OceanGate, the U.S.-based company that managed the tourist submersible that imploded during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, has suspended all exploration and commercial operations, its website showed on Thursday.  

The company did not elaborate beyond a red banner at the top of its website: “OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.” 

OceanGate had planned two expeditions to the century-old Titanic ruins, located in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, for June 2024, its website showed.  

U.S. and Canadian authorities are investigating the cause of the June undersea implosion, which killed all five people aboard and raised questions about the unregulated nature of such expeditions. 

The U.S. Coast Guard last week recovered presumed human remains and debris from the submersible, known as the Titan, after searching the ocean floor. Examination of the debris is expected to shed more light on the cause of the implosion.  

The Titan lost contact with its support vessel during its descent on June 18. Its remains were found four days later, littering the seabed about 488 meters from the bow of the Titanic wreck. 
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Europe’s workhorse Ariane 5 rocket blasted off for a final time on Wednesday, with its farewell flight after 27 years of launches coming at a difficult time for European space efforts.   

Faced with soaring global competition, the continent has unexpectedly found itself without a way to independently launch heavy missions into space due to delays to the next-generation Ariane 6 and Russia withdrawing its rockets. 

The 117th and final flight of the Ariane 5 rocket took place around 2200 GMT on Wednesday from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. 

The launch had been postponed twice. It was originally scheduled on June 16, but was called off because of problems with pyrotechnical lines in the rocket’s booster, which have since been replaced. 

Then Tuesday’s launch was delayed by bad weather. 

The Wednesday night flight went off without a hitch, watched by hundreds of spectators, including former French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, and was greeted with applause. 

Marie-Anne Clair, the director of the Guiana Space Centre, told AFP that the final flight of Ariane 5 was “charged with emotion” for the teams in Kourou, where the rocket’s launches have punctuated life for nearly three decades. 

The final payload on Ariane 5 is a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite.  

The satellite “marks a major turning point for our armed forces: better performance and greater resistance to jamming,” French Minister of the Armed Forces Sebastien Lecornu tweeted.  

Though it would become a reliable rocket, Ariane 5 had a difficult start. Its maiden flight exploded moments after liftoff in 1996. Its only other such failure came in 2002. 

Herve Gilibert, an engineer who was working on Ariane 5 at the time, said the 2002 explosion was a “traumatic experience” that “left a deep impression on us”. 

But the rocket would embark on what was ultimately a long string of successful launches.  

The initial stumbles had “the positive effect of keeping us absolutely vigilant,” Gilibert said. 

Reputation for reliability

Ariane 5 earned such a reputation for reliability that NASA trusted it to launch the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope in late 2021. 

The rocket’s second-last launch was in April, blasting the European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft on its way to find out whether Jupiter’s icy moons can host alien life. 

Daniel Neuenschwander, the ESA’s head of human and robotic exploration, said that in commercial terms, Ariane 5 had been “the spearhead of Europe’s space activities.” 

The rocket was able to carry a far bigger load than its predecessor Ariane 4, giving Europe a competitive advantage and allowing the continent to establish itself in the communication satellite market. 

While waiting for Ariane 6, whose first launch was initially scheduled for 2020, Europe had been relying on Russia’s Soyuz rockets to get heavy-load missions into space. 

But Russia withdrew space cooperation with Europe in response to sanctions imposed over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.  

The number of launches from Kourou fell from 15 in 2021 to six last year. 

Another blow came in December, when the first commercial flight of the next-generation Vega C light launcher failed. Last week, another problem was detected in the Vega C’s engine, likely pushing its return further into the future. 

Attention shifts to new rocket 

The launcher market has been increasingly dominated by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. firm SpaceX, whose rockets are now blasting off once a week. 

Lacking other options, the ESA was forced to turn to rival SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for the successful launch of its Euclid space telescope on Saturday.  

The ESA will also use a SpaceX rocket to launch satellites for the EarthCARE observation mission. 

It remains unclear how the agency will launch the next round of satellites for the European Union’s Galileo global navigation system. 

At the Paris Air Show earlier this month, ESA chief Josef Aschbacher acknowledged that these were “difficult times,” adding that everyone was “working intensely” to get Ariane 6 and Vega-C ready.  

Ariane 6 was unveiled on a launch pad in Kourou earlier this month ahead of an ignition test of its Vulcain 2.1 rocket engine. 

Because the new rocket requires less staffing and maintenance, 190 out of 1,600 positions are being cut at the Kourou spaceport. 
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The planet’s temperature spiked on Tuesday to its hottest day in at least 44 years and likely much longer. Wednesday could become the third straight day that Earth unofficially marks a new record high, the latest in a series of climate-change extremes that alarm but don’t surprise scientists.

The globe’s average temperature reached 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a common tool based on satellite data and computer simulations and used by climate scientists for a glimpse of the world’s condition.

On Monday, the average temperature was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17.01 degrees Celsius), breaking a record that lasted only 24 hours.

While it is not an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration record, “this is showing us an indication of where we are right now,” NOAA chief scientist Sarah Kapnick said. Even though the dataset used for the unofficial record goes back only to 1979, she said that given other data, it’s likely the hottest day in “several hundred years that we’ve experienced.”

The previous hottest day was in August 2021, Kapnick said.

“A record like this is another piece of evidence for the now massively supported proposition that global warming is pushing us into a hotter future,” said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who was not part of the calculations.

With many places seeing temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius), the new average temperatures might not seem very hot. But Tuesday’s global high was nearly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (a full degree Celsius) higher than the 1979-2000 average, which already tops the 20th- and 19th-century averages.

Higher temperatures translate into brutal conditions for people around the world. When the heat spikes, humans suffer health effects — especially young and elderly people, who are vulnerable to heat even under normal conditions.

“People aren’t used to that. Their bodies aren’t used to that,” said Erinanne Saffell, Arizona’s state climatologist and an expert in extreme weather and climate events. “That’s important to understand who might be at risk, making sure people are hydrated, they’re staying cool, and they’re not exerting themselves outside and taking care of those folks around you who might be at risk.”

The highs come after months of “truly unreal meteorology and climate stats for the year,” such as off-the-chart record warmth in the North Atlantic, record low sea ice in Antarctica and a rapidly strengthening El Nino, said University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado.

Scientists generally use much longer measurements — months, years, decades — to track the Earth’s warming. But the new figures are an indication that climate change is reaching uncharted territory, even if the data aren’t quite the type used by gold-standard climate measurement entities such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.

The figures legitimately capture global-scale heating, and NOAA will take them into consideration for its official record calculations, said Deke Arndt, director of the National Center for Environmental Information, a division of NOAA.

High-temperature records were surpassed this week in Quebec and Peru. Beijing reported nine straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Cities across the U.S. from Medford, Oregon, to Tampa, Florida, have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Wednesday may bring another unofficial record, with the Climate Reanalyzer again forecasting record or near-record heat. Antarctica’s average forecast for Wednesday is 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the 1979-2000 average.

In the U.S., heat advisories are in effect this week for more than 30 million people in places including portions of western Oregon, inland far northern California, central New Mexico, Texas, Florida and the coastal Carolinas, according to the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. Excessive heat warnings are continuing across southern Arizona and California.
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Health organizations in Sudan’s White Nile state said at least 13 children have died over the past week due to a suspected measles outbreak. An official with the Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said Sudan’s conflict and the approach of the rainy season could make the situation much worse.

Officials with the international medical organization MSF say they remain concerned about an increase of suspected measles cases among children in Sudan’s White Nile state.

Speaking to VOA via a messaging application from Nairobi, Mitchell Sangma, MSF’s health advisor, says MSF’s ground team have documented more than 200 suspected cases of measles among children in the last month.

He says out of that number, 72 were admitted to hospitals and 13 died.

“We are also seeing an increasing number of suspected measles in our other projects such as in Blue Nile state in Sudan. And in Renk, on the other side of the border in South Sudan, we are also seeing increasing measles cases in our measles isolation wards. So, the situation for people fleeing the conflict is desperately concerning,” he said.

The MSF official says the nearly three-month-old conflict in Sudan between the army and a rival paramilitary group has created a huge medical need and intense pressure on health care facilities all over the country.

Sangma says MSF and other aid agencies are concerned about the collapsing health system. He says health centers still in operation are struggling to cope with limited supplies and staff.

Sangma notes that as the rainy season draws near, there is an increased possibility of disease outbreaks among the millions of people displaced from their homes by the war.

The organization says there is a need to step up services like vaccinations, nutritional support, shelter, water and sanitation.

“Rainy season is fast approaching and we are very concerned about the rising waterborne diseases such as cholera and also to note that malaria is also very much endemic in this region. We need to scale up, we need experienced medical expertise on the ground,” said Sangma.

VOA reached out to Mustafa Jabrallah Ahmed, director general at the Ministry of Health in Blue Nile for this story, but he declined to comment, saying he was busy with meetings.

More than 2.8 million people have been displaced due to the Sudan conflict, including over 2.2 million internally, according to a report released by the International Organization for Migration this week.

The violence makes it difficult for people to access health care, with many getting treatment late as it is too dangerous to travel to health facilities.
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Deeply loved but wracked by crisis, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) on Wednesday marks 75 years since it was founded as the Western world’s first universal, free health care system.

In a secular age, the NHS is the closest thing Britain has to a national religion — devoutly cherished, with levels of public support higher than the royal family or any other British institution.

It was founded three years after World War II by a pioneering Labour government on the principle that everyone should access top-quality health care funded by general taxation, free at the point of care.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose parents were an NHS doctor and a pharmacist, paid tribute last week as he outlined a 15-year plan aimed at recruiting hundreds of thousands of new health staff.

“For every minute of every day of every one of those 75 years, the NHS has been kept going by the millions of people who’ve worked for it. To them on behalf of a grateful nation, I want to say: thank you,” he said.

“I feel a powerful sense of responsibility to make sure that their legacy endures. And to make sure the NHS is there for our children and grandchildren, just as it was there for us.”

Like Sunak’s parents, immigrant staff were pivotal to the NHS’s early growth, helping to remake the face of Britain itself in the decades after the war.

Its centrality to national life was underscored in a memorable dance sequence featuring NHS staff and patients during the opening of the London Olympics in 2012.

Justin Bieber remixed his hit “Holy” with an NHS choir for Christmas 2020, in a year when the public, clapping on their doorsteps, paid tribute to medics battling the Covid pandemic.

Sickly state

Sunak’s new workforce plan, however, is recognition that the NHS is under unprecedented strain following the pandemic, even though the government spends nearly 12% of its budget on healthcare — by far its single biggest item.

Demoralized doctors and nurses have been striking for better pay, an ageing and unfit population needs ever-more complex treatment, cancers go undiagnosed for lack of scanners, and hospitals are crumbling.

Sumi Manirajan, deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee, accused Sunak’s Conservative government of failing to value doctors.

“And what that leads to is doctors leaving the country, going abroad, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and actually it’s the public that loses out,” she told AFP at a protest rally by striking doctors.

“The government [ministers], they may use private health care but the ordinary citizen in the UK uses the NHS, relies on the NHS.”

In a report for the 75th anniversary, the King’s Fund charity compared the health systems of 19 similar countries and found Britain’s in a sickly state.

It cited data showing the UK performed worst in fatality rates for strokes and second worst for heart attacks.

The UK has a “strikingly low number of both nurses and doctors per person compared to its peers” and four times fewer hospital and intensive care beds than Germany, the report said.

But opinion polls show scant support in Britain for radical reform such as switching to a mixed model of funding, with patients paying via insurance for some of their treatment, as is the norm elsewhere.

Fully 93% of more than 3,000 respondents believe the NHS should remain free at the point of care, based on general taxation, according to the annual British Social Attitudes Survey last year.

But the authoritative survey also found a record 51% were dissatisfied with their quality of care, especially with waiting times for appointments to see general practitioners and hospital doctors.

Terminal decline?

Sunak has been resisting the medics’ pay demands as he battles to get soaring UK inflation under control, while insisting his government is investing “record sums” in the NHS.

But the service needs to be modernized via better use of digital technology including artificial intelligence, he said on Friday.

Sunak argued that his workforce plan would make the NHS fit “for decades to come.” But some on the front lines give a far gloomier prognosis.

“Right now, as a functional, universal public service, the NHS is failing,” geriatrics consultant David Oliver wrote in The BMJ, a medical journal.

He warned: “It may not quite be in end-of-life care, or about to have its financial or political life support removed, but without immediate action and longer-term thinking it won’t see its 85th birthday.”
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London’s expansion of a fiercely debated scheme that charges the most polluting vehicles in the city should be blocked, local authorities bringing a legal challenge over the plan argued on Tuesday.

The British capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) levies a $16 daily charge on drivers of non-compliant vehicles, in order to tackle pollution and improve air quality.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan last year decided to extend the scheme to cover almost all of the Greater London area, encompassing an extra five million people in leafier and less-connected outer boroughs, from the end of next month.

The decision has pitched Khan and health campaigners against those who say they cannot tolerate another economic hit at a time of soaring living costs.

Khan, who is running for a third four-year term in the 2024 London mayoral election, has said he is determined to face down his critics.

But his plan, which echoes hundreds of others in place in traffic-choked cities across Europe, came under challenge at London’s High Court on Tuesday as five local authorities argued the decision to expand ULEZ into their areas was unlawful.

London’s transport authority – Transport for London (TfL) – had launched a public consultation on the plan, which said 91% of vehicles driven in outer London would not be affected.

However, the local authorities’ lawyers argue that TfL provided no detail on how it calculated the 91% figure, which they say was fundamental to justifying the expansion.

The local authorities are also challenging Khan’s decision to not extend a 110 million pound scrappage scheme to those living just outside the expanded ULEZ. The scheme subsidises the cost of buying a replacement vehicle for those affected.

Lawyers representing Khan and TfL argued in court filings that TfL provided sufficient information for the consultation and said that extending the scrappage scheme beyond London was rejected in order to target those directly affected.
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Maternal deaths across the United States more than doubled over the course of two decades, and the tragedy unfolded unequally. 

Black mothers died at the nation’s highest rates, while the largest increases in deaths were found in American Indian and Native Alaskan mothers. Some states — and racial or ethnic groups within them – fared worse than others. 

The findings were laid out in a new study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers looked at maternal deaths between 1999 and 2019 — but not the pandemic spike — for every state and five racial and ethnic groups. 

“It’s a call to action to all of us to understand the root causes — to understand that some of it is about health care and access to health care, but a lot of it is about structural racism and the policies and procedures and things that we have in place that may keep people from being healthy,” said Dr. Allison Bryant, one of the study’s authors and a senior medical director for health equity at Mass General Brigham. 

Among wealthy nations, the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality, which is defined as a death during pregnancy or up to a year afterward. Common causes include excessive bleeding, infection, heart disease, suicide and drug overdose. 

Bryant and her colleagues at Mass General Brigham and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington started with national vital statistics data on deaths and live births. They then used a modeling process to estimate maternal mortality out of every 100,000 live births. 

Overall, they found rampant, widening disparities. The study showed high rates of maternal mortality aren’t confined to the South but also extend to regions like the Midwest and states such as Wyoming and Montana, which had high rates for multiple racial and ethnic groups in 2019. 

Researchers also found dramatic jumps when they compared maternal mortality in the first decade of the study to the second and identified the five states with the largest increases between those decades. Those increases exceeded: 

— 162% for American Indian and Alaska Native mothers in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Rhode Island and Wisconsin; 

— 135% for white mothers in Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee; 

— 105% for Hispanic mothers in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Tennessee; 

— 93% for Black mothers in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and Texas; 

— 83% for Asian and Pacific Islander mothers in Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan and Missouri. 

“I hate to say it, but I was not surprised by the findings. We’ve certainly seen enough anecdotal evidence in a single state or a group of states to suggest that maternal mortality is rising,” said Dr. Karen Joynt Maddox, a health services and policy researcher at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s certainly alarming, and just more evidence we have got to figure out what’s going on and try to find ways to do something about this.” 

Maddox pointed to how, compared with other wealthy nations, the U.S. underinvests in things like social services, primary care and mental health. She also said Missouri hasn’t funded public health adequately, and during the years of the study hadn’t expanded Medicaid. They’ve since expanded Medicaid — and lawmakers passed a bill giving new mothers a full year of Medicaid health coverage. Last week, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed budget bills that included $4.4 million for a maternal mortality prevention plan. 

In neighboring Arkansas, Black women are twice as likely to have pregnancy-associated deaths as white women, according to a 2021 state report. 

Dr. William Greenfield, the medical director for family health at the Arkansas Department of Health, said the disparity is significant and has “persisted over time,” and that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why there was an increase in the state’s maternal mortality rate for Black mothers. 

Rates among Black women have long been the worst in the nation, and the problem affects people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, U.S. Olympic champion sprinter Tori Bowie, 32, died from complications of childbirth in May. 

The pandemic likely exacerbated all of the demographic and geographic trends, Bryant said, and “that’s absolutely an area for future study.” According to preliminary federal data, maternal mortality fell in 2022 after rising to a six-decade high in 2021 — a spike experts attributed mainly to COVID-19. Officials said the final 2022 rate is on track to get close to the pre-pandemic level, which was still the highest in decades. 

Bryant said it’s crucial to understand more about these disparities to help focus on community-based solutions and understand what resources are needed to tackle the problem. 

Arkansas already is using telemedicine and is working on several other ways to increase access to care, said Greenfield, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock and was not involved in the study. 

The state also has a “perinatal quality collaborative,” a network to help health care providers understand best practices for things like reducing cesarean sections, managing complications with hypertensive disorders, and curbing injuries or severe complications related to childbirth. 

“Most of the deaths we reviewed and other places have reviewed … were preventable,” Greenfield said. 
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The head of the United Nations called Monday for maritime nations to agree on a course for the shipping industry to reduce its climate-harming emissions to net zero by the middle of the century at the latest.

The appeal by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came at the start of a meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London that’s seen as key for helping achieve the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

“Shipping, which accounts for almost 3% of global emissions, will be vital,” Guterres said.

He urged delegates to agree a new greenhouse gas strategy for shipping that includes “ambitious science-based targets starting in 2030 – both on absolute emissions reductions and the use of clean fuels.”

The IMO’s current target is for the shipping industry to cut its emissions by at least half from 2008 to 2050.

Guterres said the new targets should include all greenhouse gas emissions caused by the industry and backed the idea of introducing a carbon price for shipping. Campaigners have suggested that funds generated from a levy on emissions could be used to help poor nations tackle climate change, though the industry wants the money to go toward the development of clean technologies.
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Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that there is a suspected outbreak of measles in an internal displacement camp in Sudan.

The international humanitarian organization said 13 children have died recently in the suspected outbreak at the camp in Sudan’s White Nile state.

“We are receiving sick children with suspected measles every day, most with complications,” the organization posted in a tweet.

A steady stream of people is coming to the camp as they flee the fighting between the country’s two warring factions.

Doctors Without Borders has two clinics in White Nile. The organization says it had over 3,000 patients in June and needs to “increase assistance, scale up services like vaccinations, nutritional support, shelter, water and sanitation.”
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