F.D.A. AUTHORIZES STUNG BY TRUMP,

VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,795

? 2020 The New York Times Company

NEW YORK, MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 2020

Late Edition

Today, partly sunny, thunderstorms, humid, high 88. Tonight, clear, humid, low 75. Tomorrow, partly sunny, late thunderstorms, humid, high 91. Weather map appears on Page D8.

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As Woes Grow, STUNG BY TRUMP,

President Aims To Recast Story

F.D.A. AUTHORIZES PLASMA THERAPY

Looking to Convention

for a Campaign Lift NO RANDOMIZED TRIALS

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE -- GETTY IMAGES

Buoyant at Last

A party this month in Wuhan, China, the virus's early epicenter. With local transmissions near zero, life feels more normal. Page A5.

Defiance in Belarus Tests Limits of 26-Year Rule

By ANDREW HIGGINS

He jokes about running a dictatorship. He makes his generals salute his teenage son, who shares his penchant for dressing in military uniforms. He commands a brutal security service that makes people disappear. And when Covid-19 arrived, he told his people to play hockey, drive tractors and not worry about it.

Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the embattled ruler of Belarus and the most enduring leader in the former Soviet Union, heads a regime that is less a one-party state than a one-person state. In 26 years as president, he has turned Belarus into a strategically important and reliably authoritarian buffer be-

`Last Remaining True Dictatorship in the Heart of Europe'

tween Russia and NATO-member democracies like Poland.

Clinging to power amid mass protests this month, Mr. Lukashenko, the former director of a Soviet collective pig farm, might seem like a relic of an era the world had forgotten, or barely noticed. But years before Vladimir V. Putin took power, vowing to "clean up" Russia, Mr. Lukashenko made similar promises to his country, and blazed the trail Mr.

Putin would follow: an obscure figure on an unlikely, meteoric rise to personal rule.

Since a disputed election on Aug. 9, however, the biggest demonstrations in the country's history have tested whether Mr. Lukashenko's iron-fisted suppression of dissent can keep him in power after he claimed a landslide victory that is widely seen as fiction. As many as 100,000 protesters poured into central Minsk, the capital, on Sunday -- a powerful show of defiance in a country with only 9.5 million people.

Mr. Lukashenko sent his own defiant message, flying by helicopter to his presidential palace and walking off to a thank a squad of riot police officers with an auto-

Continued on Page A11

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Louisiana Braces for Rare One-Two Punch

Marris Mielnick preparing the Antieau Gallery in New Orleans for back-to-back storms. Page A13.

Census Facing

Severe Doubts

Over Accuracy

By MICHAEL WINES

WASHINGTON -- With the 2020 census into its final stage, more than one in three people hired as census takers have quit or failed to show up.

Many still on the job are going door to door in areas that largely track places where there are elevated rates of coronavirus infections, according to calculations by the National Conference on Citizenship, Civis Analytics and The New York Times.

And with 38 million households still uncounted, state and local officials are raising growing concerns that many poor and minority households will be left out of the count.

Wracked by pandemic and politics and desperately short of time, the last stage of the national population count -- a constitutional mandate to tally everyone living in the United States accurately -- is unfolding in historic doubt.

Covid-19 and rising mistrust of the government on the part of hard-to-reach groups like immigrants and Latinos already had made this census challenging. But another issue has upended it: an order last month to finish the count a month early, guaranteeing that population figures will be delivered to the White House while President Trump is still in office.

Unlike the Postal Service, another fundamental American institution suddenly under siege and where problems have unleashed a furious public backlash, the census is racing toward a finale largely out of sight. But many experts are increasingly convinced that a public reckoning over a deeply flawed count may be

Continued on Page A6

Portland's New D.A. Lets Off 300 Protesters as the Police Fume

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Just weeks after President Trump's administration agreed to pull back federal officers from demonstrations in Portland, Ore., where his attempt at a high-profile crackdown backfired, the fate of the city's protests now rests to a large extent with an altogether different leader: A brand-new, 39year-old district attorney whose

approach to enforcing the law is as contested as the demonstrations themselves.

The new prosecutor, Mike Schmidt, took office Aug. 1 after defeating an experienced federal prosecutor by a 3-to-1 margin in Multnomah County, which includes most of Portland. Even his critics say the breadth of his victory gave him a mandate to reshape prosecutions in Portland, a city of frequent protests, where

A Tightrope on Speech and Enforcement

there is no clear end in sight to demonstrations against police brutality that began after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

He has not been slow to shake

things up: Ten days after taking office, Mr. Schmidt effectively dismissed charges against more than half of about 600 people arrested since the protests began at the end of May.

His directive met with strong objections from the Portland police and Multnomah County sheriff. But it was in keeping with his progressive campaign platform as

Continued on Page A13

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON -- When President Trump's strategists mapped out their plans for the critical week leading to the Republican National Convention that would nominate him for a second term, the schedule somehow did not include a sensational arrest on a Chinese billionaire's yacht.

The last thing the president wanted to see as he kick-starts his campaign was the architect of his last campaign hauled away in handcuffs on charges of bilking his own supporters in a build-thewall fund-raising scam. Yet there was Stephen K. Bannon, the mastermind of the 2016 election, with his hair now long and scraggly and his face weathered, marched into court and called a crook.

That was only part of the president's tough week or so. In recent days, the Senate released a damning bipartisan report on Russia's efforts to help Mr. Trump win in 2016. A government agency concluded that a member of the president's cabinet is serving in violation of the law. A court rejected Mr. Trump's effort to keep his tax returns secret. Unemployment claims ticked back up. And former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. smoothly pulled off his own convention without the gaffes Mr. Trump had predicted.

If that were not enough, the president found his family dysfunction playing out in public at the same time he was presiding over a funeral for his younger brother at the White House. Tapes secretly made by his niece over the past couple of years and provided to The Washington Post captured the president's own sister saying that he "has no principles, none," railing about "his goddamned tweet and lying" and denouncing his "phoniness" and "cruelty."

It was a week that in some ways encapsulated the volatile Trump presidency and the baggage he brings into the contest this fall with Mr. Biden: a team at constant

Continued on Page A14

ANNA MONEYMAKER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The G.O.P. convention follows a tough week for the president.

Agency Was Accused of

`Deep State' Delay

Tied to Election

This article is by Sharon LaFraniere, Sheri Fink, Katie Thomas and Maggie Haberman.

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday gave emergency approval for expanded use of antibody-rich blood plasma to help hospitalized coronavirus patients, allowing President Trump, who has been pressuring the agency to move faster to address the pandemic, to claim progress on the eve of the Republican convention.

Mr. Trump cited the approval, which had been held up by concerns among top government scientists about the data behind it, as welcome news in fighting a disease that has led to 176,000 deaths in the United States and left the nation lagging far behind most others in the effectiveness of its response.

At a news briefing, he described the treatment as "a powerful therapy" made possible "by marshaling the full power of the federal government."

The decision will broaden use of a treatment that has already been administered to more than 70,000 patients. But the F.D.A. cited benefits for only some patients. And, unlike a new drug, plasma cannot be manufactured in millions of doses; its availability is limited by blood donations. Mr. Trump urged everyone who has recovered from the virus to donate plasma, saying there is a nationwide campaign to collect it.

Mr. Trump has portrayed his demands to cut red tape and speed approval of treatments and vaccines as a necessary response to a public health emergency.

But Sunday's announcement came a day after he repeated his unfounded claim that the F.D.A. was deliberately holding up decision-making until after the election, this time citing a "deep state." That accusation exacerbated concerns among some government scientists, outside experts and Democrats that the president's political needs could undermine the integrity of the regulatory process, hurt public confidence in safety and introduce a different kind of public health risk.

No randomized trials of the sort researchers consider most robust have yet shown benefit from convalescent plasma. But the F.D.A. said the data it had so far, including more than a dozen published studies, showed that "it is reason-

Continued on Page A8

In a Shifting Ohio, Two Voters Share a Family, but Not a Party

By REID J. EPSTEIN

NEWTON FALLS, Ohio -- An hour after Kamala Harris was announced as Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s running mate last week, Dan Moore sat in his living room watching the Fox News coverage of her selection.

"I would've liked to see any other candidate for a V.P. than Kamala Harris; what's that one woman's name? Amy?" said Mr. Moore, a 60-year-old boiler operator at a steel plant just over the state line in Pennsylvania. "He was influenced to pick a Black woman. I don't understand the reasoning behind Kamala Harris other than, from what we're hearing right now, is that she knows how to debate."

Before Donald J. Trump began

his first presidential campaign, Mr. Moore was a reliable Democrat who had twice voted for Barack Obama. Like legions of white union workers, he found Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign pledge to shake up Washington appealing. He plans to vote for him again in November.

Two hours away in Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Moore's stepdaughter, Kelley Boorn, cheered Ms. Harris's selection. A longtime Republican who was once a vehement anti-abortion activist, she shifted her views after a difficult pregnancy. She went from being a oneissue voter and an enthusiastic backer of John McCain in 2008, to sitting out in 2012 to becoming an

Continued on Page A16

NATIONAL A12-17, 20

California's Familiar Threat

Northern California wineries have lost valuable grapes, and revenue, in the blaze and smoke of wildfires. PAGE A12

A Mayor on the Defensive

After a series of missteps, Mayor G.T.

Bynum loses ground with many of

Tulsa's Black residents.

PAGE A17

TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-8

Masks and the City

Over several days this summer, The New York Times tallied the face-covering status of over 7,000 people at 14 spots across New York City. PAGE A4

News of Vaccine Falls Flat

Moscow dismisses skepticism as West-

ern sour grapes. But Russian doctors

also have concerns.

PAGE A7

INTERNATIONAL A9-11

Christchurch Sentencing

A hearing begins Monday for the man

who killed 51 people at two mosques in

New Zealand last year.

PAGE A10

SPORTSMONDAY D1-5

Champion of Champions

Bayern Munich, an old power, overcame

a new-money rival in the Champions

League final. On Soccer.

PAGE D1

College Football's Mixed Signals

As politics and medicine clash, a lack of transparency surrounds universities' calls on whether to play this fall. PAGE D1

BUSINESS B1-6

Over the (Red) Line

A historic run of government borrowing

has not led to the end of the world, the

traditional warning of deficit hawks. In

fact, many say there's room for the U.S.

to take on more debt.

PAGE B1

Power Brokers

So-called special purpose acquisition

companies are helping manufacturers

of electric vehicles raise capital, and

speeding up their journey to a listing on

the stock market.

PAGE B1

EDITORIAL, OP-ED A18-19

Nicholas Kristof

PAGE A18

ARTS C1-8

Race, Art and Protests

Black artists in Portland, Ore., are

speaking out on injustice. Above, "Solar

Power," by Christine Miller, Kareem

Blair and Danielle McCoy.

PAGE C1

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