Your Wednesday Evening Briefing |
Good evening. Here's the latest. |
 | | Atul Loke for The New York Times |
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1. The Biden administration said it would support lifting patent protections for Covid vaccines, a breakthrough for efforts to produce more doses globally. |
The U.S. had opposed a proposal at the World Trade Organization to suspend intellectual property protections in an effort to ramp up vaccine production. But President Biden came under pressure to throw his support behind the proposal as the pandemic rages in India and South America. Above, the Serum Institute of India's coronavirus vaccine lab in Pune. |
In poorer nations, vaccinations are happening far too slowly. Despite early vows, the developed world has done little to promote global vaccination, in what analysts call both a moral and epidemiological failure. |
 | | Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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2. Facebook's ban of Donald Trump was upheld by a company-appointed panel after his posts about the Capitol riot. |
The panel, a group of journalists, activists, academics and lawyers, ruled that the ban was justified at the time but added that the company should reassess the decision to make the ban "indefinite" and make a final decision in six months. |
The ruling diminished the prospect of the former president's return to mainstream social media and renewed a debate about big tech's power over free speech. Republicans blasted the decision as "disgraceful." |
What happens on Facebook has such big consequences, its quasi-independent Oversight Board can do only so much, our tech reporter explains. |
 | | Cindy Schultz for The New York Times |
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3. Donald Trump may be off social media, but his influence on the Republican Party remains steadfast. |
House Republicans moved decisively to expel Representative Liz Cheney from their leadership ranks for rejecting Trump's election lies. Top party leaders and the former president endorsed a replacement, Representative Elise Stefanik, above, who has styled herself as a Trump loyalist. |
 | | Reuters |
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4. Russia has withdrawn far fewer troops from the border with Ukraine than it had initially signaled, Biden administration officials said. |
Senior Defense Department officials said that close to 80,000 Russian troops remained, the biggest force Russia has amassed there since annexing Crimea in 2014. The Russian military did order a few thousand troops back to their barracks by May 1, but many units left their trucks and armored vehicles behind, ready to go back if President Vladimir Putin decided to deploy them again. |
Biden administration officials said they saw the Russian military presence as a message from Moscow that it could match the number of troops taking part in a NATO military exercise in Europe, which officially began yesterday. |
 | | Alice Proujansky for The New York Times |
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5. U.S. births declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, as the pandemic accelerated a trend that had been building for the last decade. |
Over the entire year, the birthrate declined by 4 percent. Births were down most sharply, about 8 percent, in December, when babies conceived at the start of the health crisis would have been born. The birthrate — measured as the number of babies per thousand women ages 15 to 44 — has fallen by about 19 percent since its recent peak in 2007. |
In other shifting demographics, new census estimates show that the nation's most urban counties lost population for the second year in a row. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago were among those with the steepest losses. Austin, Texas, grew most. |
 | | Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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6. The latest twist in Israeli politics: Yair Lapid, the centrist politician and former media celebrity, will be given the next shot at cobbling together a government. |
Lapid has 28 days to persuade a majority of the 120-seat Parliament to support him after Israel's president gave him the mandate to begin coalition negotiations. Should he fail, the country could face its fifth general election in a little more than two years. |
In the March election campaign, Lapid, 57, a former finance minister, ran on a promise to preserve checks and balances, and to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, from remaining in office. His party, Yesh Atid, came second behind Netanyahu's right-wing party, Likud. |
 | | Federico Rios for The New York Times |
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7. Colombians demonstrating against poverty and inequality over the past week have been met with a brutal police response, leaving at least 24 people dead and 87 missing. |
The explosion of frustration, experts say, could presage unrest across Latin America, where several countries face the same combustible mix of the unrelenting pandemic, growing hardship and governments that are short of cash. |
Clashes came to a head today when demonstrators breached protective barriers around Colombia's Congress in Bogotá, attacking the building before being repelled by the police. |
 | | Cari Vander Yacht |
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8. Alex Trebek left big shoes to fill on "Jeopardy!" His replacements seem to be battling for the soul of the game, our critic writes. |
Some contenders are just passing through, while others are vying for a permanent position that could change the essence of the role. But in the process, "the selection of the next host has turned into a culture-wide referendum on our relationship to information itself," Amanda Hess writes. Here are her rankings so far (LeVar Burton and Mayim Bialik will take their turns later this month). |
Nostalgia is also holding firm on Peacock. In "Girls5Eva" and "Rutherford Falls," NBC is trying to relive its Thursday night glory days on its new streaming platform, our TV critic says. |
 | | Morphing Matter Lab/Carnegie Mellon University |
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9. This flat pasta turns into 3-D shapes. Just add boiling water. |
The dynamic noodles made their debut this week at a Carnegie Mellon University lab, where engineers set out to pattern and build two-dimensional structures that could transform themselves into three-dimensional shapes. Researchers strategically stamped flattened pasta dough to create tiny patterned grooves on its surface. During cooking, surfaces with grooves expand less than smooth ones to create new shapes. |
 | | Erin Schaff/The New York Times; Doug Mills/The New York Times; White House Historical Association. |
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10. And finally, all the presidents' art. |
The paintings and the sculptures that are displayed in the Oval Office represent the choices of each American president — subtle and not so subtle signals every administration sends about its values and view of history. |
President Biden's selection of a large portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt to hang above the fireplace is a break from his predecessors who gave George Washington the prominent spot; Donald Trump's decorative choices reflected his admiration for Andrew Jackson; Barack Obama sought to modernize the office, bringing in paintings from the Whitney Museum in New York. Take a look. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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