Vaccines, Malcolm X, Adele: Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/briefing/vaccines-malcolm-x-adele.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Wednesday.

1. The U.S. plans to spend billions of dollars to increase the supply of Covid vaccines at home and overseas.

The investment is part of a new plan for the government to partner with manufacturing companies to address vaccine needs and to prepare for future pandemics, two top advisers to President Biden said. The goal would be to produce at least one billion doses a year beginning in the second half of 2022.

The administration also plans to buy enough of the Pfizer Covid-19 pill for about 10 million courses of treatment, and it has pledged $3 billion for rapid tests. Taken together, the investments amount to an aggressive effort to vanquish a pandemic that is heading into its third year.

Separately, Moderna has asked federal regulators to authorize booster shots of its Covid vaccine for all adults, a request that the F.D.A. could grant as early as this week, along with a similar request from Pfizer.

2. More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses during the first year of the pandemic.

The figure for the 12-month period that ended in April was up almost 30 percent from the prior year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. It’s the first time the number of overdose deaths in the U.S. has exceeded the toll of car crashes and gun fatalities combined.

The rise in deaths — a vast majority caused by synthetic opioids — was fueled by the widespread use of fentanyl. The pandemic lockdowns and fraying of social networks, along with the rise in mental health disorders like anxiety and depression, helped create the crisis.

3. Two men found guilty of assassinating Malcolm X in 1965 will be exonerated.

An investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and lawyers for the two men found that prosecutors, the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department withheld crucial evidence that, had it been turned over, would likely have led to the men’s acquittal.

The convictions are expected to be thrown out tomorrow. The exoneration of the men, Muhammad A. Aziz (who was convicted as Norman 3X Butler) and Khalil Islam (as Thomas 15X Johnson), represents a remarkable acknowledgment of grave errors made in a case that was questionable from the outset — and rewrites one of the most painful moments in modern American history.

The two men spent decades in prison. Aziz, 83, was released in 1985, and Islam, who was released in 1987, died in 2009.

4. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began a trip to Africa as crises in Ethiopia and Sudan worsened.

As if the war in Ethiopia were not enough, Blinken’s visit is also shadowed by a military coup in Sudan, which has prompted weeks of protests. Sudanese security forces fired into crowds of demonstrators in Khartoum, the country’s capital, killing 10 people, according to doctors.

At the Belarus-Poland border, a day after the main crossing erupted in violence, tensions showed signs of easing. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany spoke with the Belarusian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, his first contact with a Western leader in over a year.

5. Europe’s Covid culture war pits the vaccinated against the unvaccinated.

To persuade those who are deeply skeptical of vaccines, some European governments are resorting to thinly veiled coercion with mandates, inducements and punishments. In many countries, like France and Italy, it is working.

But regional resistance to vaccines remains, which sociologists say is influenced by a preference for alternative medicine, and by a tradition of distrust in rules imposed from the capital and by a far-right ecosystem that knows how to exploit it. Germany, Austria and the German-speaking region of Switzerland have the largest shares of unvaccinated populations in all of Western Europe.

6. President Biden asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether “illegal conduct” by oil and gas companies is pushing up gas prices.

The move is unlikely to spur any immediate action by the F.T.C., which has the power to break up large industry players, and is unlikely to affect gas prices any time soon. But the commission could open an investigation to gather data on how companies set their prices, which could be used in future enforcement actions.

Also out of Washington, the House of Representatives voted narrowly to censure Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting the president. And Jacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon Shaman involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, was sentenced to 41 months in prison.

7. A Times investigation shows how the appetite for leather-clad SUVs in the U.S. is worsening deforestation in the Amazon.

Brazil’s slaughterhouse industry, which sells tons of leather annually to companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, is rapidly expanding. But some of that cattle is raised on illegally deforested land in the Amazon, by ranchers who create a paper trail falsely showing that the animals come from a legal ranch.

Those transactions are the linchpins of a complex global trade that link erosion of the Amazon to demand in the U.S. for luxurious leather seats in pickup trucks, SUVs and other vehicles — which can require a dozen or more hides. U.S. suppliers are buying those hides from Brazil and feeding a lucrative international leather market.

8. Barefoot and in traditional dresses, a Mayan softball team is breaking barriers.

Las Diablillas, or the Little Devils, a women’s softball team from a small community in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, have become a national sensation.

Although their style of play sets them apart, it’s who they are that is also being recognized: A group of Indigenous women in a community where men have traditionally dominated and discouraged them from pursuing sports.

The Little Devils know the importance of moving. A new eye-opening study found that 300 minutes a week of moderate exercise may help ward off cancer. Researchers who analyzed cancer incidence and the physical activity habits of nearly 600,000 Americans found that about 3 percent of common cancers in the U.S. are strongly linked to inactivity.

9. Adele’s new album will be another blockbuster. But just how big is anybody’s guess.

Her fourth album, “30,” which arrives on Friday, is expected to smash sales records. The 33-year-old Londoner is the rarest of music unicorns: One who not only lands headline-grabbing hits, but also does so after years of inactivity, even near silence.

The buzz is that the album’s “equivalent sales” — a new metric that compares album purchases with song-by-song clicks on streaming services — will easily exceed one million in its first week out, and could go far higher. Those would be figures not seen in years.

Also dropping soon, “Flying Over Sunset,” a new musical about three celebrities experimenting with LSD during the uptight 1950s.

10. And finally, an unlikely home for looted artifacts.

The antiquities trafficking unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office is a victim of its own success. Set up in 2017, the office has seized 3,604 fragile and invaluable statues, sculptures and relics of ancient civilizations. Now, its evidence locker looks like a museum.

Here, a bronze idol from India priced at $2 million. There, a vase from Italy made 300 years before the birth of Christ. Thousands of items have been returned to their countries of origin — but still, that leaves a lot of very nice stuff to watch over.

“It’s one thing to pack a bronze or sandstone statue — it’s another to pack an 2,500-year-old Apulian vase that already has a crack down the side,” said Matthew Bogdanos, the assistant district attorney who directs the unit.

Have an attentive evening.

Angela Jimenez compiled photos for this briefing.

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