Good evening. Here's the latest at the end of Wednesday. |
 | | Gravediggers unloading the coffin of a victim from the coronavirus in Bogor, Indonesia, in July.Willy Kurniawan/Reuters |
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1. The World Health Organization called for a moratorium on Covid booster shots until the end of September to address the global disparities in vaccinations. |
In China, months after the country was hailed as a success story in curbing the virus, the highly infectious Delta variant is now rapidly spreading, and the government has resorted to strict lockdowns and aggressive testing. |
 | | A nursing home staff member in Washington receiving a Covid vaccine.Kenny Holston for The New York Times |
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2. Nursing homes, once devastated by large outbreaks, are facing a new hurdle: unvaccinated staff. |
New Covid-19 outbreaks among vaccinated nursing home residents and staff are putting pressure on owners to impose vaccine mandates, especially in states with low inoculation rates where the Delta variant is spreading fast. The nursing home industry has stopped short of endorsing a vaccine mandate for all staff, but some homes are now requiring them. |
Across the U.S., physicians working in Covid hot spots say that the latest wave of patients arriving in their hospitals are younger, in their 20s and 30s, and almost always unvaccinated, and that they seem sicker than young patients last year. |
 | | A protest on Wednesday against Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Desiree Rios for The New York Times |
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3. Three New York prosecutors announced that they had opened criminal investigations into Gov. Andrew Cuomo's actions. |
District attorneys in Manhattan, Nassau County and Westchester County each disclosed that they had requested investigative materials from the state attorney general's office in connection with inquiries into the governor's behavior. |
The state attorney general's report, which said Cuomo had sexually harassed 11 women and violated federal and state law, provided a meticulous rendering of how the governor's conduct was allowed to fester. |
 | | Tropical Storm Elsa in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in July.Orlando Barria/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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4. The year's hurricane season will be above average. |
Conditions in and above the Atlantic suggest that there will be 15 to 21 named storms, including seven to 10 hurricanes, by Nov. 30, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. An average year has 14 named storms, seven of which are hurricanes. |
The forecast comes as many parts of the world are experiencing extreme weather caused by climate change. |
 | | The Robinhood pop-up stand on Wall Street last week.Sasha Maslov for The New York Times |
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5. Shares of Robinhood jumped as much as 65 percent, like the meme stocks it enabled. |
The stock trading app's shares rose to $77, double their price at the end of last week, when the company made its initial public offering. Trading was briefly paused by the Nasdaq stock exchange. By day's end, it closed at $70. Robinhood helped fuel a frenzy by small investors earlier this year that drove up prices of companies like AMC Entertainment and GameStop. |
In other business news, while a second vote to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama seems likely, the company faces a campaign by the Teamsters and other groups to rein in the power it wields over its employees and their workplace conditions. |
 | | Lebanon's downward spiral has set off a new wave of migration.Bryan Denton for The New York Times |
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6. Israeli forces responded to rocket attacks from Lebanon with artillery strikes as tensions flared again in the region. |
 | | The Smith & Wesson booth at a trade show in 2016.John Locher/Associated Press |
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7. Mexico sued 11 gun manufacturers and suppliers in the U.S., accusing them of negligently facilitating the flow of weapons to powerful drug cartels. |
Mexican officials have long blamed gun manufacturers and lax American gun regulations for playing a role in the country's violence. But officials said this was the first time a national government had filed suit against gun companies in the U.S. The Justice Department found that 70 percent of the firearms recovered in Mexico between 2014 and 2018 were from the U.S. |
 | | Ryo Kiyuna competing at the karate world championships in Madrid in 2018.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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8. Every city that hosts the Olympics pushes for events popular in its country to be included in the program. Now, karate is a medal sport for the first time. |
Karate has centuries-old roots in the Japanese islands of Okinawa. It is fitting, then, that one of the gold medal favorites in the three-day tournament that begins tomorrow is Ryo Kiyuna, an Okinawan. Kiyuna will compete in the men's kata portion, in which athletes perform alone, demonstrating a series of offensive and defensive moves. |
- Sydney McLaughlin set another world record, beating her closest rival and the defending gold medalist, Dalilah Muhammad, in the women's 400-meter hurdles by a razor-thin 0.12 seconds. Here's how she did it.
- It isn't clear whether Simone Biles will compete seriously again. At the Tokyo Games, the sport got an idea of what it might be like without her.
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 | | Tiny cakes for tiny hands.Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Sue Li. Prop stylist: Nicole Louie. |
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9. How do you celebrate a first birthday? With strawberry baby cakes, of course. |
Our dessert columnist Dorie Greenspan was entrusted with making her granddaughter's first birthday cake, but in the end, she went simple — and small. Her strawberry cupcakes are made in mini-muffin tins and finished with a white-chocolate glaze. "The tins make cakes that are small enough for chubby baby hands to grab and just big enough to hold one candle for Gemma's birthday and one for her to grow on," Dorie writes. |
 | | The African house gecko has spread far and wide in the Americas. Ishan Agarwal |
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10. And finally, tracing the story of tiny stowaways. |
If you've ever seen a gecko crawling on a house in Florida, it's probably an African house gecko. But the geckos, which weigh less than a nickel, originated in southeastern Africa, from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and nearby areas. So how did they find their way here? |
Researchers who reconstructed the evolutionary history of the species put a theory to the test — that African house geckos stowed away on vessels involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They studied the genetic samplings of geckos and cross-referenced them with routes of slave voyages and historical observations of the geckos in the Americas with areas involved with the slave trade. The authors did caution that reptiles could have rafted across the Atlantic a thousand years ago some other way. |
Have an insightful evening. |
| Lance Booth compiled photos for this briefing. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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