Las Vegas, Puerto Rico, Tom Petty: Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/briefing/las-vegas-donald-trump-puerto-rico-tom-petty.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. One question hangs heaviest over Las Vegas: Why?

The authorities still have no idea what motivated Stephen Paddock, a wealthy gambler who lived in a retirement community, to commit a massacre at a country music show. Here are the latest updates on the investigation. Above, law enforcement officials pored over the scene today.

In Washington, Democrats lamented their inability to pass gun control laws. On his late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel took lawmakers to task. Security officials at music festivals, hotels and casinos took stock of their security practices.

And families, of course, were left to mourn. All but a handful of the 59 people killed in the mass shooting have now been identified. Here are the stories of those who were lost.

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2. President Trump, arriving in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, said officials should be proud that only 16 died in Hurricane Maria, unlike the thousands in a “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” That hurricane claimed 1,833 lives.

Aid is reaching the island, but distributing it remains a major challenge. About 95 percent of the island remains without power, and about 60 percent of households still lack cellphone service. More than half still don’t have running water.

Today on our podcast “The Daily,” we discuss Las Vegas and Puerto Rico.

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3. The U.S. expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington, in an escalating response to a mysterious series of illnesses that have afflicted Americans associated with the embassy in Havana.

U.S. officials believe the illnesses may have resulted from some sort of attack, perhaps by a sonic device, toxin or virus.

The State Department has not accused the Cuban government of complicity, but has sought a clear assurance that the attacks would not continue before the Cuban diplomats could return. Above, the Cuban Embassy in Washington.

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4. Big news from the Supreme Court: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seems open to limiting the practice of partisan gerrymandering.

The case in question involves Wisconsin’s legislative map, which gave Republicans many more seats in the State Assembly than vote tallies predicted. Democrats are challenging the map.

At the core of the debate is a new way to measure gerrymandering. Here’s the simple math behind it. Above, a protest outside the court.

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5. The former head of Equifax testified before irate members of Congress about the company’s epic data breach.

The number of Americans whose personal information was potentially exposed stands at 146 million, and several lawmakers demanded new measures to protect consumer data.

Richard F. Smith, above, who stepped down last week as chief executive, said he was “truly and deeply sorry” but didn’t promise any restitution. He’s scheduled to testify at three more congressional hearings this week.

And in other data security news, Verizon Communications, which now owns Yahoo, said a 2013 hack of its network affected all of its three billion user accounts.

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6. Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who was Iraq’s first president under its postwar Constitution, has died at 83. He used pragmatism, guile and an outsize personality to navigate a hazardous course through decades of political upheaval. Above, his image was hung outside his party’s headquarters in Baghdad.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, tensions seem to be calming down after the recent independence referendum.

But in Catalonia, where the Spanish government employed violent tactics to try to stop a similar vote on Sunday, protesters blocked roads, below, and called for a strike that shut down Barcelona’s public transit system.

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7. Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but had never been directly seen.

In announcing the award, the Royal Swedish Academy called it “a discovery that shook the world.” The breakthrough came last year, when an international team recorded the waves emanating from the collision of a pair of massive black holes a billion light years away. Learn more about it in this video.

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8. Tom Petty arrived in Los Angeles in the early ’70s with some big dreams. Above, his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame after his death at 66.

Here’s our obituary of the celebrated singer-songwriter, whose songs were staples of rock radio for decades, and who sold millions of albums and headlined arenas and festivals well into 2017.

In an appraisal, our critic writes that Mr. Petty, was “an unfussy rock ’n’ roll superstar who was always more savvy than he cared to appear.” We also compiled his 14 most essential hits (if one had to choose) in this annotated playlist.

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9. A potentially harmful algae bloom covered more than 700 square miles in the western basin of Lake Erie last week, turning the lake bright green near the Michigan-Ohio border.

Millions of people get drinking water from the lake. Officials said tests showed the supply remains safe.

The bloom has started to die down, but it could be weeks before it completely clears up. Scientists say the blooms are caused by the use of fertilizer on local farms, and could become more harmful as global warming intensifies storms.

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10. Finally, the eighth novel from “The Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown comes out today. “Origin” contains a familiar swirl of big ideas and nonstop action, and rushes headlong into the question of whether science can make religion obsolete.

While working on a profile of Mr. Brown, our writer got some interesting tidbits about his daily routine (he rises at 4 a.m. and drinks “bulletproof” coffee as he writes) and a tour of his house, which she pronounced “fantastically bonkers,” replete with taxidermy, secret rooms, macabre sculptures and a medieval suit of armor.

Have a great night.

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