Your Monday Evening Briefing

December 30, 2019

Your Monday Evening Briefing

By andrea kannapell, tom wright-piersanti and hiroko masuike

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

1. Police officers have been stationed in front of synagogues and yeshivas across New York and New Jersey, and are stepping up patrols after a surge of anti-Semitic crimes in the region.

Federal prosecutors filed hate crimes charges against Grafton Thomas, 38, the man accused of bursting into a Hanukkah celebration at a Hasidic rabbi’s home and stabbing five people Saturday night in Monsey, N.Y. Its county, Rockland, is believed to have one of the largest populations of ultra-Orthodox Jews outside of Israel.

Officials said he expressed anti-Semitism in his journal and had used his phone to search “Why did Hitler hate the Jews” four times in the last month, as well as “German Jewish Temples near me,” and “Zionist Temples.”

Mr. Thomas’s family says he has a history of mental illness, including schizophrenia. In court, when a judge asked him “Are you clear in your head?” he answered, “Not clear, your honor.”

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Laura Buckman for The New York Times

2. A clearer picture emerged of a church shooting on Sunday near Fort Worth.

The authorities identified a 43-year-old former drifter with an extensive criminal past, Keith Thomas Kinnunen, as the gunman who opened fire during services at the church above.

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The gunman, wearing a fake beard that had drawn notice, stood up amid the congregation with a shotgun. Within six seconds, he had killed two people and was shot dead by the head of the church’s volunteer security team. Texas law allows guns to be carried in churches.

“Evil walked boldly among us,” said the Tarrant County sheriff, Bill Waybourn. “Let me remind you, good people raised up and stopped it before it got worse.”

3. The upsurge in violent hate attacks across the country has prompted federal law enforcement agencies and other groups to look for ways to counteract radicalization online.

But what is there, besides expunging content? A company called Moonshot CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) will be trying another way: sending messages to redirect people searching terms that would lead them to hate-filled material, like “RaHoWa,” short for Racial Holy War and the name of a white power band, or “Ku Klux Klan phone number.”

Moonshot was created by Vidhya Ramalingam, an American, and Ross Frenett, who first studied extremism in his native Ireland. Both worked at a London think tank that focused on Islamic and other forms of extremism.

Behrouz Mehri/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

4. The last time we saw Carl Ghosn, the former Nissan chairman was leaving the Tokyo Detention House in April, above.

We just learned that he’s in Lebanon.

Mr. Ghosn had been in and out of jail in Japan since he was first arrested in 2018 on charges of financial wrongdoing. He posted a $9 million bail and was told not to leave the country.

Did he make a deal, or did he flee? We’re trying to find out.

Jordan Gale for The New York Times

5. Fund-raising numbers for the last three months of the year show a clear top four in the 2020 Democratic primary.

The fund-raising deadline is Tuesday, with full reports to be released by Jan. 31, but our reporter’s quarterly look ahead shows that Senator Bernie Sanders continues to lead the field with nearly five million contributors this year. He’s expected to announce a fourth-quarter haul of around $26 million.

His progressive counterpart, Senator Elizabeth Warren, is slipping in polls and donations. And former Vice President Joe Biden rebounded from a weak third quarter, and Pete Buttigieg rounds out the group with more than 700,000 donations this quarter, his biggest total yet.

And as President Trump prepares to run for re-election on strong stock market and unemployment numbers, Democrats have their own economic message: that those top-line figures don’t reflect the actual experience of working- and middle-class Americans.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

6. Armed with legions of lobbyists, American companies have been pushing hard — and successfully — to weaken parts of the Trump administration’s tax overhaul that take aim at overseas havens, a Times investigation found.

The result: The government may collect hundreds of billions of dollars less in the next decade, money that was supposed to offset much of the overhaul’s corporate tax cuts.

We also found that many of the companies have managed to avoid publicly disclosing how much they owe under some of the new rules. That makes it virtually impossible for outsiders to work out how much companies are saving.

Joe Nicholson/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

7. The N.F.L. playoffs have arrived.

The top spots belong to the Baltimore Ravens in the A.F.C. and the San Francisco 49ers in the N.F.C., above. The Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs also earned first-round byes. For less fortunate teams, heads are starting to roll: The Giants and the Browns fired their head coaches.

And if you’ll allow us to indulge in a little gloomy homerism, it has been a dreadful decade for New York sports. The Mets were generally miserable. The Jets were pitiful. And the Knicks … well, the less said, the better.

It’s enough to make one long for the good old days — like 100 years ago this Christmas, when the Yankees acquired Babe Ruth from the Red Sox.

Brandon Celi

8. Presenting the 2019 Good Tech Awards, our columnist Kevin Roose’s annual look at the technology companies that improved people’s lives in tangible ways.

There’s an open-source platform that collects air quality data and makes it free and accessible. There are three Massachusetts start-ups that addressed the opioid crisis.

And there’s Pinterest — yes, that Pinterest — which enacted tough and principled content moderation, the sort that its competitors have stridently avoided.

Michael Friberg for The New York Times

9. The podcast “Armchair Expert,” hosted by Monica Padman and Dax Shepard, above, has drawn its millions of listeners in to revealing interviews with celebrities, experts and more.

Our writer visited the studio and found that the secret to the “invisible truth serum” that seems to permeate the conversations, as Monica Lewinsky put it, is that the hosts frequently share their own vulnerabilities, encouraging openness in guests.

And speaking of empathy, our Talk columnist spoke with Lily Tomlin, whose career has been marked by generous performances. She talked about the evolution of comedy, wanting people to see themselves in her characters and coming out on her own terms.

Jason Henry for The New York Times

10. And finally, what will we be eating next year?

If the food watching industry is right, CBD-infused drinks and edible flowers will be big. (That’s a salad above, not a bouquet.) Floral flavors, too.

Interest in the coming Tokyo Olympics is expected to widen the appeal of Japanese culinary trends. Buttered toast with ice cream, anyone?

And anything good for the planet should do well. People are shifting to a plant-based diet, which overlaps with veganism. And regenerative farming is the new organic.

Have a blue-marble evening.

Melina Delkic helped compile tonight’s briefing.