ABCDEPrices may vary in areas outside metropolitan Washington. SU V1 V2 V3 V4

Democracy Dies in Darkness tuesday, july 28 , 2020 . $2Heavy thunderstorm 93/75 • Tomorrow: Partly sunny 92/76 B8

New details on Lafayette Square A National Guard officer’s account contradicts Trump officials’ claims about the clearing of protesters last month. B1

Medical milestone The first two large U.S. trials to test coronavirus vaccines launched, with 30,000 participants each. A17

Style

You only think you know Scranton“The Office” and politicos have made it an idea as much as a place. C1

Health & Science

Manure mattersFarmers convert methane into energy, curtailing a greenhouse gas. E1

In the NewsThe nationBlack mayors released a policing plan that in-cludes transparency and community engagement but doesn’t support “de-funding police.” A3President Trump’s pandemic response re-minds ex-students and

lawyers of the fight over Trump University. A8

The worldIn the absence of tour-ists, Rome’s businesses are turning to selling masks. Among the en-trepreneurs: the three teens who opened La­-

maska in a wine shop their father owns. A16

The economyAbout 4,000 federal employees are seeking compensation on the grounds they got the coronavirus at work. A19The Payroll Protec-tion Program was in-tended to keep employ-ees on the payroll, but

workers at some firms that got millions have yet to be rehired. A20

The regionThe living son of an enslaved man heard his father’s stories of the lynching tree and wit-nessed the civil rights movement from Selma to Black Lives Matter Plaza. B1

CONTENT © 2020The Washington Post Year 143, No. 236

business news.........................A17comics.........................................C6opinion pages..........................A21lotteries....................................B3obituaries..................................B5television...................................C5world news.............................A14

1

Matt McClain/The Washington Post

A military honor guard places the casket of congressman John Lewis in the Capitol Rotunda. After the Rotunda memorial event, the casket was moved to the top of the East Front steps for the public to pay tribute. Coverage, A6-7

Colleagues honor ‘conscience’ of Congress

BY KARIN BRULLIARD AND RACHEL WEINER

S arah Poe watched with ris-ing alarm as coronavirus cases began to spiral last

month in rural Malheur County, Ore., turning the remote region bright red on maps of hot spots. The county health director knew locals were ditching masks and isolation. But she also saw a threat directly across the Snake River: Idaho.

Half the workforce in Mal-heur, where the minimum wage is $4 higher than across the border, lives in Idaho. Other Idahoans come for Oregon’s sales-tax-free shopping and le-gal marijuana. But the intermin-gling looks more menacing to Poe and other Malheur officials these days — because unlike in Oregon, masks are not mandat-ed across the border and the coronavirus metrics there are far bleaker. Now, the public health department in that Ore-

BY HEATHER LONG

For real estate agent James ­Dietsche, there is only one way to describe the real estate market right now: “It’s insane.”

A 1950s three-bedroom home he listed in late June for $200,000 in a small town outside Harris-burg, Pa., received 26 offers the initial weekend it was for sale. Many would-be buyers were young couples seeking a starter home and retirees looking to downsize. But bids also came from Philadelphia, New York City and the Washington, D.C., area. One person was willing to pay up to

$50,000 above the asking price. Several were offering to buy it without inspections.

While Dietsche’s cellphone has been ringing with eager buyers, Tammy Steen’s phone has been buzzing for a different reason. Her landlord keeps calling, demand-ing the $700 rent she does not have. Steen, 52, was a hotel house-keeper at a Hampton Inn in Pensa-cola, Fla. Her temporary layoff now looks permanent. She has yet to receive unemployment aid de-spite applying in late March. She has applied to countless fast-food, retail and maid jobs but has not

see INEQUALITY on A18

Virus fuels widening gap between buyers, renters

BY DAVE SHEININ

Major League Baseball’s first existential crisis in a season un-like any in its history came on the fifth day of its 2020 schedule, before half its 30 teams could even hold their home openers. It ar-rived in a way that would not surprise an epidemiologist: with a novel coronavirus outbreak fo-cused on a team whose home city is a hot spot. And it has placed the remainder of the season in a pre-carious position.

For now, the outbreak among members of the Miami Marlins — with 11 players and two coaches testing positive by Monday, ac-cording to an official familiar with the testing — has not brought down the entire MLB season, and MLB officials hoped the outbreak

see mlb on A19

For now, outbreak won’t derail MLB season

Fragmented virus rules stir tensionsLax neighbors crossing state lines are putting healthy communities at risk

gon county has traced cases to origins in Idaho.

“Part of our threat is being so close to Idaho,” Poe said. “We are a border community up against a state that has much looser

restrictions.”That concern simmers on oth-

er state lines where neighboring jurisdictions — just a bridge or short drive away — have differ-

see NEIGHBORS on A12

Angie Smith for The Washington Post

Damien Figueroa and his son Damien Jr. at Tacos Mi Ranchito in Ontario, Ore. Idaho residents make up half the workforce in Malheur County, Ore., where the minimum wage is $4 higher.

BY ERICA WERNER, JEFF STEIN

AND SEUNG MIN KIM

A fraught showdown over the next coronavirus relief bill got un-derway Monday as Senate Repub-licans unveiled a $1 trillion pack-age and congressional Democrats sat down with top White House officials.

All parties face a tight deadline for a breakthrough as expanded jobless benefits are set to expire later this week.

The prospects for a bipartisan deal remained far from certain as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) met

late Monday with Treasury Secre-tary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead-ows to begin formal negotiations.

The White House officials de-scribed the talks as productive and said they would resume Tuesday, but Democrats left the nearly two-hour meeting describing the ini-tial GOP offer as inadequate.

“It’s frustrating because they dithered for three months when now there are very serious cliffs that hurt lots of people — unem-ployment, rental, state and local — and they’re still trying to get their act together, which is very frus-trating because of the needs of people,” Schumer said.

see stimulus on A18

Coronavirus relief talks ramp up as GOP unveils planPROPOSAL WOULD REDUCE JOBLESS BENEFIT

Prospects for passage unclear as aid expiration nears

BY TONY ROMM

Congress brought the country’s big banks to heel after the finan-cial crisis, cowed a tobacco indus-try for imperiling public health and forced airline leaders to atone for years of treating their passengers poorly.

Now, lawmakers are set to turn their attention to technology, channeling long-simmering frus-trations with Amazon, Apple, Face­book and Google into a high-profile hearing some Democrats and Republicans hope will usher in sweeping changes throughout Silicon Valley.

On Wednesday, the industry’s four most powerful chief execu-

tives are set to appear, swear an oath and submit to a grilling from House lawmakers who have been probing the Web’s most recogniz-able names to determine whether they have become too big and powerful. The focus is antitrust and the extent to which a quartet of digital behemoths — represent-ing a nearly $5 trillion slice of the U.S. economy — has harmed com-petition, consumers and the country writ large.

The congressional inquiry has been more than a year in the making. Lawmakers have amassed 1.3 million documents, conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and held five other hearings featuring the industry’s friends and foes. Led by Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), the lawmakers plan to produce a re-port in coming months that some party leaders expect will find the industry has skirted federal com-petition laws because the protec-

see Tech on A24

Big Tech is next industry to face Congress’s glare

Like tobacco, finance, airline chiefs of the past, its top CEOs set to testify

BY DEVLIN BARRETT, NICK MIROFF,

MARISSA J. LANG AND DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD

The Trump administration is sending more federal agents to Portland, Ore., already the site of aggressive policing tactics that ac-tivists and city officials across the country say are inspiring more-violent clashes and re-energizing protests.

The U.S. Marshals Service de-cided last week to send more dep-uties to Portland, according to an internal email reviewed by The Washington Post, with personnel

beginning to arrive last Thursday night. The Department of Home-land Security is also considering a plan to send an additional 50 U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel to the city, according to senior administration officials in-volved in the federal response who spoke on the condition of ano-nymity to describe internal delib-erations.

Such moves would mark a sig-nificant expansion of the federal

force operating at the Portland federal courthouse — there were 114 federal agents there in mid-July — though it is unclear how many existing personnel could be sent home after the arrival of at least 100 reinforcements.

The Trump administration has responded to protests and vandal-ism in Oregon’s largest city with a shock-and-awe strategy, using a sudden escalation in force by

see protests on A4

More federal agents being dispatched to PortlandTough response appears to expand as other cities

see renewed protests

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