Your Tuesday Evening Briefing |
Good evening. Here's the latest. |
 | | Eliza Earle for The New York Times |
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1. A mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., was the second in the U.S. in less than a week. |
Ten people were killed in the attack on Monday at a supermarket in Boulder. The victims included a police officer, a young grocery store worker and a retiree who was at the King Soopers picking up groceries for an Instacart delivery. Above, flowers for those lost in Boulder. |
On March 16, a gunman shot and killed eight people — six of them women of Asian descent — at three spas in the Atlanta area. |
 | | Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times |
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2. A fresh blow to AstraZeneca, whose vaccine has been seen as critical to the global fight against the pandemic. |
Federal health officials and an independent oversight board accused AstraZeneca of presenting potentially misleading information about the effectiveness of its Covid-19 vaccine. The company had said that based on its U.S. trial, the vaccine appeared to be 79 percent effective at preventing Covid-19. Above, administering the AstraZeneca vaccine in Milan, Italy. |
In a letter, the oversight board said that the vaccine's efficacy might have been 69 percent to 74 percent, and reprimanded AstraZeneca for an overly rosy description of the trial data. |
AstraZeneca's stumble clouds the European vaccination campaign during a surge of new infections. Germany is the latest country to tighten restrictions, announcing a five-day lockdown over Easter and the extension of existing restrictions until mid-April. |
 | | Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press |
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3. Texas and Georgia are opening Covid-19 vaccine eligibility to all residents 16 and older. |
Beginning Monday, Texas will join a number of states that have made all adults eligible. Right now, only West Virginia, Alaska and Mississippi have done so, but the list is growing: Utah will join in on Wednesday, Georgia just announced that it will on Thursday, and Tennessee has set April 5 as the date when the list of those eligible for their shots will be expanded. Above, a mass vaccination site in Austin, Texas this month. |
The broader vaccination drives come as federal officials warn of a possible fourth surge of infections as troubling new variants spread. |
Those vaccinated may be planning a night out at the movies: Regal Cinemas, the second-largest theater chain in the U.S., will reopen in April. Its London-based parent company, Cineworld, also announced it would reopen its British locations in May. |
 | | Philip Cheung for The New York Times |
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4. President Biden's big clean-energy bet is a big shift. |
Aides are set to brief Mr. Biden this week on plans to invest $3 trillion to $4 trillion in a wide range of infrastructure efforts. The strategy represents a fundamental shift in the way Democrats talk about tackling climate change: It's no longer a side issue. |
Though things could still change, a fundamental clean-energy transformation underpins nearly every part of the plan. It includes building electric power lines that can deliver more renewable energy; building electric vehicle charging stations, like the one above in Victorville, Calif.; capping oil and gas wells to reduce emissions; and reclaiming abandoned coal mines. |
Administration officials say they view averting catastrophic warming and pursuing American dominance of the emerging global industries as inseparable. |
The plan to revitalize the nation's power sector includes a focus on underserved communities, reflecting Mr. Biden's campaign promise to address the disproportionate air pollution in communities of color. |
 | | Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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5. Israel's Groundhog Day: a fourth election in two years. |
Israelis went to the polls today, hoping to end a political deadlock that has left the country without a budget or stable government. The mood is one of fatigue and cynicism. Above, voting at a polling station in Jerusalem. |
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was running for re-election despite standing trial on corruption charges. Exit polls suggest he has a path to a majority and a sixth term. Near-final results are expected Friday. |
 | | NASA/JPL-Caltech |
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6. The most technologically exciting part of NASA's Perseverance mission is set: flying a helicopter on Mars. |
NASA describes it as a "Wright brothers moment" for space exploration. Packed under the belly of the rover is Ingenuity, a four-pound mini-helicopter intended to demonstrate that flying on another planet is possible. NASA officials announced today that they had selected the site for this demonstration of extraterrestrial hovering. The test is set for around April 8, possibly a few days earlier or later. |
In other news from the cosmos: A strange interloper came zooming through our solar system in 2017. Was it a comet? Or an alien space wreck? Astronomers this month offered the most solid explanation yet: Oumuamua, as it is known, was a chip off a faraway planet from another solar system. |
 | | John Moore/Getty Images |
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7. Some Covid patients say they're left with ringing ears. |
Scientists are examining a possible link to tinnitus. It's on the list of long-Covid symptoms published by the National Health Service in Britain, and a few recent case reports and studies have hinted at a potential link. |
The suicide of Kent Taylor, the founder and chief executive of the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain, has lent urgency to the research after he reported severe tinnitus among his symptoms. |
 | | Brian Kaiser for The New York Times |
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8. The union on the cusp of getting into Amazon may be one of the most eclectic in the U.S. |
The membership of 100,000 workers in the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union seems to reach into every corner of the economy, from gravediggers, above, to the women's shoe department at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. |
This month, 5,800 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., are voting on whether to join, the first large-scale vote in Amazon's history. |
An "odd duck" with a history of feisty organizing, the R.W.D.S.U. is also racially and politically diverse. The president of its Mid-South Council calls it "the church union" and said that one of his biggest accomplishments was negotiating a paid holiday for Eid al-Fitr, for the end of Ramadan, at a poultry plant. |
 | | Sverdlovsk Regional Museum |
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9. The world's oldest wooden sculpture is older than we thought. |
As mysterious as the huge stone figures of Easter Island, the Shigir Idol, a nine-foot-tall totem pole carved from freshly cut larch, is the only surviving wood sculpture from the Stone Age. A new study has found that it is 12,500 years old, by far the earliest known work of ritual art, placing it in the context of early Eurasian art during a time of climate change. |
The idol was carved when early forests were spreading across a warmer, late-glacial to postglacial Eurasia. The landscape changed, and the art did too, "perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered," said Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and co-author of the study. |
 | | Pool photo by Alexei Druzhinin |
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10. And finally, the art of the Vladimir Putin photo shoot. |
Most political leaders favor pictures of themselves hard at work in the office. But photos recently released by the Kremlin show the Russian president walking through the Siberian wilderness in coordinated cold-weather gear. |
Mr. Putin has always emphasized the physical over namby-pamby paper pushing, writes our chief fashion critic, and his latest foray takes him into the Siberian taiga, where he dons a sheepskin winter suit and an ivory turtleneck, above, while taking an all-terrain vehicle on a spin in the snow. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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