Stranger Than Fiction

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TOP NEWS

• Florida begins to reopen today, including some beaches. The plan calls for restaurants and shops in most parts of the state to operate at 25% of their indoor capacity starting Monday. Schools, bars, gyms and salons will remain closed.

• Senate Republicans want to shield businesses from COVID-19 liability. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called liability protections a must-have “red line” for Republicans, saying he won’t support Democrats’ call for further state and local aid without it.

• In a historic first, the Supreme Court will begin to hear arguments by conference call, starting today. Two of the biggest cases, involving access to President Donald Trump's taxes and the role of the electors who cast the actual votes for president, will be argued by conference call May 12 and 13.

• Tensions are high as April rent and mortgages come due. At least 3.8 million homeowners have sought mortgage relief and were not making their payments by the end of April, a 2,400 percent increase from early March, according to Black Knight, a mortgage technology and data provider.

• Assad’s bankrollers are growing impatient. Syria’s richest man and first cousin of President Bashar al-Assad, who is accused by the US and EU of bankrolling the regime, has exacerbated a spectacular falling out with the Syrian leader, accusing him of sending security forces to arrest his employees and take over his businesses in a rare public dispute.

WHAT I’M READING + WATCHING + LISTENING TO

• Payment protection program largely shut out non-white business owners.

• Quibi already has a major lawsuit on their hands.

• Murder Hornets

THE COMMENT

“The legal adage that hard cases make bad law applies to this moment in an unforgiving way. Our choices under pressure will set precedents we may not like about what we will accept from governments, our employers and one another in the future. We may not care much about freedom of assembly when assembling poses mortal risks. It’s not just free speech, but the freedom not to speak, that counts when intimate personal details become matters of public interest. How much extra leverage on workers will employers have as they start to rehire the 30 million people they’ve laid off? How will we protect desperate workers from being exploited on the long road back to normal? How many friendships will be tested as we each reach our own conclusions about what is essential and what is indulgent?” - Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

THE STRANGEST

• Alabama man caught trying to live on Disney island.

THE AV ROOM