Senate Vote, Ethiopian Airlines, Pi Day: Your Thursday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/briefing/senate-vote-ethiopian-airlines-pi-day.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. The Senate voted to block President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the border with Mexico, setting up the first veto of his presidency.

Twelve Republicans joined all 47 Democratic senators, after the House passed a similar resolution last month. The declaration would have redirected $3.6 billion from military construction projects toward building the border wall, even after Congress rejected a funding request.

The bipartisan rebuke was the first time Congress has blocked a presidential emergency declaration. “It’s pure and simple: It’s a vote for border security, it’s a vote for no crime,” Mr. Trump, above, told reporters ahead of the vote.

Earlier in the day, the House voted overwhelmingly to demand the public release of the special counsel’s report on the Russia investigation.

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2. The captain of the doomed Ethiopian Airlines jetliner seemed calm at first. Then he sounded panicked.

Minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday, his Boeing 737 Max 8 had accelerated to abnormally high speeds. “Break break, request back to home,” he urgently radioed controllers, who had seen that the jet was oscillating vertically by hundreds of feet.

These details, provided to our reporter by a person who reviewed the air traffic communications, shed chilling new detail about the final minutes of the jet, which crashed, killing all 157 people aboard.

Many pilots are abuzz about the strange acceleration. And some are worried their hands-on flying skills are lacking amid increased automation, in the wake of recent crashes of 737 Max 8s, above, in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

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3. In other international news:

Lawmakers in Britain voted to delay the country’s departure from the European Union beyond the original March 29 deadline after two years of negotiations. In a flurry of votes on several amendments, Parliament, above, also rejected holding a second referendum on Brexit.

Separately, two rockets were fired at Tel Aviv from the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military reported. One landed in an open area, and the other was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system. Initial Israeli news media reports said there was no damage or casualties.

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4. The relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre won a major court battle over gunmakers’ liability in mass shootings.

The ruling, which allows a lawsuit brought by relatives to go to trial, could force gun companies to turn over internal communications they have fought to keep private. It also validates the new strategy lawyers used to find a route around federal protections for gunmakers. Above, Bill Sherlach, whose wife was killed in the shooting, responding to the ruling.

“I am thrilled and tremendously grateful,” said Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed in his first-grade classroom in the 2012 shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. “No one has blanket immunity.”

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5. There were pole-vaulters who didn’t pole-vault. A tennis player who didn’t play a single tennis match. A long snapper who weighed 145 pounds and had stopped playing football.

The largest college admissions scandal in recent history has shed new light on the role of college sports in gaining entry to the nation’s top schools.

As the scandal broke, students at a school in Kansas City, Mo., who had been working for months to gain entrance into some of the same universities named in court documents called it a harsh lesson in the limits of meritocracy.

We also went to the University of Southern California, one of the schools most entangled in the scandal, where four athletics officials are charged with taking bribes, more than the number named at any other school.

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6. In 2020 news, Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman, is running for president.

Mr. O’Rourke, above in Iowa, a Democrat whose near-miss Senate run against Ted Cruz propelled him to stardom last year, announced his intention in a video on his Twitter profile. He has been criticized for not taking a strong enough stance on key Democratic issues — he has declined to call himself a progressive — and for his lack of a campaign infrastructure.

We also took a look at how Texas is nearing battleground status.

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7. The reputed Gambino mob boss Frank Cali was murdered outside his home on Staten Island.

Until Wednesday, it had been decades since an organized crime leader had been killed in New York City. The Gambino family was once the nation’s largest and most influential Mafia group, but several of its leaders were convicted in the 1990s of crimes like murder and racketeering. Above, the scene outside Mr. Cali’s home.

Mr. Cali, 53, rose to power by avoiding detection, nothing like John Gotti, the “Dapper Don” who ruled the same operation when Mr. Cali was a little boy. Here are five other high-profile mob hits in New York City from over the years.

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8. Japan’s ice monsters are disappearing.

Tourists from around the world travel to see the juhyo — huge, Godzilla-like creatures, naturally formed by snow and ice, encasing conifer trees spread across a mountainous landscape. Researchers have tracked a steady deterioration of the ice monsters because of warming temperatures.

“I am very worried about greenhouse effects,” said a professor. “By the end of the century, the juhyo will disappear from Earth.” Above, a student collecting snow to sample for airborne contaminants.

In other climate news, students in more than 100 countries are planning to skip class on Friday to demand action on climate change.

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9. Hudson Yards is Manhattan’s biggest, newest, slickest gated community, according to our architecture critic, who calls it “a relic of dated 2000s thinking.”

At $25 billion, the Far West Side development, above, is the largest mixed-use private real estate venture in American history. Many of its tenants were lured by lucrative tax breaks provided by New York politicians to the developers.

“It is, at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent,” Michael Kimmelman, our critic, writes.

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10. Finally, happy Pi Day!

Pi is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, something the internet reminds us of every March 14 (or 3.14). But the famous mathematical ratio, estimated to more than 22 trillion digits (and counting), is the perfect symbol for our species’ long effort to tame infinity, one mathematician, Steven Strogatz, writes.

“For some people, Pi Day is an occasion to marvel at circles, long revered as symbols of perfection, reincarnation and the cycles of nature,” writes Mr. Strogatz. “But it is the domestication of infinity that we really should be celebrating.” Above, the Children’s Museum of Houston’s celebration for Pi Day in 2011.

Or if you’d rather use the unofficial holiday as an excuse to have a slice of pie, that’s O.K., too.

Have a sweet night.

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