| We’re covering an investigation into a gas leak in India, new findings about Cardinal George Pell and how Hong Kong’s musicians are coping. | | | By Melina Delkic and Carole Landry | | | People affected by a chemical gas leak in Visakhapatnam, India, were carried out on a truck to an ambulance on Thursday. Associated Press | | | A cloud of styrene vapor, which can be deadly in high concentrations, leaked and drifted over the outskirts of the coastal city of Visakhapatnam from the polymer plant, which is owned by the South Korean industrial giant LG Corp. | | | Residents living about a mile from the plant said they were enveloped in a white mist. “We could smell the gas in our mouths,” a local resident told our reporter by telephone as he was driving off, trying to get his family as far away as possible. “It was terrifying.” | | | Dozens of men and women were left lying unconscious in the street. Mothers ran to hospitals with limp children in their arms. | | | The plant was restarting operations after a six-week hiatus because of India’s strict coronavirus lockdown. | | | Quotable: “It seems unskilled labor mishandled the maintenance work and because of that, the gas leaked,” said Srijana Gummalla, commissioner of Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation, the local government body. | | | ■ New figures released in Britain show black people in England and Wales are twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as white people. The number of black and South Asian people working in public-facing jobs and living with conditions like obesity, hypertension and diabetes may account for some of the elevated risk. | | | ■ Afghanistan’s health minister, Dr. Ferozuddin Feroz, has tested positive for Covid-19. His illness presents another challenge in Afghanistan’s battle against the coronavirus that is spreading rapidly amid war and poverty. A spokesman said he was isolating at home and in good condition despite his symptoms. | | | ■ Researchers in China have found that the coronavirus, or bits of it, may linger in semen. But the paper, published in an open-access medical journal, does not prove that the virus can be sexually transmitted. | | | Xi Jinping, China’s leader, seen on a screen at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, in October. Aly Song/Reuters | | | Hackers who used it to remotely take over a computer could copy, delete or create files and carry out extensive searches of the device’s data. The tool featured new ways of covering its tracks to avoid detection. | | | Aria-body was used by a group of hackers, known as Naikon, that has been traced to the Chinese military. Its targets include the office of Mark McGowan, the premier of Western Australia, and government agencies and state-owned technology companies in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar and Brunei. | | | Beijing has maintained that the government and military do not engage in hacking for the theft of trade secrets. | | | Quotable: “We know that China is probably the single biggest source of cyberespionage coming into Australia by a very long way,” said Peter Jennings, a former Australian defense official who is the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. | | | A Royal Commission said it was difficult to believe claims by Cardinal George Pell, center, that his superiors in the church had deceived him. Andy Brownbill/Associated Press | | | A report by a royal commission found that the cardinal had been “conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy” as long ago as the 1970s, when he was a priest in the diocese of Ballarat. He then worked closely with another priest who was later convicted of sexually abusing 65 children from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. | | | Background: Cardinal Pell was found guilty in 2018 of sexually abusing two 13-year-old boys in 1996. Australia’s highest court overturned the conviction last month, saying there was a “significant possibility” he was not guilty. | | | Justin von Oldershausen for The New York Times | | | To capture the moment they took distanced portraits of their neighbors in Queens and asked them what they were looking forward to doing once the pandemic had passed, and what they had learned from the crisis. | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR | | TEST: Email Marketing 101: Never Sacrifice Beauty for Simplicity | | A drag-and-drop email builder, a gallery of templates and turnkey designs, personalized customer journeys, and engagement segments. It's everything you need to create stunning, results-driven email campaigns in minutes. And with Campaign Monitor, you have access to it all, along with award-winning support around the clock. It's beautiful email marketing done simply. | | | Learn More | | | | Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times | | | Snapshot: Above, Jezrael Lucero plays piano at the Grand Hyatt in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, last week. Hong Kong’s music venues have gone mostly silent, a result of the one-two punch of protests and the pandemic there. It has hit many Filipino musicians especially hard, as they and other migrants power the live music scene. Now they wonder if their work can survive. | | | What we’re looking at: Room Rater, a Twitter account that rates rooms in the backgrounds of Skype and Zoom calls. For the nosy among us who are bored of staring at people’s bookshelves. | | | Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times | | | Watch: Netflix’s documentary on Michelle Obama. Our critic Lovia Gyarkye thinks it’s a little stagy in parts, but still worthy of streaming. And you might learn to love your growing locks, taking inspiration from these 15 hair metal videos. | | | The April employment figures for the U.S. are coming out on Friday, and they’re going to be awful. Neil Irwin, a senior economics reporter for The Upshot, has been writing about the monthly jobs reports for the past 13 years. “Most of the time, it’s fun,” he said. But that was until the pandemic hit and left him struggling to find words to describe the devastation in the U.S. jobs market, where an estimated 22 million jobs have been lost. Here’s an excerpt from his article: | | | The last time the economy was in free fall, I wrote this: “The economy is unraveling so fast as to defy analysis through the usual statistical models. Among the phrases found in normally sober reports from the nation’s top economic forecasters yesterday: ‘godawful,’ ‘wholesale capitulation,’ ‘shockingly weak’ and ‘indescribably terrible.’” | | | Closed shopfronts in a fashion district in Los Angeles. Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | That jobs report, from November 2008, indicated that employers had cut 533,000 jobs. Analysts expect the April 2020 losses to be 41 times worse. | | | There will be nothing fun about Friday’s report. It’s hard to even fathom what we’re going to learn, or what kinds of words can capture the human pain beneath the eye-popping numbers. | | | I, and the rest of the jobs report nerds, will dutifully analyze and do our best to find insight in the thick stack of numbers issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday morning. But it will be with none of the giddy enthusiasm of trying to solve a puzzle; rather, it’s a moment for sorrow at what has been lost. | | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. | | Thank you
To Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
