Your Wednesday Evening Briefing |
Good evening. Here’s the latest. |
 | | Pool photo by Al Drago |
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1. “Let’s stop this nonsense.” |
Of Peter Navarro, President Trump’s top trade adviser who attacked Dr. Fauci in a short op-ed article in USA Today, he said: “I can’t explain Peter Navarro. He’s in a world by himself.” |
In other coronavirus updates: A report by the prestigious National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recommended that, wherever possible, young children and those with special needs should attend school in person. |
 | | Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times |
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2. A heat wave sweeping the country is complicating efforts to protect people at risk for the coronavirus. |
The South and the Southwest, where coronavirus cases are surging, set temperature records over the weekend, and meteorologists warned that heat would rise in the East and High Plains. For many cities, the heat is part of a double whammy — many cooling centers now require visitors to maintain social distancing and to wear masks. Downtown Phoenix, above, reached 111 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday. |
Putting temperatures aside, July is starting to feel like March in the U.S. Businesses are closing, hospitals are filling and cases have been increasing in 41 states over the past two weeks. That includes Oklahoma, where Gov. Kevin Stitt said he tested positive for the virus. He is the first U.S. governor known to have become infected. |
 | | Nati Harnik/Associated Press |
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Revising the 50-year-old law through regulatory reinterpretation is one of the biggest — and most audacious — deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, our climate reporter writes. Here’s the full list of all 100 rules the White House has reversed. Above, protesters against the Keystone XL pipeline in Lincoln, Neb., in 2017. |
The White House claimed the move will save hundreds of millions of dollars over almost a decade by significantly reducing the amount of time allowed to complete reviews of major infrastructure projects. |
 | | Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times |
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4. President Trump plans to try to block prosecutors from seeking his tax returns — again — his lawyers said. |
The effort comes less than a week after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Manhattan district attorney to demand the records. The president’s lawyers said they planned to argue that the district attorney’s subpoena seeking eight years of Mr. Trump’s personal tax returns was politically motivated and too broad. |
5. The Twitter accounts of some of the biggest names in politics, entertainment and technology appear to have been hacked. |
Warren Buffett, Joe Biden, Kanye West, Bill Gates and Elon Musk were among those whose accounts tweeted messages related to cryptocurrency, with most of the messages promising to double the money of anyone who sent Bitcoin to a specific cryptocurrency wallet. Corporate accounts for both Uber and Apple were also targeted. |
In other tech news, a European court handed Apple a legal victory over European antitrust regulators, overruling a 2016 order for Apple to pay $14.9 billion in unpaid taxes to Ireland. The decision is a setback for European efforts to clamp down on what the authorities there believe is anticompetitive behavior. |
 | | The New York Times |
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6. Nearly 72,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2019, a record high, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. |
The rate, which fell for the first time in 25 years in 2018, is a trend that the coronavirus pandemic is probably reinforcing. So far in 2020, drug deaths have risen an average of 13 percent over last year, according to data collected by The Times that covers approximately 40 percent of the U.S. population. |
If this trend continues for the rest of the year, it will be the sharpest increase in annual drug deaths since 2016, when fentanyl first made significant inroads in the country’s illicit drug supply. |
 | | Valerie Plesch for The New York Times |
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Black Lives Matter, possibly the largest protest movement in U.S. history, has inspired newly minted activists in small towns to demand police reform. It’s also prompted a realization for many Americans: Their neighbors are more multiracial and less willing to be quiet about things than most people had assumed. |
“This was not the Chambersburg I grew up in,” said Nikki Wilkerson of her rural Pennsylvania hometown, above. “I had no idea. All of these people are just coming out of the woodwork.” |
 | | Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images ; Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press |
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8. “Everything is up for change, and will change.” |
That’s Regan Arthur’s assessment of the future of the publishing world. Ms. Arthur was named publisher at Knopf in January, and is part of a rare changing of the guard that promises to transform the industry, and to influence the books it puts out into the world. |
The change includes Lisa Lucas, the new publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, above left, and Dana Canedy, the new publisher of Simon & Schuster, right. Both newcomers to publishing, they are poised to become two of the most powerful Black women in the literary world. |
 | | John Taggart for The New York Times |
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9. The answer you’ve been waiting for: Scientists have finally calculated how many hot dogs a person could theoretically consume in 10 minutes: 83. |
The number is based on 39 years of historical data from the annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest (where the record is 75), as well as on mathematical models of human performance that consider the potential for extreme feats. Miki Sudo, above, set a women’s record this year with 48.5 hot dogs. |
For context, the study found that the world’s best hot dog eaters could outeat a grizzly bear or a coyote, but would fall far behind a wolf or a Burmese python. |
And on the topic of animals: American paddlefish and Russian sturgeon were not supposed to be able to create hybrid offspring. Surprise! Scientists accidentally bred the fish version of a liger (that’s a lion-tiger). It’s unclear how many hot dogs a “sturddlefish” can consume. |
 | | Kleon Papadimitriou |
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10. And finally, the road less traveled. |
Nearly a month into the coronavirus lockdown, Kleon Papadimitriou, a Greek student in Aberdeen, Scotland, was feeling homesick and looking for a way home. With flights to much of Europe canceled, he hopped on his bike. |
Two thousand miles and 48 days later, Mr. Papadimitriou, 20, finally arrived in Athens. Along the way, he got lost and suffered flats, bad weather and steep climbs. He made stops in Leeds, England; Stuttgart, Germany, where his grandmother lives; Italy, where he had a pepperoni pizza and beer in the Alps before heading to Venice; and then a port to the south for a ferry to Greece. |
His parents met him in Patras, Greece, and the three of them cycled the final stretch to Athens together. |
Have an adventurous night. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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