March 8, 2020

Your Weekend Briefing

By Penn Bullock and Elijah Walker

Here are the week’s top stories, and a look ahead.

T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

1. Our reporters reconstructed the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, finding “a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth.”

Scientists and health officials sounded an early alarm, but President Trump, above at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Friday, has played down the risks in an effort to pacify increasingly frantic stock markets, while a shortfall of test kits has left the medical system flying blind.

New York declared a state of emergency, and the number of cases in the U.S. passed 400. California is a locus, along with Washington State, and low-income minorities could be particularly vulnerable. Here are live updates.

At the global epicenter, in China, mass quarantines have apparently slowed the spread, but at a steep cost to livelihoods and liberties. In the most sweeping measures outside of China, Italy locked down much of the country’s north, its economic engine.

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Jeenah Moon/Reuters

2. Erik Prince, the security contractor close to the Trump administration, worked to recruit former American and British spies for secretive, politically motivated intelligence-gathering operations. Above, Mr. Prince arriving at a gala for young Republicans in New York last year.

The efforts, carried out through the conservative group Project Veritas, targeted Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda. In one instance, an ex-MI6 officer supervised a 2017 operation against the American Federation of Teachers.

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In other Washington news, President Trump removed Mick Mulvaney, his acting White House chief of staff, and replaced him with Representative Mark Meadows, a stalwart conservative ally.

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

3. A roundup of Saudi royals widened with word that a fourth senior prince had been detained under orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, above right with one of those targeted, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, in 2016.

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The extraordinary detentions sent fear through the royal family and created speculation that the young crown prince would soon seek to take formal power from his aging father, King Salman, 84. His ruthlessness is in no doubt after he presided over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Lauren Justice for The New York Times

4. Brian Michelz of Madison, Wis., is buried in debt. Bernie Sanders has offered him an out.

Once apolitical, Mr. Michelz, 29, above with his wife, Sarah, was driven to support Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign by the crush of the Great Recession, of medical bills and of college loans, for which the socialist senator has promised relief.

As the fight for the Democratic nomination approaches a critical stage in primaries on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders is depending on voters like Mr. Michelz to turn out in larger numbers than they have so far.

And as other Democratic campaigns have dissolved, laid-off staffers are getting alerts on the money-transferring app Venmo that their former colleagues (and rivals) are sending funds to buy them drinks.

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

5. Along Greece’s border with Turkey, vigilantes are mounting patrols against migrants.

Villagers from border towns are forming civilian patrols to round up migrants. Residents of the island of Lesbos have set up roadblocks to stop migrants from reaching refugee camps, like the one above. Others have physically attacked aid workers and journalists, accusing them of helping migrants come to the island.

It’s a sharp turn from the 2015 European migrant crisis, when locals helped rescue refugees at sea. But for many Greeks, this crisis feels less spontaneous than manufactured: Turkey has allowed thousands of migrants to cross into Greece as it tries to pressure Europe for help in the conflict in Syria.

And in Canada, we spoke to four women from a variety of faiths who feel discriminated against by a ban in fiercely secular Quebec on public sector employees wearing religious symbols.

Srdjan Suki/EPA, via Shutterstock

6. From concentration camp to quiet ranch house.

The decades-long hunt for collaborators in Nazi war crimes on American soil is nearing its end with the case of a 94-year-old suburbanite.

Friedrich Karl Berger was ordered by a federal judge this week to return to Germany, where he remains a citizen and served as a guard in the Neuengamme concentration camp network during World War II. Above, a former camp in the network near Hamburg.

After the war, Mr. Berger blended into Oak Ridge, Tenn., ingratiating himself with neighbors. Justice Department investigators, who have lodged 133 deportation cases against former Nazi officials since 1979, were led to him by a clue from a sunken ship. His case may be one of the last.

Chandra X-Ray Observatory

7. Did anyone else hear that?

Astronomers say they have detected the biggest explosion ever documented in the universe — very likely a gigantic outburst of energy from a supermassive black hole, which blew a crater more than a million light-years wide through a galaxy cluster far, far away called Ophiuchus. The explosion is seen above in an image comprising X-ray (pink), radio (blue) and infrared (white) data.

To create a blast that large, one scientist said, the black hole would have had to swallow about 270 million suns’ worth of mass.

And undetected software errors in Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts, could have potentially led a December test flight to end in disaster, a review found. The uncrewed flight was to have been the last major milestone before NASA agreed to putting its astronauts aboard the craft, but now another test flight may be needed.

Brian Bielmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

8. Since there’s no surfing in Paris, organizers of the 2024 Olympic Games to be held there announced this week that the surfing competition would happen 10,000 miles away, in the village of Teahupo’o, Tahiti, in French Polynesia.

Teahupo’o, by the way, roughly translates to “wall of skulls.” The waves there are iconic and extremely dangerous, offering the ultimate rush or a headfirst trip into sharp coral. Above, the American surfer Conner Coffin risking it last year.

Surfing will have its Olympic debut at this summer’s games in Tokyo, on smaller waves that reward acrobatics. By contrast, Tahiti will be more about survival. “It’s going to look like a completely different sport,” said Keala Kennelly, a surfer known as the queen of the wall of skulls.

Sam Rowe

9. Want to make money in your sleep?

Hundreds of TikTok users have begun live-streaming themselves overnight, and people are tuning in to watch them snooze. “Overnight my video blew up, and I got over 6,000 new followers,” said one streamer.

On the app, viewers can donate digital “coins” that can be cashed out for money. Another streamer said he received about $10 worth of coins during his first sleep-stream — not riches, exactly, but $10 more than he’d usually make while asleep.

Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

10. And finally, dig in to The Weekender.

This week we had dinner with Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, above; examined the weird and wonderful video games of Hideo Kojima; and learned how to live in the Stone Age.

For more ideas on what to read, watch and listen to, may we suggest these 11 new books our editors liked, a glance at the latest small-screen recommendations from Watching and our music critics’ latest playlist.

Have you been keeping up with the headlines? Test your knowledge with our news quiz. And here’s the front page of our Sunday paper, the Sunday Review from Opinion and our crossword puzzles.

Tom Wright-Piersanti contributed to this briefing.

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