This archive report was first published on 22 May 2020.
Thursday Evening Briefing: Trump Visits Michigan, Testing Lags ¶
President Trump's visit to Michigan, a key swing state, has sparked controversy as he refused to wear a mask despite the plant's guidelines and the urging of the state's attorney general.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from Michigan, where he is behind in recent polling, because it mailed citizens applications to vote by mail. However, voting by mail is something most states allow, and which even some of the holdouts are now moving toward.
The U.S.'s failure to test for the coronavirus on a far broader scale stems at least in part from a fragmented health care system. Our reporting found that hospitals and other medical providers were too bound by red tape to quickly switch from sending samples to overloaded for-profit testing centers, even though new labs offered ample capacity.
Testing is now rising, with about 300,000 tests being carried out every day, but that may be only a third of what's needed — or less — for society to safely reopen. The proposal reignited the fear, anger, and protests over Beijing's creeping influence in Hong Kong, and inflamed worries for the distinct political and cultural identity that has defined the semiautonomous former British colony since China reclaimed it in 1997.
There is growing concern that many of the jobs lost during the pandemic will never come back. Dam failures in central Michigan on Tuesday have left much of the city of Midland under water, forcing about 11,000 people to evacuate and menacing more communities downstream with potential flooding.
Paterson, N.J., a poor, largely nonwhite city of about 150,000, has been tracing the coronavirus at a level that could be the envy of larger cities. Contact tracing is a painstaking endeavor cities like New York are only now undertaking on a large scale. Paterson's experience and its dropping case rates offer lessons.
Lori Loughlin and her husband agreed to plead guilty to charges in the nation's largest-ever college admissions prosecution. The actress has agreed to serve two months in prison, and her husband is expected to serve five for conspiring to get their daughters admitted to the University of Southern California as crew recruits.
Our Book Review team has plenty of options for your summer reading lists. We have picks for thrillers, historical fiction, sports, music, Hollywood, horror, romance, and more. Let these titles entertain you, offer escape, and stretch your horizons this season.
For Spike Lee, the past is never simply the past. With 'Da 5 Bloods,' his new action-adventure tale about four black veterans, the filmmaker saw an opportunity to explore a side of the black experience of Vietnam that hadn't been shown in cinema.
Food scientists and enthusiasts have been playing around with creating an iridescent sheen on chocolate, all with a little help from physics. The principle behind the magic is diffraction — when light interacts with a surface and is drawn or pulled apart.
