Good evening. Here's the latest at the end of Thursday. |
 | | Prime Minister Boris Johnson returned to 10 Downing Street after he announced his resignation.Leon Neal/Getty Images |
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1. Boris Johnson's messy tenure as Britain's prime minister comes to a messy end. |
Bowing to intense pressure from his own party, Johnson said he would step down after three years as the country's leader. The announcement followed a wholesale rebellion of his cabinet and a wave of resignations prompted by recent scandals. |
"It is clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative Party that there should be a new leader," Johnson said, adding that he would stay in his post until a new leader was chosen. |
Johnson's term was defined by a successful drive to pull Britain out of the E.U., "a gleeful disregard for the rules, a shrewd instinct for public opinion" and "an elastic approach to ethics," our London bureau chief writes in an analysis. |
 | | James Comey was audited by the I.R.S. for the 2017 tax return he filed with his wife.Jared Soares for The New York Times |
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2. The I.R.S. asked an inspector general to investigate how James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and his deputy came to be faced with rare, exhaustive audits. |
Trump said he had no knowledge of the audits. The I.R.S. has denied that any wrongdoing occurred. |
Just how unlikely is it that the audits of two close associates like Comey and McCabe were a coincidence? The chances are minuscule. But minuscule is not zero. |
 | | "There was no intent," Brittney Griner told a Russian judge.Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters |
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3. Brittney Griner pleaded guilty to drug charges in Russia as the American basketball star's fate shifted increasingly toward the diplomatic arena. |
Her best hope, experts say, is that the Biden administration secures her freedom by releasing a Russian held in the U.S. Russian officials said they would engage in that negotiation only after her trial. |
4. The most transmissible coronavirus variants yet are threatening a fresh wave of infections in the U.S. |
In places where the subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 have been dominant for weeks or months, there have been increases in cases and hospitalizations, even among those who have recovered from the virus fairly recently. "There's a wave afoot, there's no question about it," one expert said. "My concern is the length of it." |
 | | Derek Chauvin during sentencing in his state trial in June 2021. Pool photo by Court TV |
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5. Derek Chauvin, convicted of murdering George Floyd, was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison for violating civil rights. |
The former Minneapolis police officer, who is already serving more than 22 years in state prison for Floyd's murder, was sentenced for using excessive force against both Floyd, who died in the encounter, and a Black 14-year-old boy who was injured in an unrelated, though similar, case. The federal and state sentences are to be served concurrently. |
Separately, the Cleveland police officer who shot and killed Tamir Rice in 2014 quickly exited a new job as an officer in Pennsylvania. It came after a public outcry over a local newspaper report about his hiring. |
 | | James Caan as Sonny Corleone in "The Godfather" (1972).CBS via Getty Images |
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6. James Caan, the actor best known for his role as the quick-tempered Sonny Corleone in the original "Godfather" movie, died at 82. |
Caan threw himself into the role so fully that for years, he said, strangers would say to him things like "Hey, don't go through that tollbooth again." Some mistook him for a real mobster or thought he was Italian, though Caan was Jewish and was raised by German-born parents in Sunnyside, Queens. |
His work included "Gardens of Stone," which, like "The Godfather," was directed by Francis Ford Coppola; "Misery"; the TV series "Las Vegas"; and "Elf." But "The Godfather" dominated. Caan is credited with improvising the words "bada bing!" in the film. "Bada bing? Bada boom? I said that, didn't I?" Caan once told Vanity Fair. "Or did I just say bada bing? It just came out of my mouth. I don't know from where." |
 | | Fin whales feeding near Elephant Island, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.Dan Beecham |
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7. A glimmer of good news for global biodiversity. |
Fin whales, the second-largest animal on the planet, were once hunted nearly to extinction. But an international ban on commercial whaling that was established 40 years ago appears to be paying off. During a 2018 and 2019 survey of the Southern Ocean, researchers stumbled upon the largest gathering of fin whales ever documented, the findings of which were made public today. |
Commercial whalers killed an estimated 725,000 fin whales there from 1904 to 1976, depleting the population to as little as 1 percent of its pre-whaling size. The recent survey found some gatherings so large — involving as many as 150 whales — that spray from their blowholes resembled fog. "It was one of the most spectacular observations I've had," one of the researchers said. |
 | | "I believe I can't win two matches under these circumstances," Rafael Nadal said.Andrew Toth/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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8. Rafael Nadal, the 22-time Grand Slam champion, pulled out of Wimbledon before his semifinal match because of an injury. |
Nadal, who was set to play Nick Kyrgios tomorrow, tore a muscle in his abdomen while playing in the tournament. He aggravated it in his remarkable five-set comeback over Taylor Fritz in the quarterfinals yesterday. With Nadal's withdrawal, Kyrgios receives a pass through to his final on Sunday. |
On Saturday, Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan will play Ons Jabeur of Tunisia in the women's singles final. Jabeur will be the first Arab woman to play in a Grand Slam final. |
If your only exposure to tennis's Grand Slam events is through television, you might think singles matches are all that matters. But doubles action, our columnist writes, is Wimbledon's best-kept secret. |
 | | Tom Jamieson for The New York Times |
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9. "It's just sitting there, daring you to see it." |
A collection of sketches for jewelry and other lavish ornaments, commissioned during the reign of Henry VIII, has long been a mysterious treasure of the British Museum in London. Some of the designs are ciphers, or coded symbols, entangling the initials of Henry and his many paramours. But one may carry a very different message. |
Using a process that Vanessa Braganza, a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard, calls "early modern Wordle," she has concluded that one pendant was commissioned not by Henry but by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, during the period when he was trying to divorce her and marry Anne Boleyn. The commission, the scholar says, served as a brazen assertion by Catherine of her lifelong claim to be his sole legal wife. See how she deciphered it. |
 | | Abdiel and Azrael Ali at a Dance Is Life event at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.Lia Clay Miller for The New York Times |
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10. And finally, do the hustle. |
If you think you know hustle from "Saturday Night Fever," think again. The movie has little to do with the partnered style that first emerged in the early 1970s in New York City. Hustle is fluid, fleet, as elegant as it is funky, and it is very much back. |
At the center of its revival is Abdiel Jacobsen, a former principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company who hosts regular dance parties in Central Park. Abdiel has found freedom in the movement, which offers a progressive, gender-neutral vision of partnered social dance. Hustle, Abdiel said, is "about everyone coming together, just as they are, under the sermon of the music." |
| Brent Lewis compiled photos for this briefing. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
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