Fwd: NYT Now: Your Wednesday Briefing

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• Tense but quiet in Baltimore.

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From: NYTimes.com <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 12:17 PM
Subject: NYT Now: Your Wednesday Briefing
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View in Browser | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. Wednesday, April 29, 2015 Wednesday, April 29, 2015 nytnow.com » Enjoy this newsletter? Get continuous updates on today's most important stories with the NYT Now app for iPhone. Download now. Watching protesters in Baltimore on Tuesday. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Your Wednesday Briefing By ADEEL HASSAN Good morning. Here's what you need to know: • Tense but quiet in Baltimore. Thousands of police officers and National Guard troops worked to maintain order and enforce an overnight curfew. College students are planning to march to City Hall today and the Baltimore Orioles will play the Chicago White Sox in an empty stadium, the first major league game to be closed to fans. • Japanese prime minister's address. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks at 11 a.m. Eastern to a joint meeting of Congress — the first Japanese leader to do so. He'll likely try to convince lawmakers to support the proposed Pacific trade pact, outline his vision of a newly vigorous Japan and seek to soothe concerns about his views of his country's role in World War II. • Saudi succession shake-up. King Salman shuffled the line of princes due to succeed him today, strengthening his own branch of the royal family. The moves are unlikely to lead to big changes in the kingdom's bombing of Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq or of Houthi rebels who have seized parts of neighboring Yemen. • Race against time. Rescue teams in Nepal are in a frantic search for survivors four days after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck. While aftershocks and landslides have complicated the relief effort, aid is beginning to reach remote areas, but many people are in desperate need of food and water. Here's how you can help them. • Cruel and unusual punishment? That's the question in front of the Supreme Court today as Oklahoma death row inmates seek to outlaw a sedative used in lethal injections that they say fails to prevent a painful death. The ruling, expected in June, could force some states to either find new execution drugs or change the way they put prisoners to death. • At the White House. President Obama honors Shanna Peeples of Amarillo, Tex., the 2015 National Teacher of the Year, and finalists today. MARKETS • Wall Street stock futures are flat. European shares are slightly higher, and Asian indexes ended mixed. • The U.S. government issues this morning its initial calculation of U.S. economic growth in the first quarter, and all indications are that it will be weak. • The Federal Reserve gives us a statement at 2 p.m. Eastern on its monetary policy. No big shift is expected, but observers will parse the language for any subtleties about interest rates. • Twitter's stock will be watched closely today after quarterly earnings showed its once-blistering advertising growth faltering. Selerity, a data-mining company with about 35 employees, found and publicized Twitter's results online almost an hour before their official release, leading to an 18 percent drop in share price. • Budweiser said it had stopped making Bud Light beer cans with a label that says, "The perfect beer for removing 'no' from your vocabulary for the night" after social media protests. NOTEWORTHY • A poor report card. Only about a quarter of eighth graders showed solid performance or better in U.S. history, civics and geography in 2014, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress released today. About one-third knew that "the government of the United States should be a democracy" is a political belief shared by most people in the U.S. • They're all Muggles. J.K. Rowling's first post-"Harry Potter" novel, "The Casual Vacancy," about the ugly side of life in a picturesque British village, has been adapted into a mini-series starring Michael Gambon (who played Dumbledore in the Potter films) and the most recent Miss Marple, Julia McKenzie (8 p.m. Eastern, HBO). • The air we breathe. The American Lung Association today releases its annual State of the Air report, which gives A-F grades to counties across the country. • Denim Day. More than five million people have registered for Denim Day USA, organized by an advocacy group called Peace Over Violence. It encourages people to wear denim today to raise awareness about rape and sexual assault. • Freedom of the press. Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization, finds an overall drop in freedom for the ninth consecutive year in its latest assessment of media freedoms and restrictions around the globe, out today. BACK STORY We managed to stir up a little controversy this week with an item we published about Bruce Jenner. We said he identified as a woman. So why, some of you wrote to ask, were we referring to him with "he" instead of "she?" In this case, the answer was simple. That was the pronoun he said he preferred in his appearance last week on national television in which he disclosed that he was becoming a woman. Still, it can be tricky to be both respectful and grammatically accurate when writing about gender transitions and gender nonconformity. Some people identify as male or female. Others reject both labels or say they're in transition. But traditional English usage has only "he" or "she." Not a lot of nuance there. That could change. A dozen or so gender-neutral pronouns ("ze" and "xe," for instance) have been suggested, but none has really caught on. And grammarians aren't ready give up their death grip on "they." For now, the advocacy group GLAAD advises the news media to use the pronoun a transgender person prefers. The New York Times, for one, defers to the individual's choice, although we avoid new alternatives not widely familiar to readers. For Mr. Jenner, as of last week, that choice was still "he." Your Morning Briefing is published weekdays at 6 a.m. Eastern and updated on the web all morning. What would you like to see here? Contact us at briefing@nytimes.com. Want to get the briefing by email? Here's the sign-up. 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