Welcome to the Weekend Briefing. We're covering voting restrictions, India's vaccination efforts and moms' secret talents. |
 | | Saul Martinez for The New York Times |
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1. The Republican Party's efforts to limit voting rights are making inroads. |
Florida and Texas became the latest states to move toward limiting voter access after November's elections, joining Republican-backed measures in Georgia, Montana and Iowa. Other states including Arizona, Michigan and Ohio are considering their own bills. |
On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law that restricts absentee ballots, a popular method of voting in that state, and expands a current rule that prohibits outside groups from canvassing close to polling places. Critics say the new law will disproportionately hurt people of color. |
The Texas House of Representatives passed a similar measure last week that would also greatly empower partisan poll watchers. If Gov. Greg Abbott signs the bill, which he supports, Texas will become one of the most difficult states in the nation in which to cast a ballot. |
 | | Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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2. A ransomware attack forced the shutdown of one of the largest U.S. pipelines, which carries 45 percent of the East Coast's fuel supplies. |
The operator of the system, Colonial Pipeline, said it had halted systems for its 5,500 miles of pipeline, which transports gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel from Texas up the East Coast to New York, in an effort to contain the breach on its computer networks. It was not immediately clear who the hacker was, but a federal agency is investigating. |
Attacks on critical infrastructure have accelerated in recent months after two breaches, one by Russia's main intelligence service and another by Chinese hackers, underscored the vulnerability of the networks. In the coming weeks, the Biden administration is expected to issue an executive order to bolster security of federal and private systems. |
 | | Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times |
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3. Explosions outside a high school in Afghanistan's capital killed at least 50 people and wounded dozens more, many of them teenage girls leaving class. |
Streets and roads were packed on Saturday as Kabul's residents prepared for the end of the holy month of Ramadan. So far no group has claimed responsibility. |
The blast capped a particularly violent week in Afghanistan: At least 44 civilians and 139 government forces were killed in the country, the highest weekly death toll since October. |
 | | Adnan Abidi/Reuters |
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4. India is home to the world's largest vaccine maker, the Serum Institute, which had big plans to inoculate the poor across the globe against Covid-19. Those promises have fallen apart. |
In an interview with The Times, Serum's chief executive, Adar Poonawalla, defended his company and its ambitions. He had no choice but to hand over vaccines to the government, he said. He cited a lack of raw materials, which he has partly blamed on the U.S. |
 | | Mark Abramson for The New York Times |
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5. "Will I recognize you?" |
After seven years apart, Ana Paredes and her 10-year-old daughter, Melissa, were reunited in Los Angeles last month. Melissa's arrival marked the end of a 2,500-mile journey that began in Guatemala in February and ended in a hazardous raft trip across the Rio Grande into Texas. |
Over the past six months, nearly 50,000 migrant children like Melissa have crossed the southwestern border on their own as part of an extraordinary new wave of immigration. Many of the children were left behind years ago in Central America by parents who traveled north to find work. |
Federal documents indicate that while the Biden administration has cleared migrant children from border detention centers, shelters are now strained. Over the past week, more than 21,000 children were living in shelters under government care. |
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 | | Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters |
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6. The N.C.A.A. has long stopped college athletes from making money from their fame. That may soon change. |
Under pressure to reshape college sports, Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, told The Times he would push to let athletes make endorsement deals this year. Emmert said he would recommend that college sports' governing bodies approve new rules by July 1, when laws on such contracts go into effect in five states. |
The changes promise to reshape a multibillion-dollar industry and test the N.C.A.A.'s generations-long assertions that student-athletes should be amateurs who play mainly for scholarships, and that college sports appeal to fans partly because the players are not professionals. |
 | | Philip Cheung for The New York Times |
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7. Regulators in California will require the nation's largest cluster of warehouses used by Amazon and others to drastically clean up their emissions. |
The new rules would force the operators of some 3,000 mega-warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet to slash pollution from trucks that serve those facilities. The regulations have set a precedent for regulating the exploding e-commerce industry; they could also speed up the electrification of freight trucks. |
The pollution has taken a particularly heavy toll in Southern California, which suffers from the nation's worst air quality. Minority neighborhoods have been disproportionately affected. |
 | | Griselda San Martin |
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8. They cook. They feign interest in Minecraft. They wrestle. They teach. They give their children confidence. Moms do it all. |
When the pandemic hit last March, one photographer with a new baby turned to other mothers for comfort. She captured them across New York City, above, and asked them to write letters to their children. "I haven't lost myself in the midst of all the chaos in the world because of you," one wrote. |
 | | Getty Images |
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9. Are you trying to build a deer-proof garden? We'll get straight to the bad news: It doesn't exist. |
As one of the dominant species in Canada and the U.S., the white-tailed deer is the largest herbivore in most places where we farm and garden. But our garden expert says there are still plenty of things you can do to deter them, like building a barrier or using repellents that smell or taste bad. First, though, make sure your adversary is a deer. |
 | | Jen Guyto |
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10. And finally, great weekend reads. |
Your Weekend Briefing is published Sundays at 6:30 a.m. Eastern. |
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