Evening Briefing: New York City sets a vaccine mandate for private employers

December 6, 2021

By Victoria Shannon

Briefings, Newsdesk

Good evening. Here's the latest at the end of Monday.

The SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in September.Stephanie Keith for The New York Times

1. New York City set a sweeping vaccine mandate for all private employers.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said the aggressive measure was needed as a "pre-emptive strike" to stall another wave of coronavirus cases and to help reduce transmission during the winter.

The measure applies to about 184,000 businesses. Employees who work in-person at private companies must have one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine by Dec. 27; remote workers will not be required to be vaccinated. There is no testing option as an alternative.

De Blasio described the mandate as the first of its kind in the nation. Dozens of counties and cities have imposed vaccine requirements on health care or public sector workers, but they have largely left private-sector employers untouched.

Eric Adams, the mayor-elect who takes office on Jan. 1, four days after the measure takes effect, was on vacation and did not have an immediate comment.

Continue reading the main story

Legislators in the House chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin in September.Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images

2. The Justice Department sued Texas over the state's plan to redraw its voting districts.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the map enacted by the Republican-led Legislature diluted the significance of ballots cast by Black and Latino voters, essentially making their votes count for less than those of their fellow citizens.

Continue reading the main story

The Justice Department's lawsuit comes as President Biden and congressional Democrats face sustained pressure to combat Republican state legislatures that have sought to curb voting access.

Garland said that the Biden administration had only a limited ability to keep states from enacting discriminatory voting laws — even though the Justice Department has prioritized the issue and doubled its enforcement staff — because a 2013 Supreme Court decision ended its authority to approve or deny them before they went into effect.

President Biden at the White House today.Doug Mills/The New York Times

3. President Biden is ready to confront Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, over Ukraine.

The video meeting tomorrow — most likely Biden's highest-stakes leader-to-leader conversation so far as president — may set the course for Ukraine's fate as a fully independent nation.

Biden will tell the Russian president that if he orders his forces to invade Ukraine, Western allies may move to cut off Russia from the international financial system, administration officials said.

In recent weeks, Ukrainians have warned that Russia is erecting the architecture for significant military action, even a full-fledged invasion. U.S. intelligence officials have assessed that Moscow has drawn up plans for an offensive involving an estimated 175,000 troops to begin as early as next year.

A ski jump test event yesterday in Zhangjiakou, China.Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

4. The U.S. government will boycott the Beijing Olympics, but American athletes will still be able to compete.

The diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Games is intended to pressure China over human rights abuses, the Biden administration said.

"This is just an indication that it cannot be business as usual," Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said. "That does not mean that is the end of the concerns we will raise about human rights abuses."

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as human rights advocates, have called on the White House to use the Winter Games to pressure Beijing over abuses against the Uyghur community and a crackdown on free speech in Hong Kong.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in 2019.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

5. Myanmar's democratic hopes live on, despite the sentencing of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the former civilian leader.

Even as a court in Myanmar today handed down her first sentences in the junta's long list of charges, a new democratic movement with younger, more progressive politicians was waiting in the wings.

Hope now rests with an immensely popular shadow government that formed after Aung San Suu Kyi was detained by the military in a Feb. 1 coup. Many in this new group of leaders, known as the National Unity Government, operate from exile.

Subscribe Today

We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times with this special offer.

Jonah Peretti, founder and chief executive of BuzzFeed, with employees in Times Square yesterday.Brendan McDermid/Reuters

6. BuzzFeed, aiming to chart a path for other young digital media companies, stumbled in its first day of trading.

The stock soared 50 percent in its first hour, but then fell sharply, ending the day down 11 percent from its opening price.

As a listed company, BuzzFeed plans to grow by acquiring competitors. Last month, it announced it was buying the sports and entertainment publisher Complex. BuzzFeed bought HuffPost last year.

BuzzFeed merged this year with a "special purpose acquisition company" — also called a blank-check company because it has no business until it acquires one — in order to go public.

Separately, securities regulators disclosed that they were investigating another blank-check company, Digital World Acquisition Group, over its plans to merge with Trump Media Technology Group, a social media company backed by Donald Trump. Digital World raised nearly $300 million in an initial public offering in September.

The Federation Tower East, center, in Moscow. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

7. The tallest skyscraper in Moscow, carrying one of the city's most prestigious addresses, appears to house companies that specialize in online extortion.

The U.S. has targeted several companies in the building, Federation Tower East, as it seeks to penalize Russian ransomware gangs, which encrypt their victims' digital data and then demand payments to unscramble it.

That this high-rise in Moscow's financial district has emerged as an apparent hub of such money laundering has convinced many security experts that the Russian authorities tolerate ransomware operators.

Dr. Jasmine Saavedra, a pediatrician in Chicago.Amr Alfiky/Associated Press

8. Female doctors earn $2 million less than male doctors over their careers.

That's 25 percent less than men over a 40-year span, a survey of more than 80,000 physicians estimated.

Researchers adjusted their study to account for certain variables, like a doctor's specialty, type of practice and patient volume. If they had not, the estimated pay gap would have been far larger. "Our numbers would roughly double," said Christopher Whaley, the lead author of the study.

More men, for example, become surgeons — the highest paid of all specialties — whereas more women go into primary care. And women have been shown to spend more time with their patients, leading to fewer services and procedures that can be billed for.

Bison in Yellowstone National Park.Josh Haner/The New York Times

9. Where too many buffalo roam.

In 1902, fewer than 100 bison were scattered throughout the Great Plains. Today, there are 5,400 bison in Yellowstone National Park, and they have been increasing by 10 to 17 percent each year.

But that's too many, according to the National Park Service. Officials have decided that as many as 900 bison from Yellowstone will be slaughtered, shot by hunters or placed in quarantine to prevent overgrazing and causing possible mass starvation of other animals.

Wildlife officials have permitted bison hunting outside the park, but it has done little to solve the problem — in part because the wary beasts learn the property boundaries.

The Fifth Dimension performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, in "Summer of Soul," a documentary by Questlove. Searchlight Pictures

10. And finally, the best movies of 2021.

"Summer of Soul" and "The Power of the Dog" are among the top 10 choices of both of our chief film critics, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, as are "The Velvet Underground" and "Drive My Car."

For Dargis, the year was about a return to theaters. "I missed really, really big bright images," she writes, "and I missed the rituals, including the quick search for the most perfect seat and the anticipatory wait for the movie to begin, for someone to hit the lights and start the show."

For Scott, each pick was an argument for why movies matter: "They reward your attention, engage your feelings and respect your intelligence," he writes.

Have a cinematic evening.

Angela Jimenez compiled photos for this briefing.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here.

What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.

Here are today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

Continue reading the main story