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 Monday.
1. Russian forces are stepping up indiscriminate attacks and laying siege to Ukrainian cities.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians are without food, water, power and heat in besieged cities in southern Ukraine and elsewhere, magnifying fears for their fate if urgent relief does not arrive soon.
Hopes for even brief humanitarian cease-fires have repeatedly collapsed in the nearly two-week-old Russian invasion. Russia had announced a temporary pause in fighting in some combat zones to allow civilians to flee, but its continued shelling around evacuation paths made the cease-fires all but meaningless. A Kremlin proposal to evacuate Ukrainians to Russia or its ally, Belarus, was denounced by Ukraine’s president.
Ukrainian forces said they repelled a Russian attack on the southern city of Mykolaiv and shot down two Russian airplanes over the capital of Kyiv and in a nearby area.
An image on today’s front page captured the brutality of the war: A family was killed while fleeing the Russian advance in Irpin, near Kyiv.
2. Congress is moving to ban Russian energy imports and restrict trade with Russia and Belarus.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers reached an agreement on legislation aimed at inflicting further financial pain on the Kremlin and giving President Biden the ability to increase tariffs on products from Russia and Belarus. Energy prices jumped on fears of a cutoff of Russian supplies. The U.S. imports 7 percent of its oil from Russia.
In less than a week, the U.S. and NATO have provided Ukraine with more than 17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles. It is a race against time to get tons of arms into the hands of Ukrainian forces while supply routes remain open.
Meanwhile, Russia’s isolation from the West is growing. President Vladimir Putin has strangled the last vestiges of Russia’s free press and moved his country closer to the stultifying orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. In return, multinational companies have erected a digital barricade.
3. The world hit a tragic milestone as the number of known Covid deaths surpassed six million.
Many coronavirus trends are rapidly improving, but surges are still intensifying in China, Hong Kong, South Korea and New Zealand. New death counts are dropping in many places as Omicron recedes. Public health experts agree that six million is a vast undercount and that the true devastation will never be precisely known.
In other virus news:
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Covid may cause changes in the brain, mostly in areas related to smell, according to a large new study.
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Starting today, students in New York City and New Jersey public schools are allowed to attend classes without wearing masks.
4. Alex Jones tormented Sandy Hook families and helped elect Donald Trump. Now the Infowars host is under scrutiny for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Jones, whose lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting fueled years of threats against victims’ families, urged fans of his show to turn out for a Jan. 6 rally in Washington. Two weeks later, he attended as a behind-the-scenes organizer — a crucial role that congressional investigators are now scrutinizing.
The House committee has subpoenaed Jones, and is seeking his communications and financial records, including communications with Trump in the days before the riot.
5. A convoy of truckers and other supporters circled Washington, D.C., for a second day, protesting Covid-19 mandates and hoping to attract attention from lawmakers.
An organizer told participants at a staging area in Hagerstown, Md., that the convoy — consisting of several dozen trucks, along with minivans, motorcycles, pickups and hatchbacks — would again avoid entering the capital. “We don’t want to shut down the Beltway,” he said. “We want them to hear us roar.”
A similar demonstration yesterday had minimal impact on traffic. The main group behind the caravan, the People’s Convoy, has called for an end to the national emergency declared in March 2020 and recently extended. The group was inspired by recent Canadian protests against pandemic restrictions, and many members appear to be aligned with far-right organizations.
6. States aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. The legislative frenzy offers a preview of a post-Roe America.
Experts and activists on both sides of the abortion debate expect that by July, the court will have overturned the landmark decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. But Republican-led state legislatures are operating as if Roe is already gone, advancing new restrictions that aim to make abortion illegal in as many circumstances as possible.
Texas offers a case study in what may happen if Roe is overturned. In the months after the state banned nearly all abortions, new studies suggest that the total number of legal abortions among Texas women fell by far less than previously estimated — around 10 percent — because of large increases in the number of Texans who traveled to a clinic in a nearby state or ordered abortion pills online.
7. The Amazon is losing its ability to bounce back from disruptions like droughts, a new study found, and is approaching a tipping point where it ceases being rainforest and becomes largely grasslands.
Climate change, together with widespread deforestation and burning for agriculture and ranching, has taken a toll on the Amazon. The region, one of the wettest on Earth, has experienced three droughts since 2000. Losing the rainforest could result in up to 90 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide getting put back into the atmosphere, an amount equivalent to several years of global emissions.
In other climate news, the E.P.A. proposed strict tailpipe limits on buses, delivery vans and heavy trucks, the first time in 21 years that standards have been tightened for the biggest polluters on the road.
8. This rock art may depict extinct ice age mammals.
Giant ground sloths, elephant-like herbivores and a long-lost lineage of horses have vanished from the Americas. But a new study suggests that we can see these lost creatures in ocher paintings made by ice age humans in the Colombian Amazon.
Also from Science: Tuatara are often called living fossils — oddball reptiles that inhabit chilly climates, sport a third eye and can live for more than a century. A new study shows that the modern reptiles found in New Zealand are little changed from their ancestors 190 million years ago.
9. Balenciaga delivered the defining show of the season.
A Paris Fashion Week collection originally meant as commentary on climate change morphed into a powerful response to the war in Ukraine. Demna, the label’s designer, fled Georgia as a 12-year-old during that country’s civil war. For the Balenciaga show, he built an enormous snow globe, filled with men and women clutching faux trash bags, before an audience clutching blue and yellow T-shirts to represent the Ukrainian flag.
“His subject isn’t silhouette, it’s the human condition,” writes Vanessa Friedman, our fashion critic. “On an epic, pop culture scale.”
Over the span of two decades, the American designer Thom Browne has transformed the anonymous gray flannel suit into something subversive and radical. Here’s how he did it.
10. And finally, as winter ends, rest your eyes on snow-covered Vermont.
The Green Mountain State is famous for its verdant summer landscapes and brilliant fall colors. But it’s Vermont’s winter landscape that sparks the eye of the photographer Caleb Kenna. New snow, he says, transforms the dull tones of winter into a fresh palette of photographic possibility, especially when using a drone. Take a look.
“In winter, the state becomes more luminous, more elemental, more abstract,” Kenna writes, making Vermont winters his “most inspiring muse.”
Have a magical evening.
Angela Jimenez compiled photos for this briefing.
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