Trump, Inflation, Planets: Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Wednesday.

1. Donald Trump refused to answer questions as part of an investigation of his company’s business practices.

The former president cited the Fifth Amendment during a deposition at the office of the New York attorney general. Since March 2019, Attorney General Letitia James’s office has been investigating whether Trump and his company improperly inflated the value of his hotels, golf clubs and other assets.

Trump’s office released a statement that said he would invoke his right against self-incrimination and cast the inquiry as part of a grander conspiracy against him, linking it to the F.B.I. search at Mar-a-Lago, his home and private club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday.

Staying silent could hurt Trump politically at a time when he is hinting that he will join the 2024 presidential race: It could raise questions about what he might be trying to hide. We have updates here.

2. Inflation cooled in July as gas prices and airfares fell.

The Consumer Price Index climbed 8.5 percent in the year through July, a slower pace than economists expected and considerably less than the 9.1 percent increase in the year through June.

3. The damage from blasts at a Russian air base in Crimea appears to be far worse than what Russian officials claimed.

After a series of explosions yesterday, which were claimed as the work of Ukrainian forces, Russia moved quickly to downplay the damage, saying no equipment had been destroyed and no casualties reported.

4. The police revealed evidence against a man charged with killing two fellow Muslims.

The man, Muhammad Syed, was charged with the Aug. 1 killing of a 27-year-old urban planner and the July 26 killing of a 41-year-old cafe employee — two of four shootings of Muslim men that have shaken Albuquerque, a community with many immigrants.

Syed was driving to Texas when he was arrested, and the police found a bullet casing in his car that matched those found at one of the four crime scenes. Officials said they considered Syed to also be a likely suspect in a November 2021 killing and the most recent of the four, that of a 25-year-old man on Friday.

The president of the city’s largest mosque said the police might be examining the possibility that Syed was a Sunni Muslim angered over his daughter’s marriage to a Shiite Muslim — an unconfirmed motive.

5. Results from primaries in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont and Connecticut showed the impact of an endorsement from Donald Trump.

In Wisconsin, Republicans chose Tim Michels, a construction executive endorsed by Trump, to challenge Gov. Tony Evers this fall. Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the State Assembly, narrowly defeated Adam Steen, a Trump-backed primary challenger.

In Arizona, Kari Lake, a former local news anchor who is favored by Trump, won the Republican nomination for governor. Lake is running on falsehoods about the 2020 election. Republican groups are planning to pour millions into her race to help the party keep control of a key political battleground. Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s elections.

6. The Justice Department charged an Iranian man in a plot to kill John Bolton.

Prosecutors said the man, who is a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had offered $300,000 to hire someone to kill Bolton, a hard-liner on Iran who served as national security adviser in the Trump administration.

Shahram Poursafi, the man named in the criminal complaint, is not in custody and remains abroad. But if captured and convicted, he would face up to 25 years in prison.

Officials said the plan to murder Bolton was most likely in retaliation for the U.S. military’s killing in January 2020 of Qassim Suleimani, a top commander of the Revolutionary Guard.

7. These climate activists groups have surprising funders: oil heirs.

Some environmental groups have resorted to civil disobedience and disruption to convey the urgency of the climate crisis: They have taken hammers to gas pumps, glued themselves to museum masterpieces, chained themselves to banks and rushed onto a Grand Prix racetrack.

Dozens of those protest groups are funded, in part, by oil-fortune families whose younger generations feel a responsibility to reverse the harm done by fossil fuels. “It’s time to put the genie back in the bottle,” one donor said. “I feel a moral obligation to do my part. Wouldn’t you?”

In other climate news, a Times investigation found that the United Nations Development Program partnered with oil companies, even those that at times worked against the interests of the communities the agency was supposed to help.

8. Astronomers may have found the galaxy’s youngest planet.

Scientists discovered compelling evidence of a world just 1.5 million years old, making it one of the youngest planets ever found — if not the youngest. The planet, 395 light-years from Earth, is so young that its building blocks of gas and dust are still coming together.

“It is like looking at our own past,” an astronomer and co-author of the study said.

The suspected planet is shrouded by the matter that is making it, meaning further telescopic observations are needed to confirm its existence. But presuming it isn’t just rocky debris masquerading as a planet, scientists can use it to better understand how worlds are made.

9. The “Game of Thrones” prequel is coming.

“House of the Dragon” takes place almost 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones” and follows the Targaryen family melodrama with all the violence, sex and power-lust one would expect. Years in the making, the series debuts on HBO on Aug. 21.

George R.R. Martin, the creator of the “Thrones” universe, wonders whether the controversial “Thrones” series finale, which aired in May 2019, may have affected fans too deeply to return. The stakes are high for the first “Thrones” spinoff, which could determine the future of the franchise.

The profile of the British actor Paddy Considine is more modest in America, but it may not stay that way: In “House of the Dragon,” he stars as King Viserys, the ruler whose decisions and frailties set into motion much of the conflict and carnage to come.

10. And finally, someone give that sponge a tissue.

Sneezing doesn’t require a nervous system, or even a nose, and dates back to some of the first multicellular animals: sponges. Scientists have known that sponges can regulate their water flow with a many-minutes-long body contraction, a kind of sneeze. But now, researchers have found that sneezing is a form of self-cleaning, releasing waste particles in mucus.

Video of the sneezing sponges has shown clumps of mucus quickly gobbled up by other ocean creatures. Studying this mucus could improve scientists’ understanding of how microbes, and possibly disease, are transmitted in reef ecosystems.

Have a symbiotic evening.

Shelby Knowles compiled photos for this briefing.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

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