Nicholas Spangler

5 days ago | newsday.com | Nicholas Spangler

A wayward Soviet spacecraft, adrift for more than half a century, will fall to Earth on Friday or Saturday, astronomers said. The craft, which came to be known as Cosmos 482, was Venus-bound when it launched March 31, 1972, from a Kazakhstan spaceport, according to a NASA history. But it never escaped Earth’s gravity, probably suffering a malfunction in an engine burn. Pieces of it were pulled back into the atmosphere within days.

6 days ago | newsday.com | Nicholas Spangler

On this day 80 years ago, Long Islanders celebrated victory as German forces ended fighting in Europe by surrendering unconditionally to the allies, an occasion memorialized by space-pressed newspaper headline writers as V-E Day. Given what the world had endured over the last six years of World War II, the celebrations seem subdued, at least as portrayed in local newspapers. "Prayers and Pledge to Finish Job" was the headline in The Farmingdale Post.

1 week ago | newsday.com | Nicholas Spangler

Nassau County’s home-based day care providers say late payments from the county’s Department of Social Services are forcing some to cut staff hours and run up credit card debt, problems they say could drive them out of business. In interviews, several providers described a roughly monthlong delay in tuition payments from the department, which administers a state program subsidizing child care for nearly 5,000 families so that parents can work or look for work.

1 week ago | newsday.com | Nicholas Spangler

Saturday night, May 2, 1970, Bruce Meirowitz, a 19-year-old Kent State freshman from North Massapequa, was watching a movie in his Kent State dorm when a friend told him the campus was on fire. President Richard Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia, which further entangled the U.S. in the Vietnam War, had prompted huge demonstrations around the nation.

1 week ago | newsday.com | Nicholas Spangler

The scenario was imagined but plausible: A category 4 hurricane has devastated Fire Island. New York City's elite search and rescue team, Task Force One, has been activated. The roads have washed away, so rescuers deploy on small inflatable boats. They don’t know what they will find but early reports are bad. People are stranded, possibly trapped in collapsed buildings, missing or injured.