Your Friday Evening Briefing: Hillary Clinton, Kanye West, Syria

Across social media, iPhone users have reported waking up to the scary realization that they had missed their alarm. “In the past six days of school, I’ve accumulated seven tardies,” said TikTok user CarterPCS. “I could’ve sworn it was because my alarm wasn’t going off.” “I was literally late to work the other day because I slept through all four of my alarms that I had set,” TikTok user Charkaylotte recounted.

BEIJING — The death toll from a collapsed highway in southeastern China climbed to 48 on Thursday as searchers dug for a second day through a treacherous and mountainous area. One side of the four-lane highway in the city of Meizhou gave way about 2 a.m. on Wednesday after a month of heavy rains in Guangdong province.

President Ronald Reagan warned in 1986 that if Nicaragua’s “Sandinistas” remained in power, “terrorists and subversives” would have sanctuary “just 2 days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.” During the 1980s, Reagan gave more speeches on the Central American country than about almost any other foreign policy issue. Congress voted countless times on his policy of undermining Nicaragua’s Cuban- and Soviet-backed government by arming insurgents known as the Contra.

LOS ANGELES — Police removed barricades and began dismantling a pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ fortified encampment early Thursday at the University of California, Los Angeles, after hundreds of protesters defied orders to leave. Some people were detained, their hands bound with zip ties. The action came after officers spent hours threatening arrests over loudspeakers if people did not disperse.

In 2018, we worked with Bill Gates on a special issue of TIME dedicated to the power of optimism. Gates’ view, shared by many of the issue’s contributors, was that people are wired to focus on when things go wrong and when they don’t work. Sometimes this attention distracts us from the moments when progress is being made.

Sometimes all it takes is a cold email to start a revolution. Dr. Alex Oshmyansky, a radiologist who had become incensed by the runaway prices of prescription drugs, decided to email billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who famously makes his contact info public. He included a business plan for a small company he had created in 2018 that made drugs and sold them at cost.