Infrastructure, Surfside, Giuliani: Your Thursday Evening Briefing
[ad_1]
(Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.)
Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.
1. President Biden reached a bipartisan infrastructure deal to spend nearly $600 billion on roads, internet, electric utilities and other projects.
Top Democrats, including the president, have made it clear that the plan — just a fraction of Biden’s $4 trillion economic proposal — can move only along with a much larger package of spending and tax increases that Democrats are planning to push through Congress over Republican opposition.
“If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s in tandem.”
2. A 12-story condo building near Miami Beach partly collapsed, killing at least one person and leaving dozens unaccounted for.
Surveillance video from nearby buildings showed part of the tower shearing away in a cloud of dust, but the cause of the collapse is still unknown. Here’s what we know.
3. New York State suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license after a court ruled he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of the 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump.
An appellate court said that Giuliani’s actions represented an “immediate threat” to the public and that he had “directly inflamed” the tensions that led to the Capitol riot in January. The court also said that he would most likely face “permanent sanctions,” which could include disbarment.
4. The remains of 751 people, mostly children, were found in unmarked graves at the site of a former boarding school in Saskatchewan, a Canadian Indigenous group said.
The U.S. will also search federal boarding schools for possible burial sites of Native American children, hundreds of thousands of whom were forcibly taken from their communities to be culturally assimilated in the schools.
5. A 20,000-year-old coronavirus epidemic could be both a warning and an opportunity.
A new study found that a few dozen human genes rapidly evolved in ancient East Asia to thwart coronavirus infections. The epidemic was devastating enough to leave an evolutionary imprint on the DNA of people alive today.
The implications “should make us worry,” one of the lead researchers said. But the discovery could also help to find new drugs to fight viruses, by “pointing us to molecular knobs to adjust the immune response to the virus.”
6. Thousands of police officers nationwide have left their jobs in the past year.
Since last year’s George Floyd protests, police officer retirements surged by 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent, according to a new survey of 200 departments that compared the year from April 2020 to April 2021 with the previous 12 months.
Liberal cities like Asheville, N.C. — where racial justice protests resurfaced long-simmering tensions — had some of the biggest personnel losses. The city lost more than one-third of its 238-strong force.
7. Meetings. Why?
Over thousands of years of human society, work gatherings have morphed into a bewildering variety, including the “stand-up,” the “all-hands” and the “check-in.” Then came the coronavirus pandemic, and its disruption of all things meeting-related.
As companies struggle to figure out post-pandemic work culture, our reporter Caity Weaver examined the long history of meetings and what makes them successful. One expert identified three criteria: “You know what you’re going to do in it. You do the thing. And at the end, somebody reports out: ‘OK, we’re all going to do these things going forward.’”
8. Dinosaurs once roamed the Arctic.
The discovery of baby dinosaur fossils in northern Alaska suggests that a number of species survived year-round above the Arctic Circle — enduring freezing temperatures, food shortages and four straight months of darkness.
To survive, the dinosaurs must have found ways to keep themselves warm, and it’s likely that some had downy feathers, said Patrick Druckenmiller, a paleontologist. The fossils also support the increasingly popular idea that dinosaurs were not “coldblooded, lizardlike creatures,” but rather endotherms, able to create their own body heat.
9. The allure of abandoned houses.
Lonely country cabins, melancholic mansions and other abandoned houses are filling the Instagram feeds of amateur and professional photographers, prompting viewers to wonder about the stories behind faded wallpaper and dusty furniture. Some artists see the dilapidated dwellings as muses, while others want to document the buildings before they succumb to the vines.
“My favorite feeling is a sense of awe or appreciation that I get for a second to stand in this place,” said Kelly Gomez, a photographer and preservation advocate. “It’s almost like a museum that doesn’t have an admission ticket and the velvet rope.”
10. And finally, revisiting a soulful summer.
In one pivotal scene, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sing the gospel pillar “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” in tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “They share the microphone. They pass it between them,” the Times critic Wesley Morris writes. “Howling, moaning, wailing, hopping, but well within the song’s generous contours and, somehow, in control of themselves. My tears weren’t jerked as I watched. The ducts simply gave way.”
Have a soulful evening.
David Poller 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 is today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here.