Good evening. Here's the latest at the end of Monday. |
 | | Senator Joe Manchin, center, speaks to reporters while walking through the U.S. Capitol last week.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times |
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1. Details and compromises are still out of reach as Democrats push for a deal on President Biden's social spending and climate bill this week. |
A number of sticking points remained on health care benefits, paid leave and how to pay for the package, which could cost up to $2 trillion. The White House and top Democrats hope to reach an agreement before the president departs Thursday for a U.N. climate conference. |
Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist holdout, said that a compromise framework should be reached this week, though he acknowledged he had a number of unresolved concerns about policy details. Manchin is seeking to cut or weaken a second major climate provision. |
A so-called billionaires' tax is being eyed to fund the package. It would essentially apply a more stringent version of capital gains taxes on those with over $1 billion in assets or three straight years of income over $100 million, targeting their unrealized capital gains. |
 | | Sudanese protesters in Khartoum, Sudan.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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2. Sudan's military seized power and fired on protesters. |
Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the military chief, said he was dissolving the country's joint civilian-military government and imposing a state of emergency. Even so, he vowed to press ahead with elections planned for July 2023. |
There were reports that soldiers gunned down protesters gathered outside the army headquarters in Khartoum. A doctors' group said that at least three had been killed and more than 80 wounded. |
 | | The Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen leaving the Houses of Parliament today in London.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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3. Facebook is confronting a public relations crisis over disclosures made by a former employee about how it deals with the effects of some of its most basic features, including groups, sharing and the Like button. |
Researchers said in internal documents that Facebook's "core product mechanics" let misinformation and hate speech flourish on the site. "The mechanics of our platform are not neutral," they concluded. |
At the same time, the company's financial position remains strong. It reported today that revenue rose 35 percent to $29 billion in the most recent quarter, while profit rose 17 percent to $9.2 billion. |
Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistle-blower, appeared before British lawmakers ahead of meetings this week with French, German and E.U. officials. She painted a portrait of a company vividly aware of its harmful effects on society but unwilling to act because doing so could jeopardize profits and growth. |
 | | The New York Times |
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4. Since 2014, the world has made progress on climate change. |
Current policies put the planet on pace for roughly 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. It's an improvement from the 4 degrees expected in 2014, but short of the target of 1.5 degrees set by the Paris climate agreement, and still devastating. |
The change came from several factors: The 2015 Paris agreement spurred voluntary action by nations; clean energy has advanced far more quickly than predicted; and coal power has begun to wane. |
"There has been a genuine shift over the past decade," said Niklas Höhne, founding partner of NewClimate Institute, which did the calculations. "You can say that progress has been too slow, that it's still not enough, and I agree with all that. But we do see real movement." |
 | | Kaden Sweeten, 10, received a shot of Moderna's coronavirus vaccine as part of a pediatric trial in Salt Lake City in April.Velocity Clinical Research/Via Reuters |
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5. Moderna said its coronavirus vaccine was safe for children. |
The results were announced a day before an F.D.A. advisory committee is scheduled to review data for the Pfizer vaccine in children 5 through 11. If the application is approved, those children could be fully immunized by the holidays. |
Separately, the Biden administration said unvaccinated children would face few restrictions when traveling to the U.S. starting on Nov. 8. That's the date the U.S. reopens to fully vaccinated international travelers who had been barred for nearly a year and a half from entering the country. |
 | | World Policy Analysis Center, University of California, Los Angeles by The New York Times |
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6. The U.S. is one of only six countries with no national paid family or medical leave. |
Of 185 countries that offer paid leave for new mothers, only one, Eswatini (once called Swaziland), offers fewer than four weeks. The average length for those that have maternity leave is 29 weeks; 107 countries have parental leave for fathers. |
"The rest of the world, including low-income countries, have found a way to do this," said Jody Heymann, founding director of the World Policy Analysis Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. |
 | | Tesla electric cars charging in July.Roger Kisby for The New York Times |
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7. Tesla's stock market capitalization topped $1 trillion. |
By the end of next year, electric vehicles will make up more than 20 percent of Hertz's global vehicle fleet, the company said. The car-rental company emerged from bankruptcy in June after shedding much of its debt, which freed it to invest in modernizing its fleet. |
The order will reportedly generate $4.2 billion in revenue for Tesla. It is only the fifth U.S. company with a $1 trillion market cap, behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, Google's parent company. (Facebook surpassed $1 trillion earlier this year before falling.) |
 | | A farmworker harvesting sweet potatoes at Kornegay Family Farms and Produce in Princeton, N.C.Madeline Gray for The New York Times |
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8. A record high price for Thanksgiving. |
Nearly every ingredient of the traditional holiday feast — the turkey, the aluminum roasting pan, the coffee after dinner — is expected to cost more than ever this year. |
There is no single culprit. The nation's food supply has been battered by a knotted supply chain, high transportation expenses, labor shortages, trade policies and bad weather. Inflation is at play, too. Consumer prices for food rose 4.6 percent in September from a year ago. |
The director of sweet potato sales for one grower is paying truckers nearly twice as much as usual to haul the crop. "I never seen anything like it, and I've been running sweet potatoes for 38 or 39 years," he said. |
 | | The Rev. Luis Urriza received a hug from a young boy after leading his final Mass.Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times |
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9. This 100-year-old priest has a new assignment. |
His parishioners organized a march hoping to convince the church to keep him in Texas. But the decision stood. |
"God does things you don't understand," Father Luis said. "Maybe they need me over there." |
 | | A blackworm blob under a microscope. Harry Tuazon, Bhamla Lab at Georgia Tech |
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10. And finally, the dynamics of worm blobs. |
In a recent study, a group of researchers showed how a worm blob could move as one unit like an animated ball of yarn, meandering away from predators or stress. Their computer simulation, one scientist said, "lays a path forward for new kinds of models for similarly entangled systems." |
"I was first just shocked," Serena Ding, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, said about seeing a photo of worm blobs for the first time. "And then I was grossed out, and then I was fascinated." |
| Eve Edelheit compiled photos for this briefing. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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