Your Monday Evening Briefing

June 29, 2020

Your Monday Evening Briefing

By Victoria Shannon and Hiroko Masuike

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

1. The Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law restricting abortion.

Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, said the law put an undue burden on the constitutional right to the procedure. If upheld, it could have left the state with a single abortion clinic.

It was the first abortion ruling since two judges appointed by President Trump joined the court. The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. voting with the court’s four-member liberal wing in the third major case in two weeks. Above, an anti-abortion activist in front of the Supreme Court in Washington today.

The unexpected decision preserves the status quo for abortion access, at least for now, our reporters write in an analysis.

The court also let stand an appeals court ruling allowing the Trump administration to resume executions in federal death penalty cases after a 17-year hiatus. The order cleared the way for the executions of four men in the coming months.

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Mike Blake/Reuters

2. Drug prices are back in focus as a coronavirus treatment cost is set.

House Democrats approved legislation to ensure that Americans paid no more than 8.5 percent of their income for health insurance and to allow the government to negotiate prices with drug makers.

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The bill, which has no chance in the Senate, passed just hours after the Trump administration said it had secured 500,000 treatment courses of a drug to treat Covid-19, remdesivir. Gilead Sciences will charge $2,340 per course.

In Austin, Texas, two friends got a coronavirus test at the same emergency center. One of them paid in cash and was charged $199. The other, who paid with insurance, was charged $6,408. Experts say such differences arise because the government does not regulate prices.

In other developments:

In Jacksonville, Fla., the new host of the Republican presidential convention in August, imposed a requirement that people wear masks indoors.
The governors of New York and New Jersey, worried by the surge in coronavirus cases in the South and West, said they were reconsidering plans to allow indoor dining in the coming days.
In Africa, the pandemic is decimating the livelihoods of the middle class that was helping to drive an economic expansion from Kenya to Nigeria and from South Africa to Rwanda.

Hennepin County Jail, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

3. The judge overseeing the George Floyd case threatened to move the trial from Minneapolis.

While stopping short of issuing a gag order, Judge Peter Cahill warned the parties at a pretrial hearing against leaking information or offering opinions about the guilt or innocence of the four former police officers charged in Mr. Floyd’s death.

Lawyers for the officers cited “multiple inappropriate public comments” from local officials that they said had already prejudiced potential jurors. Above, the defendants, from left to right, Derek Chauvin, Tou Thao, Alexander Kueng and Thomas Kiernan Lane.

The dying words “I can’t breathe” first came to wide attention after Eric Garner said them to the New York police officer who had him in a chokehold in 2014. They were Mr. Floyd’s last words to a Minneapolis officer.

But at least 70 people have died in law enforcement custody after saying “I can’t breathe” over the past decade, The Times found.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

4. President Trump is losing swing voters as he focuses on his base.

While Republicans back him overwhelmingly, a national poll of registered voters by The Times and Siena College shows the president has the support of just 29 percent of independents — 18 points behind Joe Biden, his Democratic opponent.

And only 17 percent of independents strongly approve of Mr. Trump’s job performance, the poll shows. Above, Trump supporters at a rally in Tulsa on Saturday.

“It’s not enough to win re-election,” said Sara Fagen, the White House political director for President George W. Bush.

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

5. More moves to combat hate on social media are growing.

The social networking website Reddit banned its biggest community devoted to President Trump, called “The_Donald” and home to more than 790,000 users, saying it had consistently allowed people to target and harass others with hate speech.

Twitch, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, said it was suspending Mr. Trump’s channel for “hateful conduct.”

And Facebook has been hit by a growing boycott of advertisers, which are protesting its policies on misinformation and hate speech. Coca-Cola, Diageo, Starbucks, Levi Strauss and Patagonia have stopped ads on either all social networks or Facebook specifically.

Today, Mr. Trump retweeted a video of an armed white couple confronting protesters in St. Louis, a day after sharing on Twitter a video with a supporter yelling “white power.”

6. Nearly twice as many U.S. properties may be at risk of flooding as previously thought.

New calculations estimate that 14.6 million properties are at risk from what experts call a 100-year flood, far more than the 8.7 million properties shown on federal government flood maps.

Cities as diverse as Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Buffalo, N.Y., and Chattanooga, Tenn., show a large gap in the risk assessments. In Chicago alone, 75,000 properties have a previously undisclosed flood risk.

The First Street Foundation, which compiled the data, also created a website where people can check their own address.

Sanjeev Gupta/EPA, via Shutterstock

7. A miles-long cloud of locusts swarmed India’s capital region over the weekend, the latest of about 20 invasions so far this year.

Scientists warned that the number of locusts in India could top a trillion and severely disrupt food supplies and farming. Above, a swarm in Bhopal earlier this month.

In a single day, a modestly sized swarm can eat as much food as 35,000 people and travel more than 100 miles.

David S. Allee for The New York Times

8. Broadway will remain closed for at least the rest of the year.

Theater owners and producers are ready to refund or exchange tickets purchased for shows through Jan. 3, the Broadway League said.

The group did not give a reopening date. But many shows don’t expect a return to the stage until late winter or early spring, given the unpredictability of the pandemic.

And the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival will be held simultaneously at theaters in its home town of Park City, Utah, and at least 20 other locales across the country, and perhaps in Mexico, too, because of the virus.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

9. The history of working from home has been strewn with failure.

Just ask IBM, Aetna, Best Buy, Bank of America, Yahoo, AT&T and Reddit, some of the companies that pulled back from telecommuting over the past decade.

Remote employees often felt marginalized, which made them less loyal. Creativity, innovation and serendipity seemed to suffer. While the technology is better today, and coronavirus fears may make flexible working permanent for many people, concerns remain.

“It’s good P.R., and very romantic, and very unrealistic,” warned one chief executive with a failed experiment under his belt. “We’ll be back in the office as soon as there’s a vaccine.”

Zack Wittman for The New York Times

10. And finally, if you have to work from home, how to Zoom Shirt.

Only 10 percent of people get dressed up for working at home at the start of the day and change later, a poll showed.

The vast portion of the rest of us just slip into and out of our Zoom Shirt: a top typically kept on the back of the computer chair, ready the moment our webcam lights up.

Some people go to a one-garment extreme. Others rotate a couple of shirts, depending on the formality of the video call. Some take their Zoom Shirt on and off for every meeting, while others wear theirs all day.

Have a casual evening.

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

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