Friday, May 29, 2020

Your Friday Briefing

Anti-police protests escalate, and President Trump and Twitter keep up their spat

Good morning. Anti-police protests became violent in both Minneapolis and Louisville last night. President Trump and Twitter kept up their spat. And herd immunity from the virus remains far off.

Protests against police escalate

Protesters outside the burning 3rd Police Precinct, in Minneapolis Thursday.John Minchillo/Associated Press

There were violent protests in both Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., last night, as tensions over recent police killings escalated. A police precinct in Minneapolis was set on fire, and seven people were shot at a demonstration in Louisville.

There were also protests in several other cities, including New York, Denver and Columbus, Ohio, and President Trump posted two angry tweets, one of which Twitter flagged for “glorifying violence.”

The Times has started a live briefing so you can follow the latest developments.

The conflicts come after the latest spate of deaths of African-Americans caused by the police, including George Floyd, who was apparently suffocated in Minneapolis, and Breonna Taylor, who was killed in March during a “no-knock” raid of her apartment in Louisville.

In Minneapolis, protesters broke into the city’s Third Precinct, on the city’s south side, just after 10 p.m. and smashed equipment, set off fireworks and lit fires, according to videos posted from the scene.

All police had already fled the building. Firefighters could not respond because of safety concerns, an official said. Footage from helicopter cameras showed nearby businesses engulfed in flames.

Gov. Tim Walz has sent 500 members of the Minnesota National Guard to the Twin Cities.

In Louisville, seven people were struck by gunfire at a protest. The city’s mayor, Greg Fischer, said that no officers discharged their weapons and that the violence came from within the crowd. Two of the seven were in surgery last night.

In March, Louisville police fatally shot Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, at her home. Questions have continued to mount about the handling of the case.

President Trump — who has long considered racial conflict to be politically helpful to him — sent two tweets about the situation. One taunted the mayor of Minneapolis for not having control of the situation, while the second used the racially charged word “thugs” (in all capital letters) and added, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Twitter said the message violated the company’s rules against glorifying violence. The company prevented users from viewing Mr. Trump’s message without first reading a brief notice describing the rule violation.

THREE MORE BIG STORIES

1. A Twitter feud in the Oval Office

The flagging of Trump’s Minneapolis tweet continued a battle between the company and the president. Earlier this week, Twitter placed fact-checking links alongside two Trump tweets that contained false claims about voter fraud.

Yesterday afternoon, Trump issued an executive order directing federal regulators to consider stripping social media companies of the legal shield that says they are not liable for the content posted on their platforms.

Legal experts said the president’s order was largely toothless and unlikely to hold up in court. A Times correspondent in Washington explained which parts might have an effect.

2. Herd immunity is still far off

London, Madrid and other cities around the world have only a small fraction of the coronavirus cases needed to achieve herd immunity, according to new studies. Experts believe herd immunity — after which new infections will no longer cause large outbreaks — is reached when between 60 percent and 80 percent of the population has contracted the virus.

Even New York, the city with the world’s highest known infection rate, is barely a third of the way there, according to the studies.

By The New York Times

In other virus developments:

  • Parisians, annoyed at government restrictions, have adopted a rebellious new drinking tradition: the apérue, in which revelers gather on the city’s streets (or rues) to enjoy pre-dinner drinks.
  • The C.D.C. is suggesting big changes to workplaces, including regular temperature checks, spread-out desks and the closing of common areas.
  • For the first time in its 124-year history, the Boston Marathon has been canceled. Organizers plan to hold a virtual race instead, with people running the 26.2 miles remotely.

3. A looming stimulus cliff

A northwest Washington neighborhood.Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

The small-business lending program will soon run out of money. The $600 per week in additional unemployment benefits will expire at the end of July. And eviction moratoriums in many cities are expiring.

The patchwork of government programs created in response to the virus are beginning to fade, and it’s not clear whether Congress and the Trump administration will extend many of them. It’s also clear that the economy will not return to anything like full health in the coming weeks, given people’s continuing fears about contracting the virus. That combination is creating enormous uncertainty about the U.S. economy — and fear among many people who have lost jobs.

Related: Bloomberg News says we’re living in “a new economy built on fear” and has published a series of charts to explain.

No fly: American Airlines and Delta Air Lines are offering buyouts to employees, in a sign that they expect airline travel to be depressed for years.

Here’s what else is happening

  • The U.S. reaction to China’s crackdown in Hong Kong is part of “a downward spiral of actions and responses” between the two countries, our correspondents write.
  • Opposition from Republicans and progressive Democrats led House leaders to pull a bill that would have renewed some of the government’s powers to collect Americans’ internet data during national security investigations.
  • William J. Small, who built the Washington bureau of CBS News into a journalistic powerhouse in the 1960s and ’70s, died at 93. When President Richard Nixon tried to get Dan Rather removed as White House correspondent, Small “flatly refused on the spot.”

BACK STORY: A TRIP ACROSS EUROPE

Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Patrick Kingsley, an international correspondent, and Laetitia Vancon, a photojournalist, are driving more than 3,700 miles across Europe to document how life has changed on the slowly reopening continent. We caught up with Patrick yesterday, while he was driving through the Netherlands:

It’s been often sad but sometimes also inspiring. People have responded with such creativity — in Prague we visited a drive-in theater founded by frustrated actors, and tonight we’re going to a drive-in disco.
The whole trip almost ended before it had really begun. To enter the Czech Republic, I needed proof that I was Covid-free — a certificate from a testing center. But the clinic initially lost my certificate, a near-fiasco that took several hours to resolve.
So far, the saddest moment was reporting from outside a stadium in Geneva — one of the world’s richest cities — where thousands of people who lost their jobs during the pandemic were queuing up for hours to receive a food parcel.
A happier memory was attending a concert in a German vineyard, where there was just one performer and one audience member — me.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, STREAM

Rediscovering small joys

Quick ground beef ragù with broken lasagna noodles.Ryan Liebe for The New York Times

After a wine-loving neurologist lost his taste and smell to the virus, he went on a quest to rehabilitate his senses, with help from daily whiffs of coffee and Cognac. “You don’t realize what a powerful connection these sorts of flavors can have with your life’s experiences and memories,” he told The Times.

Raise a glass: Whip up a quick ragù using a full-bodied red, like cabernet or merlot, for the sauce (and pour a glass for yourself, too).

An N.F.L. refereeing mess

The National Football League yesterday put an end to a widely derided experiment that allowed teams to challenge any pass-interference penalty through video replay.

The change was a response to an obviously blown pass-interference call in a 2019 playoff game, which likely cost the New Orleans Saints a spot in the Super Bowl. But the N.F.L.’s solution was a classic fighting-the-last-battle mistake. The new policy narrowly addressed the mistake the referees had made in that game without fixing other bad calls — and while creating a whole new set of problems.

John Parry, a former referee who works for ESPN, predicted the league would eventually need to come up with a new rule to avoid “a game-changing egregious miss.” For now, though, another such miss remains possible.

This weekend, watch … something whimsical

“My Neighbor Totoro.”Studio Ghibli, Tokuma-Shoten, Nibariki, via Kobal Collection

This week, The Times’s Culture editor, Gilbert Cruz, suggests diving into the animated universe of Studio Ghibli:

HBO Max, the latest service in the great streaming wars, debuted this week. I am not here to tell you whether to subscribe — money’s tight all around. But if you do have the new service, I heartily recommend the movies of Studio Ghibli.

Long impossible to access on streaming services, Ghibli’s delicate, hand-drawn stories are not as frantic as modern American kids movies, and can be moving in a way that rarely feels calculated or cloying.

The most famous titles, like “My Neighbor Totoro” and the Oscar-winning “Spirited Away,” were directed by the wonderfully eccentric Hayao Miyazaki. Or try “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” which I watched this week with my 5-year-old. If you want a full accounting, the Times critic Mike Hale has ranked all 22 films.

Diversions

Games

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: PlayStation competitor (four letters).

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you on Monday. — David

P.S. The first class of New York Times fellows — 23 young journalists, chosen from about 5,000 applicants — is graduating. Somereflected on their experiences in a series of short essays.

You can see today’s print front page here.

The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.

Today’s episode of “The Daily” remembers 100 of the more than 100,000 Americans who have died of the coronavirus.

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Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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