Boeing, Jamal Khashoggi, Lost Luggage: Your Monday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/briefing/boeing-jamal-khashoggi-lost-luggage.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. The crisis at Boeing is far from over.

The airplane manufacturer’s board of directors ousted Dennis Muilenburg, who came under fire for his handling of the biggest crisis in the company’s history: the global grounding of the 737 Max after two crashes that killed 346 people.

The board, which had stood behind Mr. Muilenburg for months as he became a magnet for public outrage, decided to remove him after last week’s turmoil, including the decision to temporarily shut down the 737 Max factory and the botched launch of a Boeing space capsule designed for NASA. Above, Mr. Muilenburg in October.

David Calhoun, the chairman, will replace Mr. Muilenburg on Jan. 13. Until then, Boeing’s chief financial officer, Greg Smith, will serve as the interim chief executive.

2. A Saudi Arabian court sentenced five men to death and three to prison over the killing of the dissident writer Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last year, the kingdom’s public prosecutor said.

The sentences match Saudi Arabia’s longstanding argument that the killing was not premeditated or ordered by the court, but was instead a last-minute decision by agents who went rogue.

That narrative, however, contradicts ample evidence that the agents went to Turkey with the intent, and tools, to kill. Our video investigation laid out how the killing unfolded.

3. Congressional Democrats are keeping up the impeachment pressure over their holiday break, even as a Senate trial remains in limbo.

Top party members renewed their demands for witnesses to testify at President Trump’s impeachment trial. They cited newly released emails that show the White house asked officials to keep quiet over the suspension of military aid just 90 minutes after Mr. Trump pressured the country’s president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden.

Senator Chuck Schumer, above last week, also sent a letter to colleagues asking them to subpoena internal emails and documents from the White House, the State Department and the Office of Management and Budget relating to the president’s effort to press Ukraine’s leader to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals.

4. Russia’s economy is sputtering, its young people are frustrated, and yet the country and its leader of two decades are on a roll.

It’s been 20 years since a virtually unknown former K.G.B. spy took power in the Kremlin. Today, President Vladimir Putin, pictured above last week, is a formidable adversary, taking advantage of the tumult in the U.S. and Europe and forging stronger relationships in the Middle East. Our Moscow bureau chief examined how we got here.

Mr. Putin, one expert said, “is at once a technocrat and a religious zealot, an exhibitionist and a master of secrets. You expect one thing, linearly, and suddenly it’s entirely something else, smoke and mirrors.”

5. Homelessness is Los Angeles’s defining crisis. Decades of racism fueled it.

Black residents make up 8 percent of Los Angeles County, but 42 percent of its homeless population. A major cause: redlining, a practice in which real estate agents and lenders marked neighborhoods as areas undesirable for investment, putting home loans out of reach — and laying the groundwork for a housing crisis decades in the making.

And income inequality, housing shortages, failing mental health services and drugs have all contributed to the growing scenes of squalor across America’s second-largest city.

6. What do Baby Yoda, “O.K. Boomer” and hemp farming have in common? The 2019 U.S. economy.

Economics is a social science, after all. With that in mind, you can see Baby Yoda as a productivity metaphor, “O.K. Boomer” as a reflection of generational tensions that have real economic sources, and hemp cultivation as an outgrowth of the trade war.

Speaking of generational differences, try our latest quiz: See how many notable people you can identify based only on a photograph. Do you find it harder to recognize Joe Biden or PewDiePie?

7. Our cosmology reporter has a theory: The U.S. is about to lose the universe.

In the 1990s, he writes, Americans ceded the exploration of the inner universe — particle physics — to Europe and the particle accelerator at its nuclear research center, CERN. The U.S. no longer builds particle accelerators.

In 2025 the European Southern Observatory will invite the first light into a telescope that will dwarf all others, pictured in the rendition above. And there could come a day, soon, when Americans no longer build giant telescopes.

Are you keeping up with space news? Our Science team reviewed what we learned in 2019.

8. For more than 25 years, a collection of 36 Chevrolet Corvettes has languished in one New York parking garage or another. Next year, one could be yours.

The ’Vettes, one from each production year from the model’s inauguration in 1953 to 1989, have been called “the largest Corvette barn-find in history.”

They’ll be part of a sweepstakes drawing in 2020. It will be the second time the Corvettes will serve as contest prizes — the first winner sold the set to the artist Peter Max, who sold the collection to the current owners.

This time, there will be 36 individual winners. One ticket costs $3.

9. We’re at peak lost luggage.

During the holiday travel season, we decided to look at a model lost-and-found system.

Every year, roughly 250,000 items are forgotten in the trains or on the platforms belonging to Deutsche Bahn, the German railway operator. The central office in the city of Wuppertal serves as a foster home to about 3,000 suitcases, 3,500 cellphones, 1,400 wallets and miles worth of charging cables.

Deutsche Bahn boasts a 60 percent average return rate for lost items. But once three months have passed, the items head to auction. We recently attended one of the weekly sales.

“We cannot always give everything back,” one employee said. “Everything that is lost is not always found.”

10. And finally, more words to live by.

The artists who died this year sometimes helped us see the world in new ways — even as they made us laugh and cry. Among them were Toni Morrison, I.M. Pei, John Singleton, Diahann Carroll, Cokie Roberts and Valerie Harper.

Our Culture desk selected some of their most memorable words from over the years.

“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind,” Ms. Morrison once said. “They are its necessity.”

Have an inspirational night.

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