 | | President Obama welcomes his Persian Gulf allies today. Doug Mills/The New York Times | Your Thursday Briefing By ADEEL HASSAN |
| Good morning. |
| Here's what you need to know: |
| • Reassuring American allies. |
| At Camp David in Maryland today, President Obama defends his efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran and promises his skeptical Persian Gulf allies that the U.S. is committed to their security. |
| Saudi Arabia and many of the smaller Arab states are now vowing to match whatever nuclear enrichment capability Iran is permitted to retain. |
| • Excessive speed. |
| Some passengers still haven't been accounted for after the Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia on Tuesday night that killed seven. |
| The train was traveling at 106 miles per hour, twice the limit for that curve of track, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. |
| Democratic lawmakers in Washington angrily demanded an increase in Amtrak funding, calling the accident a result of congressional failure to support the rail system, but Republicans refused the request. |
| • Heavyweight rivals meet. |
| India's prime minister is in China for a visit that officials on both sides are promoting as a business trip. |
| The leaders will try to set aside their countries' historical differences in an effort to increase trade and investment. |
| • A coup in Africa? |
| Gunfire and explosions were heard today in the central African country of Burundi, amid confusion over who is in control there. |
| Violence surrounding protests this month against the president's bid for a third term have left at least 20 dead. More than 50,000 people have fled to neighboring countries. |
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| • Factory fatalities. |
| The death toll is at 72 today from a fire on Wednesday that gutted a rubber slipper factory in the Philippine capital of Manila. |
| The police are trying to determine whether it was caused by arson or by poor safety measures. |
| • Another candidate? |
| John Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, is to announce today whether he will run for president. |
| He has been one of the Obama administration's harshest foreign policy critics. |
| • Let the litigation begin. |
| Tom Brady and the New England Patriots are expected to challenge the N.F.L. punishment for "Deflategate" by the 5 p.m. deadline today. |
| The league handed down a four-game suspension for Brady, and a league-record $1 million fine and the loss of draft picks for the team. |
| MARKETS |
| • Wall Street stock futures are rising. European shares are lower, and Asian indexes ended mixed. |
| • Bird flu, which has led to the slaughter of 30 million chickens and turkeys in 16 U.S. states since December, is starting to affect food prices. |
| • Walmart will test an unlimited shipping service for online shoppers this summer, for $50 a year, to compete with Amazon's $99 Prime service. |
| • Sharp, the Japanese electronics firm, received a $1.7 billion bailout from banks, its second major rescue in three years. |
| NOTEWORTHY |
| • U2 returns to the stage. |
| The band begins its "Innocence and Experience" tour tonight in Vancouver, British Columbia, and 98 percent of the tickets for their 70 concerts worldwide have been sold. |
| Their last tour, from 2009 to 2011, broke the Rolling Stones's record for the highest grossing tour in history, raking in $736 million in 110 concerts. |
| • Scoreboard. |
| In the N.B.A. playoffs on ESPN, Cleveland is at Chicago (8 p.m. Eastern) and Houston is at Los Angeles (10:30 p.m. Eastern). If they win their games, Cleveland and L.A. advance to the conference finals. |
| On Wednesday night, Golden State's 98-78 win over Memphis means they are only one victory away from their first appearance in the conference finals in 40 years. And Atlanta edged Washington, 82-81. |
| On the ice, New York advanced to the conference finals with a 2-1 overtime victory over Washington in the Stanley Cup playoffs. |
| • Depp's dogs. |
| Johnny Depp, in Australia to film the fifth in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, has until Saturday to remove his two Yorkshire terriers from the country or they will be put down. |
| He is accused of breaking import and quarantine laws by not declaring the dogs when they were flown in by private jet last month. |
| • Creepy. |
| Matt Dillon plays a Secret Service agent trapped in a mysterious Idaho town in "Wayward Pines," a 10-part psychological thriller for TV based on a series of novels by Blake Crouch (9 p.m. Eastern, Fox). |
| • For Road Runner's iPod? |
| The New York Philharmonic begins its "Bugs Bunny at the Symphony" concerts, a hugely popular production that features classic cartoons projected on a big screen with the orchestra playing the original scores. |
| • Fresh art. |
| Frieze New York, the American version of one of Britain's largest contemporary art events, opens today, featuring works by more than 1,000 artists. |
| BACK STORY |
| Once upon a time, the Taino Indians of Jamaica got hungry, and they used the sweet wood of the allspice tree to cook meat over a slow fire. |
| The wood they used was called barbacoa. That's where we get the word barbecue. Today, teams are competing for more than $100,000 in prizes at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest in Memphis. |
| Now let's get back to Jamaica. When Spaniards arrived on the island in the 1490s, they enslaved the Indians and brought them to near extinction in about 50 years. African slaves were brought in to replace them. |
| In the 1650s, escaped slaves joined the remaining Taino in the forests and tried to fight the British and Spanish for control. |
| The slaves learned how to preserve meat with spices because they didn't know when their next meal might be. They shared with the Taino their method of smoking food in pits dug into the earth. |
| So it's no surprise that the barbecue has become one of our most popular outdoor forms of social entertainment. It's been bringing people together for more than 350 years. |
| Victoria Shannon contributed reporting. |
| Your Morning Briefing is published weekdays at 6 a.m. Eastern and updated on the web all morning. |
| What would you like to see here? Contact us at briefing@nytimes.com. |
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