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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Tuesday.
1. Russia bombarded areas around the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, striking a military factory, residential buildings and a shopping mall.
As the bombing intensified, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv to show support for Ukraine.
The visit also came as President Vladimir Putin of Russia slapped sanctions on President Biden and other senior U.S. officials. Biden announced plans to travel to Europe next week to showcase the unity of the NATO alliance in the face of Russian aggression.
On Capitol Hill, the crisis in Ukraine is upending policy and political thinking on both the left and the right, empowering the political center. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will address Congress tomorrow at 9 a.m. Eastern time in a virtual speech that could increase pressure on the Biden administration to send fighter jets to Kyiv.
Russian forces want to take Mykolaiv because a bridge in the city is the only passage for miles across the Southern Buh River on the way west to Odessa, which holds the headquarters of the Ukrainian Navy and the country’s largest civilian port.
But so far, Ukrainian fighters and civilians have not budged. Soldiers have pushed the Russians out of the local airport, and trash collection has continued. Every day the regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, addresses the city with upbeat videos on Facebook and Telegram.
“What can I say, the 17th day of war, all is well, the mood is excellent,” Kim said in a message over the weekend. “We have freedom and we’re fighting for it. And all they have is slavery.”
Outside of Kyiv, the capital, a Fox News crew was attacked, leaving two journalists dead.
3. Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine is now preventing infections, hospitalizations and deaths at least as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, new data suggests.
4. A suspect in five shootings of homeless men in New York and Washington, D.C., was arrested today.
Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Gerald Brevard III, a Washington resident whose criminal record included several charges of assault. He was temporarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in Washington in 2019.
In New York, the police said they arrested a suspect in the stabbing of two employees at the Museum of Modern Art over the weekend. Gary Cabana, 60, became “upset” after he was denied entry to the museum, the police said. Both employees are expected to survive.
And in Yonkers, N.Y., officials charged a man with attempted murder and assault, both as hate crimes. Officials said he hit a woman in the head 125 times because she was of Asian descent — yet another incident in a nationwide surge of anti-Asian bias.
5. Sept. 11 prosecutors are considering a plea deal for the accused mastermind of the terrorist attacks.
The Pentagon is speaking with lawyers for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to drop the death penalty from the case in exchange for a guilty plea. Mohammed and four co-defendants would receive life sentences.
That could force the Biden administration to modify its ambition of ending detention operations at Guantánamo Bay and instead rebrand it as a military prison for a few men.
An attempt at such talks during the Trump administration failed. The accused plotters demanded that they serve their sentences at Guantánamo, where they are able to pray and eat in groups, instead of at a supermax prison where federal inmates are held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day.
6. The Federal Reserve plans to raise interest rates Wednesday as global economic turmoil and inflation pressures block an expected return to normal.
Among the issues: Backlogged factories, crowded ports and overburdened trucking companies haven’t caught up. Repeated Covid waves have pushed up wages. And consumer price gains hit a 40-year high in February, as prices for food, rent and gas rose.
7. Francis Kéré, a West African architect, won the Pritzker Prize — the field’s highest honor.
Kéré, 56, is known for using Indigenous materials and local symbols to make buildings that serve the community he came from. Growing up in Burkina Faso, Kéré said the hot classrooms made him want to learn carpentry and build better buildings.
In the absence of air-conditioning for his Gando Primary School, he used cement-fortified bricks and an elevated, overhanging roof to counteract extreme heat and poor lighting. Last year, T Magazine named it one of the 25 most significant buildings constructed after World War II.
8. Daylight saving time might become permanent — or so the U.S. Senate hopes.
Senators unanimously, and quite suddenly, passed legislation today that would eliminate the biannual ritual of springing forward and falling back. If the bill passes the House, it would take effect in November 2023, making daylight saving time last all year.
It faces opposition from sleep scientists, though, who argue that a permanent switch could have long-term, dangerous effects on public health and that standard time — winter time — is more closely aligned with the sun’s progression. Any disjuncture, sleep experts say, might lead to long-term circadian misalignment.
9. Sedona Prince changed basketball with a TikTok.
Last year, Prince, a forward at the University of Oregon, shared a video that showed the stark differences between the women’s and men’s training rooms for their respective N.C.A.A. tournaments. Prince’s video was seen more than 13 million times; Steph Curry, the N.B.A. star, sent a tsk-tsk-ing retweet (“wow-come on now!”).
Months later, a civil rights law firm issued a report citing a range of gender-biased differences between the two tournaments. Looking back, the N.C.A.A.’s president, Mark Emmert, said the video had jump-started a series of changes addressing parity across a range of issues.
Prince herself is cautious. “Hopefully in this tournament,” Prince said, speaking of 2022, “we’ll see a lot of things have changed. Hopefully.”
10. And finally, expanding the lingo of crossword puzzles.
Crossword puzzles and other word games have an inclusivity problem: Constructors are more likely to be white and male, and clues may reference the history of baseball and Italian food, rather than current music or Sichuan cuisine. You might find EPEE but not ERHU, or SINATRA but not MITSKI.
As Erica Hsiung Wojcik, a professor and puzzle constructor, explains in an essay, that’s why she created the Expanded Crossword Names Database (and you can contribute suggestions). It has over 2,200 entries so far, including notables like the author Eula Biss or terms like “cishet.”
“By using this new word list, my grids look different,” she writes. “They look like me.”
Have an inclusive night.
Eve Edelheit compiled photos for this briefing.