Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

By |2022-08-23T18:31:51-04:00August 23rd, 2022|Breonna Taylor|

Here’s what you need to know at the end of the day.(Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.)Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Tuesday.A federal law enforcement officer guarding an entrance to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., earlier this month.Saul Martinez for The New York Times1. Donald Trump brought home more than 700 pages of classified documents.Trump took the documents, including some related to the nation’s most covert intelligence operations, to his private club and residence in Florida when he left the White House last year, according to a letter from the National Archives.The letter, dated May 10 and first disclosed by John Solomon, one of Trump’s allies in the news media, described the state of alarm in the Justice Department, as officials began to realize how serious the documents were.The letter could further implicate Trump in a potential crime, confirming, for instance, that the former president had kept documents related to Special Access Programs, some of the nation’s most closely held secrets, before the F.B.I. searched the property.Ukrainian emergency rescue teams, wearing radiation protection suits, during a disaster drill last week in Zaporizhzhia.David Guttenfelder for The New York Times2. A Ukrainian nuclear plant, held hostage by Russian forces, is on the brink of calamity.The U.N. held an emergency meeting in response to recent attacks around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine, Europe’s largest, which has been occupied by Russian forces since March.The plant has repeatedly come dangerously close to disaster. In March, a large caliber bullet pierced an outer wall of an active reactor. In recent weeks, artillery fire striking the plant has raised the specter of nuclear catastrophe. Standing between the world and calamity are the Ukrainian operators working at gunpoint.Miami-Dade County Elections workers counting ballots today.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times3. Voters in Florida and New York cast ballots in key primaries today.In Florida, Representative Charlie Crist, who as a Republican served as governor from 2007 to 2011, and Nikki Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner, are the leading candidates in a bitter battle for the Democratic party’s nomination to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis in November.In Manhattan, Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two powerful House Democrats who have served neighboring districts for three decades, are pitted against each other.In New York’s suburbs, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, who leads the House Democratic campaign arm, faces a challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive state senator endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Follow along for our live coverage of tonight’s races.Peiter Zatko is a well-known hacker who goes by the nickname Mudge in the security community.Jim Wilson/The New York Times4. Twitter’s former security chief filed a whistle-blower complaint.Peiter Zatko, the social media giant’s former head of security, accused the company of making false and misleading statements about its security practices and lying to Elon Musk about fake accounts on its platform.In complaints to the S.E.C., D.O.J. and F.T.C., Zatko accused Twitter; its chief executive, Parag Agrawal; and other top executives of “extensive legal violations,” including acting with “negligence and even complicity” against hackers.Twitter said that Zatko was fired in January 2022 for poor performance and that his allegations were false. Analysis: The complaint could strengthen Musk’s efforts to walk away from his Twitter deal, DealBook reports. Prosecutors told jurors that the men were upset about Covid-19 restrictions and that they plotted a kidnapping raid on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s vacation home.Emily Elconin for The New York Times5. Two men were convicted in a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor.A federal jury found the men, Barry Croft and Adam Fox, guilty of plotting to kidnap the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, ending one of the highest-profile domestic terrorism cases in recent history. Months ago, prosecutors had presented the case to a different jury, which decided not to convict. The F.B.I. investigation relied on embedded operatives, including an informant who became second-in-command of a militia and an undercover agent who offered to provide explosives. Defense lawyers argued that their clients were preyed upon by undercover agents.In other court news, a former detective admitted she had helped mislead a judge into authorizing the raid that led to the killing of Breonna Taylor. She is the first officer to be convicted over the 2020 raid.In Atlanta, prosecutors dropped all charges against the white police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, in a parking lot in 2020.With the cost of living outpacing her pay, Tamela Clover has begun relying on a food pantry in Portland, Ore.Ivan McClellan for The New York Times6. Pandemic aid is running out, and food insecurity is rising. More than a year after President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus package into law, that assistance is drying up as prices have risen at the fastest pace in 40 years. The extent to which the aid fed inflation remains a matter of disagreement, but almost no one expects another round, even if the economy tips into a recession. The progress that the Biden administration hailed in fighting poverty last year has also faded. The national child poverty rate and the food hardship rate for families with children have rebounded to their highest levels since December 2020.Related: With the cost and frequency of weather-driven disasters on the rise, here are tips to prepare financially.Monkeypox got its name in 1958, after researchers first identified it in a colony of laboratory monkeys in Denmark.Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via Shutterstock7. Many experts want to rename monkeypox.As monkeypox has spread to 92 countries in recent months, some scientists have begun calling the virus “hMPXV” or “MPV.” The more common name, they argue, is both a misnomer and a stigma.Rodents are the most likely reservoir for the virus, and experts say the current name reinforces offensive tropes about Africa, where it had been spotted occasionally before the current outbreak. There has also been an outbreak of violence against marmosets and capuchin monkeys in Brazil. The W.H.O. has acknowledged the problem, saying it would work to find a new name. In other science news, researchers found that dopplegängers — people who are unrelated but look a lot alike — have look-alike DNA.A still from “Minions: The Rise of Gru.”Illumination Entertainment/Universal Pictures8. In China, the new Minions movie has a dramatically different ending.In the original version of “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” the film’s two main villains make a bold escape, unpunished. But an apparent censor-added epilogue specially for Chinese moviegoers changed the movie’s tone and earned online mockery from viewers.In the revision, one of the villains got a lengthy prison sentence, while the other became an attentive father of three — in what some saw as a nod to China’s policy of encouraging higher birthrates. The new ending reflects the increasingly moralistic bent of Chinese officials, who have called on artists to spread “socialist core values.”In other crackdowns on speech, Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, is detaining and silencing the country’s last independent voices: Roman Catholic priests. Lori King had to swim in a looping U to get from Block Island to Montauk, so that strong currents would not push her off course.Drew Maloney9. A Long Island woman swam through sharks, cramps and current to set a record.When Lori King, a 47-year-old woman, swam 24 miles from Block Island, R.I., to Montauk, N.Y. — becoming the first person known to do so — the lengthy distance wasn’t the only obstacle.A crew with her spotted three sharks. At one point, King suffered such severe cramping that she couldn’t kick with her right foot. She contended with cold surges of water in only a bathing suit, cap and goggles. And she had to keep pace to finish before the tides changed, which had ended attempts by other swimmers.But after 8 hours 39 minutes 45 seconds, King completed her journey, considered a marathon swim for being at least 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).Most of the butter sculptures at the fair are completed within six to eight hours.Nate Ryan for The New York Times10. And finally, a new artist takes the butter knife at the Minnesota State Fair.The fair has featured butter sculptures for more than a century, and for more than 50 years they were made by Linda Christensen. Now she has passed on her dull sculpting knife, quite literally, to Gerry Kulzer, a former high school teacher who spent two years as her apprentice.His job: bundling up in a glass-enclosed refrigerator where he’ll spend the next few days carving 90-pound blocks of salted butter into soft reflections of the fair’s dairy princesses — a contest that honors young female leaders in the state’s dairy industry. (The women are given the busts to take home. Some are stored for decades; others are eaten with pancakes.)Have a Grade AA day.Brent Lewis