Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

July 7, 2020

Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin and Hiroko Masuike

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times

1. The U.S. is still struggling with coronavirus testing.

A shortage of supplies, skyrocketing growth in cases and backlogs at labs are leading public health officials in many large cities to limit testing to only people showing symptoms — a return to restrictions that were in place in many parts of the country during the earlier days of the outbreak. Above, a testing center in Houston, Texas.

“It’s terrifying, and clearly evidence of a failure of the system,” an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins Hospital said.

As the number of new infections continued to surge, the Trump administration formally notified the United Nations that the U.S. would withdraw from the World Health Organization.

Nearly three million people in the U.S. have been infected with the coronavirus and 130,800 have died. Here’s the latest map and case count.

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2. President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil tested positive for the virus after months of dismissing its seriousness. More than 65,000 Brazilians have died, the world’s second-worst outbreak after the U.S.

Mr. Bolsonaro, 65, above, said he had taken a test after experiencing fatigue, muscle pain and a fever. He did not express contrition for his handling of the pandemic, saying the demands of his job had put him at risk. He compared the virus to “rain, which is going to get to you.”

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He fell ill two days after he and a handful of his ministers attended a Fourth of July luncheon at the residence of the American ambassador in Brazil.

And in Europe, Sweden has become a cautionary tale. Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge in deaths without sparing its economy from damage.

Elise Amendola/Associated Press

3. President Trump demanded that schools reopen in the fall despite a spike in coronavirus cases around the country.

“We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open,” Mr. Trump said. He characterized those reluctant as partisans trying to hurt him politically at the height of his re-election campaign.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos admonished the nation’s school administrations for moving too slowly to reopen in the fall.

Colleges say that to provide some semblance of the campus experience during a pandemic, large chunks of the student body will have to stay away and study remotely for all or part of the year. Above, Harvard University.

International students are scrambling to figure out their options after the Trump administration said they’d be stripped of their visas if their coursework ends up being entirely online.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

4. Facebook failed to appease the organizers of a widespread ad boycott who said the platform’s leaders delivered “spin” in a meeting over hate speech.

Members of the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Color of Change said they discussed their demands with Facebook leaders Mark Zuckerberg, pictured in October, and Sheryl Sandberg, including the hiring of a top executive with a civil rights background and updating its community standards.

But the Facebook executives did not agree to their requests, and instead “delivered the same old talking points to try to placate us without meeting our demands,” they said. The groups have helped push hundreds of companies to pause their advertising on Facebook to protest its handling of toxic speech and misinformation.

Yevgeny Sofroneyev/TASS, via Getty Images

5. Recent wildfires in the Arctic have released more polluting gases last month than any other fires in almost two decades of monitoring.

In June, fires released 59 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide, raging in ideal conditions of high temperatures and dry soil. The Arctic is warming at least two and a half times faster than the global average. Smoke from the Siberian fires seems to be reaching as far as the Pacific Northwest, scientists said.

Other fire seasons are looming: Vast swaths of the Amazon have been cleared in recent months and are likely to be set ablaze in August, with the potential to spread across the rainforest as they did last year.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

6. We got an early look at the tell-all book by President Trump’s niece.

In “Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary L. Trump claims that Mr. Trump embraces “cheating as a way of life” and sees people in “monetary terms.” Here are some highlights from the manuscript.

And a barrage of court rulings and lawsuits has turned one of the most divisive presidential elections in memory into one that is on track to be the most litigated ever. Many of the lawsuits will determine how easy — or hard — it will be to cast a ballot.

New Jersey and Delaware hold primaries today. Here’s what to watch for.

September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times

7. “This was like a heart attack.”

That’s the economic assessment of a former chief economist for New York City. The coronavirus outbreak has created the city’s worst economic calamity since the financial crisis of the 1970s, when New York nearly went bankrupt. The shutdown threw at least a million people out of work and threatened the survival of their employers.

Two new reports don’t provide any glimmers of hope, either. Economists found it will take years for the global economy to recover from the downturn caused by the pandemic, and in Europe, the recession will be significantly deeper than was forecast just two months ago.

Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

8. Minnesota has few Black-owned food businesses. The killing of George Floyd is prompting chefs and restaurateurs to fix the racial imbalance.

A 2012 census found that about 20,000 of the more than half-million businesses in the state were Black-owned. There are so few African-American food and beverage establishments in the Twin Cities that they are nearly impossible to find if you don’t know where to look.

Now, some white business owners are looking to turn their spaces over to African-Americans. Jared Brewington, a restaurateur, above, is working on a crowdsourcing platform to help L.G.B.T. people and people of color find capital to start businesses.

And two chefs left Minneapolis for a small central Minnesota community, where they are using their restaurant, bakery and farm to promote diversity and teach children about food.

Suliane Favennec/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

9. Albania, many Caribbean islands, North Macedonia, French Polynesia, above.

These are a few of the countries that are starting to welcome back American travelers. We rounded up the places you can go, though there may be restrictions and curtailed activities. The State Department still advises U.S. citizens to avoid all international travel because of the pandemic.

Travel this summer — and likely beyond — will not be the same. Hostels, built on the idea of community and sharing, are wondering if they can survive in the time of social distancing.

September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times

10. And finally, the ocean’s sweet relief.

Public beaches in New York City had been closed to swimming to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That changed last week, when cooped-up New Yorkers were finally able to take a dip.

These images capture beachgoers relishing the feel of sand between their toes.

“It seems like everyone was trying to have a relaxing, enjoyable time,” one said. “It felt like an escape, everyone was just trying to escape.”

Have a cool evening.

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

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