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May 1, 1977

New York City skyline and Brooklyn Bridge

The space shuttle orbiter Enterprise, riding piggy-back on its 747 mothership,

He had earlier lashed out at Sadiq Khan, tweeting that the London mayor had offered a "pathetic excuse" to Londoners after the London Bridge terror attack by telling people not to be alarmed.The Office for National Statistics said it would not comment on Mr Trump's tweet, but added that the survey relates to all crimes in England and Wales between 2016 and 2017.

It’s all tied to a warming earth, caused by greenhouse gases. Because global temperatures have risen 1.1 degrees Celsius, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, over preindustrial levels, landscapes dry out more quickly, producing severe droughts, even as more water vapor rises into the atmosphere, increasing the likelihood of extreme downpours.

Australia’s conservative government — heavily resistant to aggressive action on climate change that might threaten the country’s fossil fuel industry — has yet to make that link.

In and around the historic downtown, many of the businesses close to the river stayed shut on Monday, with a few putting sandbags by their doors. The central meeting place seemed to be at the foot of the Windsor Bridge, where television crews and crowds in rubber boots marveled at the view.

“That’s the problem,” he said. “It’s just going to keep building up.”

“This is a full-fledged cold war that risks turning hot with a single mistake,” said Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization. “We’re still in an escalatory spiral that risks getting out of control.”

Since 2019, Israeli commandos have attacked at least 10 ships carrying Iranian cargo, according to an American official and a former senior Israeli official. The real number of targeted ships may be higher than 20, according to an Iranian Oil Ministry official, an adviser to the ministry and an oil trader.

The extent of Iran’s retaliation is unclear. Most of the attacks are carried out clandestinely and with no public claims of responsibility.

The Israeli ship attacked last month was a car freighter, the Helios Ray, carrying several thousand German-made cars to China.

Several tankers were similarly attacked in the Red Sea last fall and winter, actions some officials attributed to the Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel movement in Yemen.

Iran has denied involvement in all of these attacks which, like the Israeli ones, appeared intended not to sink the ships but to send a message.

Israel has tried to counter Iran’s power play by launching regular airstrikes on Iranian shipments by land and air of arms and other cargo to Syria and Lebanon. Those attacks have made those routes riskier and shifted at least some of the weapons transit, and the conflict, to the sea, analysts said.

“Neither Israel nor Iran want to publicly take responsibility for the attacks because doing so would be an act of war with military consequences,” Hossein Dalirian, a military analyst affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, told The New York Times in a Clubhouse discussion on Thursday.

Analysts say that Iran wants to continue to needle Israel and to arm and support its Middle Eastern allies, both to surround Israel with well-armed proxies and to give Iran a stronger hand in any future nuclear negotiations.

The Israeli offensive against Iranian shipping has two goals, analysts and officials said. The first is to prevent Tehran from sending equipment to Lebanon to help Hezbollah build a precision missile program, which Israel considers a strategic threat.

The tankers targeted by Israel were carrying Iranian oil to Syria, contravening American sanctions and most likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, also under sanctions, is in dire need of oil. Iran, its economy decimated by American sanctions, needs cash. Hezbollah has also been hit hard by the severe economic and political crisis in Lebanon and a cyberattack on its financial system.

The effectiveness of the Israeli campaign is unclear. Some of the targeted ships were forced to return to Iran without delivering their cargo, the American official said.

While the Israeli Navy can make its presence felt in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, it is less effective in waters closer to Iran. And that could make Israeli-owned ships more vulnerable to Iranian attacks as they pass Iran’s western shores on their way to ports in the Gulf, said Shaul Chorev, a retired Israeli admiral who now heads the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center at the University of Haifa.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) offered an amendment to the Covid-aid bill on Friday pushing for the Senate to override the rules and raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, eight Democrats voted against it, including swing votes Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona along with Mr. Coons.

A group of other Senate Republicans signed on to the proposal, with some additional GOP lawmakers saying they would be open to an increase.

But any Democratic effort to compromise with Republicans on a minimum-wage increase would need to contend with demands from progressive Democrats and activists to not back down from $15 an hour.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that Mr. Biden will use his “political capital” to help achieve a $15 minimum wage, and said he wasn’t currently considering a lower rate

Sen. Manchin has said $15 is too high for low cost-of-living states and said he could support a minimum wage of $11 an hour. Other Democratic senators had expressed concern about the rate, as well as its extension to tipped workers, who currently must be paid a subminimum wage of as little as $2.13 an hour, as long as they earn the full minimum in gratuity.

Many economists say a smaller total increase or a raise spread out over more years would cause less job loss.

a $12-an-hour minimum wage by 2025 would reduce employment by 300,000, while increasing wages for up to 11 million workers and lift 400,000 above the poverty threshold. A minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2025 would have little effect on employment or poverty, while providing raises for up to 3.5 million workers.

“If the progressive view is that it’s $15 or nothing, they may end up with nothing,” said Glenn Spencer, head of the Chamber’s Employment Policy Division.

Mr. Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000.

“The purpose of the tax system is to both raise enough revenue for what the government wants to do, and to make sure that as we’re doing that we are encouraging activities that are in the national interest and discouraging ones that are not,” said Heather Boushey, a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers.Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden of Oregon, is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Mr. Biden’s campaign proposals.

A report from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation this month showed that multinational companies paid an average U.S. tax rate of less than 8 percent on their income in 2018, down from 16 percent in 2017. The report also found that those companies did not slow their practice of booking profits in low-tax havens like Bermuda.

Sunday's order directs the heads of all federal agencies to submit proposals for their respective agencies to promote voter registration and participation within 200 days, while assisting states in voter registration under the National Voter Registration Act.

"Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have that vote counted. If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote," he said at the event.

"I also urge Congress to fully restore the Voting Rights Act, named in John Lewis' honor," he said, referring to the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon who died last year.

Biden called HR1 "a landmark piece of legislation that is urgently needed to protect the right to vote, the integrity of our elections, and to repair and strengthen our democracy."

"For the federal agencies, many of them have footprints around the country, with offices that people, outside the context of a pandemic could walk in and seek particular services," the official told reporters Saturday. We want to make sure that we can maximize the use of that kind of walk-in service and have them be places where people can also register to vote -- the goal is to make registering to vote and voting access as easy as possible."

The executive order also expands voter access and registration efforts for communities often overlooked in outreach, including the disabled, military serving overseas and the incarcerated.

As of February, state legislators in 43 states had introduced more than 250 bills with restrictive voting provisions, according to a tally from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

"The President doesn't have executive authority to prevent a state from taking that kind of action," they said. "That would require congressional action -- so this executive order uses all of the authority that the President has to be able to take steps necessary to make voter registration and voter access easy and straightforward for people, and it also uses the President's bully pulpit to send a message to all the states and to all voters about the importance of democracy."

By extending the child tax credit, we can cut childhood poverty nearly in half and end the international embarrassment of the US having one of the highest rates of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.Read More

In a statement, White House officials called the GOP counteroffer "encouraging" but said they were concerned about the proposal to use COVID-19 relief funding to pay for the plan and that some concerns remained about funding proposals for VA hospitals, rail, transit, lead pipes and climate. Biden said he plans to meet with Republican senators on infrastructure talks next week.

Democrats want to increase taxes on corporations and high income earners — a plan that Republicans have flatly rejected.

Biden and his allies have also firmly supported plans to pay for the spending by increasing the corporate tax rate to 28%, increasing the top federal income tax rate to 39.6% for those earning more than $400,000, and expanding the capital gains tax.

"Of the remaining 5% the largest categories of unobligated balances are in the Heath Care Provider Relief Fund—funding for rural hospitals, health care providers and disaster loans for small businesses," the White House said. Targeting that money risks dragging infrastructure into ongoing political arguments about the coronavirus and the pandemic response.

Biden has recently called for $1.7 trillion in spending in a package that broadly redefines the definition of infrastructure as well as expanding federal spending priorities and the role of the federal government in the everyday lives of Americans.

Biden's plan expands the term infrastructure to cover virtually every aspect of a worker's relationship to the economy. His plan includes measures to combat climate change and promote green energy, funding for child care and early childhood education, union-friendly measures and worker protections.

Emily's grandparents, Hui and Edgar Kwong, were worried he would fall behind. They stopped speaking Mandarin to Christopher at home, and dedicated themselves to teaching him English. "I realized I had to engage in a different world, a world in English," Christopher Kwong says. "You have to integrate, otherwise you're going to be really in a terrible place."

Emily will explore how being 'Chinese enough' gets tied up in language fluency and the feeling of racial imposter syndrome, in conversation with sociolinguist Amelia Tseng. She also discovers how language is a bridge that can be broken and rebuilt between generations — as an act of love and reclamation.

Biden has indicated he would be open to discussing a $1 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan, senators have told CNN. But even after trading a couple of counteroffers, Republicans and the White House still have sharply different views about the size and scope of the proposal and how it would be paid for.

Biden has proposed hiking corporate taxes in order to pay for the proposal, but Republicans are strongly opposed to the idea and have said raising taxes to fund the plan is a "red line" for them.

Buttigieg told CNN on Sunday that though Republicans "philosophically seem to agree that $1 trillion investment is the kind of thing we need to do right now," there is still a lot of "daylight" between the two sides.

Since Biden first proposed his infrastructure plan, Republicans and the White House have disagreed on its scope and the definition of infrastructure. Biden argues infrastructure touches every pillar of American life and includes education, health care, energy and manufacturing. Republicans argue infrastructure is confined to things like roads, bridges and more traditional transportation projects.

Biden said during his speech that he carries a card with him every day, and on it, the number of American service members killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When he spoke Sunday, Biden talked about his son, Beau, who served in the Delaware Army National Guard. His unit was activated and he deployed to Iraq in October 2008. Beau Biden died exactly six years ago Sunday of brain cancer.

"A lot of time passes, but you all know, better than I do or as well as I do, that the moment that we celebrate it is the toughest day of the year. We're honored, but it's a tough day that brings back everything," President Biden said. "

"We may have many obligations to the nation, but we only have one truly sacred obligation and that's to equip those that we send into harm's way with all they need and care for them and their families when they return home, and when they don't," Biden said.

Memorial Day officially became a federal holiday in 1971, but its roots go back to the Civil War.

There are currently 155 national cemeteries in 42 states and Puerto Rico operated and maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs' National Cemetery Administration. This doesn't include state-run veterans cemeteries. The men and women buried at these sacred sites are the backbone of the United States, Biden said.

Even before Covid, it was clear to anyone who looked at the data that child care allowed parents to get to their jobs, and a lack of it did the opposite. In 2016, nearly two million American parents said they had to quit their job, refuse a new one, or significantly change the one they had thanks to problems with child care. One of the reasons that the United States has fallen so far behind our international peers when it comes to the share of women in the labor force is that we invest so few resources in child care and early education. Since the 1990s, the rising cost of private day care has reduced employment for American mothers of children ages 5 and younger by 13 percent.

If child care is infrastructure, then, it should be nearly self-evident that care for the elderly and disabled is, too. Children aren’t the only members of our families who require daily care. But we offer miserly support for those who need to secure and pay for it. Medicare doesn’t cover nursing home or assisted living stays, only Medicaid does, requiring families with resources to spend them down before they can get assistance with the exorbitant cost. Medicare also doesn’t cover in-home care, and not all state Medicaid programs cover it.

Paid leave helps mothers in particular stay connected to their jobs before and after the arrival of a new child. On top of that, an analysis of more than 10,000 companies found that after they offered paid leave the majority had an increase in revenue and profit per each employee — in other words, it allowed workers to perform better.

All of these things clearly undergird the functioning of our economy, just as a smooth road allows trucks to transport goods to stores and drivers to get to their workplaces. It’s one thing to debate whether or not to invest in them. But there’s no rational argument for why they should be excluded from Mr. Biden’s focus on repairing and upgrading the systems that keep our country running.

The prince, who vowed to crush the Houthis when Riyadh intervened in Yemen in 2015 at the head of a military coalition, also softened his rhetoric towards the Iran-aligned movement that has launched missile and drone attacks on the kingdom."There is no doubt the Houthis have strong ties with the Iranian regime, but they are Yemenis with Arab instincts," he said, urging the group to accept a ceasefire deal.

Even considering patients like mine as recipients of new lungs represents a paradigm shift. A lung transplant is an arduous procedure, one that a very frail patient has little hope of surviving. And given that lung transplant programs are evaluated based on one-year mortality, they have a disincentive to take a chance on sicker patients.

When asked whether they want to receive a transplant after considering all the implications, many will say yes. But others say no.

Try to imagine: You go to the E.R. with a cough. You’re not even sure that you will be admitted. Days later you are intubated. Consciousness ceases. A month or two pass and then you wake up with hoses in your neck and you learn that transplant and all that comes with it is your only option to stay alive.

But a larger second wave is coming, this time of coronavirus survivors who have made it out of the hospital but are left with lungs that are irrevocably scarred.

Moving forward, this means that we will need to educate doctors in the community, outside of large academic centers, who simply might not think of post-Covid patients as candidates for transplants.

No one can survive the physical and emotional toll of transplant without assistance, especially in the first year. But not everyone is lucky enough to have people who can commit to helping with medications and appointments. Will we choose not to list someone whose family members live in a different state? How about a patient who would be an ideal candidate but simply lives an isolated existence?

Even as we prepare for this next wave, my 61-year-old patient and his family continue to wait. Standing at his bedside, I am struck by the reality that if his son had not pushed for him to be transferred to a hospital that would consider him a potential transplant candidate, if we did not have access to the machine that could make it possible to reach that goal, he surely would have died.

“If we look up at the mountain, we grow overwhelmed and feel that we are going to fail,” he tells them. “So we don’t worry about the peak. We focus on the individual steps. There is still no guarantee. But we’re going to attempt. That’s all we can do.”

The far-left wants to force our kids and grandkids to pay for every single penny of it. As if the $28 trillion national debt we have right now wasn’t enough. 

It was the rare silver lining of a troubled time: About 20 or 30 newcomers to a dwindling town of 140 souls, where even the tiny school on the town plaza got a second chance after parents started enrolling their children there.

“If it weren’t for Covid, the school would have closed,” said Josep Tomás Puig, 67, a retired mail carrier in Gósol who spent his life watching the younger generation depart to Spain’s cities.

Rafael López, a former renewable energy entrepreneur whose business collapsed in Spain’s 2008 financial crisis, was interested. “My mom said she saw this on TV,” said Mr. López. “And I said, ‘Well, what do you say if we take the car and go have a look, see what’s there?’”

For decades in Spain, a landscape of walled cities, stone bridges and ancient winding roads has become mostly abandoned as generations of young people left for cities. La España Vacía, or “the Empty Spain,” is the phrase that was coined to describe the blight.

Yet tiny Gósol had fared better than many others, residents say.It sits in the wealthy autonomous region of Catalonia, in a majestic valley in the Pyrenees Mountains that brought tourists and part-time residents in the summer months.

By 2015, the situation had gotten critical. The number of permanent residents was 120 and falling. The mayor went on television warning, among other things, that the school was about to close because it was down to five students.

“And if the school closed, the town might as well have closed too.”

Over the next months, hundreds of people came to Gósol to kick the tires. They said they were impressed by the quaint homes and the ruined castle atop the hill.

As the coronavirus began to spread last year, Spain entered another economic crisis, this one on a scale even greater than the collapse that had brought Mr. López in 2008.

In Castelldefels, a seaside town southwest of Barcelona, life was starting to look upside-down for Ms. Calvar, the bar owner who came to Gósol in September.

The path seemed clear when, passing through Gósol one day, Ms. Calvar learned that the owner of the grocery store on the plaza was at looking to sell the business.

The schoolhouse sits along the plaza, a place of kid-sized chairs and tables, paper planets hanging from the ceiling and an incubator warming eggs.

Classes ended at 5 p.m. and Ms. Otero, the telecommuting web designer who had moved to Gósol from Barcelona last June, was waiting for two of her children, 6 and 7.

There was a note of regret in her voice when she thought about the end of the pandemic, and the pressure that she knew would inevitably build to return to Barcelona. She didn’t want Gósol to disappear yet, she said.

Businesses about 30 miles north, in the city of Fort Lauderdale, are monitoring the developments in Miami Beach. “We’ve been watching it very closely,” Dan Lindblade, president and chief executive of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce, said on Sunday evening. “We’ll do everything we have to do to make sure we don’t have the same situation happen up here.”

Seemingly undeterred by the police presence on Sunday night in South Beach, two maskless men in their 20s, who were wearing board shorts and clutching hard seltzers, took turns snorting white lines from a postcard. Around the corner, a group of police officers stood calmly, talking with one another and shouting for people to go home.