US President Donald Trump geared up to unveil sweeping new "Liberation Day" tariffs on Wednesday in a move that threatens to ignite a devastating global trade war. Key US trading partners including the European Union and Britain said they were preparing their responses to Trump's escalation, as nervous markets fell in Europe and America. Trump will unveil the levies in a grand ceremony with his cabinet members in the White House Rose Garden -- just as Wall Street stocks close at 4:00 pm (2000 GMT). "IT'S LIBERATION DAY IN AMERICA!" Trump posted a one-liner on his Truth Social platform early Wednesday. The 78-year-old has promised so-called reciprocal tariffs on friends and foes alike if they target the world's largest economy, saying the levies will stop the United States being "ripped off." But Trump has kept the world guessing until the last minute about the scale and scope, with the White House saying he was still "perfecting"...
NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore thanked US President Donald Trump and SpaceX owner Elon Musk for their help in bringing them back from the International Space Station (ISS), where they stayed on for nine months after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft malfunctioned, turning a mission that was supposed to be short into a long one.
The two astronauts in an interview to Fox News said space flight is hard, and using new technology to try to further and better themselves is harder.
To a question on whether Boeing "screwed this up", Mr Wilmore said he does not want to point fingers at anyone.
"... In certain respects, we were stuck. In certain respects, maybe we were stranded. But based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten and all that, we were nowhere near any of that at all. So stuck, okay, we didn't get to come home the way we planned. So in one definition, we're stuck. But in the big scheme of things, we weren't stuck. We planned and trained," Mr Wilmore said.
Ms Williams said they prepped as if they were going to stay long while planning for the short mission.
"Our focus was on the mission, the Starliner portion of the mission, first flights, test flight. And that was our focus, but we trained for everything. Maintenance on station, science on station, spacewalks on station, robotics, arm work on station. We trained for it all. And we were prepared to do anything that we were asked of for a long duration," the Indian-origin astronaut said.
"Again, planning for one thing, preparing for other. And that's not unique to us. This is what a human space flight programme does. This is what each individual, the army that supports human space flight... that is passionate about human space flight... do. We plan for as many contingencies as we can dream up because this is a hard business. It's tough," Ms Williams said.
Mr Wilmore indicated it would be absolutely wrong to pin blame on anyone for what happened with their mission.
"... There are many questions that as the commander of CFT (crew flight test), I didn't ask. So I'm culpable. I'll admit that to the nation. There's things that I did not ask that I should have asked. I didn't know at the time I needed to ask them. But in hindsight, the signal, some of the signals were there. Is Boeing to blame? Are they culpable? Sure.
"Is NASA to blame? Are they culpable? Sure. Everybody has a piece in this because it did not come off. There were some shortcomings in tests, shortcomings in preparation that we did not foresee. So yeah, are there, could you point fingers? I don't want to point fingers. I hope nobody wants to point fingers. We don't want to look back and say, shame, shame, shame.
"We want to look forward and say, let's rectify what we've learned and let's make the future even more productive and better. That's the way that I look at it. I think the way the nation should look at it," Mr Wilmore said.
The two NASA Crew-9 astronauts returned to Earth on SpaceX's Dragon capsule on March 18.
President Trump alleged his predecessor Joe Biden abandoned the astronauts in space. On March 7, he announced he gave permission to Mr Musk to bring back the two American astronauts.
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