Yxxx,2017-04-28,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
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National Edition
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VOL. CLXVI . . . No. 57,581
FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2017
© 2017 The New York Times Company
Printed in Chicago
$2.50
Trump’s Plan
FOR G.O.P., DEFICIT
Shifts Trillions TAKES A BACK SEAT
To Wealthiest
TO CUTTING TAXES
Despite Lack of Details,
Impact Is Clear
REVERSAL ON PRIORITIES
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS
and PATRICIA COHEN
JOSHUA BRIGHT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Brooklyn United Marching Band performed Thursday at the grand opening of the first span of the new Kosciuszko Bridge.
STRANDS OF STEEL In Execution, Health Law Repeal Will Miss
Trump’s 100-Day Target Date
SOAR OVER WATER A Community
Seeks Solace
By THOMAS KAPLAN and ROBERT PEAR
3 Cable-Stayed Bridges
Rising in New York
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
New York, the city of perpetual
arrival, is getting three new gateways: diaphanous cable-stayed
bridges that look almost too ethereal to bear the load of thousands
of vehicles and people each day.
They are already transforming
the skyline. With luck, they may
even improve the drive.
In the last half-century, while
New York was out of the bridgebuilding business, cable-stayed
bridges were proliferating around
the world. They were relatively
easy and economical to build. And
they almost couldn’t help but look
beautiful, with their slender pylons and radiating cables.
It’s as though a race of giant
harp makers had been roaming
JAKE NAUGHTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The old Kosciuszko Bridge, in
background, will be destroyed.
the planet, threading it together
with gossamer strands of steel.
They simply hadn’t reached
New York — until now.
On Thursday night, traffic between Brooklyn and Queens is to
begin crossing the Newtown
Creek on the first of two parallel
cable-stayed bridges that are replacing the deeply loathed Kosciuszko Bridge, an ungainly 78year-old trusswork contraption.
Rather than being enmeshed in
a creaky Erector Set, drivers on
the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will travel between two tapered concrete pylons that rise
from the Brooklyn shore and open
like arms to embrace the sky. Just
56 cables, splayed outward from
the pylons, support the six-lane
bridge deck, which is 90 feet
above mean high water — or 35
feet lower than the current bridge,
which required infamously steep
approach ramps.
Continued on Page A28
By ALAN BLINDER
and MANNY FERNANDEZ
STAR CITY, Ark. — James
Hawkins, the affable local coroner,
has long performed a grim duty on
execution nights: He pronounces
the deaths of the condemned
prisoners. He has done it more
than two dozen times.
Mr. Hawkins anticipated declaring another man dead on
Thursday night, when Arkansas
planned to execute its fourth
prisoner in seven days. Seventeen
years after pronouncing the death
of a murder victim and family
friend, Cecil Boren, Mr. Hawkins
expected to do the same for Mr.
Boren’s killer, Kenneth D.
Williams.
“It’s a satisfying moment,” Mr.
Hawkins said in an interview at a
funeral home in this largely rural
patch of southeast Arkansas,
where prisons and produce are
about all that power the local
economy. “What I’ve heard nonstop in this community — this entire community — is: ‘This is the
one we’re waiting on.’”
The death chamber in nearby
Varner is Arkansas’s ultimate
clearinghouse for capital cases,
the site of all of the state’s executions in the modern era of the
American death penalty. The area
is one of the country’s sparsely
populated death chamber locales,
places of peculiar notoriety whose
very names can be statewide
shorthand for capital punishment
and hard prison time: Angola,
La.; Parchman, Miss.; Raiford,
Fla.
But it is exceptionally rare for
any such place to hold an execution for a crime committed in the
area. And no case connected to
Arkansas’s recent spate of executions, when the state intended to
put eight inmates to death over
less than two weeks, was more locally resonant than the one that
involved Mr. Boren, a former Internal Revenue Service worker
who had been an assistant warden
at the Cummins Unit, the prison
where Mr. Williams awaited his
execution. Mr. Boren’s nickname
was “Pee-Wee,” and Mr. Williams
murdered him after escaping
from the prison.
“I personally know part of the
Boren family, and, of course, naturally we empathize with them,”
said Charles R. Knight, the mayor
of nearby Grady, where the city
Continued on Page A25
WASHINGTON — An 11th-hour
White House push to give President Trump a major legislative
victory in his first 100 days in office broke down late Thursday as
House Republican leaders failed
to round up enough votes for their
bill to repeal the Affordable Care
Act.
Some White House officials had
hoped for a vote on Friday on a
measure to prove that Mr. Trump
was making good on his promise
to undo the sweeping health law
— President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement —
in his first 100 days in office.
But seesawing commitments
and the reservations from numerous lawmakers throughout Thursday laid bare the difficulty that Republican leaders faced in trying to
push through a repeal bill. While
revisions to their bill won over the
conservative hard-liners in the
Stories From Weimar
A German city’s asylum-seekers and
natives face a tough adjustment despite
projects linking them, above. PAGE A10
A Cozy Perch for Populists
Right-wing politicians happily attack
the European Union — while pocketing
pay as the bloc’s legislators.
PAGE A12
This article is by Binyamin Appelbaum, Alan Rappeport and Nicholas Fandos.
WASHINGTON — From an office high above Manhattan, the
billionaire Peter G. Peterson has
warned for years that the federal
government is borrowing too
much money. So have other Republican grandees, like former
Senator Alan K. Simpson, who
made dire predictions about the
federal debt in a 2010 report. Republicans in Congress have been
eager to sing from the same hymnal so long as a Democrat was in
the White House.
But when Republicans take
charge, their fiscal rectitude
sometimes starts to waver. The
broad Republican support this
week for President Trump’s plan
to sharply reduce taxes suggests
that those who hang on to austere
concerns about debt will now be
facing former allies who want to
chase economic growth.
Some Republicans are rallying
around the idea that less taxation
is more important than less debt,
just as they did during the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. That
shift is a break with the die-hard
hawks of the anti-deficit industrial
complex, who have long warned of
calamitous consequences to the
American economy.
“This is about math, not mystery and magic,” said Mr. Simpson, who was a chairman of President Barack Obama’s bipartisan
commission on the federal debt in
2010. “It’s madness to think that
you can have a tax cut without
some reduction in spending or
some increase in revenue.”
Mr. Trump’s proposal, while
short on details, calls for cutting
Continued on Page A18
COURT INTERVENTION Legal principles meant to curb executive over-
reach are indifferent to a president’s party. PAGE A24
HARDBALL AND CONFUSION President Trump said a deal on Nafta was
“very possible,” hours after aides indicated he would scrap it. PAGE A21
STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES
President Trump and Melania Trump with President Mauricio Macri and Juliana Awada Macri of Argentina on Thursday.
Pentagon Is Investigating Whether Flynn Hid Foreign Payment
By EMMARIE HUETTEMAN
and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
WASHINGTON — Michael T.
Flynn, the former national security adviser, was explicitly told in
2014 to seek approval for any payments he accepted from a foreign
government, documents released
on Thursday show.
But a year later, he was paid
$45,000 by a Kremlin-backed
news organization to give a
speech in Moscow, an arrangement lawmakers say he failed to
disclose the next month when he
submitted paperwork to renew
his security clearance.
The disclosure on Thursday
also included a letter showing that
the Defense Department’s inspector general opened an investigation this spring into whether Mr.
Flynn failed to properly report a
payment from a foreign government.
As a retired military intelli-
gence officer, Mr. Flynn was required to vet all foreign payments
with the Pentagon and the State
Department, according to an October 2014 letter that was released
as lawmakers investigate allegations of ties between President
Trump’s associates and the Russian government.
The April 11 letter from the inspector general did not specify
what payment from a foreign government was at issue. But Mr.
Flynn is known to have been paid
more than $45,000 by RT, the
Kremlin-financed news network,
to give a speech in Moscow in December 2015.
More than two months after Mr.
Flynn was fired as national security adviser, his links to Moscow
continue to bedevil the Trump administration, which itself has been
dogged by reports of ties between
Russian officials and the president’s associates. The Senate and
House Intelligence Committees
Continued on Page A24
NATIONAL A13-25
BUSINESS DAY B1-7
SPORTSFRIDAY B8-13
Die-Off of Whales Baffles
Hannity Defends Fox Leader
Return to Offense in Draft
An inquiry has begun after 41 humpback whales have been found dead
along the Atlantic coast.
PAGE A13
Sean Hannity appeared to yoke himself
to the fate of the embattled Fox News
executive Bill Shine in a series of extraordinary Twitter posts.
PAGE B1
Offense ruled in the opening round of
the N.F.L. Draft, after years of focus on
linemen and defense.
PAGE B8
Amends in a 1949 Case
INTERNATIONAL A4-12
Freedom Caucus this week, those
same changes threatened to drive
away other members, even some
who supported the first version.
At least 18 House Republicans
oppose the latest version of the
bill, the American Health Care
Act, and leaders can lose no more
than 22 to win passage if all members vote.
“We’re going to go when we
have the votes,” said Speaker Paul
D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who added
that Republicans would not be
constrained by “some artificial
deadline.”
House Democrats, sensing an
advantage, pressured Republicans to once again back away
from the bill, just as they did a
month ago in an embarrassing defeat for Mr. Trump and Mr. Ryan.
Democratic leaders threatened to
Continued on Page A22
WASHINGTON — President
Trump’s proposal to slash individual and business taxes and erase a
surtax that funds the Affordable
Care Act would amount to a multitrillion-dollar shift from federal
coffers to America’s richest families and their heirs, setting up a
politically fraught battle over how
best to use the government’s already strained resources.
The outline that Mr. Trump offered on Wednesday — less a tax
overhaul plan than a list of costly
cuts with no price tags attached,
rushed out by a president staring
down his 100-day mark in office —
calls for tax reductions for individuals of every income level as well
as businesses large and small.
But the vast majority of benefits
would accrue to the highest
earners and largest holders of
wealth, according to economists
and analysts, accounting for a lopsided portion of the proposal’s
costs.
“The only Americans who are
very clear winners under the new
system are the wealthiest,” said
Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and former chief of
staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, which estimates
the revenue effects of tax proposals.
Repealing the estate tax, for example, would affect just 5,300 or
so fortunes a year. For 2017, couples can shield up to $11 million of
their estates from any taxation,
leaving only the largest inheritances subject to taxation. Repealing the estate tax alone would
cost an estimated $174.2 billion
over a decade, the nonpartisan
Tax Policy Center said.
Reducing the rate on capital
gains, noncorporate business
taxes and those in the highest
bracket, as well as repealing the
alternative minimum tax, would
also ease the burden on wealthier
Continued on Page A19
Bending to Back Trump,
but Some Maintain
Hawkish Stance
Florida apologized for the mistreatment
and wrongful convictions of four black
men in a white woman’s rape. PAGE A13
A Hardware Renaissance
NEW YORK A26-29
New start-ups are making all sorts of
devices that offer a glimpse of the future for the manufacturing of high-tech
hardware in America’s cities.
PAGE B1
A Missing Wife’s Phone Call
United Settles With Passenger
A film producer testified that Susan
Berman posed as Robert Durst’s wife
over the phone. Mr. Durst is charged in
Ms. Berman’s death.
PAGE A29
The airline came to an agreement with
a doctor whose forcible removal from a
flight resulted in widespread outrage.
Terms were not disclosed.
PAGE B2
All Things Jackie Robinson
WEEKEND ARTS C1-32
The City as Gallery
Critics guide readers through 47 art
exhibitions featured in five New York
neighborhoods.
PAGE C17
The Ebony-and-Ivory Tower
The new Netflix series “Dear White
People” retains the essence of the film it
was based on. A review.
PAGE C1
A groundbreaking heralded the coming
of a Manhattan museum celebrating the
barrier-busting baseball player. PAGE B9
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A30-31
Paul Krugman
PAGE A31
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