U(D547FD)v+,!z!_!$!" In a Venezuelan fishing village, gold nuggets and jewelry have been mysteri- ously washing ashore for weeks, easing the pain of an economic crisis. PAGE 11 INTERNATIONAL 11-21 A Fortune Sent From the Sea Did you know solving challenges causes the body to produce endorphins and dopamine? Introducing the sixth edi- tion of The Times’s “happiness maker.” SPECIAL SECTION Puzzle Mania Returns Our critics look back on the creative bright spots of 2020, when the pan- demic disrupted so much, but the arts somehow carried on and inspired. ARTS & LEISURE The Best of an Awful Year A 21-year-old fan of the president im- personated Trump family members on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories and even fooling the president. PAGE 1 SUNDAY BUSINESS Pulling One Over on Trump David Quammen PAGE 4 SUNDAY REVIEW VICTOR MORIYAMA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES When life changed seemingly overnight, photographers transformed how they worked, trading intimacy for distance. This is what they captured. A Special Section. A Year Like No Other: 2020 in Pictures she had pursued them on her own, with a meticulous abandon. She cut her hair, dyed it and dis- guised herself as a pollster, a health worker and an election offi- cial to get their names and ad- dresses. She invented excuses to meet their families, unsuspecting grandmothers and cousins who gave her details, however small. She wrote everything down and stuffed it into her black computer bag, building her investigation and tracking them down, one by one. She knew their habits, friends, hometowns, childhoods. She knew the florist had sold flowers on the street before joining the Zeta cartel and getting involved in her daughter’s kidnapping. Now he was on the run and back to SAN FERNANDO, Mexico — Miriam Rodríguez clutched a pis- tol in her purse as she ran past the morning crowds on the bridge to Texas. She stopped every few minutes to catch her breath and study the photo of her next target: the florist. She had been hunting him for a year, stalking him online, interro- gating the criminals he worked with, even befriending unwitting relatives for tips on his where- abouts. Now she finally had one — a widow called to tell her that he was peddling flowers on the bor- der. Ever since 2014, she had been tracking the people responsible for the kidnapping and murder of her 20-year-old daughter, Karen. Half of them were already in pris- on, not because the authorities had cracked the case, but because ‘If You Move, I’ll Shoot’: Stalking Her Daughter’s Killers in Mexico, One by One By AZAM AHMED A ranch where 72 bodies were found in 2010 near San Fernando, a Mexico city scarred by violence. DANIEL BEREHULAK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Continued on Page 12 WASHINGTON — The head of the N.A.A.C.P. had a blunt warn- ing for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. when Mr. Biden met with civil rights leaders in Wilmington last week. Nominating Tom Vilsack, a sec- retary of agriculture in the Obama administration, to run the depart- ment would enrage Black farmers and threaten Democratic hopes of winning two Senate runoffs in Georgia, the N.A.A.C.P. head, Der- rick Johnson, told Mr. Biden. “Former Secretary Vilsack could have a disastrous impact on voters in Georgia,” Mr. Johnson cautioned, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Vilsack’s abrupt firing of a popular Black department offi- cial in 2010 was still too raw for many Black farmers despite Mr. Vilsack’s subsequent apology and offer to rehire her. Mr. Biden promptly ignored the warning. Within hours, his deci- sion to nominate Mr. Vilsack to lead the Agriculture Department had leaked, angering the very ac- tivists he had just met with. The episode was only one piece of a concerted campaign by activ- ists to demand the president-elect make good on his promise that his administration will “look like America.” In their meeting, Mr. Johnson and the group also urged Mr. Biden to nominate a Black at- torney general and to name a White House civil rights “czar.” The pressure on the Democrat- ic president-elect is intense, even as his efforts to ensure ethnic and gender diversity already go far beyond those of President Trump, who did not make diversity a pri- Heat on Biden Over Diversity Grows Intense By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and ANNIE KARNI Continued on Page 24 At Novant Health in Winston- Salem, N.C., the new ultracold freezers are ready — enough to eventually house more than 500,000 doses of the first corona- virus vaccine approved in the United States. In Los Angeles, the Cedars-Si- nai medical center has installed extra security cameras to protect the secret location of its soon-to- arrive supply of the vaccine. In Jackson, Miss., the state’s top two health officials are preparing to roll up their own sleeves in the coming days and be the first to get the shots there as cameras roll, hoping to send the message, “We trust it.” The Food and Drug Administra- tion’s emergency authorization on Friday night of the vaccine devel- oped by Pfizer and BioNTech has set in motion the most ambitious vaccination campaign in the na- tion’s history, a challenge of stag- gering proportions choreo- graphed against a backdrop of soaring infection rates and deaths. This weekend, 2.9 million doses of the vaccine are to begin traveling by plane and guarded truck from Pfizer facilities in Michigan and Wisconsin to desig- nated locations, mostly hospitals, in all 50 states. The first injections are ex- pected to be given by Monday to high-risk health care workers, the initial step toward the goal of in- oculating enough Americans by spring to finally halt the spread of a virus that has killed nearly 300,000, sickened millions and up- ended the country’s economy, ed- ucation system and daily life. The rapid development of the vaccine, and its authorization based on data showing it to be 95 percent effective, has been a tri- umph of medical science, but much in this complicated next stage could go wrong. The Pfizer vaccine needs to be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahren- heit, and the special boxes it is be- ing shipped in can be opened no more than twice a day, in order to maintain the deep freeze. Side ef- fects, like achiness or headache, VEXING LOGISTICS AS FIRST VACCINES ARE SET TO ARRIVE INITIAL SHOTS MONDAY A Daunting Challenge of Storage, Security and Delivery to States This article is by Abby Goodnough, Reed Abelson and Jan Hoffman. Continued on Page 10 The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American de- mocracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election. The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares re- sponsibility for the quixotic at- tempt to ignore the nation’s found- ing principles and engineer a dif- ferent verdict from the one voters cast in November. Many regular Republicans sup- ported this effort, too — a sign that Mr. Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the serv- ice of overturning an election out- come and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The G.O.P. sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argu- ment. Even some Republican leaders In Rejecting Lawsuit, Justices Deliver a Rebuke to the G.O.P. By JIM RUTENBERG and NICK CORASANITI Continued on Page 25 When college students re- turned to campuses around the country this fall, spurring a spike in new coronavirus infections na- tionwide, people like Phyllis Baukol seemed at little risk. A classical pianist who, at 94, was ill with Alzheimer’s, she lived tucked away in a nursing home in Grand Forks, N.D., far from the classrooms, bars and fraternity houses frequented by students at the University of North Dakota. But the surge of the virus in Grand Forks, first attributed to cases among students and then ballooning through the communi- ty, eventually reached Ms. Baukol. She tested positive this fall, and three days later, staff members pushed her bed up against a win- dow at the nursing home so her daughter could say goodbye. As coronavirus deaths soar across the country, deaths in com- munities that are home to colleges have risen faster than the rest of the nation, a New York Times analysis of 203 counties where students compose at least 10 per- cent of the population has found. In late August and early Sep- tember, as college students re- turned to campus and some insti- tutions put into place rigorous testing programs, the number of reported infections surged. Yet because serious illness and death are rare among young coronavi- rus patients, it was unclear at the time whether the growth of infec- After the Students Came Back, Deaths Rose in College Towns This article is by Danielle Ivory, Robert Gebeloff and Sarah Mervosh. Continued on Page 6 Late Edition VOL. CLXX . . . No. 58,906 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020 Today, mild, some sunshine, high 59. Tonight, mostly cloudy, still mild, low 40. Tomorrow, chillier, rain, mix- ing with wet snow in the afternoon, high 43. Weather map, Page 26. $6.00