Subterms
<!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> [–> <!–>Whatever. Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill. In the entire history of […] More
If President Trump cancels the contracts for Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company, the federal government would struggle to achieve many goals in orbit and beyond.In 2006, a small, little-known company named Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — SpaceX, for short — won a NASA contract to ferry cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.At that moment, SpaceX had not yet launched anything to orbit and would not succeed until two years later with its tiny Falcon 1 rocket. But since then, the Elon Musk-founded company has become the linchpin of all American civilian and military spaceflight.It started in 2010 with the launch of the first Falcon 9 rocket. By 2012 the launcher was sending cargo to the space station.NASA money helped finance the development of the Falcon 9, and SpaceX capitalized on the NASA seal of approval to entice companies to launch their satellites with SpaceX.It became the Southwest Airlines of the rocket industry, selling launches and hauling satellites into orbit at a lower price than most other rockets then available.That story repeated during the Obama administration when SpaceX won a contract to take astronauts to the space station, which it did for the first time in May 2020 during the first administration of President Trump.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
Adrian Johnson opens our solving weekend.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — This is Adrian Johnson’s 12th crossword in The New York Times, and he seems to enjoy hanging out at the end of the week. Eight of Mr. Johnson’s puzzles were published on Fridays or Saturdays and, if you are just joining us, the crosswords on those days run without themes.There are pros and cons to constructing themeless crosswords. Pros include having more open space in which to place those lengthy, wonderful entries (as long as you can keep your black square count down) and not needing to come up with and polish a theme. The primary con is that it’s tough to get a themeless puzzle published these days. Only two are published each week, and the bar is extremely high. The result is that you may have a long wait before your puzzle sees the light of day.Fortunately for us, Mr. Johnson’s puzzle cleared the bar. His long entries and quadruple stacks in the northeast and southwest are lively, and there’s a decent amount of wordplay in the clues.Tricky Clues4A. Very slick, Mr. Johnson, but you can’t fool us with [Adviser to an acting president?]. The word “acting” refers to a dramatic performance (as in Martin Sheen’s portrayal of President Bartlet in “The West Wing.” The answer is DRAMA COACH.17A. ATTA, or whole wheat flour, is [one of two ingredients used to make chapati]. The other ingredient is water, although oil and salt may be added. Want to make the Indian flatbread known as chapati? Here’s a recipe from New York Times Cooking.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
What happens when two billionaires with huge followings on social media start a public feud? Great memes.It was a messy divorce, and the internet was watching from the sidelines. So of course, the memes were out in full force.As the relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk unraveled publicly on Thursday, bystanders flooded social media with memes comparing them to the main figures in some of the most legendary feuds, including the teenage frenemies of “Mean Girls” and the rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar.“The big beautiful bill led to the big beautiful breakup,” one person observed on X, Mr. Musk’s social media platform, referring to the disagreement over Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill that set off the clash. An X account devoted to political jokes posted a doctored image of an iPhone emergency alert: “THE GIRLS ARE CRASHING OUTTTTT,” it announced.It’s “like Kendrick v. Drake but with two Drakes,” another X user posted, comparing Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk to the rapper who was perceived as having definitively lost his feud with Mr. Lamar after Mr. Lamar performed a diss track at the Super Bowl in February.Other scenarios recast Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk as a divorced couple sharing custody of their child, Vice President JD Vance; supermarket lobsters being egged on to fight; and two monkeys engaged in a knife fight surrounded by cheering spectators clutching fistfuls of money — a scene from a 2000 episode of “The Simpsons.”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
The worker, a 43-year-old man, was trapped under the fallen roof in an extension behind a former restaurant in Brooklyn, the Buildings Department said.A construction worker died in Brooklyn on Thursday after a roof collapsed at the site of a former steakhouse where demolition work was being conducted without the required permits, according to the New York City Department of Buildings.Around 8:50 a.m., someone at the scene called 9-1-1 about a partial building collapse, the police said. Emergency medical workers found a 43-year-old man trapped under the fallen roof, unconscious. He was in critical condition when he was taken to Brookdale Hospital, where he later died, the police said. The worker’s name had not been released Thursday evening pending notification of his family.The work site was at the corner of Quentin Road and East 33rd Street in Brooklyn’s Marine Park neighborhood. A two-story structure there once housed a restaurant called T Fusion Steakhouse, which has closed. The structural failure happened in a concrete extension behind the building, which had been used for storage, according to the Buildings Department, which is investigating the incident.Workers had been demolishing a walk-in freezer and commercial kitchen, the department said, but no permits for the work had been filed with the city. Utility service to the building was shut off after the collapse, and inspectors with the Buildings Department ordered that the building be vacated and all work ceased.The Buildings Department posted a vacate order and a stop-work order on the building.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesThe Fire Department has requested an inspection to determine the building’s structural stability, according to public records.The building was bought in 2020 for $1.1 million by LA3223 LLC, which is owned by Larry Leiby Ackerman, according to property records. Since then, the only complaint on file with the Buildings Department about the site before Thursday was one filed last April, warning that balcony doors on the second floor of the vacant building were open to birds and trespassers, and that the backyard was full of garbage.The problems were resolved before inspectors arrived, according to department records, and the complaint was closed. A person who answered the phone at a number listed for Mr. Ackerman hung up when reached on Thursday evening.Alain Delaquérière More
Air defense crews in the capital were racing to combat a large-scale bombardment before dawn on Friday, officials said. Explosions rocked Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, before dawn on Friday as air defense crews raced to combat a large-scale Russian bombardment, the authorities said. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russia had begun launching ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones at the capital and other cities overnight. Multiple fires were reported across Kyiv, including at a 16-story apartment block. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least three people had been injured, and officials cautioned that the toll could rise as the attack was still underway. Russia has launched more than 1,000 drones per week at military and civilian targets in Ukraine in recent months, including more than 300 in a single night last week. On Wednesday, Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, warned President Trump that his country would retaliate against Ukraine for its audacious drone attack last weekend on airfields across Russia, according to Mr. Trump. On Thursday, Mr. Trump compared Russia and Ukraine to two fighting children who needed to work out their differences before their bloody war could end. “Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart,” he said in the Oval Office as Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, urged him to leverage the power of the United States to end the conflict. Mr. Trump avoided answering a question about whether he was willing to increase pressure on Russia. The Kremlin has repeatedly resisted his calls for an unconditional cease-fire. Since the beginning of this year, the Russian military has carried out attacks against Ukraine using nearly 27,700 aerial bombs, almost 11,200 Shahed drones, around 9,000 other attack strike drones and more than 700 missiles, including ballistic ones, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday. “This is the pace of Russian strikes, and they deliberately set this tempo from the very first days of the full-scale war,” Mr. Zelensky said. “Russia has restructured its entire state, society, and economy to be able to kill people in other countries on a massive scale and with impunity.” Before the overnight bombardment, Russia launched high-explosive aerial bombs at the center of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson on Thursday morning, partially destroying the Regional State Administration building and damaging several surrounding structures. On Wednesday night, the Russians attacked the city of Pryluky in the northeastern Chernihiv region, killing at least five people, including a 1-year-old baby, Ukrainian officials said. More
Carrie’s long-distance “situationship” with Aidan becomes frustrating in ways she didn’t anticipate.Season 3, Episode 2: ‘The Rat Race’Here in the real world, it’s a common refrain from single people that dating apps are as tired as the tiramisu Seema’s date orders for her without asking. Everyone is sick of the swiping, the ghosting and the serial situationships. The virtual-first connections that seem essential to dating in 2025 have never played a major role in the “Sex and the City” franchise, mostly because the majority of this decades-spanning story has predated all that.But Carrie’s former neighbor Lisette (Katerina Tannenbaum) shows up at the beginning of Episode 2 to reflect that cultural shift, lamenting to Carrie that, as a single woman of today, she is mostly in a relationship with her phone. Turns out, throwing it across a room may be a more effective way of it helping you meet someone.Some of the characters, though, regardless of age, are no better than Lisette when it comes to phone addiction.Starting with our star, Carrie is in something of a love-hate relationship with texting Aidan. Now that Aidan has cracked the communication door ajar, Carrie feels slightly more empowered to reach out to her “boyfriend.” (I insist on putting that in quotes because while Carrie may use that word to refer to Aidan, at this point, I simply refuse.)First, Carrie drafts a long, meandering voice text to Aidan about a newly-discovered rat infestation in her garden, but she deletes it before sending. Considering Aidan’s request for no contact (or at least very limited contact), she determines it is best to leave him alone.But without any such regard for the rules he set himself, Aidan lights his no-contact contract on fire with a surprise appearance at Carrie’s Gramercy townhouse, to her delight.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
The Trump administration appears to have relied on a variety of considerations as it put together its latest restrictions.President Trump said on Thursday that his new travel ban against a dozen mostly African and Middle Eastern countries “can’t come soon enough.” He argued the ban would help prevent terrorist attacks and keep out those who overstay their visas.But even by that logic, Mr. Trump’s ban is rife with contradictions.“There’s no consistent set of criteria that would lead you to these 19 countries,” said Doug Rand, a former immigration official in the Biden administration, referring to the 12 countries and seven others that face restrictions but not a full ban. “You have a bunch of countries that seem to be politically motivated and then a bunch of random countries with a fig leaf of data to support their conclusion.”The order, which goes into effect on Monday, bans travel to the United States by citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. And it limits travel from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. It includes some exemptions, including people with existing visas.Mr. Trump argued that the timing of the ban was spurred by a recent attack in Colorado on a group honoring hostages being held in Gaza in which an Egyptian man has been arrested and charged.But Egypt — which is both a military partner and a critical mediator in negotiations between Israel and Hamas — was not on the travel ban list. Also omitted were nations that national security officials have long treated as pariahs, including Syria, where Mr. Trump has recently sought to improve relations.Mr. Rand and other immigration experts noted that nations home to a higher number of people who overstay visas were left off the list.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
