Here’s what you need to know at the end of the day.
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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.
1. “Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more.”
President Biden announced that the leader of ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, died during an assault in Syria carried out by about two dozen American commandos. Rescue workers said women and children were among at least 13 people killed during the raid in Atmeh, a town close to the border with Turkey in rebel-held Idlib Province.
Witnesses described the raid to The Times. One bystander said that U.S. forces issued demands of surrender by loudspeaker to a woman apparently in the house with children, and that he thought missiles were later fired at the house amid hails of gunfire.
U.S. officials, however, said that al-Qurayshi perished by detonating a bomb. Little is known about the ISIS leader, who died as he lived most of his life: off the grid in the jihadist underworld.
2. The U.S. exposed what it said was a Russian plan to use a fake video as a pretext to invade Ukraine.
The purported plan — which the U.S. says it hopes to spoil by making it public — involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine. Russia would then use the outrage over the video to justify an attack.
As Russia amassed more troops and military hardware on Ukraine’s borders, the Kremlin accused the U.S. of “igniting tensions” by sending additional forces to Eastern Europe.
The U.S. is also ramping up natural gas shipments to Europe as Russia squeezes supplies.
The posture that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has taken toward the West in the Ukraine crisis seems unusually defiant, our columnist writes. That may be the result of a long effort to “sanctions-proof” the Russian economy.
3. A winter storm brought freezing rain and snow, reaching from North Texas to upstate New York.
Ice brought down power lines and plunged at least 200,000 people into outages. More than 4,700 flights were canceled nationwide, amounting to about 10 percent of U.S. air traffic. We have live updates here.
With snow and sleet incoming for Texas, state officials promised there would be no repeat of the fiasco almost exactly a year ago, in which a deep freeze knocked out the power grid, leading to more than 200 deaths.
4. Australia, the government says, is ready to “live with the virus” after nearly 95 percent of adults there have been vaccinated. But many people don’t feel ready.
When the state of South Australia announced it was ending intensive contact tracing, a Facebook group formed so residents could do their own. The prime minister declared lockdowns a thing of the past, but then so many residents of Australia’s two biggest cities stayed inside during an Omicron spike that it was labeled a “shadow lockdown.”
Even as borders opened for the first time since March 2020, the nation mostly stayed put.
Sweden said it, too, would lift most Covid restrictions next week, joining a growing list of European nations.
5. President Biden traveled to New York City to show support for law enforcement amid a rise in crime.
Flanked by elected officials including Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, Biden appeared at New York Police Department headquarters, where he highlighted his calls to increase federal investments in police departments and pledged that the Justice Department would focus on so-called ghost guns.
“Mayor Adams, you and I agree: the answer is not to abandon our streets,” Biden said.
Biden’s visit was meant to convey his desire to respond to violent crime while guarding against the danger of excess policing. That stance has gotten the Biden administration in hot water recently, setting off a near breakdown between the White House and the police over an executive order on police reform.
6. At the Beijing Games, the issue of what participants can and cannot say looms larger than at any Olympics in years.
Athletes have found themselves caught between activists urging them to use their celebrity to speak out and the rules of the International Olympic Committee, which restrict what they can say and where. China’s Communist Party has also warned that athletes are subject not only to Olympic rules, but also to Chinese law.
Ahead of the opening ceremony tomorrow, the U.S. women’s hockey team was dealt a blow when one of its strongest players, Brianna Decker, suffered a serious injury on the ice. The coronavirus continues to jeopardize medal hopes. The total number of cases among athletes and team officials is now 287.
7. Billionaires, their boats and jets.
The new superyacht commissioned by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is so large that an iconic bridge in the Netherlands, where the ship is being built, may have to be dismantled so it can go out to sea.
The authorities in Rotterdam initially said they had agreed to the removal and reassembly this summer of part of the bridge, known locally as “De Hef,” with all costs to be covered by the shipbuilder. But now they say no decision has been made.
Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has gone to comparatively lesser lengths to keep his travels aboard his private jet off Twitter. A college student said Musk offered him $5,000 to take down a bot-driven account that monitors public information about the movement of his private, or not-so-private, jet.
8. Sheila Heti has written about some of our biggest modern-day conundrums: whether to have children, how to live an authentic life. In “Pure Colour,” she considers how love and art can heal.
Heti, the author of 10 books, is accustomed to borrowing from her own life to feed her fiction. But it wasn’t until months after her father’s death that she realized the writing she had done as she was grieving, through personal diaries, belonged in “Pure Colour.” “I’ve never had a book unfold for me in such a surprising way,” she said.
Heti is writing a limited-run newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section based on her diary entries from the past decade.
Hers is one of a number of new titles out this month. Here are others to watch for.
9. Where have all the flowers gone?
Supply chain challenges, labor shortages and poor growing conditions have led to a global shortage of fresh flowers, especially the kinds grown for events like weddings. And it’s hitting at the same time as a boom in nuptials: About 2.5 million weddings are expected to take place in the U.S. this year.
“What we are facing now is an abrupt halt in the entire floral world,” one event producer said.
For home gardeners: Our expert Margaret Roach talked to experts about what to use instead of peat, which is thought to contribute to climate change. Finding a substitute is a little like making your first cake without gluten.
10. And finally, pee-ew.
If you’re one of the fortunate ones who isn’t overwhelmed by body odor, you should probably thank evolution. A team of scientists has identified the olfactory receptors for two common odor molecules: a musk found in soaps and perfumes and a compound prominent in smelly armpits. Their findings, they say, support the theory that the primate olfactory system has degenerated over evolutionary time.
The study was a collaborative effort between scientists in the U.S. and China. They sequenced the genomes of 1,000 people in Tangshan, China, and 364 people in New York City. By sampling a large, diverse population of people, the researchers were able to home in on odors whose perception was based in genetic differences between people, rather than on cultural or experiential factors.
Have a fragrant night.
Jennifer Arnow compiled photos for this briefing.
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