U(D54G1D)y+$!{!&!$!z Donté Stallworth PAGE A23 EDITORIAL, OP-ED A22-23 AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMES Sunbathing in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The heat around the nation put a strain on pandemic guidance for being outdoors. Splendor in the Grass About four months after 1.1 mil- lion New York City children were forced into online learning, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that public schools would still not fully reopen in Sep- tember, saying that classroom at- tendance would instead be limited to only one to three days a week in an effort to continue to curb the coronavirus outbreak. The mayor’s release of his plan for the system, by far the nation’s largest, capped weeks of intense debate among elected officials, educators and public health ex- perts over how to bring children back safely to 1,800 public schools. The decision to opt for only a partial reopening, which is most likely the only way to accommo- date students in school buildings while maintaining social distanc- ing, may hinder hundreds of thou- sands of parents from returning to their pre-pandemic work lives, undermining the recovery of the sputtering local economy. Still, the staggered schedules in New York City schools for Sep- tember reflect a growing trend among school systems, universi- ties and colleges around the coun- try, which are all trying to find ways of balancing the urgent need to bring students back to class- rooms and campuses while also reducing density to prevent the spread of the virus. “Everyone is looking to the pub- lic school system to indicate the bigger direction of New York City,” Mr. de Blasio said Wednesday. Under the mayor’s plan, there will probably be no more than a dozen people in a classroom at a time, including teachers and aides, a stark change from typical class size in New York City schools, which can hover around 30 children. Educators widely consider on- line learning to be a poor substi- tute for the classroom, especially for younger children and those with special needs. The shift has also created enor- mous challenges for parents who have had to struggle with helping their children learn even as they have had to maintain their jobs from home or, if an essential worker, scramble for child care. Still, like New York City’s, many school districts around the coun- try are planning on not reopening fully, and instead will use a mix of in-person and remote learning in- New York City Set to Stagger Classes in Fall By ELIZA SHAPIRO Continued on Page A8 ISTANBUL — Since it was built in the sixth century, changing hands from empire to empire, Ha- gia Sophia has been a Byzantine cathedral, a mosque under the Ot- tomans and finally a museum, making it one of the world’s most potent symbols of Christian-Mus- lim rivalry and of Turkey’s more recent devotion to secularism. Now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making moves to de- clare it a working mosque once more, fulfilling a dream for him- self, his supporters and conserva- tive Muslims far beyond Turkey’s shores — but threatening to set off an international furor. The very idea of changing the monument’s status has escalated tensions with Turkey’s longtime rival, Greece; upset Christians around the world; and set off a chorus of dismay from political and religious leaders as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. Mr. Erdogan’s opponents say he has raised the issue of restoring Hagia Sophia as a mosque every time he has faced a political crisis, using it to stir supporters in his nationalist and conservative reli- Museum or Mosque? A Furor Erupts in Istanbul By CARLOTTA GALL Hagia Sophia is the most frequented tourist site in Turkey, with 3.7 million visitors last year. OZAN KOSE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES Turkish Leader’s Idea for Hagia Sophia Continued on Page A11 SAN FRANCISCO — Auditors handpicked by Facebook to exam- ine its policies said that the com- pany had not done enough to pro- tect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up Presi- dent Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civ- il rights.” The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the compa- ny’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and mis- information to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: That it may once again be negatively influencing American voters. Now Facebook has to decide whether its approach to hateful speech and noxious content — which was to leave it alone in the name of free expression — re- mains tenable. And that decision puts pressure on Mark Zucker- berg, Facebook’s chief executive, who has repeatedly said that his company was not an arbiter of truth and that it would not police politicians’ posts. “Many in the civil rights com- munity have become disheart- Facebook Lets Hate Flourish, Report Finds By MIKE ISAAC Continued on Page A15 WASHINGTON — President Trump pressured the govern- ment’s top public health experts on Wednesday to water down rec- ommendations for how the na- tion’s schools could reopen safely this fall and threatened to cut fed- eral funding for districts that de- fied his demand to resume classes in person. Once again rejecting the advice of the specialists who work for him, Mr. Trump dismissed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “very tough & ex- pensive guidelines,” which he said asked schools “to do very imprac- tical things.” Within hours, the White House announced that the agency would issue new recom- mendations in the days to come. The president’s criticisms, in a barrage of Twitter threats, in- flamed a difficult debate that has challenged educators and parents across the country as they seek ways to safely resume teaching American children by September. Even as the coronavirus is spread- ing faster than ever in the United States, Mr. Trump expressed no concern about the health implica- tions of reopening in person and no support for compromise plans that many districts are consider- ing. His all-or-nothing stance left him at odds with the nation’s two largest school districts. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City an- nounced shortly after Mr. Trump’s tweets that schools would not fully reopen in September, with stu- dents attending classes in person only one to three days a week to accommodate social distancing. The chief public health officer in Los Angeles County told school of- ficials on Tuesday to be prepared to continue learning entirely from home given the surge of infections in California. But Mr. Trump’s attack on the C.D.C. underscored his growing impatience with public health ex- perts he considers obstacles to his ambitions of reopening the coun- try after months of lockdown. As he significantly trails Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Demo- cratic presidential nominee, in Trump Threatens Cuts if Schools Don’t Reopen This article is by Peter Baker, Eri- ca L. Green and Noah Weiland. Continued on Page A9 Pressures Top Health Officials to Weaken Safety Guidelines WASHINGTON — The Su- preme Court on Wednesday up- held a Trump administration reg- ulation that lets employers with religious or moral objections limit women’s access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act and could result in as many as 126,000 women losing contraceptive coverage from their employers. The 7-to-2 decision was the lat- est turn in seven years of fierce lit- igation over the “contraception mandate,” a signature initiative of the Obama administration that re- quired most employers to provide cost-free coverage for contracep- tion and that the Trump adminis- tration has sought to limit. In a second major decision on religious rights on Wednesday, the court ruled by another 7-to-2 vote that employment discrimina- tion laws did not apply to teachers in religious schools. Last week, by a 5-to-4 vote, it said state pro- grams that provide scholarships to students in private schools may not exclude religious schools. The three decisions were part of a broad examination of the rela- tionship between church and state over the 15-year tenure of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in which the court’s conservative majority has almost always sided with religious groups. Many religious groups praised the contraception decision. “The government has no business forc- ing pro-life and religious organiza- tions to provide drugs and devices that can destroy life,” John Bursch, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement. Organizations seeking to pro- tect access to birth control and abortion denounced the ruling as an assault on women that, as NARAL Pro-Choice America said on Twitter, “gave the Trump ad- ministration a green light to at- tack our birth control coverage.” The clash between contracep- tive coverage and claims of con- science is a key battleground in the culture wars, and the Supreme Court’s decision is likely to mobi- lize voters on both sides of the di- vide. For opponents of the regulation, the decision to uphold it was espe- cially disappointing because two members of the court’s liberal wing, Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer, voted with the majority. Both justices had been in dis- sent in 2014, when the court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision that requiring family-owned corporations to pro- vide contraceptive coverage vio- lated a federal law protecting reli- gious freedom. On Wednesday, in a concurring opinion written by Justice Kagan, they said that the Affordable Care Act itself authorized regulators to create exemptions for employers with religious objections, noting that the Obama administration had adopted one limited to houses of worship. Whether the Trump administration had provided ade- quate justifications for its much broader exemption, Justice Ka- gan wrote, was a question for an- other day. “Even in an area of broad statu- tory authority — maybe espe- COURT, 7-2, ALLOWS RELIGIOUS OPT-OUT ON BIRTH CONTROL 126,000 May Lose Coverage as Victories Pile Up for Faith-Based Employers By ADAM LIPTAK Continued on Page A17 DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer voted with the court’s conservative wing. Durek Verrett, above, purports to be a sixth-generation shaman, is a friend of Gwyneth Paltrow and wants to bring healing to the masses. PAGE D1 THURSDAY STYLES D1-6 The Shaman of Now Wyatt Cenac, above, took on police reform on “Problem Areas,” but the HBO series didn’t gain traction. PAGE C1 ARTS C1-8 Ahead of the Curve, in 2019 Barbara Murray, a Florida nurse. Five months into the pandemic, the U.S. still hasn’t solved the problem. PAGE A7 TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-9 Protective Gear in Short Supply Ennio Morricone, who died on Monday, was one of the world’s great composers, the musician John Zorn writes. PAGE C1 More Than a Film Composer The country has halted imports of secondhand clothes, limiting fashion options but opening doors for its own designers and manufacturers. PAGE A10 INTERNATIONAL A10-13 Current Trend: Made in Kenya Such projects are facing legal hurdles, shifting economics and rising demands to fight climate change. PAGE A15 NATIONAL A14-21, 24 The End of New Pipelines? United Airlines warned workers that up to 36,000 of them could lose their jobs because demand for travel is weak and falling again as infections rise. PAGE B1 BUSINESS B1-7 Furloughs Loom for Airline George Floyd’s dying moments have played on an endless loop, horrifying the world and prompt- ing a spasm of street protests, but newly released evidence reveals an even more desperate scene than previously known in the mo- ments before an officer pressed his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck. Mr. Floyd uttered “I can’t breathe” not a handful of times, as previous videotapes showed, but more than 20 times in all. He cried out not just for his dead mother but for his children too. Before his final breaths, Mr. Floyd gasped: “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me.” As Mr. Floyd shouted for his life, an officer yelled back at him to “stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.” The chilling transcripts of Min- neapolis police body camera footage, made public on Wednes- day, were filed in state court as part of an effort by one of the offi- cers on the scene, Thomas Lane, 37, to have charges that he aided and abetted Mr. Floyd’s murder thrown out by a judge. Mr. Floyd, 46, died after another officer, Derek Chauvin, 44, pressed his knee down onto Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes until he was no longer moving. Mr. Chauvin, who was on the ‘They’ll Kill Me,’ Floyd Pleaded, Records Reveal By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and KIM BARKER Continued on Page A18 The Ivy League is putting all sports on hold until at least January, becoming the first Division I conference to sus- pend football for the fall. PAGE B8 SPORTSTHURSDAY B8-12 The Ivies Put Sports on Pause The White House had told the Pentagon the president did not want Lt. Col. Alex- ander S. Vindman promoted. PAGE A16 Impeachment Witness to Retire Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps have been linked to hun- dreds of cases nationally. PAGE A6 Churches Become Hot Spots Late Edition VOL. CLXIX .... No. 58,749 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, THURSDAY, JULY 9, 2020 Today, mostly sunny, hot, humid, high 90. Tonight, cloudy, showers late, low 74. Tomorrow, mostly cloudy, showers, breezy, humid, high 82. Weather map is on Page A24. $3.00