Your Thursday Evening Briefing

June 25, 2020

Your Thursday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin and Marcus Payadue

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Erin Trieb for The New York Times

1. The U.S. likely has at least 16 million coronavirus cases — far more than the 2.3 million so far identified.

That’s the judgment of Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We probably recognized about 10 percent of the outbreak,” he said at a news briefing, suggesting that between 5 percent and 8 percent of Americans have actually been infected to date.

Texas is pausing its reopening and moving to free up hospital space. That’s an abrupt turnaround for Gov. Greg Abbott, who reopened restaurants and other businesses 55 days ago, only to see the state’s caseload soar to more than 130,000, with deaths reaching nearly 3,000. Above, Houston Methodist Hospital on Thursday.

How did the U.S. get to this point? We traced the virus’s hidden spread and the missed warning signals to show how the U.S. outbreak spun out of control.

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Will Matsuda for The New York Times

2. Nearly 1.5 million American workers filed new state unemployment claims last week, the Labor Department said, the 14th week in a row that the figure has topped one million.

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Businesses continue to reopen in fits and starts, which likely explains at least in part why the total number of people collecting state unemployment insurance has dropped to 19.5 million from nearly 25 million in early May, for the week ending June 13.

Glitches remain: Chris Bryan, above, was furloughed in Portland, Ore., in March but has yet to receive unemployment benefits. And an oversight agency found that the Trump administration delivered more than $1.4 billion in stimulus payments to dead people.

Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

3. The House is about to vote on the most aggressive intervention into policing that lawmakers have proposed in recent memory.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would in effect eliminate qualified immunity and restrict the use of lethal force, among other things. On Capitol Hill, above, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a pledge of “never again” to the American public.

It is expected to be approved by the Democratic-led House — and then to be doomed in the Republican-led Senate. That, and a vote on Wednesday in which Democrats blocked a Republican police bill, reflect the waning likelihood that Congress, in this election year, will reach agreement on legislation to address racial bias in policing.

We’re also following developments out of Tucson, Ariz., where the police chief offered to step down after the release of a video depicting the death of a Latino man while in police custody two months ago, and out of New York City, where a police officer was charged with illegally using a chokehold.

Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

4. In a decision that will affect thousands of immigrants, the Supreme Court ruled that rejected asylum seekers can’t contest the decision in court.

The decision supports the Trump administration’s efforts to speed the deportation of asylum seekers, ruling that a law limiting the role of federal courts in reviewing those decisions was constitutional. The vote was 7 to 2. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented. Above, asylum seekers in Mexico last year.

The case concerned a member of Sri Lanka’s Tamil ethnic minority, who said he feared persecution and sought to file a petition for a writ habeas corpus.

John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

5. Statues and monuments that incorporate white supremacist images of all kinds — Confederate soldiers, slave-owners, colonizers — are falling around the world.

Among the long list: representations of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, in Richmond, Va., and of Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback and flanked by a Native American man and an African man, at the American Museum of Natural History.

The statue of the former president “as a heroic white man atop the world” had to go, our critic Holland Cotter writes. But what do we do with other monuments that have similar compositions but more complex images and histories, he asks, like the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, above?

We spoke to descendants of the honorees in some of the troubling monuments and heard their re-evaluation of both the nation’s history and their family story.

Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

6. The cleaner air experienced during pandemic lockdowns could reshape what we know about the atmosphere. Above, a clear Los Angeles in April.

Scientists around the world have been gathering air quality data that will inform their understanding of atmospheric chemistry, air pollution and public health for decades. It will also guide policymakers looking to preserve the silver lining of the global shutdown.

“This is a really good experiment that we hope will never be repeated again,” a researcher said.

Separately, California is expected to adopt a landmark rule that requires more than half of all trucks sold in the state to be zero-emissions by 2035. The rule is the first of its kind in the U.S.

Popperfoto, via Getty Images; Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

7. “Every work of American literature is about race, whether the writer knows it or not.”

That’s Danzy Senna, the novelist, one of nearly two dozen writers, historians, poets, comedians and activists we asked to reflect on the books that have shaped their understanding of race and racism.

In other book news, a previously unpublished piece by Louisa May Alcott is now available in print for the first time. She wrote “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” when she was just 17, long before she published “Little Women.”

And in case you missed it, here are 16 new books to watch for in July.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

8. The film version of “Hamilton,” the hit Broadway show, is coming to Disney Plus on July 3. But that wasn’t always the plan.

The musical was shot over just three days in June 2016, on nine cameras and 100 microphones — all 161 minutes of it, including intermission. The plan was to lock the footage away for five or six years, until the time felt right to share it with the public. Then the pandemic hit.

Here’s how “Hamilton” went from stage to screen.

Sonja Wild/Dolphin Innovation Project

9. Three revelatory animal studies:

Scientists documented dolphins near Australia using an eating tactic known as shelling, in which dolphins chase fish into empty shells, then bring the shells up to the water’s surface and shake the prey into their mouths. One researcher compared the technique to getting the last crumbs of an empty bag of chips.

Here’s another one from Australia: Researchers identified a wow-inducing wombat ancestor from 25 million years ago that tipped the scales at well over 300 pounds.

Much farther north, a team of ancient DNA experts uncovered a genetically detailed picture of the oldest known case of selective breeding: the creation of Arctic sled dogs at least 9,500 years ago.

Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

10. And finally, time to dust off your roller skates.

Whether you’re scrolling through TikTok and Instagram or people-watching at the park, it’s hard to ignore skaters this summer. Nostalgia, a new crop of catchy skate brands and the itch to break out of quarantine has created a perfect storm of popularity.

“I used to be opposed to it,” said Terrence Brown of Santa Barbara, Calif., who began skating five months ago. “I’m a football guy. I thought, Don’t roller skate. I was afraid that if I fell, people would laugh at me.” Now, Mr. Brown has been skating every day. “The only reason I stop skating is when the sun goes down,” he said.

Have a freewheeling night.

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

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