Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

May 27, 2020

Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin and Marcus Payadue

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Philip Cheung for The New York Times

1. More than 100,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, far more than any other nation in the world.

The stark milestone comes just months after the country’s first known case was confirmed. Experts say the true toll of the pandemic is already likely to be even higher. Here are some of the stories of those we’ve lost.

Known infections in the U.S. have passed 1.7 million. In California, now the fourth state to account for at least 100,000 cases, Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to be moving closer to handing the reins of reopening to county public health officials. Los Angeles, above, will begin allowing in-store shopping for “lower risk” businesses.

Scientists have revised part of the pandemic’s timeline. A new analysis of viral genes shows that the initial cases weren’t the ones that ignited the outbreaks in Italy and Washington State, but rather strains that arrived a couple of weeks later.

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Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

2. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Hong Kong was no longer autonomous under China, signaling a likely end to special trade rules with the territory.

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The U.S. is considering slapping tariffs on exports from Hong Kong — like those applied to goods from mainland China — over Beijing’s plan to enact new security laws and tighten its grip on the city. The National People’s Congress is expected to rubber-stamp the legislation around 10 p.m. Eastern.

At least 300 demonstrators were arrested in Hong Kong on Wednesday, above, in protests increasingly focused on directly challenging China’s ruling Communist Party. Here’s what you need to know.

David J. Phillip/Associated Press

3. SpaceX postponed the launch of the Crew Dragon capsule carrying NASA astronauts because of bad weather. The team will try again on Saturday.

President Trump had gone to Florida for the launch, but our chief White House correspondent writes that, for now, the narrative of recovery that the president has been pitching will have to wait.

Just as Mr. Trump landed at Cape Canaveral, nearly two dozen states sued his administration over its rollback of fuel-efficiency rules for cars, arguing the move endangers public health.

Issei Kato/Reuters

4. Two of the world’s biggest economies moved to hand out funds to cushion the blow from lockdowns and chart a course toward recovery.

The Japanese cabinet approved more than $1 trillion in stimulus, including a combination of subsidies to companies and to people. And in Brussels, the E.U.’s executive arm took a major step, proposing to issue bonds in capital markets to raise 750 billion euros, or $826 billion. Above, a shuttered Tokyo today.

In Canada, the case against an executive of the Chinese tech giant Huawei cleared a legal hurdle. Meng Wanzhou is now closer to extradition to the U.S. to stand trial on accusations of crimes including a decade-long attempt to steal U.S. trade secrets.

Offices of Ben Crump Law

5. Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis called on prosecutors to file charges in the death of George Floyd, above, who died on Monday after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground.

A video recorded by a bystander shows a white officer pressing his knee to Mr. Floyd’s neck for minutes as witnesses protest and Mr. Floyd pleads that he can’t breathe.

The Minneapolis Police Department said that officers had responded to a call about a man suspected of forgery, and that Mr. Floyd had resisted arrest. The graphic video of the aftermath has led to widespread criticism and protests.

We also spoke with Christian Cooper, the bird watcher involved in a confrontation with a white woman over her unleashed dog in Central Park. “I’m not excusing the racism,” he said. “But I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart.”

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

6. The Trump administration will force public school superintendents to share a large portion of coronavirus rescue funds with private schools, regardless of income.

A number of education officials say the guidance, directed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, would divert millions of dollars away from disadvantaged students and compel poor districts to support even the wealthiest private schools. The association representing the nation’s school superintendents told districts to ignore the guidance.

Low-income Americans are confronting another threat: The U.S. may soon face a wave of evictions as relief payments and legal protections run out for millions of unemployed workers.

Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

7. More signs of tourism edging toward “normal.”

Disney World in Florida, one of the world’s largest tourist sites, will begin to reopen to the public on a limited basis in mid-July with reduced capacity and new safety precautions, including mandatory face masks for all visitors and employees.

Sun-starved Europeans are desperate to get to the beach, and tourism-starved Mediterranean countries like Italy are desperate to have them. Social distancing measures vary across the region.

Even air travel is inching back. Here’s how to think about approaching a flight.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

8. We remember Larry Kramer, who helped shock the country into dealing with the AIDS crisis. He was 84, and died from pneumonia this morning in Manhattan.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Kramer, above in 1989, was among the first people to foresee that what had at first caused alarm as a rare form of cancer among gay men would spread worldwide and kill millions. The infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci was one who got the message.

Mr. Kramer often took a caustic approach in his activism, reasoning, “If you write a calm letter and fax it to nobody, it sinks like a brick in the Hudson.”

But on the stage and on the page, his fury was fueled by an often-cloaked belief in the power of love, our theater critic writes.

Groninger Museum, via Associated Press

9. “This is the easiest art heist I’ve ever seen.”

Octave Durham would know. He went to prison for stealing two paintings by Vincent van Gogh in 2002. So when the van Gogh above, “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring,” was stolen recently from the Singer Laren museum in the Netherlands, we asked him: What does one do with a stolen Van Gogh?

You try to sell it — but buyers for stolen art are hard to find. “I just did it because I saw the opportunity,” Mr. Durham said of his own heist, after he noticed a window at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum he thought would be easy to smash.

On his approach to robberies: “My No. 1 rule is talk smooth, be cool, have a fast car and never touch anyone.”

Stephanie Dalton Cowan

10. And finally, a pulse-slowing playlist.

Time has been an obsession for many lately — a forever March, a lingering April and now a speedy May. Investigations into the perception of time have long been the work of composers, too. The composer Pierre Boulez distinguished between the time we count and the time we inhabit.

One of our classical music reporters selected seven pieces that speak to our current time warp, from Wagner’s “Parsifal” to Meredith Monk’s “Falling.”

Have an up-tempo evening.

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