NASA / JPL-Caltech / Jason Major
For the first time in history, humankind has taken flight on another planet. Millions of miles from Earth, on an alien world with a wisp-thin atmosphere, a tiny helicopter rose into the air, hovered for 39 seconds, and then gently touched back down on the surface of Mars.Today’s historic flight is a tremendous feat of engineering and a marvelous display of—as the aircraft is named—ingenuity.
Joe Biden spent the bulk of his adult life running for president or auditioning to be president. Now he is president, and yet the notion that he might walk away from the job while he still has a choice in the matter remains a source of undimmed speculation rare in the postwar era. No one seriously believed that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or any president over the past half century would forgo a second term as long as there was the faintest hope of winning one.
Amid nationwide protests over police abuse, we speak with Cariol Horne, the Buffalo police officer whom a New York court has just vindicated for stopping a fellow cop from choking a handcuffed Black man during an arrest. In 2006, Horne, who is Black, saw a white officer repeatedly punching the man in the face before putting him in a chokehold. After Horne heard the man say “I can’t breathe,” she intervened by grabbing the officer’s arm.
We speak with the lawyer for a lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps who is suing two Virginia police officers who pepper-sprayed him, pushed him to the ground and pointed their guns at him during a traffic stop at a gas station last December. Video of the encounter has gone viral and shows Caron Nazario, who is a Black and Latino man, was wearing his Army uniform during the stop. When Nazario says he’s afraid to get out of his car, one officer responds, “You should be.
As protests continue in Chicago and nationwide over the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, we get an update from community activist and independent journalist Mateo Zapata, who says, “People in Chicago are just tired of seeing Black and Brown youth murdered by police.” Released bodycam video showed Adam had his hands up in the air when he was shot by an officer.
Parenting advice on strong toddlers, grandparent introductions, and gift-giving worries.
If the financial and crypto markets are going to be so dumb, count me in.
Just impressively terrible.
Weighing the evidence in a late-pandemic mystery.
Relocation incentives get lots of buzz.
A year of trying everything to survive the pandemic.
The current investigation could intensify concerns by state officials that the public will lose overall confidence in Covid-19 vaccines.
“It’s been a steep learning curve” for Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, said one senior administration official.
Fetal tissue research has been used in the development of numerous vaccines and treatments, including for Parkinson’s, HIV and Covid-19.
Updated at 6:40 p.m. ET on April 17, 2021.In the trailer for Amazon’s new horror series, Them, Diana Ross’s “Home” soundtracks a tender scene: A Black husband and wife in the 1950s survey their new house in wonder and dance in the living room with their two daughters. “When I think of home / I think of a place where there’s love overflowing,” Ross sings. But, as in the song, the tenor of the trailer changes.
The numbers signal the U.S. is well on its way toward a revival, one that’s widely expected to reach record levels of growth later this year.
The president’s team is preparing a $3 trillion spending proposal to power through Congress. They’re betting markets and the economy will cooperate long enough to pass it.
Structural inequities in the U.S. labor market that have affected Black and Hispanic workers’ ability to advance out of low-paying jobs, as well as discrimination in hiring practices, are also likely having an effect.
The United States has imposed new sanctions on Russia and expelled 10 Russian diplomats after the Biden administration accused Moscow of being involved in major cyberattacks. The Treasury Department claimed Russia interfered in the 2020 election and was behind the SolarWinds hack, which compromised the computer systems of nine U.S. government agencies and scores of private companies. The sanctions target 32 Russian entities and individuals and bar U.S.
In the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a key witness for the defense was the former Maryland chief medical examiner, Dr. David Fowler, who contradicted most other expert witnesses in the trial and suggested heart trouble and other issues, not the police restraint, caused George Floyd’s death.
Protesters in Chicago took to the streets to condemn the police killing of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latinx boy, after bodycam video released by the Chicago police showed Toledo had his hands up in the air when a police officer shot him dead on March 29. Police initially described the incident as an “armed confrontation,” but the video shows Toledo raised his hands after being ordered to do so.
U.S. health officials have delayed a decision on whether to resume the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine after reports of blood clots in six women who received doses. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital, says it’s “prudent” to investigate reports of blood clots but notes the issue “is very rare” and unlikely to cause more than a temporary delay.
The contest to succeed Donald Trump at the head of the Republican Party is on.
“We’ve all agreed for a long time that we need to invest more in American infrastructure, we just disagree about how to pay for it,” Sen. Chris Coons said.
“There’s a lot of confusion in the Twitterverse about that,” the Texas senator confessed.
In the news today: Employees of conspiracy network OAN dish to The New York Times. The primary calendar fights continue. And Texas Republicans get an earful.
In 2013, my next-door neighbor in college planned to kill everyone in my building. He had 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and four bombs he had made in his room. We shared a wall.
The police found he had been planning this for months. He pulled the fire alarm so that all the students would exit their rooms, and he planned to open fire and kill them all. When this was happening, I was at my then-boyfriend’s apartment three miles away.
“Please put aside all the harsh rhetoric about immigration. Please put aside tryin’ to score political points,” urged the former president.
I knew this would happen.
If you are a lawyer representing, say, a voting machine manufacturer suing the Trump-centric propagandist conspiracy network known as OAN, you probably already have today’s New York Times story on the network printed out, all the interesting bits highlighted. In an examination of OAN’s continued misinformation, disinformation, and genuine frontier gibberish, Times reporter Rachel Abrams drops a few intriguing little tidbits from inside Fort Alwaystrump.