Your Thursday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/briefing/biden-marijuana-pardons-barnard-college.html

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

1. President Biden pardoned thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession.

Biden’s move cleared about 6,500 people who were convicted on federal charges of simple possession from 1992 to 2021. The president said his administration would review whether marijuana should still be a Schedule 1 drug like heroin and LSD.

The president urged governors to follow suit and pardon those convicted on state charges of possession, which far outnumber those charged with violating federal law. Biden stopped short of calling for the complete decriminalization of marijuana, which Congress would have to authorize. Still, his move was a striking shift, about a month before the midterm elections.

Advocacy groups praised the president’s announcement, but said the impact on individuals will be limited if the states do not also act.

In other legal news, a judge ruled that large parts of New York’s new gun restrictions were unconstitutional. New York’s new law had been seen as a model for states after the Supreme Court struck down stricter measures.

2. Russia’s military leadership is facing a barrage of criticism over failures in Ukraine.

A senior Russian occupation official blasted the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, saying that he should “simply shoot himself for being the one who let things get to this state.” After Russian forces suffered battlefield setbacks in the last week, prominent officials have increasingly criticized Shoigu, a close associate of President Vladimir Putin.

One common thread in the criticism has been that Russia’s military has turned out to be unprepared for a real war, despite the country’s enormous defense budget. Many Russian hawks have praised Putin for ordering a draft but have criticized the military for its poor execution of it.

Separately, the Biden administration has quietly fast-tracked private weapons sales to Ukraine, slashing a weekslong approval process to a matter of hours. Scant oversight means these weapons risk falling into the wrong hands.

3. Twenty-four children were among the victims of the deadliest mass shooting in Thailand ever carried out by a lone perpetrator.

In all, 36 people were killed by a former police officer who attacked a child-care facility with a handgun and knife in the country’s northeast. He then shot and killed himself, his wife and their son. The authorities identified him as Panya Kamrab, 34, who in June was fired from the police force after being arrested for possession of methamphetamine.

The attack shocked Thailand, where mass shootings are rare, although the country has some of Asia’s highest rates of gun ownership and gun homicide.

4. A family drama is upending the Senate race in Georgia.

After a report that Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, paid for a former girlfriend to have an abortion, his son Christian publicly criticized him, writing on Twitter that his father was dishonest and “not a ‘family man.’” Christian Walker, 23, had built a major following as a conservative firebrand, but had largely been silent about his father’s campaign until this week.

In Wisconsin, the Democratic Senate candidate, Mandela Barnes, has lost his early lead in the polls and is struggling to parry a Republican advertising blitz.

In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, will face his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, in their first and probably only debate tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern.

5. Iran’s security forces cracked down on a university protest. But demonstrations continued.

When students at the elite Sharif University of Technology in Tehran protested the Islamic Republic’s rule last weekend, the security forces opened fire with rubber bullets and paintballs. The violent crackdown appears to have fueled more discontent.

University campuses across Iran held solidarity protests against the government, with videos circulating of students raising their fists in defiance. Students are joining nationwide protests that began three weeks ago following the death of a woman in police custody for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law.

In other international news, U.S. forces carried out a rare operation inside Syrian government territory, killing Rakkan Wahid al-Shammari, a senior Islamic State official.

6. New details emerge about the death of the Chinese doctor who sounded the alarm on Covid-19.

A video investigation by The Times chronicles how Dr. Li Wenliang spent his final days. Though there was no evidence that his medical care was compromised, internal memos, medical records and an exclusive interview with one of his colleagues show how Li battled Covid while navigating government attempts to censor him.

Li was reprimanded for trying to raise the alarm. His death in 2020 set off an outpouring of grief and anger on a scale rarely seen in China.

In other China news, a bid by the U.S. and other Western countries to hold a debate on China’s abuses against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang failed at the U.N.

7. Barnard plans to offer abortion pills on campus.

Officials at Barnard, the women’s college in New York City, said they would wait until next fall to make the pills available, allowing time to train staff and develop protocols and logistics.

At the same time, colleges in states with abortion bans or strict restrictions are imposing measures to rein in campus reproductive health services. Last month, the general counsel of the University of Idaho said that under Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion, employees of the university cannot counsel patients about abortion or refer them to abortion services.

In other health news, the U.S. will begin screening travelers from Uganda for Ebola, the Biden administration announced today.

8. A Dutch company is trying to recycle office towers.

Buildings are responsible for nearly 40 percent of the world’s climate emissions, half of which is generated by their construction. Some European countries have tried to reduce waste by smashing deteriorating structures into material for asphalt. But a Dutch engineer named Michel Baars is taking this effort a step further: using the disassembled parts of old buildings to build new ones.

Baars’s company, New Horizon, demolishes buildings, plucking the electronics, fire safety equipment, wood, aluminum and concrete for reuse. He is part of an emerging group of architects, engineers and contractors who are working to develop a circular economy, in which everything should be designed with reuse in mind.

In other environmental news, a climate disaster wiped out a decades-long project to bring pipe-borne water to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

9. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French novelist Annie Ernaux.

The Swedish Academy, which decides the prize, lauded Ernaux for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” Ernaux’s work has highlighted events from her own life, including a back-street abortion and a passionate extramarital affair.

Ernaux, 82, is only the 17th female writer to have won the prestigious prize. Outside France, she is perhaps best known for her memoir “The Years.”

Read our Q. and A. with another writer: Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist and advocate for autistic people, is a visual thinker who hates graphic novels. Her new book is “Visual Thinking.”

10. And finally, the “fattest tournament on Earth.”

In a weeklong bracket-style contest called Fat Bear Week, 12 bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska are vying for portly dominance. Over the next several days, online voters will assess the bears’ weight gain as they approach winter hibernation. The king or queen of the pack will be named on Oct. 11, or Fat Bear Tuesday.

This year’s biggest draw is 747, whose girth is comparable to that of the airplane model. Park officials say he has become one of the largest brown bears on Earth, perhaps weighing as much as 1,400 pounds.

Have a fulfilling night.

Brent Lewis compiled photos for this briefing.

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