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Caring for the planet is one of those things that can seem out of our reach.
The problems are too big and complex to wrap our heads around. There aren’t any practical steps we can take in our
everyday lives. And there’s nothing we can really do to help anyway. Right?
Nope.
Every week, The New York Times’s Climate and Environment team publishes a newsletter called Climate Fwd:, which
gives you stories and insights about climate change, along with tips on what you can do.
In that spirit, we’re partnering with them this week to pull advice from a recurring featuring in their newsletter: One thing
you can do. Below are eight things that you — yes, you, the person reading this — can do to care for the planet.
(And, of course, click here to subscribe to the Climate Fwd: newsletter.)
Hang on to your smartphone
The little computer you carry with you requires a lot of energy to assemble. The production of an iPhone 6, for example,
released the equivalent of 178 pounds of carbon dioxide, or about as much as burning nine gallons of gas, according to
a 2015 study. Instead of buying a new phone, try to keep yours in working condition for as long as possible (here’s
some advice on how to extend its life). But if you must get rid of yours, recycle it or consider buying a used one.
Leave leaves
Leaves provide shelter for worms, moths and some butterflies, which then become prey for neighborhood birds. They
also help nourish and fertilize soil, and you won’t burn fossil fuels by using a lawn mower or leaf blower.
Use a dishwasher, not the sink
Dishwashers have improved over the years: Average models certified by the government’s Energy Star program use
3.5 gallons or less per cycle. Compare that with an efficient kitchen faucet, which pours 1.5 gallons of water per minute,
meaning that handwashing for four minutes nearly doubles the water use of a dishwasher. If you don’t have the luxury
of owning a dishwasher, try to do the two-bucket method: “When washing dishes by hand, don’t let the water run. Fill
one basin with wash water and the other with rinse water.”
Buy fewer clothes
Manufacturers use water and chemicals to dye and finish cotton clothes. Polyesters and nylons aren’t biodegradable. In
this age of fast fashion, it’s best to wear your clothes for a long, long time. (Buying secondhand helps, too.)
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Consider your online order, from click to carrier
When you’re shopping online, try to buy in bulk to reduce multiple deliveries, which can help cut carbon emissions from
delivery trucks. Research your items to avoid having to return them, and always recycle the boxes.
Divest from fossil fuel
Do your retirement funds or other investments include fossil-fuel companies? Divesting has become common in union,
city and state pension funds. In a 2018 report published by Arabella Advisors, a philanthropy services firm, 61 pension
funds have committed to divestment since 2016, bringing the total to 144. Consider adjusting your retirement fund, and
ask if your 401(k) can be fossil-fuel free.
Be mindful of your food waste
A massive amount of energy goes into producing the food we eat, especially meat and dairy. For example, the
production of a single hamburger uses the same amount of water as a 90-minute shower. And about 40 percent of food
in the United States is thrown away. To limit food waste when you’re hosting a get-together, use this “Guest-imator” to
calculate the amount of groceries you’ll need. Also check out the “Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook” for more help on
reducing food waste.
Tune your heating system
Most American homes are heated by furnaces or boilers, according to the Energy Department, and poorly maintained
systems can burn more oil or natural gas than is necessary. Hire a technician to inspect yours to make sure it’s running
efficiently and to cut down on indoor particulate matter. And if you have a boiler system that uses radiators, consider
installing an outdoor reset control, which modulates the radiator’s water temperature based on the temperature outside.
All of this can even result in direct savings for you: These small actions can knock down a heating bill by up to 10
percent.
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How Many Push-Ups Can You Do? It May Be a Good Predictor of Heart Health. Men who could get through 40 or more
push-ups had 96 percent less risk of heart problems in the next 10 years than those who quit at 10 or fewer.
9 Ways to Cut Down on Plastic. It’s all about reducing single-use plastics.
There Are No Towels? The Renter’s Lament. One of the most frustrating aspects of renting a vacation home online —
perhaps second only to a rental not resembling its photos or description — is what is missing.
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A weekly roundup of the best advice from The Times on living a better, smarter, more fulfilling life.
The Good-Enough Life. The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential.
6 Things to Bring to an All-Inclusive Resort. Along with your usual beach vacation gear, you’ll want to pack some
unexpected extras when you’re heading to an all-inclusive resort.
Tip of the Week
This week I’ve invited friend of S.L. Kara Cutruzzula, who writes my favorite daily newsletter, Brass Ring Daily, to tell us
when throwing money at a problem is the right move.
Call the neurologists, I’ve figured out the impossible: I’m buying back brain space.
This year, my goal is to streamline my life and habits. The first step is eliminating minor tasks and actions that suck up
time, energy and gray matter. My solution? Throwing money — small amounts, mind you — at problems.
And no, this isn’t just a cop-out to doing work: A 2017 study found that “spending money to save time may reduce
stress about the limited time in the day, thereby improving happiness.”
Here’s my strategy.
Buy common items in bulk
I’m done pretending that certain items I use every day will never run out (as all logic and experience would suggest).
After realizing “go to Target” was playing on a loop in my mind, I resolved to spend less time and mental energy
running errands for basic essentials. So I ordered embarrassingly large quantities online and got them delivered
instead. Now I have enough toilet paper, paper towels, tampons, oatmeal and coffee to carry me through to 2020.
Buy doubles
What do you use — or carry around — every day? I was transporting a wireless mouse to work for months before
realizing they cost $10 and that buying two would allow me to stop thinking about it altogether. Purchasing multiple
phone chargers also comes with minimal cost but maximum benefit. You can stop borrowing your colleague’s and
never worry about hovering at 12 percent again.
Buy help
Whether you hire someone to clean your home or install your new 4K TV, the point is this: Paying someone to perform
tasks that are always on your mind will get them done more quickly (and regularly) than if you try to do them yourself.
Then you can focus on literally anything else. Your brain will thank you.
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A railroad crossing in Nassau County turned into a chaotic disaster scene on Tuesday night when two Long Island
Rail Road trains traveling in opposite directions struck a car that had swerved around lowered gates and onto the
tracks, killing three people.
The rush-hour collision occurred near the Westbury station, about 30 miles east of Manhattan, setting off fires that
terrified passengers before they could escape. The authorities said that at least seven people on the trains were
injured; the three people who were killed were in the car.
After the driver of the vehicle went around the gates, an eastbound train pulling out of the station struck the car,
according to Phillip Eng, the president of the railroad.
Another train, traveling westbound, then crashed into the vehicle and pushed it down the tracks before the front two
cars of the train derailed and collided with the concrete platform.
By late into the night, the westbound train still lay against the Westbury station’s platform, part of which had been
knocked over.
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On Wednesday, the L.I.R.R. continued to have extensive delays because of the crash. In an early-morning report,
officials said the impact caused “significant damage” to 200 feet of third rail.
The two trains were together carrying about 900 passengers, and some offered a harrowing account of what
happened.
“It was like a bad movie,” said Michelle Asprer of Hicksville, N.Y., a passenger in the second-to-last car on the
eastbound train. “It was so scary.”
She said her train stopped after Westbury without explanation. “There was a whole line of cars” at the grade-level
crossing where the train stopped, she said.
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She said she heard a westbound train approaching and “making a funny noise.”
“It hit us,” she said. “It hit the last car” of the eastbound train, she said. “The people from the last car were running
up, saying ‘Move up, move up because the last car is on fire.’”
A passenger on the westbound train, Mike Picarella, 36, was in the back of the train when, around 7:20 p.m., he
heard “a little thump.” He said he didn’t think much of it, but seconds later, there was a second, bigger thump, he
said.
“You knew something happened,” Mr. Picarella said. “The train stopped.”
Realizing their train had hit something, the passengers stood up and then looked out the window, where they saw
another train. At first many wondered if they had hit it.
But there was a fire raging, too, flames knifing up from underneath the train, halfway up the windows. On the ground
below was half of a crumpled vehicle.
Within a minute of stopping, the train started filling up with smoke, Mr. Picarella said, and passengers were quickly
moved to the front. Eventually, the doors were opened to let the smoke out, he said, and passengers could then see
that a train car had peeled off the tracks.
Mr. Picarella, who is a maintenance manager for New York City Transit, praised the response of local emergency
responders and the police, who he said arrived within minutes of the crash, and got people off the train quickly.
Rescuers could not immediately identify the vehicle or its passengers because the car was damaged so severely,
said Commissioner Patrick Ryder of the Nassau County Police.
Mr. Eng said that the authorities often warned drivers about the dangers of trying to cross ahead of trains.
“You’re not only taking your own life into your hands, but you’re taking the lives of others into your own hands: our
engineers, our conductors, our customers and anyone else along the local road. It’s unfortunate,” Mr. Eng said.
Mr. Eng added that Wednesday morning service would undoubtedly be affected.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued a statement calling for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the State Police,
local law enforcement and the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate the crash.
“As we continue to gather information surrounding the incident, my heart goes out to the victims and their loved
ones,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Crashes at railroad crossings have occurred with surprising regularity in the New York region over the last decade,
federal data show.
At the same time, the number of accidents and fatalities at these crossings has fallen nationally, as grade crossings
have been eliminated and safety improvements made, according to safety groups.
In 2015, a crowded Metro-North train passing through Westchester County at the height of the evening rush
slammed into a sport utility vehicle on the tracks at a crossing, killing seven people.
The crash in Westbury was the second fatal encounter on the railroad on Tuesday. At about 3:45 p.m., a westbound
train struck and killed a pedestrian between the stations in Baldwin and Freeport, said Chris McKniff, a spokesman
for the L.I.R.R. That accident caused long delays for commuters who were trying to get home from Pennsylvania
Station in Manhattan.
Mr. McKniff said service had been restored around 5:45 p.m., about an hour before the crash in Westbury.
Jorge Ramos: The Dictator of Venezuela Earns His Title
Nicolás Maduro stole my television crew’s cameras and expelled me from the country, all because he was afraid of
an interview.
I was expelled from Venezuela on Tuesday after a contentious interview with Nicolás Maduro, the country’s
strongman. He stood up in the middle of our conversation and his security agents confiscated our television
cameras, the memory cards and our cellphones. Yes, Mr. Maduro stole the interview so nobody could watch it.
We got the interview the old fashion way: by making a phone call and requesting it. A producer from Univision — the
television network where I’ve worked since 1984 — contacted the government’s communications minister, Jorge
Rodríguez, and asked if Mr. Maduro wanted to do the interview. The leader said: “Come to Caracas.” And so we did,
with official entry papers in hand.
The interview started on Monday evening, three hours late, at the Miraflores Palace. Mr. Maduro had spoken a few
minutes before with Tom Llamas of ABC News, and he seemed to be in a good mood. The humanitarian aid that the
political opposition — with the help of an international coalition — had tried to get into the country over the
Colombian and Brazilian borders had been largely stopped, and Mr. Maduro felt emboldened. This was supposed to
be a good day.
But it wasn’t. The first question I asked Mr. Maduro was whether I should call him “Presidente” or “Dictador,” as
many Venezuelans do. I confronted him about human rights violations and cases of torture that have been reported
by Human Rights Watch, and with the existence of political prisoners. I questioned his claim that he had won the
2013 and the 2018 presidential elections without fraud and, most important, his assurances that Venezuela was not
experiencing a humanitarian crisis. That’s when I opened up my iPad…
The day before I had recorded on my cellphone three young men looking for food on the back of a garbage truck in
a poor neighborhood minutes away from the presidential palace. I showed those images to Mr. Maduro. Each frame
contradicted his narrative of a prosperous and progressive Venezuela 20 years after the revolution. That’s when he
broke.
About 17 minutes into the interview, Mr. Maduro stood up, comically tried to block the images on my iPad and
declared that the interview was over. “That’s what dictators do,” I told him.
A few seconds after Mr. Maduro left, Mr. Rodríguez, the communications minister, told me that his government had
not authorized the interview and he ordered his security agents to confiscate my team’s four cameras and other
equipment and the video cards on which we had recorded the conversation.
Somebody shouted to take me out of the presidential palace immediately, but instead two security agents escorted
me to a little room where they ordered me to give them my cellphone and its password. They were concerned that I
had recorded the audio of the interview and they didn’t want any leaks. But I refused.
Soon after, my colleague María Martínez, one of the best producers in the country, was thrown into the same room.
María, to the security agents’ frustration, managed to make a quick phone call to Univision News’s president, who
warned the State Department and many news organizations about what was happening. The rest of our team, I later
learned — five Univision employees — were taken to the press room, and then out to a government bus.
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In our little room, someone turned off all the lights, and a group of agents came in and forcefully took away my
cellphone and my backpack. They furiously went through all my personal stuff. They patted me down from head to
toe. María went through the same humiliating experience with a female officer. I asked if we were being detained.
They said no — but still they didn’t let us leave the room.
Finally they told María and me to join our colleagues on the bus. They said they wanted to take us to our hotel. But
we refused again. At that point we were very concerned about our safety and the possibility of being taken to a
detention center or an even darker place.
We were taken to the street, where Mr. Rodríguez came out to complain about the interview and the way we had
conducted ourselves. I told him that our job was to ask questions, and that they had stolen our interview and our
equipment. By then, we later realized, the first reports about our detention were already being published. They
couldn’t keep it a secret anymore. It was about 9:30 p.m., more than two hours after the end of the interview.
Our driver, who had been waiting all this time on one of the side streets, suddenly appeared. At that point, the same
people who had detained us wanted us to leave. Fast. And so we did.
We piled into the car and went back to the hotel. Members of the government’s intelligence agency cordoned off the
hotel so we couldn’t leave. A few hours later, an immigration official came to inform us that we would be expelled
from the country in the morning. Around 1 a.m., a self-described “captain” — one of the men who had detained me
at the presidential palace — came to my room and returned my cellphone in a plastic bag. All of its contents had
been deleted. I assume they had first hacked into whatever they could.
We experienced only a taste of the harassment and abuse that Venezuelan journalists have been suffering for
years. We have two Venezuelans in our crew — the correspondent Francisco Urreiztieta and the cameraman Edgar
Trujillo — and they would have faced terrible risks if they stayed in their own country. Luckily, we all made it safely
back to Miami. But our cameras and the records of our interview remained behind.
What is Mr. Maduro so afraid of? He should release the interview for the world to see. If he does not, all he has
proved is that he is behaving exactly like a dictator.
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busines: China Shifts, and Detroit’s Big Bet Goes Sour
Chrysler, Ford and General Motors saw a booming Chinese driving culture and cheap labor. Now the market is
slowing, competition is rising and the Trump administration wants limits.

CHONGQING, China — For Detroit, China once meant opportunity. The country’s growing ranks of drivers bought
cars by the millions. Its cheap labor gave American automakers dreams of someday exporting their Chinese-made
cars to the United States. The Big Three bet billions of dollars there.
Now China’s place in the world is shifting, and that bet is starting to sour.
Chinese consumers are buying fewer cars as the country’s economy slows. Local competitors have raised their
game. Many young people would rather use ride-sharing services similar to Uber than own vehicles themselves.
And if the Trump administration’s trade hawks have their way, China won’t make many cars for Americans. As
Washington and Beijing haggle over a deal to end their trade war, the hawks are defending tariffs, imposed by
President Trump last year, that would make it expensive to sell Chinese-made cars — including those with American
brands — in the United States.
China’s slowdown presents the most immediate problem. Some of Detroit’s Chinese factories have slowed to a
crawl. In the inland metropolis of Chongqing, where Ford builds cars like the compact Focus, three big assembly
plants have been running at less than one-fifth of capacity. Ford’s joint venture in Chongqing has quietly begun
dismissing thousands of its 20,000 workers. Seven Zhou, a 32-year-old worker who assembled transmissions, lost
his job last month. His paychecks had already shrunk by two-thirds because he was working fewer hours. He quit
smoking to pay for food and rent, and the family is struggling to pay for the after-school English and math lessons
his son needs for a chance at college.
“I do not have much education,” Mr. Zhou said. “I had hoped my child would not be like me, the bottom level of
labor.”
As China transforms, many global businesses are struggling to adapt. China’s economy has matured and can no
longer match the sky-high growth rates of its go-go years. The Chinese government is trying to cope with all the debt
accumulated to pay for that growth. Initiatives that could juice the economy have slowed.
The rest of the world has begun to fundamentally rethink its dependence on China to make much of what the world
consumes. Some within the Trump administration see China as an existential threat to core American industries like
autos, much as it has come to dominate production of solar panels, steel and aluminum. There have long been
doubts among automakers and consumers about whether cars made in China could measure up to those produced
in America. But with the gap in quality narrowing, companies in China and the United States have begun to explore
the possibility.
General Motors, which began exporting the Buick Envision from China to the United States in 2016, has been
pleading since last summer without success for the Trump administration to exempt it from a 25 percent tariff
imposed on Chinese-made cars. Ford announced in the summer of 2017 that it would move Focus production to
China from Michigan, only to cancel those plans as the political landscape changed in the United States.
Exports from China to the United States of Detroit-brand cars are “a no-fly zone,” said Michael Dunne, the chief
executive of ZoZo Go, an automotive consulting firm in San Diego. “It’s just too politically sensitive.”
Detroit’s fortunes in China could still improve. A final trade deal could leave the door open to Chinese exports. The
Chinese government could take steps to rev up domestic growth or empower its consumers to buy cars.
“A stronger economy will lead to stronger auto sales,” said Irene Shen, a General Motors spokeswoman.
But for now, Detroit’s Big Three are struggling in China — particularly Ford.
Business from Detroit has helped China become both the world’s largest maker and its largest buyer of cars. Much
of the global auto parts industry has moved there as well, making it especially convenient to manufacture cars in
China.
Drawn by the country’s rapid development and consumer revolution, G.M. invested about $10 billion. It now makes
and sells more cars through its Chinese joint ventures than it does in the United States. Ford, which came later,
invested as much as $5 billion.
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‘Executing Babies’: Here Are the Facts Behind Trump’s Misleading Abortion Tweet
Infants are rarely born alive after abortion procedures, and if they are, doctors do not kill them.
The latest battle in the nation’s continuing war over abortion involves a federal bill called the Born-Alive Abortion
Survivors Protection Act. Senate Democrats this week blocked the bill from reaching a vote, and President Trump
responded with an angry tweet. What would the bill do?
The bill would require doctors to use all means available to save the life of a child born alive after an attempted
abortion. They must, it says, “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life
and health of the child” as they would for “any other child born alive at the same gestational age.”
Senator Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican who is the author of the bill, had called it an “infanticide ban.”
Opponents said that the bill was aimed at discouraging doctors from performing legal abortions and that it was
unnecessary because a similar law already exists, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002.
How often are infants born alive after attempted abortions?
It hardly ever happens, according to Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive
sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He performs abortions and is a spokesman for the American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, where he leads a committee on health care for underserved women.
A healthy fetus becomes viable — potentially able to survive outside the womb — at about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Only about 1.3 percent of abortions in the United States in 2015 were performed in or after the 21st week of
pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Less than 1 percent of all abortions are
done after 24 weeks, and many are performed because the fetus has a fatal condition or the pregnant woman’s life
or health is at severe risk.
If an abortion is performed at 20 weeks or later, a drug may be injected to stop the fetal heartbeat before the fetus
comes out of the womb, Dr. Grossman said. In other cases, suction devices and other instruments end the fetus’s
life before it is removed, he said.