Your Thursday Evening Briefing

May 14, 2020

Your Thursday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin, Penn Bullock and Marcus Payadue

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Pool photo by Shawn Thew

1. No master plan, and the window is closing, warned Dr. Rick Bright, who was ousted as the director of a federal medical research agency.

In four hours of testimony, Dr. Bright told a House subcommittee that the Trump administration was too slow to prepare for the coronavirus pandemic or warn Americans of its severity.

He also said that top administration officials ignored his “dire predictions” and then failed to be fully truthful with the public. “Lives were endangered,” he said, “and I believe lives were lost.”

He warned that the outbreak would “get worse and be prolonged” without a national strategy. Watch the video.

The partisan fight over reopening is growing. President Trump visited Pennsylvania, where lifting stay-at-home orders has become an election issue. And in Wisconsin, after a ruling by the State Supreme Court upended restrictions imposed by the governor, local officials in the state’s six largest cities issued their own directives.

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2. The nation’s patchwork of reopenings hasn’t stopped job losses. Nearly three million people filed new unemployment claims last week, bringing the two-month tally to 36.5 million.

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The weekly count of new claims has been declining since late March, but returning workers often face reduced hours and paychecks — and heightened risk of infection.

A survey by the Federal Reserve found that in households making less than $40,000 a year, nearly 40 percent of those working in February lost their jobs in March or the beginning of April.

What steps will Congress take next? Some progressive and conservative lawmakers want guaranteed income programs.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

3. In the case of Michael Flynn, another highly unusual turn.

The federal judge overseeing the case against President Trump’s former national security adviser appointed a tough judge and former prosecutor to oppose the Justice Department’s effort to drop the case.

The White House and the Justice Department are portraying Mr. Flynn, seen above in 2018, as a victim of an F.B.I. frame-up. That narrative is a stark departure from the deep concerns at the White House around the time of his firing about his repeated misrepresentation of phone conversations with a Russian ambassador.

And Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, temporarily stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after F.B.I. agents seized his cellphone. The agency is investigating whether he acted on nonpublic warnings about the coronavirus to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock.

Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

4. Russia’s medical workers are suffering astonishing levels of infection and death. Above, medical workers preparing to enter a Moscow hospital’s so-called red zone.

Russia has confirmed more than 250,000 infections, a distant second to the U.S.’s 1.4 million. The virus has hit Russian hospitals particularly hard, spreading through some 400 and killing more than 180 medical workers. A department head at a top Moscow hospital said 75 percent of the department’s staff had fallen ill.

An internal government document obtained by our reporters sheds light on how the Russian medical system was caught unprepared by the onslaught.

Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

5. As coronavirus outbreaks force meatpacking plants to shut down, farmers face a backlog of hundreds of thousands of pigs.

That means mass culls that inflict deep economic loss and emotional anguish. Above, piglets at a Minnesota farm.

The damage extends to poultry, too, and some farmers fear ruin, even as people across the U.S. are struggling to find enough to eat. To offer an outlet for gluts of meat and produce and to meet their own soaring demand, some food banks are taking up cooking.

Pete Marovich for The New York Times

6. The Environmental Protection Agency won’t regulate perchlorate, a chemical used in rocket fuel that contaminates water and has been tied to fetal damage, two E.P.A. staff members said.

The decision by Andrew Wheeler, above, the E.P.A. administrator, appears to defy a court order requiring the agency to establish a safe drinking-water standard for perchlorate by the end of June. The policy could set a precedent for the regulation of other chemicals.

High perchlorate concentrations have been found in 26 states, often near military installations. The Pentagon and military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have aggressively sought to block regulations.

via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

7. Two months after Louisville police officers fatally shot a woman as they raided her home while she was sleeping, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky called for a review of the police investigation into the shooting.

The police said officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor, 26, pictured above, after her boyfriend shot an officer in the leg. But neither Ms. Taylor nor her boyfriend was a target of the police investigation that led to the drug raid, and the man who was had already been taken into custody.

Only recently has nationwide attention focused on the case. Among the lawyers representing Ms. Taylor’s family is Benjamin Crump, who represents the family of Ahmaud Arbery, the unarmed black jogger killed in Georgia in February.

Calla Kessler/The New York Times

8. Amazon is coming to the fashion world’s rescue. Well, part of it.

The e-commerce giant (and the largest fashion retailer in the U.S.) is opening a new store to showcase 20 independent designers currently at risk of bankruptcy because of the pandemic.

Our chief fashion critic wonders: Does this mark the moment the two worlds finally get hitched? It certainly will give Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder — flanked above by his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, and Anna Wintour in February — influence over a community that has been largely suspicious of him.

In an Opinion video, the beauty guru Ingrid Nilsen challenges women to stop apologizing for how they look in quarantine and reconsider what makeup is for.

Shrivastava et al., Sci. Robot. 5, eaba3499 (2020)

9. A new system of movement could allow rovers to move more nimbly across alien landscapes.

The hope is to avoid any repetition of the unfortunate fate of NASA’s Spirit rover, which expired a decade ago in a Martian sand trap.

As you can see above, on a practice terrain of poppy seeds, the front wheels kick up a kind of debris field that the back wheels wiggle through.

And astronomers are offering a theory for why the jets of energy some black holes expel form vast X’s that mark their galaxies like a treasure map: The X is formed when the jets fall back gravitationally to the galaxy center to be deflected out again at a diagonal.

A recreation of Mannahatta circa 1609, left. Lower Manhattan in the early 21st century.Markley Boyer/The Mannahatta Project, via Wildlife; Stephen Amiaga, via Wildlife Conservation Society

10. And finally, when Manhattan was Mannahatta.

It’s the September afternoon in 1609 when Henry Hudson arrives. Whales and porpoises are swimming in the river; otters, oysters, beavers, mink and more are part of an abundant ecosystem, with walnut, hickory and chestnut trees. The Lenape have been here for centuries.

Our architecture critic Michael Kimmelman was joined by a conservation ecologist for a virtual stroll of the original Lower Manhattan, the latest in a series of walkabouts. It’s quite a soothing tour.

And if you’re in New York City and looking for places to be outside while staying socially distant, here are some of our favorite places.

Have a tranquil night.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

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