Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

October 6, 2020

Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin and Karen Cetinkaya

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

1. President Trump called off negotiations with Democrats on a new coronavirus relief bill, accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi of “not negotiating in good faith.” Stocks plunged.

In an afternoon tweet, Mr. Trump said talks would be on hold until after the election and urged Senate Republicans to focus solely on confirming his nominee to the Supreme Court.

Earlier in the day, the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, called the economic recovery “incomplete” and urged additional support. His message to fellow policymakers was blunt: Faced with a once-in-a-century pandemic that has inflicted economic pain on millions of households, go big.

Also on Capitol Hill: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google abused their monopoly power, House lawmakers said in a report that called for sweeping changes to antitrust laws.

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

2. Will there be a presidential debate next week after all?

President Trump said he would attend next week’s debate in Miami, even as medical experts warned that the course of his illness was unpredictable. It is unclear whether Joe Biden will agree to share a stage with him, given that the president might still be contagious then.

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Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris are preparing to debate each other in Salt Lake City, above — from 12 feet 3 inches apart, seated at tables, divided by plexiglass. Any audience member not wearing a mask will be ejected. Aides to Mr. Pence said that they felt the barriers were unnecessary.

And the outbreak in Washington power circles is growing: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and several top Pentagon leaders are quarantining after being exposed to the virus, an official said.

Separately, we asked experts about the $70,000 in hairstyling bills that President Trump claimed as a tax expense during his run on “The Apprentice.” They said the deduction was illegal.

Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock

3. Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed tough restrictions aimed at curbing coronavirus outbreaks in parts of New York City and its northern suburbs.

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Under the new rules, Mr. Cuomo said nonessential businesses — including restaurants, bars and gyms — would close for at least two weeks in certain parts of Brooklyn and Queens and in New York City suburbs. On Monday, Mr. Cuomo rejected a similar proposal from Mayor Bill de Blasio, which did not include restrictions on houses of worship.

The plan was intended to stamp out clusters in some areas, many with large populations of Orthodox Jews, after sharp increases in cases were reported in the past few weeks. The fresh set of lockdown measures is a setback for New York, once the epicenter of the pandemic.

Jorge Delgado/Reuters

4. Hurricane Delta is expected to be an “extremely dangerous” storm as it reaches Mexico by early Wednesday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

At Category 4, Delta, the ninth named hurricane of the season, had maximum sustained winds of 140 miles per hour with higher gusts as of this afternoon. The government of Mexico had issued a hurricane warning from Tulum to Dzilam, which includes Cancún, above.

The brunt of the storm will hit the Yucatán Peninsula first and the U.S. later this week. Alabama has already declared a state of emergency.

Leo Correa/Associated Press

5. West Africa’s largest religious gathering has drawn huge throngs of people to a holy city in Senegal, where they slept, ate and prayed together. Many people wore masks, many did not.

Millions traveled in recent days to Touba, 120 miles west of the capital, Dakar, for the Magal, which honors the founder of the Mouride Brotherhood, the country’s most influential religious order. Senegal has so far been praised for its coronavirus containment efforts, but the government did not try to ban the event.

Separately, a top World Health Organization official said that about 10 percent of the world’s population might have already contracted the coronavirus. That estimate — which works out to 760 million people — far exceeds the confirmed global caseload of about 35 million.

Paul Natkin/WireImage, via Getty Images

6. Eddie Van Halen, the rock guitarist whose band, Van Halen, was one of the most popular acts of all time, died on Tuesday. The cause was cancer, his son said. He was 65.

Mr. Van Halen’s razzle-dazzle approach made him a signature guitarist of his generation. His outpouring riffs shot “rockets of sound into the air that seemed to explode in a shower of light and color,” the music critic Jim Farber wrote.

“Eddie put the smile back in rock guitar at a time when it was all getting a bit broody,” his fellow guitar ace Joe Satriani told Billboard in 2015. “He also scared the hell out of a million guitarists because he was so damn good.”

John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

7. The list of very smart, talented people in our orbit is growing.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 21 fellows who are being honored this year for their “exceptional creativity” in a wide range of fields and specialties. Known as the “genius” grant, this year’s recipients include the writers N.K. Jemisin and Jacqueline Woodson and the playwright Larissa FastHorse, above. Here’s the full list.

The National Book Award announced the 25 finalists across five categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. The winners will be named in November.

And the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists for research that has bettered our understanding of black holes and for discovering a supermassive object at the Milky Way’s center.

Harry How/Getty Images

8. How long do you hold a grudge? Surely longer than LeBron James.

James doesn’t have to go far for reminders of the foiled championship attempts from years past. Some of the players who beat James are sitting next to him on the Los Angeles Lakers’ bench, like Danny Green, pictured with James, and are now helping him secure his fourth championship. The Lakers face off against the Miami Heat in Game 4 tonight.

And the Seattle Storm are one game away from winning the W.N.B.A. final. The Las Vegas Aces will need to return to their bruising defense and attacking drives tonight in order to save their season.

We also looked at the new “Monday Night Football,” which our reporter says “is missing its mojo” with no fans, and the likely Yankees-Astros American League playoff series.

Ryan Liebe for The New York Times

9. Want to cook like a restaurant chef? Our columnist suggests culinary building blocks.

These blocks include homemade and store-bought sauces, dressings, condiments, pickles, chile oils, sauce bases, concentrated stocks, curry pastes — anything that can add a quick, easy boost of flavor to meals, writes J. Kenji López-Alt. A pepper-and-onion base, above, is one of his go-tos.

And if you’ve been a part of the influx of visitors to pumpkin patches and apple orchards lately, you may be looking for ideas on what to do with all that apple cider. Our Food writer suggests these cocktails (booze optional).

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

10. And finally, Halloween meets the pandemic.

Good news for ghouls, superheroes and pint-size Supreme Court justices: Halloween does not have to be canceled, according to experts. But parents and children have to take precautions. Here are some useful suggestions.

Some practices are riskier than others (the C.D.C. recommends avoiding crowded indoor parties and haunted houses “where people may be crowded together and screaming”). Wear face coverings (your costume’s mask does not count). Leave baskets of candy for trick-or-treaters outside your home and have kids wear gloves and carry hand sanitizer. And make sure to wash your hands before you eat your kids’ candy.

Have a fearless night.

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

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