Good evening. Here's the latest at the end of Wednesday . |
 | | People cooling off at the beach this week in Vancouver, British Columbia.Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters |
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1. The heat wave roiling the West and parts of Canada has turned deadly. |
In the U.S., where parts of Washington State and Oregon have been battered by extreme heat for several days in a row, President Biden talked with state leaders and pledged aid to try to minimize weather-related disasters. California is bracing for another summer of destructive fires, and punishing drought conditions are gripping the American West. Heat advisories are also in effect from Philadelphia to Boston in the Northeast. |
"The big lesson coming out of the past number of days is that the climate crisis is not a fiction," John Horgan, the premier of British Columbia, said. |
 | | A new Times analysis offers critical insights into the character and motivation of rioters.The New York Times |
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2. The Times spent six months analyzing thousands of videos of the Capitol riot. Our video reconstruction provides the most complete picture yet of what happened. |
In a 40-minute panoramic take of Jan. 6, our Visual Investigations team shows at least eight places where the rioters broke in, evidence of members of extremist groups inciting others to riot, and the impact of Donald Trump's own words resonating with the mob in real time as they staged the attack. Watch it here and scan through some of the key takeaways. |
 | | Donald Rumsfeld in 2000, between Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.Jeff Mitchell/Reuters |
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3. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense for Presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush, died Tuesday. He was 88. The cause was multiple myeloma. |
Rumsfeld presided over America's Cold War strategies in the 1970s and, in the new world of terrorism decades later, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A staunch ally of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld was known as a combative infighter and was widely regarded in his second tour as the most powerful defense secretary since Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. |
Rumsfeld waged a costly and divisive war in Iraq that ultimately destroyed his political life and outlived his tenure by many years. But he never expressed regrets, and later said that the removal of Saddam Hussein had "created a more stable and secure world." |
 | | Bill Cosby arrived home today following his release from prison.Bastiaan Slabbers/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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4. Bill Cosby was freed from prison after a Pennsylvania appeals court overturned his conviction for sexual assault. |
The entertainer had served three years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a prison outside Philadelphia when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Cosby, 83, had been denied a fair trial in 2018. His case represented the first high-profile sexual assault trial to unfold in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement. |
 | | Absentee ballots were counted for the New York City mayoral race in Queens today.Dave Sanders for The New York Times |
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5. A new, preliminary tally of ranked-choice votes in New York City showed a tightening primary, a day after a counting fiasco. |
The results still showed that Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a much narrower lead than the one he held on primary night. About 125,000 absentee ballots that have yet to be tabulated. |
But the new tally was overshadowed by an egregious error by the city's Board of Elections late Tuesday: Roughly 135,000 sample ballots, used to test the ranked-choice software, had been mistakenly counted. The board, which has a long history of blunders, was forced to retract the results from a tabulation of ranked-choice preferences, just hours after it had published them. |
 | | Inside Grand Central Market in Los Angeles in June.Allison Zaucha for The New York Times |
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6. The director of the C.D.C. stood by her advice that people fully vaccinated against the coronavirus do not need to wear masks in most situations. |
The comments came after the World Health Organization said that everyone, vaccinated or not, should wear masks and take other precautions as the Delta variant surges. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, added that the W.H.O.'s blanket suggestion was informed by its global view of vaccination rates. |
 | | A helicopter lifted a victim during an earthquake disaster rehearsal in Tokyo in 2019.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times |
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7. Tokyo says it is ready for Covid-19 when it welcomes athletes for the Olympic Games next month. But what about earthquakes? |
On average over the past five years, central Tokyo has had about 60 felt earthquakes every year (only one over the last year reached an intensity rating of at least 4), so it's not unlikely that the city will experience one during the Olympics. Organizers hope that any tremors will be small ones, but they're preparing visitors for whatever may come. |
The Tokyo Olympics offer an opportunity to anoint a new crop of champions to inspire Japanese girls with athletic aspirations. But outside of the Games, female athletes face immense hurdles and are limited by the rigid gender norms of Japanese society. |
 | | Grilled halloumi served over fresh tomatoes and seasoned with coriander and cumin.Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Susan Spungen. |
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8. Grill first, then season. |
That is the simple rule to cook by this summer. Fire is a mighty ingredient all on its own, so skip the marinade. Grill your ingredients with only oil and salt and then season them hot off the grill with acidic, salty, fresh or spicy seasonings that stand up to smokiness (and distract if the cooking went awry). This style of cooking takes little time and less planning. |
To cool off, consider this sweet tea that straddles the line between just right and puckery sweet. The food contributor Vallery Lomas grew up in Louisiana drinking her grandmother's recipe, "an inviting elixir" that "is an act of service, much like a beloved parent serving a child cut fruit or buttered toast." |
 | | In "The Greatest Showman," a historically preserved mansion became an overgrown mess.20th Century Fox |
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9. A tropical Vietnamese jungle in the suburbs of New York. Fake autumn foliage, placed leaf by colored leaf onto trees that had long gone bare. Houseplants that span the decades. |
Transforming winter into spring or creating faux forests and fanciful estates is all in a day's work for a special group of behind-the-scenes masters of foliage on movie and TV sets aptly known as greenspeople. "I've given nurseries a couple bucks for weeds," one said. Take a look at some of their magic tricks. |
 | | Over 200 million years ago, nature called. It was full of beetles.Qvarnström et al. |
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10. And finally, insights from feces 200 million years later. |
Coprolites, as fossilized feces are called, can provide extraordinary details about long-lost ecosystems, or in the case of a team of researchers in Poland, a new species of beetles. Triamyxa coprolithica, which are now extinct, were found suspended inside a piece of excrement from the Triassic Period. According to the authors of a new study, this is the first insect species described in the fossilized feces of a vertebrate animal. |
The scientists suspect that the waste belonged to a close relative of the dinosaurs that lived about 230 million years ago. For a fuller picture, researchers scanned the specimen and rendered them in 3D. |
| Sarah Hughes compiled photos for this briefing. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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