Food Stamps, Economy, Val Kilmer
Your Wednesday Evening Briefing |
Good evening. Here’s the latest. |
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 | | John G Mabanglo/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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1. Nearly one in five young children in the U.S. are not getting enough to eat. |
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That’s according to a new survey of households by the Brookings Institution, which found that 17.4 percent of children were not eating enough. That’s three times as high as in 2008, during the Great Recession. |
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Disruptions in school meal programs during the pandemic may be part of the problem, the lead researcher said, with some families unable to reach distribution sites and older siblings at home competing for limited food. Above, a school lunch drop-off in Alameda, Calif., last week. |
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The findings come as Democrats seek to raise food stamp benefits for the duration of the economic crisis, and Republicans resist doing so. |
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 | | Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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“I thought we could wind it down sooner,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday at an event to honor National Nurses Day. “But I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday, when I started talking about winding it down.” (Watch the video.) |
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In other news out of Washington, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released final rules for campus sexual misconduct claims that bolster protections for the accused. Victims’ groups plan to sue. |
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 | | Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times |
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3. The European Union’s economy is on the verge of a depression, with investment expected to collapse and deficits to balloon, the European Union’s executive branch said. |
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The E.U. economy is set to shrink 7.4 percent this year — more than during the Great Recession, when it shrank 4.5 percent. For some countries, like Italy, Spain and Greece, the projections go past 9 percent. |
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The consequences will ripple out: The bloc is a major trading partner for the U.S., China and other major economies. |
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More bad news is expected on Friday, when the U.S. Labor Department releases unemployment numbers for the entire month of April. The figures will undoubtedly show the nation’s worst-ever job losses. But they could also provide key hints about recovery, like how many job losses are expected to be temporary. |
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 | | Thoka Maer |
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4. An anvil sitting on your chest. An alien takeover. A really long hangover. |
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“Nothing in my body felt like it was working,” said a 43-year-old woman who owns a public relations firm. “I felt so beat up, like I had been in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson.” |
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But there may be hope from an unexpected source. Antibodies from a 4-year-old llama in Belgium, named Winter, may lead scientists to a protective treatment against the coronavirus. Llamas produce a special kind of antibody and have long been a part of virus studies. |
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 | | Leila Navidi/Star Tribune, via Associated Press |
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Both men and women are doing more housework and child care now, the survey found, but the results suggest that they aren’t dividing the work any differently. And men and women see things differently: Nearly half of the men surveyed said they did most of home schooling. Only 3 percent of women agreed. Above, home school in Roseville, Minn. |
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Many researchers and couples assumed women were bearing the brunt of the extra labor, but this is among the first efforts to quantify it at a national level. |
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 | | Shawn Poynter for The New York Times |
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6. The urge to travel isn’t going anywhere. |
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We examined how airlines, cruises, home sharing and parks will change in a post-pandemic world. Expect a boom in road trips, for example. Above, a flashback to a retired couple’s Tennessee stop in 2014. |
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And what about the future of music clubs? Independent venues around the country are critical to local scenes and artists on the rise. With concerts on hold during the pandemic, they’re struggling to hang on. |
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If you need a reminder of what an audience looks like, photographers shared their images of prequarantine crowds, when jamming together elbow to elbow felt normal. |
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 | | Calla Kessler/The New York Times |
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7. Joe Biden’s lead on President Trump is growing nationwide, according to a new Monmouth University poll. |
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All told, 50 percent of voters said they would vote for Mr. Biden and 41 percent said they would vote for Mr. Trump. It is the first major national survey to ask voters about the sexual-assault allegation by Tara Reade, a former Senate aide, against Mr. Biden. There was a large partisan divide in assessments of her credibility. |
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 | | NASA, ESA and D. Lin/University of New Hampshire |
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The word “intermediate” is a bit of a misnomer. This black hole is thousands or hundreds of thousands of times more massive than the sun. It’s just smaller than the better-known supermassive black holes, which weigh in at millions of billions of solar masses. |
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The discovery sheds light on how the universe was assembled in the dark. |
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 | | Jeff Minton for The New York Times |
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Throat cancer has taken his voice, but his perpetual lesson rules supreme: If you have enough faith, destiny takes over. He spoke to Taffy Brodesser-Akner about his love for Mark Twain, dedication to Christian Science and the new roles coming his way (including a “Top Gun” revival). |
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“I feel like I could not possibly be in a better place for attracting better and better roles,” he said. |
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 | | Justin von Oldershausen for The New York Times |
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10. And finally, hey, neighbor. |
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New Yorkers tend to live their lives without ever really knowing who’s next door. They might overhear an argument, see a face often enough to get used to it. But two siblings found an unexpected upside to quarantine: Neighbors are getting to know one another better. |
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To capture the moment they took distanced portraits of their neighbors in Jamaica, Queens, and asked them what they were looking forward to once the pandemic has passed, and what they’ve learned from the crisis. |
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Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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