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Is U.S.-U.K. Relationship Still ‘Special’ After Trump Spats, Shock Vote

LONDON — The so-called "special relationship" between the United States and Britain was forged on the beaches of Normandy 73 years ago. This alliance, nurtured by presidents and prime ministers for decades, has taken a battering since President Donald Trump took office. Trump criticized London Mayor Sadiq Khan after the most recent terror attack in the city and he has previously suggested British intelligence agencies spied on him during his campaign.

Nearly every Brazilian state has an ICU occupancy of 80% or higher,

As of Friday, 16 of 26 states were at or above 90%, meaning those health systems have collapsed or are at imminent risk of doing so.

The seven-day averages of both new cases and new deaths are higher than they have ever been.In the last 10 days, about a quarter of all coronavirus deaths worldwide have been recorded in Brazil,

Syria is the world’s war. Here are 10 reasons why 10 years of unending misery and mayhem have harmed everyone:

Estimates of civilian lives lost since March 2011 vary greatly, from about 117,000 to 226,000 – but the vast scale of this modern killing field is indisputable.

Over half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million is displaced, about 6.6 million abroad. Many are trapped in Idlib, in north-west Syria, caught between opposing forces and prey to Islamist militias.

Hundreds of high school seniors rode in bus caravans recently to a mass vaccination site outside Hartford, Conn., where they got Covid-19 shots as a D.J. played Lady Gaga and a selfie backdrop awaited.

The F.D.A.’s decision, announced Monday afternoon, presents a bright new opportunity in the push for broad immunity against the coronavirus in the United States, but the challenges are more daunting than for immunizing older, more independent teenagers.

But with the school year ending soon, many health officials are racing against the academic clock to schedule both recommended doses, seeing schools as the best place to reach many students at once.

A Florida man accused of killing an iguana last year wanted a charge of animal cruelty dismissed on the basis of the state's "stand your ground" law. A judge has denied his motion.

PJ Nilaja Patterson was arrested after allegedly beating, dragging and kicking a 3-foot iguana in Lake Worth, Florida, on September 2, 2020, according to a probable cause affidavit. The animal died as Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control was transporting it to be euthanized, according to the affidavit.

Patterson's attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the charge, but Judge Jeffrey Gillen denied the motion on Friday.

Two 5.9 magnitude earthquakes struck the Pacific Ocean off Oregon's coast early Friday morning,

The tremors occurred about 89 miles and 98 miles west of the coastal town of Gold Beach, Oregon, after 1 a.m. (PT)

At least five earthquakes ranging in magnitudes from 3.2 to 5.9 have occurred in the area in the last few hours, according to USGS.

For the first time, a woman had been elected vice president of the United States. A woman of color at that. But while that was certainly noted — there were the requisite headlines, the expected tweets — it wasn’t trumpeted as triumphantly as it could and should have been, because Donald Trump once again sucked up all the oxygen.

That’s why Nikki Haley, so covetous of the White House herself, denounced Harris for a tweet last Saturday in which Harris encouraged Americans to “enjoy the long weekend.”“Unprofessional and unfit,” Haley labeled it, because … nobody goes to the beach on Memorial Day? Nobody barbecues? It was as if Harris had done something truly damaging, like abetting a despot intent on subverting American democracy. Harris may have failed, in that one terse tweet, to mention the uniformed men and women who had died in service to the country, but she honored them in other contexts. As for Haley, well, there’s a musty saying that comes to mind. It concerns glass houses.

Those attacks coincide with the upsizing of the tasks that Biden has assigned her. Having asked her last March to work on stemming migration across the southern border, he identified her on Tuesday as the administration’s lead on voting rights. That’s huge. The issue is a defining one for many Democrats, a top legislative priority for the party and a furiously argued point of contention between them and Republicans.

Until recently, the question of what counts as infrastructure was an academic matter. Today, thanks to President Biden’s $2 trillion proposal to upgrade and transform the nation’s infrastructure, it’s the most important issue in American political and economic life.

Republican leaders have accused Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats of smuggling their entire domestic agenda into the word “infrastructure.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas caricatured the plan on Twitter: “Abortion is infrastructure. Gun control is infrastructure. Forced unionization is infrastructure.” He and his colleagues argue that “real” infrastructure is little more than roads, bridges, tunnels and ports.

Political officials and corporate leaders now use the concept of infrastructure capaciously, as Mr. Reagan did. Governments make substantial investments in energy infrastructure, transit infrastructure, communications infrastructure and health infrastructure. But as Mr. Biden’s proposal makes disappointingly clear, adequate investments in civic and social infrastructure are less common.

research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t

Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes to their behaviour. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.

Before humans, orca were their only predators, against whom sperm whales form defensive circles, their powerful tails held outwards to keep their assailants at bay. But such techniques “just made it easier for the whalers to slaughter them”, says Whitehead.

After a year of criticism by health experts, mockery from comedians and blistering critiques from political rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing unabashedly tall among the nation's governors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight.

As many parts of the country embark on an uneasy march toward normalcy, Florida is not only back in business -- it's been in business for the better part of the past year. DeSantis' gamble to take a laissez faire approach appears to be paying off -- at least politically, at least for now, as other governors capturing attention in the opening phase of the pandemic now face steeper challenges.

"Those lockdowns have not worked. They've done great damage to our country," DeSantis said Tuesday at a news conference in Tallahassee. "We can never let something like this happen again. Florida took a different path. We've had more success as a result."

Tornadoes struck the Deep South after a line of storms moved through the region Wednesday, part of a system that is expected to continue further into the Southeast and the Eastern Seaboard on Thursday, leaving millions at risk from severe weather conditions.

At least 24 preliminary reports of tornadoes across five states were tracked Wednesday

with the greatest storm damage apparent in Alabama and Mississippi.

The castle that crowns the hill above the village of Gósol used to be among the grandest along Spain’s border with France, with views of fertile farms and forests rich in timber that stretched up to the cloudy mountaintops.

But the castle is in ruins now, and until last year, Gósol had fallen on hard times, too. The town census had gone down in nearly every count since the 1960s.

It took a pandemic for Spaniards to heed his call.Among those who packed their bags was Gabriela Calvar, a 37-year-old who once owned a bar in a beach town near Barcelona, but watched it go under during last year’s lockdowns and decamped to the town in the mountains for a new start.

Spain deployed troops, military trucks and helicopters in its North African enclave of Ceuta on Tuesday after thousands of people crossed over from Morocco, one of the largest movements of migrants reported in the area in recent years.

More than 8,000 migrants, including nearly 2,000 minors, arrived on the beaches of Ceuta on Monday and Tuesday, mostly swimming or aboard inflatable boats, according to the Spanish authorities, who said that Spain had already sent back 4,000 people.

The sudden arrival of migrants has created a humanitarian emergency in Ceuta, a Spanish autonomous city of 80,000 residents off the tip of Morocco and just 18 miles off Gibraltar, in Spain’s mainland territory.

Darwin’s Arch, a famous, photo-friendly rock formation in the remote Galápagos Islands, collapsed on Monday because of natural erosion, Ecuadorean officials said.

The collapse of the natural archway in the Pacific Ocean, about 600 miles west of continental Ecuador, left a pile of rubble between two pillars.

The waters around the arch are known as a destination for divers, with tours from the main islands offering the opportunity to spot sharks, turtles, manta rays and dolphins. The arch was less than a mile from the uninhabited Darwin Island; both are named after Charles Darwin, the scientist whose study of species on the islands in 1835 influenced his theory of evolution and natural selection.

So it was unsurprising when, on the day after his supporters stormed the Capitol, he uttered those familiar three words just 20 seconds into a video filmed from the White House.

“America is, and must always be,” Donald Trump declared, “a nation of law and order.”

For Mr. Trump, the latter was never so much the undercurrent as the main event. Long before running for president, he liked talking about who the criminals were, even when he got them wrong. In 1989, Mr. Trump took out a full-page ad in multiple New York City newspapers to call for the execution of those responsible for the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park, wondering what had happened to “law and order.” The police wrongly charged a group of Black and Latino men, known as the Central Park Five, for the crime.

in 2018, the average pay of CEOs at America’s 350 top firms hit $17.2 million―an increase, when adjusted for inflation, of 1,007.5 percent since 1978.  By contrast, the typical worker’s wage, adjusted for inflation, grew by only 11.9 percent over this 40-year period.

the three richest U.S. families―the Waltons (owners of Walmart), the Mars candy family, and the Koch family (owners of a vast fossil fuel conglomerate)―possessed a combined fortune ($348.7 billion), which is 4 million times the wealth of the median U.S. family.

average CEO pay in 2018 had increased by $5.2 million over the preceding 10 years.  This resulted in an average CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 287-to-1.

In their quest to win the 23 seats that would give them control of the House of Representatives, Democrats are targeting the seven Republican-held districts in California that were won by Hillary Clinton in 2016. There are high-profile female Democrats in several of those districts, all hoping the trend will carry them over the finish line Tuesday night.

In the wild race for retiring Rep. Ed Royce's district in California-39, the attention has focused on the slugfest between Gil Cisneros and Andy Thorburn — who are competing against two Republicans for the No. 2 slot. But pediatrician Mai Khanh Tran got the backing of EMILY's list and could draw a significant share of the vote.

"There are so many young people who are excited to see someone who looks like them," Jacobs says. Her youth and gender have also brought valuable financial support for Jacobs in this highly competitive district, which covers portions of Orange and San Diego counties. The super PAC for EMILY's List, Women Vote!, has spent $2.4 million to support her campaign. (Jacobs' grandfather, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, has given more than a $1 million to Women Vote! this campaign cycle).

Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by fewer than 113,000 of the 9.4m votes cast in Florida’s 2016 presidential election, it came as little surprise in a state accustomed to razor-thin margins.

when lightning struck again in the 2018 midterms and the Democratic candidates for state governor and the US Senate were edged out after close recounts, it was time for some profound introspection.

the state’s Democratic leaders convened a top-level war council to plot strategy for the 2020 presidential election, now just 12 months away

Leatherback turtles are making exhausting journeys, in some cases nearly twice as long as usual, from nesting to feeding grounds, because of rising ocean temperatures and changing sea currents.

In another stark example of the dangers to marine life from human actions, one turtle followed was found dead on a beach in Suriname only 120km (74 miles) from the starting point, drowned after having become enmeshed in a discarded fishing net.

Warming oceans pose clear dangers to human life as they lead to more intense storms and rising sea levels, but the impact of the increasing frequency of heatwaves at sea on marine species is much less studied. There is evidence that some species, including commercially important fish such as cod, are migrating towards the poles in search of cooler waters, but more research is needed for a fuller picture.

His style is deceptively simple. Nearly every Twitter message begins “Florida Man.” What follows, though, is almost always a pile of trouble

Some examples:Florida Man Tries to Walk Out of Store With Chainsaw Stuffed Down His Pants.

Now I think there are people who actually aspire to Florida Man-ness,” said Dave Barry, who celebrates Florida’s brand of madness in his popular columns and best-selling books. “It’s like the big leagues. It’s the Broadway for idiots.”