Evening Briefing: Pope Francis voices support for same-sex civil unions

October 21, 2020

Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin and Karen Cetinkaya

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

1. Pope Francis voiced support for same-sex civil unions, his strongest statement yet on the issue and an apparent break with church policy.

“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” Francis said in a documentary that premiered on Wednesday, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up for that.”

The remarks from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church could shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten traditional marriage. His comments drew mixed reactions.

Francis backed same-sex civil unions before becoming pope, when he was the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires. Gay Catholics and their allies say that his opposition to gay marriage within the church remains absolute.

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George Frey/Reuters

2. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and will face $8.3 billion in fines over its role in the opioid crisis. The company’s owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, will pay $225 million in civil penalties.

This is the first time since 2007 that Purdue has pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for misleading doctors, patients and the government about its drug.

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Because the company is in bankruptcy court, it is unlikely Purdue will end up paying anything close to the negotiated amount. But the move is a significant advance in the long legal march to help pay for a public health crisis that has resulted in the deaths of more than 450,000 Americans since 1999.

Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

3. The parents of 545 migrant children who were separated from them at the U.S. border have not yet been found, despite a wide-ranging campaign across Central America.

The total number of parents, much higher than was previously known, was disclosed in court documents filed this week in a case challenging the Trump administration’s family separation policy. Researchers presume about two-thirds of the parents now being sought are back in their home countries. Above, a temporary shelter for unaccompanied children in Homestead, Fla., in 2019.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is leading the court challenge, said it had also been unable to find 362 of the children who were separated from their parents, many of whom are most likely living in the U.S.

Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

4. Seven countries, seven days: More than 100,000 coronavirus cases each.

We looked at Argentina, Brazil, Britain, France, India, Russia and the U.S., where large numbers of new coronavirus cases over the past week have helped push the global tally to more than 40.7 million. Above, Paris this week.

In the U.S., there have been 421,114 new cases over the past week. Midwestern and Rocky Mountain states are struggling to control major outbreaks. Alaska is seeing record case numbers, too, adding to evidence that the virus is poised to thrive as the weather grows colder.

In California, a court ruled that San Quentin State Prison, which has been ravaged by the virus, must transfer inmates to other facilities to protect them.

And in Boston, the city suspended its attempt to resume in-person learning in public schools because of rising cases.

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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

5. Can Joe Biden pull off a landslide in two weeks? Some Democrats are beginning to entertain the idea, albeit quietly.

President Trump is making visits to normally safe Republican strongholds, and weeks of public polls show Mr. Biden with a lead or an edge in key states. But other experts warn that Mr. Trump, having pulled off a surprise win in 2016, could do it again.

In other 2020 election developments:

Former President Barack Obama will make his first live campaign appearance for Mr. Biden at a “drive-in rally” in Philadelphia tonight.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are gearing up for their final presidential debate tomorrow night. Here’s how the candidates are preparing.
We talked to LeBron James about More Than a Vote, a collective of athletes trying to combat misinformation among Black communities before Election Day.

Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

6. In international news:

Azerbaijan is in full war mode as it engages in heavy fighting over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave. When clashes broke out three weeks ago, the country plunged into fighting to reclaim the lands it lost. Azerbaijan has not released numbers of military casualties, but funerals are underway.

And in Nigeria, tens of thousands of protesters have been demonstrating for weeks against a notoriously brutal and corrupt police agency: the Special Anti-Robbery Squad known as SARS. On Tuesday, the security forces killed at least 12 people at demonstrations in the Lagos area.

“The Nigerian state has turned on its people,” the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Opinion. “It is a colossal and unforgivable crime.”

Boris Séméniako

7. Apple and Google have made security central to their marketing pitches. But law enforcement can still probably break into your phone.

At least 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states now have tools to get into locked, encrypted phones and extract their data, according to years of public records collected by a nonprofit that investigates how the police use technology. With more tools in their arsenal, the authorities have used them in a wide range of cases, including homicides and shoplifting.

And in a turning of tables, activists around the world are developing facial recognition tools that can unmask law enforcement in cases of misconduct.

The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS)

8. This work by Jacob Lawrence was believed to be missing for 60 years. It will go on public view on Thursday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The 1956 painting was first identified by a recent visitor to the Met’s celebrated Lawrence exhibition. She suspected that it had been hanging for decades in her neighbors’ Upper West Side apartment.

The owners purchased the small painting, which depicts an uprising of American farmers in Massachusetts, by the renowned Black artist for a very modest sum at a friend’s Christmas charity art auction in 1960.

We also looked at the career of Barbara Kruger, who has blurred the lines between political slogans, poetry and the language of advertising. The artist is one of this year’s T Magazine Greats.

Ross MacDonald

9. 50 states, 50 scares.

An abandoned hotel in New Jersey. A slow-burn ghost story from Rhode Island. A Detroit serial-killer thriller. A gritty reimagining of the Donner party’s westward crossing. To celebrate the spookiest season, we’ve made a list of the scariest novel set in every state.

The list includes some little-known titles, but there are also classics like Stephen King’s “The Shining,” which takes place in Colorado, and William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist,” a tale set in Washington, D.C.

John Herrman, a Styles reporter, captured the spirit of the 2020 season in “A Spooky Fall Poem.”

David Kisailus

10. And finally, the diabolical ironclad beetle.

That is the colloquial name for a species called Phloeodes diabolicus, which has an exterior that can hold its own against a force 39,000 times its body weight — the equivalent of a 150-pound person resisting the crush of about 25 blue whales. Just about any other living thing would be liquefied at those forces.

The impressively armored beetles, which are found primarily on the west coast of North America, most likely evolved to allow them to safely wriggle under rocks and fend off birds and rodents, according to a new study (which involved driving a car over the tough insect) Understanding what makes it so indestructible could help in creating more durable products for use in construction or aeronautics.

Have a tenacious night.

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

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