(Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.)
Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.


1. An F.D.A. panel recommended boosters of the Johnson Johnson vaccine for millions of Americans.
The decision by the panel of independent experts likely means that the 15 million adults who received the one-shot vaccination will be eligible for an additional injection two months after their initial dose. If the F.D.A. and the C.D.C. accept the recommendation, as expected, boosters could be offered as early as the end of next week. Here’s what to know about the Johnson Johnson boosters.
The vote concludes a series of recommendations over the last month to back boosters for all three vaccines used in the U.S., adding momentum to a booster program that the Biden administration has called crucial to its fight against the pandemic.


2. The Biden administration will ask the Supreme Court to block Texas’ new abortion law while it’s being challenged in court.


Last month, in a separate case brought by abortion providers, the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect. The new challenge will let the justices take a fresh look at the law, which bans most abortions after about six weeks, before many women are even aware they are pregnant. It makes no exceptions for rape or incest.
The move comes a day after a federal appeals court reinstated the law, temporarily restoring a ban on procedures that had been blocked by a lower court.


3. A British lawmaker was fatally stabbed while meeting with constituents, rattling the country’s political establishment.
David Amess, 69, a long-serving Conservative Party member of the House of Commons, was killed in the town of Leigh-on-Sea, about 40 miles east of London. Amess, a hard-line critic of the E.U. and a supporter of Brexit, had been scheduled to hold a meeting with voters at a church. The police said that a 25-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of his murder. They said the investigation would be led by counterterrorism officers, raising the prospect that it would be treated as an act of terrorism.
Amess is the second lawmaker to be killed in such an attack in little more than five years. In 2016, Jo Cox, a Labour lawmaker, was killed by a right-wing extremist outside a meeting with constituents.


4. Rents slumped briefly during the pandemic. Now they’re skyrocketing.
The national median rent increased by 16.4 percent since January, according to one industry metric, spurred by the frenzy in the housing market. As purchasers bid up prices, many people who would have otherwise bought their first homes were priced out, increasing demand for rentals.
Separately, retail sales rose in September, the second straight month of gains, as consumer spending climbed despite rising prices and supply-chain disruptions. The increase was larger than economists expected.


5. Nikolas Cruz plans to plead guilty to 17 counts of premeditated murder for the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., his lawyers said.


Lawyers have spent years interviewing witnesses and making other preparations for a lengthy and emotionally grueling trial. After a plea hearing next week, the next step would be a penalty phase before a jury, during which Cruz’s lawyers would attempt to avoid the death penalty and argue instead for a life sentence.
Cruz, a former student who was 19 at the time of the shooting and had a history of mental health and behavior problems, used a semiautomatic rifle that he had legally bought to kill 14 students and three faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.


6. A blast at an Afghan mosque killed more than 40 people and wounded dozens more. It was the second week in a row that an attack struck a Shiite place of worship in the country during Friday Prayer.


7. Emails from a sprawling N.F.L. investigation reveal the clubby nature of the league.
For nearly a decade, Bruce Allen, the president of the Washington Football Team, sent emails to Jeff Pash, the N.F.L.’s top lawyer, in which he casually joked about Native Americans and racial and political diversity, griped about league initiatives to improve player safety, and thanked Pash for understanding the thorny troubles facing his team, formerly known as the Washington Redskins.
The exchanges were part of a trove of 650,000 emails gathered in a league investigation of workplace misconduct in Washington’s front office. The emails resulted in the resignation of Jon Gruden as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.
In baseball: Tonight is Game 1 of the American League Championship Series. The Boston Red Sox play the Houston Astros at 8:07 p.m. Eastern.


8. When Nike released this shoe last year, it sold out online within minutes. How did it get so hard to buy sneakers?
Gone are the days when sneakerheads would camp overnight in front of stores for the next hyped release. Now online shoppers with specialized sneaker bots can deplete a store’s inventory in seconds. To most customers, bots are the bane of online shopping. For sneaker brands and retailers, the relationship is more complicated. Still, some e-commerce sites are starting to fight back.
In other highly coveted collectibles, the Birkin bag is getting an update. The iconic Hermès carryall, with yearslong wait lists and limited editions, can now be worn three different ways thanks to a new puzzle-like design. The price tag: a cool $14,400.


9. Preserving culinary traditions requires adapting to the realities of daily life.
That was Genevieve Ko’s experience trying to capture wok hei, which gives a dish a singed smokiness, without using a wok. To mimic the effect, she used a sizzling hot skillet on the stovetop to make caramelized and tender vegetables in under 10 minutes. The method allowed Genevieve to find her way back to the Chinese cooking of her childhood.


10. And finally, a vast odyssey across the solar system.
NASA is preparing to launch a probe toward clusters of asteroids along Jupiter’s orbital path. Known as Trojan swarms, they represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. Scientists believe the Trojans may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits and how life might have emerged on Earth.
The space agency has never gone this far to study asteroids, and they’ll do it with the help of a robot named Lucy (a nod to the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton that revealed secrets of human evolution). Over 12 years, Lucy will fly close to seven Trojan asteroids. The hope, one planetary scientist said, is that Lucy will reveal something entirely unexpected about how the solar system evolved.
Have an adventurous weekend.
Bryan Denton compiled photos for this briefing.

Source: New York Times

Powered by NewsAPI.org