Aurelia Butler

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    Trump Pledges to Double Tariffs on Foreign Steel and Aluminum to 50%

    President Trump made the announcement at a U.S. Steel factory outside Pittsburgh.President Trump said on Friday that he would double the tariffs he had levied on foreign steel and aluminum to 50 percent, a move that he claimed would further protect the industry.The announcement came as Mr. Trump traveled to a U.S. Steel factory outside Pittsburgh to hail a “planned partnership” that he helped broker between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel, a corporate merger that he opposed last year as a presidential candidate. Although the details of the U.S. Steel deal are still murky — and Mr. Trump later admitted he had not yet seen or signed off on it — the president used the moment to cast himself as a champion of the embattled industry.Speaking to a crowd of steel workers, Mr. Trump claimed that foreign countries had been able to circumvent the 25 percent tariff he put in place this year. The higher tariffs would “even further secure the steel industry in the United States,” Mr. Trump said.It is not clear how much doubling the tariff rate would actually bolster the domestic steel sector, but the move gave Mr. Trump the opportunity to wield tariffs at a time when his other import taxes have proved vulnerable to legal challenges.In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that the tariffs would take effect on June 4 and that they would provide a “big jolt” to American steel and aluminum workers.Mr. Trump has in recent weeks announced large tariffs only to quickly reverse himself and pause them. Analysts suggested on Friday that Mr. Trump could be seeking new ways to gain leverage over trading partners as the pace of negotiations has proved to be painfully slow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Blow to Biden-era Program Plunges Migrants Into Further Uncertainty

    A Supreme Court ruling on Friday ended temporary humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of people. But it is unclear how quickly many could be deported.For thousands of migrants from some of the world’s most unstable countries, the last several months in United States have felt like a life-or-death legal roller coaster.And after a Supreme Court ruling on Friday in favor of a key piece of the Trump administration’s deportation effort, hundreds of thousands of migrants found themselves plunged once again into a well of uncertainty. They face the prospect that after being granted temporary permission to live in the United States, they will now be abruptly expelled and perhaps sent back to their perilous homelands.“One court said one thing, another court said another, and that just leaves us all very confused and worried,” said Frantzdy Jerome, a Haitian who lives with his partner and their toddler in Ohio.Immigration lawyers reported that they had been fielding calls from families asking whether they should continue to go to work or school. Their clients, they say, were given permission to live and work temporarily in the United States.Now, with that permission revoked while legal challenges work their way through lower courts, many immigrants fear that any encounter with the police or other government agencies could lead to deportation, according to lawyers and community leaders.“Sometimes I have thought of going to Canada, but I don’t have family there to receive me,” said Frantzdy Jerome, who came to the United States from Haiti and lives in Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Officials Unveil Budget Cuts to Aid for Health, Housing and Research

    The new blueprint shows that a vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs would be hit, including aid for college and cancer research.The Trump administration on Friday unveiled fuller details of its proposal to slash about $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year, offering a more intricate glimpse into the vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs that would be hit by the deepest cuts.The many spending reductions throughout the roughly 1,220-page document and agency blueprints underscored President Trump’s desire to foster a vast transformation in Washington. His budget seeks to reduce the size of government and its reach into Americans lives, including services to the poor.The new proposal reaffirmed the president’s recommendation to set federal spending levels at their lowest in modern history, as the White House first sketched out in its initial submission to Congress transmitted in early May. But it offered new details about the ways in which Mr. Trump hoped to achieve the savings, and the many functions of government that could be affected as a result.The White House budget is not a matter of law. Ultimately, it is up to Congress to determine the budget, and in recent years it has routinely discarded many of the president’s proposals. Lawmakers are only starting to embark on the annual process, with government funding set to expire at the end of September.The updated budget reiterated the president’s pursuit of deep reductions for nearly every major federal agency, reserving its steepest cuts for foreign aid, medical research, tax enforcement and a slew of anti-poverty programs, including rental assistance. The White House restated its plan to seek a $33 billion cut at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, and another $33 billion reduction at the Department of Health and Human Services.Targeting the Education Department, the president again put forward a roughly $12 billion cut, seeking to eliminate dozens of programs while unveiling new changes to Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Administration Ends Program Critical to Search for an H.I.V. Vaccine

    The termination is the latest in a series of cuts to H.I.V. research and programs to prevent the disease.The Trump administration has dealt a sharp blow to work on H.I.V. vaccines, terminating a $258 million program whose work was instrumental to the search for a vaccine.Officials from the H.I.V. division of the National Institutes of Health delivered the news on Friday to the program’s two leaders, at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute.Both teams were collaborating with numerous other research partners. The work was broadly applicable to a wide range of treatments for other illnesses, from Covid drugs to snake antivenom and therapies for autoimmune diseases.“The consortia for H.I.V./AIDS vaccine development and immunology was reviewed by N.I.H. leadership, which does not support it moving forward,” said a senior official at the agency who was not authorized to speak on the matter and asked not to be identified.“N.I.H. expects to be shifting its focus toward using currently available approaches to eliminate H.I.V./AIDS,” the official said.The program’s elimination is the latest in a series of cuts to H.I.V.-related initiatives, and to prevention of the disease in particular. Separately, the N.I.H. also paused funding for a clinical trial of an H.I.V. vaccine made by Moderna.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    George E. Smith Dead: Nobel Prize Winner Was 95

    Together with Willard S. Boyle, he invented an imaging device that is an essential part of nearly every telescope, photocopier and digital camera used today.George E. Smith, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing a revolutionary imaging device that has not only allowed scientists to see the universe more clearly but has also made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to record every birthday and vacation for posterity, died on Wednesday at his home in Barnegat Township, N.J. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter Lauren Lanning.It was while he was working at Bell Laboratories in 1969 that Dr. Smith and a colleague, Willard S. Boyle, came up with the idea for what is known as the charge-coupled device, or CCD — a technology that is an essential component of nearly every telescope, medical scanner, photocopier and digital camera in use today. Their work helped build “the foundation to our modern information society,” Gunnar Oquist, the Nobel academy’s secretary general, said when it was announced that Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle would share the 2009 prize for physics. (They split the award with Charles K. Kao, who was recognized for work that resulted in the development of fiber-optic cables.)Dr. Smith, left, and Dr. Boyle in 2009, at a news conference in Stockholm after they won the Nobel Prize in Physics.Bertil Ericson/Scanpix Sweden, via Associated PressDr. Smith and Dr. Boyle had been trying to create better memory storage for computers when the idea for the CCD arose. They thought the photoelectric effect — which Einstein had explained, an explanation that won him a 1921 Nobel Prize — might offer a solution.The photoelectric phenomenon occurs when electromagnetic radiation, such as light, hits a metal surface, dislodging electrons from atoms and causing a current to flow through the metal. The device that Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle created employs rows of tiny capacitors to store and transfer the electrical charge — essentially capturing light — and uses the information to construct an image.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Skulls of 19 Black Americans Return to New Orleans After 150 Years in Germany

    The remains, used in the 19th century as part of now discredited racial science, are being laid to rest on Saturday in a traditional jazz funeral.Sometime before Jan. 10, 1872, a young Black laborer named William Roberts checked himself into Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Just 23 years old, he was from Georgia and had a strong build, according to hospital records. His only recorded sickness was diarrhea.He was one of 19 Black patients who died at the hospital in December 1871 and January 1872, and whose skulls were sent to Germany to be studied by a doctor researching a now wholly discredited science that purported a correlation between the shape and size of a skull and a person’s intellect and character.The skulls languished in Germany for about 150 years until Leipzig University contacted the city of New Orleans two years ago to repatriate them.They were returned to New Orleans this month, and on Saturday morning those 19 people who died in the 1800s are being honored with a jazz funeral before their skulls are interred.A staff member at Rhodes Funeral Home removes the remains of one person from the shipping crate that arrived from Germany.Jacob Cochran/Dillard UniversityWhile the return of human remains from museum collections has become more common, the repatriation of these 19 Black cranial remains to New Orleans is believed to be the first major international restitution of the remains of Black Americans from Europe, according to Paul Wolff Mitchell, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who studies the 19th century history of race and science in the United States and Europe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Court Debates Whether a Climate Lawsuit Threatens National Security

    The judge asked lawyers how a suit by Charleston, S.C., claiming oil companies misled people about climate risks, might be affected by a Trump executive order blasting cases like these.Two teams of high-powered lawyers clashed this week in Charleston, S.C., over a global-warming question with major implications: Do climate lawsuits against oil companies threaten national security, as President Trump has claimed?In the lawsuit, the City of Charleston is arguing that oil companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron and about a dozen others carried out a sophisticated, decades-long misinformation campaign to cover up what they knew about the dangers of climate change.There are some three dozen similar cases around the country, and recently Mr. Trump issued an executive order calling the lawsuits a threat to national security, saying they could lead to crippling damages. The hearings in Charleston were the first time lawyers had to grapple in a courtroom with the president’s assertions.Mr. Trump’s executive order was the opening salvo in a broad new attack by his administration against climate lawsuits targeting oil companies. Citing the executive order, the Justice Department this month filed unusual lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan seeking to prevent them from filing their own climate-change suits. (Hawaii filed its suit anyway, and Michigan’s attorney general has signaled that she will also be proceeding.)In court hearings in Charleston on Thursday and Friday, Judge Roger M. Young Sr. asked each side to weigh in on the order as they sparred over the companies’ motions to dismiss the case, which was filed in 2020.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Biden Is ‘Optimistic’ About Cancer Treatment in First Remarks Since Diagnosis

    The former president said on Friday that he was taking a single pill daily to treat aggressive prostate cancer.Former President Biden said on Friday afternoon that he was feeling good after beginning treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer.“The prognosis is good,” he said.“We’re working on everything. All the folks are optimistic,” he added, referring to his medical team. He said that one of the surgeons treating him was given the same diagnosis 32 years ago.Mr. Biden spoke to reporters after an event honoring veterans in New Castle, Del., making his first public remarks since May 18, when his office announced his illness and said the cancer had metastasized to the bone. Mr. Biden attended the event, which fell on the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Beau, with Beau’s son, Robert Biden II, who graduated from high school this week.Mr. Biden said that his treatment was “all a matter of taking a pill, one particular pill.”“The expectation is we’re going to be able to beat this,” he said.Mr. Biden’s cancer was given a Gleason score of 9. The score is used to describe how prostate cancers look under a microscope; 9 and 10 are the most aggressive.Mr. Biden, 82, left office in January as the oldest-serving president in American history.Asked about a new book, “Original Sin,” by the journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which details how Mr. Biden’s advisers curbed discussion of his age-related limitations in the run-up to the 2024 election, he responded tongue-in-cheek, saying, “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk.”He added that he “could beat the hell out of both of” the authors.Mr. Biden also said that he had no regrets for deciding to run for re-election, before ultimately dropping out. He responded to a question about Democrats who hold that he should not have by saying: “Why didn’t anyone run against me then?”“We have a lot going on, and I think we’re in a really difficult moment, not only in America, but in the world,” Mr. Biden quickly added. “I think that this is one of those inflection points in history.”He said that he was “very proud” of his time in office. “I put my record as president against any president at all,” he said. He added that leading presidential historians ranked his term highly, and that President Trump was rated last. More