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


1. Lawmakers put the most senior U.S. military commander in the hot seat.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended his actions in the final months of the Trump administration and warned that Al Qaeda and ISIS could rebuild in Afghanistan.
Milley insisted that calls to his Chinese counterpart in October and a meeting in which he told U.S. generals to alert him if the president tried to launch a nuclear weapon were all part of his job.


2. The mess of bills before lawmakers on Capitol Hill has not gotten any more orderly.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled she would push for a House vote on Thursday on a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, effectively decoupling the infrastructure legislation from the far more expansive $3.5 trillion domestic policy and tax package. Progressive lawmakers have long warned that they would not vote for the infrastructure package until the safety net bill cleared the Senate.


Also on Capitol Hill, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the U.S. would face default if the debt limit wasn’t raised by Oct. 18. The debt limit is traditionally addressed on a bipartisan basis, but Republicans believe Democrats must deal with the debt limit on their own.
The SP 500 fell 2 percent, its worst drop since May, as rising government bond yields hit tech stocks hard.


3. New York State’s pioneering effort to force health care workers to get Covid-19 vaccines appears to be working.
As the mandate went into full effect just after midnight yesterday, 92 percent of the state’s 600,000 hospital and nursing home workers had received at least one dose. Thousands of holdouts received last-minute shots before the deadline, and officials say worst-case staffing shortages seem less likely.
Separately, Pfizer and BioNTech said that they had submitted data to the F.D.A. showing that their coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective in children ages 5 to 11.


4. Misinformation that an animal drug can cure Covid has run rampant, causing demand for it to surge.
Last month, prescriptions for human formulations of ivermectin jumped to more than 88,000 a week, up from a prepandemic baseline of 3,600. Now veterinarians, ranchers and farmers say they are struggling with the effects of the demand as people buy up formulations meant for animals. One farmer who uses the drug for his 400 pigs and 25 cattle said that if he couldn’t treat his pigs with the medicine, they risked going to slaughter.
“I’m keeping it for my horse people, because they need it,” one sales associate said. “That’s who I’m protecting.”


5. Xu Jiayin, born into rural poverty, became China’s richest man. Now Beijing is threatening to take all his wealth and success away.


The debt that powered the country’s breakneck growth for decades is jeopardizing the economy, and the government is changing the rules. Beijing has signaled that it will no longer tolerate the strategy that turned his company, Evergrande, into a real estate powerhouse, pushing it to the precipice — along with many of the creditors that hold its more than $300 billion in unpaid bills.
In other business news:


6. The gunman who stormed a Maryland newsroom in 2018 was sentenced to five consecutive life terms, prosecutors said.


Jarrod Ramos had pleaded guilty to murder charges in one of the deadliest attacks on American journalists. In July, a jury found him criminally responsible for the attack at the Capital Gazette that killed five people. Ramos was also sentenced to a sixth life sentence for attempted murder and 345 years on other charges.
Separately, a 22-year-old man pleaded not guilty to four murder charges stemming from a shooting rampage at a string of spas in the Atlanta area last spring. He had previously pleaded guilty to four murder charges in a nearby county where the shooting spree began.


7. One of the most closely watched restaurants on the planet made waves by pivoting to a vegan menu. It’s now doing strange things to vegetables.
In the 10-course, $335 tasting menu at Eleven Madison Park, almost none of the ingredients taste quite like themselves, writes our restaurant critic, Pete Wells. “Some are so obviously standing in for meat or fish that you almost feel sorry for them,” he says, like a beet forced to mimic duck that “tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.”
But at the core of Wells’s criticism is that the chef, Daniel Humm, hasn’t explained why he objects to serving animal products. In fact, he still serves beef — in an off-the-menu item for customers who book a private dining room.


8. Baseball’s Wall Street-style executives are getting the titles to match.
In recognition of the growing size of baseball operation departments, front office structures are increasingly akin to Fortune 500 companies that employ both a chief executive and a president. Yesterday’s general manager is today’s president of baseball operations or chief baseball officer. Of the 30 M.L.B. franchises, only 16 still have a baseball operations department led by a general manager.
In other sports news, Hakuho, the most accomplished sumo wrestler in history, is calling it a career at age 36. A native of Mongolia who came to Japan to pursue sumo at age 15, he retires with more top-level championships, or yusho, than anyone in the sport’s history.


9. “The Morning Show” reoriented its first season in response to the #MeToo movement. The news drama did it again for the pandemic.


Season 2 is set in the first three months of 2020 as the coronavirus slowly gathers force around the world — and as a reckoning is coming for many of the characters as they struggle with their own identities and with a changing understanding of power and privilege.
“The question is, how do we have more grace as human beings toward each other?” Reese Witherspoon said in an interview with her co-star, Jennifer Aniston.
We also interviewed Brian Cox ahead of Season 3 of “Succession,” in which the avowed socialist plays a wealthy patriarch, about his empathy toward the ultrarich, why he likes acting in series television and how he’d like to see his character’s story — and his own — end.


10. And finally, the afterlives of your favorite containers.
Royal Dansk tins, Cool Whip tubs, Dannon yogurt containers and Bonne Maman jam jars all belong to an unofficial hall of fame of receptacles that have been redeployed for myriad uses. The most popular tend to be well designed and sturdy, like Altoids tins for spare change and Folgers coffee cans for nuts and bolts.
The result is a special meaning that transcends whatever they contained in the first place. Folu Akinkuotu, who writes a newsletter about snacks, said she feels deeply nostalgic for containers like those from Country Crock, which her family used to store jollof rice and egusi stew. “I have a relationship with the container,” she said, “not the product itself.”

Source: New York Times

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