Evening Briefing: The House approved $2,000 stimulus checks

December 28, 2020

Your Monday Evening Briefing

By Victoria Shannon and Karen Cetinkaya

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Al Drago for The New York Times

1. The House voted to increase stimulus checks to $2,000 from $600.

The vote, which just reached the two-thirds majority needed to pass, endorsed a measure demanded by President Trump and dared Senate Republicans to either approve the heftier sum or defy the president.

The action came a day after Mr. Trump finally signed off on a $900 billion pandemic relief package. His demands for bigger checks nearly scuttled the entire stimulus package.

It is unclear whether the Senate will entertain such a measure. Senate Republicans have resisted increasing the payments, citing concerns about the federal budget deficit.

Here’s a closer look at the relief package, which casts a wide net aimed at addressing the needs of millions of Americans, including those who have lost their jobs, as well as small businesses, nursing homes, colleges, universities and K-12 schools.

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Novavax CZ, via EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

2. Another coronavirus vaccine is on the runway.

Novavax, a Maryland biotech firm that received up to $1.6 billion from the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed, says it is starting the final stage of testing for its vaccine in the U.S. and Mexico.

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How does it feel to get the vaccine? Here is what some of the first Americans to be vaccinated against Covid-19 are saying about how they felt afterward: Sore arm, yes. Headache, maybe. Regrets, no.

A small number of Covid patients have developed severe psychotic symptoms, doctors say. Most had no history of mental illness and became psychotic weeks after contracting the virus. Such cases are expected to remain rare but are being reported worldwide.

Joao Silva/The New York Times

3. Some countries are too rich for the Covid-19 vaccines — and some are too poor.

South Africa, where a factory will produce virus vaccines early next year, does not expect to start distributing doses to its residents until the middle of the year. By then, the U.S., Britain and Canada may have vaccinated more than 100 million people.

But even though its government is nearly insolvent and half of its citizens live in poverty, South Africa is considered too rich to qualify for cut-rate vaccines from international aid organizations. Above, a Novavax vaccine trial in Johannesburg this month.

Global inequality is shaping which countries get vaccines first. In South Africa, people’s best chance for vaccines anytime soon is to join an experimental trial.

Erin Scott for The New York Times

4. President Trump faces his first veto override.

The House is also set to vote tonight on overriding Mr. Trump’s veto of the annual military spending bill.

Mr. Trump vetoed the bipartisan legislation on Wednesday, citing a list of reasons including his objection to its directing the military to strip the names of Confederate leaders from bases. He has also demanded that the bill include the repeal of a legal shield for social media companies.

Congress has successfully passed the legislation for 60 consecutive years, and this year’s measure passed the House and the Senate by margins surpassing the two-thirds majority necessary in both chambers to force enactment of the bill over Mr. Trump’s veto.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums

5. No connections to the White House? Your odds for a pardon are long.

More than 14,000 people with federal convictions are awaiting word on their applications for clemency. Those with sentences they contend are excessive and people who have shown remorse and turned their lives around in prison are hoping for mercy.

As inmate Nichole Forde, above, watched the list of politicians and presidential pals granted clemency, she lamented: What about people like me?

“I feel sad that not everyone has a fair and equal shot at a clemency,” she said in email. “I have just as much chance at hitting a Powerball number than getting a clemency.”

Nashville Fire Department, via Reuters

6. Investigators are still searching for a motive in the Nashville bombing.

“It does appear that the intent was more destruction than death,” David Rausch, director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, said on the “Today” show. But, he added, “We don’t know for sure that we’ll ever get to the complete answer.”

Investigators say Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, rigged his R.V. with explosives and parked it in a popular entertainment district. But he also played a message warning of an explosion, which detonated at 6:30 a.m. on a holiday, a time when the area was basically deserted.

The explosion killed Mr. Warner, injured three others and caused structural damage to at least 41 buildings in a historic part of downtown Nashville.

Jackson Gibbs

7. Did you miss out on vacation this year? You’re not alone.

An employer’s use-it-or-lose-it rule about vacation days can help ensure that its workers take time off to decompress. But in this pandemic year, many employees are finding themselves unable to take vacations that they postponed.

Some companies are responding by easing their rules, or compensating workers for the lost days. “Since this year was so crazy and people were afraid to travel, we made a one-time change,” said one executive.

Others have been less accommodating.

Nils Ericson for The New York Times

8. Not buying, not dining out.

For some people, the coronavirus pandemic has helped them — or forced them — to live minimally, and taught them life lessons in the process.

In Portland, Ore., Elizabeth Chai, above, spent the year disposing of 2,020 possessions and deliberately buying next to nothing. She learned that temptations fade surprisingly fast.

In New York City, the Hungry City columnist Ligaya Mishan spent the year away from restaurants. She learned that, for her, the ritual of a meal at a restaurant was an anchor to the world.

Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

9. “It’s hard to catch it, it’s hard to coach it. It’s hard to predict what it’s going to be.”

That’s R.A. Dickey, Major League Baseball’s last successful knuckleballer, talking about the pitch that made a career for Phil Niekro, who died Saturday at age 81.

The knuckleball pitch is essentially extinct. The website Fangraphs counted only three pitchers who threw the knuckleball in 2020, and they were all position players moonlighting as pitchers at the end of blowouts.

Niekro learned the pitch he used through 24 major league seasons from his father, a sandlot pitcher in Ohio who turned to it after hurting his arm. It worked so well for the younger Niekro that he never saw the need for other pitches.

The Martin Gardner Literary Interests/Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

10. And finally, Life is 50 years old.

The Game of Life, that is. Invented in 1970 by the Princeton professor John Horton Conway, who died in April of the coronavirus, it is more of a mathematical model of computation than it is a game.

We asked fans for their assessment of the game, a favorite of scientists and others (like the musician Brian Eno) who have an appreciation for the way complexity arises out of simplicity. But the Game of Life’s creator had a love-hate relationship with it in his lifetime.

“I used to go around saying, ‘I hate Life,’” he says in a documentary. “But then I was giving a lecture somewhere, and I was introduced as ‘John Conway, Creator of Life.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite a nice way to be known.’ So I stopped saying ‘I hate Life’ after that.”

Have a lively evening.

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