and President Petro Poroshenko.

Speaking alongside Poroshenko at a news conference, Mattis said he intended to strengthen the US relationship with Ukraine in the face of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing conflict with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

"Have no doubt, the United States stands with Ukraine. We support you in the face of threats to sovereignty and territorial integrity, to international law, and to the international order writ large," he said.

"We do not, and we will not, accept Russia's seizure of Crimea and despite Russia's denials, we know they are seeking to redraw international borders by force, undermining the sovereign and free nations of Europe."

Mattis said the United States would continue to pressure Moscow to live up to its commitments under the 2014 Minsk agreement, saying Russia had "put its reputation on the line" when it signed up to the deal, never fully implemented.

"The US will continue to press Russia to honor its Minsk commitments and our sanctions will remain in place until Moscow reverses the actions that triggered them," he said.

The Minsk agreement calls for an immediate ceasefire, withdrawal of all heavy weapons and unfettered access to monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to Ukraine's Donbas area, which takes in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. It was negotiated by the leaders of the so-called Normandy Four -- Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany.

"We in the United States understand the strategic challenges associated with Russian aggression -- alongside our allies, we remain committed to upholding the widely accepted international norms that have increased global stability for decades," Mattis added

Mattis said he would go back to Washington with a clearer idea of the needs of Ukrainian soldiers on the front line.

A key issue is whether the United States should provide Ukraine with defensive armaments, such as anti-tank missiles, in addition to non-lethal military equipment.

The United States has approved the provision of nearly $750 million-worth of military equipment in recent years, Mattis said.

A new ceasefire is supposed to come into force on Thursday, Poroshenko said, to coincide with the start of a new school year.

Asked by a reporter what steps he would now like to see, Poroshenko urged Russia immediately to withdraw its troops from the Donbas region. Ukrainian assessments indicate that there are currently about 3,000 members of the regular Russian forces on Ukrainian territory, he said.

He described the Russian military presence in his country as "extremely dangerous" and called for the troops' immediate withdrawal, as well as a halt to the flow of new weapons into the area, the release of hostages and full access for OSCE monitors to areas occupied by pro-Russian forces.

Poroshenko also raised the idea of "the possible presence of the UN peacekeepers" in the region in order to protect a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

The Ukrainian president, who met with US President Donald Trump at the White House in June, also expressed his gratitude for America's ongoing support.

The Kremlin said Tuesday that the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany "strongly supported" the decision by negotiators to announce the latest ceasefire.

"The leaders expressed hope that such a ceasefire would lead to a sustainable improvement in the security situation for the benefit of schoolchildren and the entire civilian population of Donbas," said a statement released by the Kremlin after a phone call between the leaders of the Normandy Four.

The leaders pledged to continue working together for the further implementation of the Minsk commitments for a peaceful solution to the crisis, the statement said.

Western leaders and Kiev have long accused Russia of fostering the conflict by providing weapons and training to the pro-Russian separatists, as well as sending regular Russian troops over the border to fight. Moscow has denied the allegations.

CNN's Katie Polglase contributed to this report.

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Mattis vows US support for Ukraine against Russian 'aggression' - CNN International

In a rare window into the opaque, deadly and secretive world of missile technology espionage, Ukrainian security services have given CNN surveillance footage and details of an elaborate sting operation they carried out to snare two North Korean spies in 2011.

Ukraine has denied any link to North Korea's long-range missiles, and said Russia may instead have provided Pyongyang with the improved missile designs. Russia has denied supporting North Korea's arms program.

An officer with Ukraine's security service, who worked on the 2011 case of the two North Koreans and who we granted anonymity because of his operational role, insisted it was "impossible" North Korea had obtained any missile technology, as he was sure their espionage attempts had all been intercepted.

He said that in 2011 two other North Koreans -- who traveled to Ukraine from the country's Moscow Embassy -- were deported after they were caught trying to obtain "missile munitions, homing missile devices in particular for air-to-air class missiles." A third North Korean, tasked with transporting the actual devices out of Ukraine, was also deported.

And as recently as 2015, five North Koreans were deported for "assisting North Korea's intelligence work in Ukraine," the officer said, without providing further details.

He said, apart from the two in jail, there were no North Koreans left in Ukraine, as those not deported by Ukraine had been voluntarily withdrawn -- many working in alternative medicine centers.

The two North Korean spies seen on the grainy surveillance footage are currently serving eight-year prison sentences for espionage in the Ukrainian town of Zhytomyr, 140 kilometers (87 miles) west of Kiev.

Ukrainian officials allowed CNN inside the prison facilities to see if they would grant interviews under guard supervision.

The elder inmate is a man in his fifties from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang who is known in court documents as X5. He is gaunt, compared to the fuller frame he had in the surveillance videos, and speaks lightly-accented Russian.

His younger accomplice is a technical expert known as X32.

They are the only such spies in Ukrainian custody, although officials say they have on several occasions intercepted North Korean attempts to access their missile secrets, and as a result in 2016 effectively barred all North Koreans from the country.

The grainy surveillance video provided to CNN was filmed on July 27, 2011, on a hidden camera set up within a garage to capture the end of a sting operation that was months in the planning.

The two suspects can be seen moments before Ukrainian security service agents burst in and arrest them.

The Ukrainian missile experts they had been courting in the weeks before had informed on them to Ukrainian counter-intelligence agents.

As a result, authorities had detailed knowledge of the information they sought -- "ballistic missiles, missile systems, missile construction, spacecraft engines, solar batteries, fast-emptying fuel tanks, mobile launch containers, powder accumulators and military government standards," according to the court papers from their 2012 trial.

Some of the information related to the SS-24 Scalpel intercontinental ballistic missile, the court papers add. The SS-24 Scalpel, also known as the RT-23, is a solid-fueled missile capable of carrying up to 10 warheads that was launched via missile silos or railroad cars.

The Ukraine security footage gives a rare window into the elaborate and shadowy world of North Korea's bid to improve its ability to hit the United States and other adversaries with long-range missiles.

The court documents also reveal startlingly human moments during the operation.

The two nervous men continually whisper to each other the material they seek is "secret," and worry the flash batteries may run out on their PowerShot and Coolpix cameras as they photograph the dummy designs.

Speaking briefly to CNN in the jail where he now makes cement railings and iron rods to pass prison time, X5 confirmed he had "partially" admitted his guilt.

The court papers say he insisted his job, as a trade representative in the North Korean embassy in neighboring Belarus, was merely to arrange training in missile technology for North Korean experts -- information he didn't think was classified. He even tried to get one expert, the papers allege, to travel to North Korea and teach there.

Dressed in dark blue overalls and a cloth cap, mixing cement, X5 said he "of course" wanted to return to North Korea, and had not spoken to his family or anyone there since his arrest.

"I am serving my term of punishment. They feed us well here, we work... I don't want to give an interview for the preservation of my safety and that of my family."

He shares a well-lit cell with a TV with eight other convicts, and sleeps in a double bunk bed, with pots of vitamins and toiletries his only obvious possessions.

The second convict, X32, agreed to meet CNN, but immediately declined to be interviewed, covering the camera lens with his hand and walking away.

He has not admitted his guilt and is held in a more relaxed facility where he makes furniture to pass the time.

Denys Chernyshov, Ukraine's deputy minister for justice, said the men had been met once by two officials from North Korea's Moscow embassy, but otherwise had no contact at all with their relatives or North Korea.

"They have asked Ukrainian authorities to be extradited to North Korea to continue their sentence," he said. "But because they are held for spying for North Korea, we obviously declined their request."

Chernyshov added the pair were well-trained.

"To be isolated in another country and culture, with different food even, that brings about a particular stress," he said. "So it is clear these are well prepared, strong people."

However, he added North Korea may not turn out to be that welcoming when they likely travel home in September 2018, at the end of their sentences.

"That their task was unsuccessful, they cannot expect much of a hero's welcome on their return."

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The North Korean spies Ukraine caught stealing missile plans - CNN

PETAWAWA Soldiers from 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (2CMBG) are heading back to the Ukraine to train a military battling a Russian-backed separatist insurgency that has killed more than 10,000 people.

Under the mission Operation: Unifier, personnel mostly made up from the 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment will be assigned to provide specialized training and skill sets to Ukrainian forces who continue to engage Russian-backed separatists in the breakaway eastern republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The task force of 200 troops, which includes augmentees from across Canada, will deploy in September for a seven-month tour on the fifth rotation for Operation Unifier.

So far, Canadian troops have trained some 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The federal government has pledged its support to the mission until at least March 2019. During a departure ceremony and family day event at Centennial Park Thursday, 2CMBG commander Col. Michael Wright noted that since the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea which began the current crisis Canada has been at the forefront of the international community's support to the Ukraine.

Canada has played an important role being part of the multinational NATO-Ukraine Commission, helping lead the overall international effort in the Ukraine and providing military training and capacity building of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Col. Wright told the task force which formed up in front of the Evergreen Stage bandshell. You are operationally ready for this mission. You are ready to go over and be great ambassadors for the Canadian Armed Forces but be great ambassadors for Canada, itself.

The scope of training that the Petawawa instructors have provided include small arms marksmanship, defusing improvised explosive devices or IED's, infantry fighting tactics, communications, mounting mechanized operations, logistical support, and medical training in providing basic first aid and casualty evacuation. In his remarks, Cassian Soltykevych, with the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress, expressed his gratitude noting that Canada's involvement is emblematic of the strong bond between their two nations.

In the last three and a half years while defending Ukraine from foreign aggression, the armed forces of Ukraine have undergone a profound transformation. Today they are a fighting force of which their country can rightly be proud, said Soltykevych. This is due in no small part to Canada and her allies. It is in times of turbulence that one finds out who one's true friends are. It is of great comfort that Canada is a true friend to Ukraine.

The parade was held on the same day that Ukraine marks its independence from the former Soviet Union. On Aug. 24, 1991, the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine passed by the Verkhovna Rada, which is the Ukraine's parliament. Lt.-Col. Kris Reeves, who will deploy as task force commander, called Ukraine a proud and important nation in the community of countries. He said he looked forward to building on their long friendship and lend whatever assistance to the besieged eastern European nation.

Nobody is attacking our borders. Nobody is encroaching on our sovereignty. That is not the same in the Ukraine, said Lt.-Col. Reeves. For us to be able to dedicate this year of our lives to increasing the professionalism and capabilities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is the least we can do. I believe we are ready and we are going to make Ukraine and Canada very proud.

SChase@postmedia.com

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Petawawa troops heading to Ukraine - Pembroke Daily Observer

The terrible famine of 1932-3 hit all the major Soviet grain-growing regions, but Ukraine worst of all. It was not the result of adverse climatic conditions but a product of government policies. This is, in fact, the case with many famines, as Amartya Sen pointed out in his classic study, Poverty and Famines (1981), though the deaths generally occur because of administrative mismanagement and incompetence rather than an intention to murder millions of peasants. The Soviet example is unusual in that Stalin is often accused of having exactly that intention.

The famine followed agricultural collectivisation at the end of the 1920s, a formally voluntary process that was in fact coercive in its implementation. Along with forced-pace industrialisation, it was part of a package of breakthrough modernisation policies launched by Stalin in the first phase of his leadership. Industrial growth needed to be financed by grain exports, which collectivisation was supposed to facilitate through compulsory state procurements and non-negotiable prices. The problem was how to get the grain out of the countryside. The state did not know how much grain the peasants actually had, but suspected (correctly) that much was being hidden. An intense tussle between the states agents and peasants over grain deliveries ensued.

That is a brief version of the rational account of collectivisation, but there was an irrational side as well. The Soviet leaders had worked themselves and the population into a frenzy of anxiety about imminent attack from foreign capitalist powers. In Soviet Marxist-Leninist thinking, class enemies within the Soviet Union were likely to welcome such an invasion; and such class enemies included kulaks, the most prosperous peasants in the villages. Thus collectivisation went hand in glove with a drive against kulaks, or peasants labelled as such, who were liable to expropriation and deportation into the depths of the USSR. Resistance to collectivisation was understood as kulak sabotage.

Stalin harped on this theme, particularly as relations with peasants deteriorated and procurement problems intensified. Ukrainian officials, including senior ones, tried to tell him that it was no longer a matter of peasants concealing grain: they actually had none, not even for their own survival through the winter and the spring sowing. But Stalin was sceptical on principle of bureaucrats who came with sob stories to explain their own failure to meet targets and discounted the warnings. Angry and paranoid after his wife killed herself in November 1932, he preferred to see the procurement shortfall as the result of sabotage. So there was no let-up in state pressure through the winter of 1932-3, and peasants fleeing the hungry villages were shut out of the cities. Stalin eased up the pressure in the spring of 1933, but it was too late to avert the famine.

This brings us back to the question of intention. In my 1994 book Stalins Peasants, I argued that what Stalin wanted was not to kill millions (a course with obvious economic disadvantages) but rather to get as much grain out of them as possible the problem being that nobody knew how much it was possible to get without starving them to death and ruining the next harvest. But that was an argument about the Soviet Union as a whole. If you look at those regions against which Stalin had particular animus, notably Ukraine (with its border location and his paranoia about Polish spies) and the Russian North Caucasus (with its politically suspect Cossack farmers), the picture could be different. Certainly Ukrainians think so. In the version that has become popular since it declared independence, Stalins murderous impulse was directed specifically against Ukrainians. Holomodor, the Ukrainian word for the famine, is understood in contemporary Ukraine not just as a national tragedy but as an act of genocide on the part of the Soviet Union/Russia. As such it has become a staple part of the national myth-making of the new Ukrainian state.

Anne Applebaums book takes her into this politically contentious territory, and her subtitle, Stalins War on Ukraine, may set off some alarm bells. An American journalist who has also worked in Britain (her husband, Radosaw Sikorski, served as Polish minister for defence and for foreign affairs, and played a major role in sorting out the Maidan crisis in Ukraine in 2014, and advocated tough sanctions against Russia), Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putins regime. Her first book, Gulag: A History, won her a Pulitzer prize in 2004 but few friends among western Soviet historians, since she explained in her introduction that, as an undergraduate at Yale in the 1980s, she had decided not to join their ranks once she found out they allegedly had to curry favour with the Soviet authorities to get visas and archival access, a suggestion many saw as a slur on their professional integrity. Her remarks in the same introduction on the worlds failure to recognise Soviet atrocities as being on a par with those of Nazi Germany struck an anachronistic note. Currently she is a professor in practice at the LSEs Institute of Global Affairs specialising in 21st century propaganda and disinformation, asubject she knows from both sides, having been involved in the mid-1990s in theSpectators expos of Guardian journalist Richard Gott for KGB connections and, in 2014, and having been herself targeted by what she describes as a Russian social media smear campaign.

Guardian readers may be inclined to approach a new book on Soviet atrocities by Applebaum warily. But in many ways it is a welcome surprise. Like her Gulag which, if you held your nose through the introduction, turned out to be a good read, reasonably argued and thoroughly researched Red Famine is a superior work of popular history. She still doesnt like western academic Soviet historians much, but at least she mainly avoids gratuitous snideness and cites their work in her bibliography (although my Stalins Peasants is not included, but that is probably an oversight). Whereas in Gulag she tended to be grudging about her towering precursor, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago was the pioneering work in the 1970s, in Red Famine she is appropriately respectful of Robert Conquest (his The Harvest of Sorrow came out in 1986).

Applebaum has, of course, more material at her disposal than Conquest had, including large numbers of Ukrainian famine memoirs. Many of these are published by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, which has an obvious political agenda, but she isby no means offering an uncritical Ukrainian account of the famine. Though sympathetic to the sentimentsbehind it, she ultimately doesnt buy the Ukrainian argument that Holodomor was an act of genocide. Her estimate of famine losses in Ukraine 4.5 million people reflects current scholarship. Her take on Stalins intentions comes closer than I would to seeing him as specifically out to kill Ukrainians, but this is a legitimate difference of interpretation. For scholars, the mostinteresting part ofthe book will be the two excellent historiographical chapters in which she teases out the political and scholarly impulses tending to minimise the famine in Soviet times (The Cover-Up) and does the same for post-Soviet Ukrainian exploitation of the issue (The Holodomor in History and Memory).

The book has one odd quirk, namely its citation practice. As far as I can see, Applebaum has not worked in archives for this book (although she did for Gulag). Her footnotes are bulging with archival citations, however, because every time she quotes something from a secondary source thathas an archival reference, she givesthat as well and then lists all these archives among the primary sources in her bibliography. This is not normal scholarly practice, though graduate students sometimes do it for effect before they learn better. But given that shewas writing a popular history on atopic on which there is an abundance of recently published documents, memoirs and scholarly studies, there was no need for her to do original archival work in order to produce, as shehas done, a vivid and informative account of the Ukrainian famine.

Sheila Fitzpatricks Mischkas War is published by IBTauris.

Red Famine: Stalins War on Ukraine is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for 21.25 (RRP 25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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Red Famine by Anne Applebaum review did Stalin deliberately let Ukraine starve? - The Guardian