内容摘要：This watershed is a cold-water lifeline in the lower Klamath for spawning salmon and steelhead that stop to cool down before swimming upstream. That’s key amid climate-infused droughts and warming waters.

This watershed is a cold-water lifeline in the lower Klamath for spawning salmon and steelhead that stop to cool down before swimming upstream. That’s key amid climate-infused droughts and warming waters.

The White House official said Trump on Thursday will stress that direct peace talks must continue.In their first phone call since Merz became chancellor, Trump said he would support the efforts of Germany and other European countries to achieve peace, according to a readout from the German government. Merz also said last month that “it is of paramount importance that the political West not let itself be divided, so I will continue to make every effort to produce the greatest possible unity between the European and American partners.”

Under Merz’s immediate predecessor, Olaf Scholz, Germany became the second-biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the United States. Merz has vowed to keep up the support and last weekdevelop its own long-range missile systems that would be free of any range limits.At home, Merz’s government is intensifying a drive that Scholz started to bolster the German military after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In Trump’s first term, Berlin was a target of his ire for failing to meet the current NATO target of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense, and Trump is now demanding at least 5% from allies.

The White House official said the upcoming NATO summit in the Netherlands later this month is a “good opportunity” for Germany to commit to meeting that 5% mark.Scholz set up a 100 billion euro ($115 billion) special fund to modernize Germany’s armed forces — called the Bundeswehr — which had suffered from years of neglect. Germany has met the 2% target thanks to the fund, but it will be used up in 2027.

Merz has said that “the government will in the future provide all the financing the Bundeswehr needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe.” He has

for all allies to aim to spend 3.5% of GDP on their defense budgets by 2032, plus an extra 1.5% on potentially defense-related things like infrastructure.The decline comes about 15 years faster than the government prediction. Last year’s figure is about one-quarter of the peak of 2.7 million births in 1949 during the postwar baby boom.

The data in a country of rapidly aging andadds to concern about the sustainability of the economy and national security at a time it seeks to increase defense spending.

has described the situation as “a silent emergency” and has promised to promote more flexible working environment and other measures that would help married couples to balance work and parenting, especially in rural areas where family values tend to be more conservative and harder on women.The Health Ministry’s latest data showed that Japan’s fertility rate — the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime — also fell to a new low of 1.15 in 2024, from 1.2 a year earlier. The number of marriage was slightly up, to 485,063 couples, but the downtrend since the 1970s remains unchanged.