Los Angeles — Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and A-list Hollywood actor, has died.
Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, family spokesperson Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88.
McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given. He was 88.
Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such classics standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake from memory, wove intricate folk music lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music. With his long hair and bell-bottomed slacks and counterculture songs influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with such peers as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.
“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson held by BMI. “Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”
As an actor, he played the leading man opposite Barbara Streisand and Ellen Burstyn, but also had a fondness for shoot-out Westerns and cowboy dramas.
He was a Golden Gloves boxer and football player in college, received a master’s degree in English from Merton College at the University of Oxford in England and turned down an appointment to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, to pursue songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to break into the industry, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966 when Dylan recorded tracks for the seminal “Blonde on Blonde” double album.
At times, the legend of Kristofferson was larger than real life. Johnny Cash liked to tell a mostly exaggerated story of how Kristofferson, a former U.S. Army pilot, landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to give him a tape of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” with a beer in one hand. Over the years in interviews, Kristofferson said with all respect to Cash, while he did land a helicopter at Cash’s house, the ‘man in black’ wasn’t even home at the time, the demo tape was a song that no one ever actually cut, and he certainly couldn’t fly a helicopter holding a beer.
In a 2006 interview with The Associated Press, he said he might not have had a career without Cash.
“Shaking his hand when I was still in the Army backstage at the Grand Ole Opry was the moment I’d decided I’d come back,” Kristofferson said. “It was electric. He kind of took me under his wing before he cut any of my songs. He cut my first record that was record of the year. He put me on stage the first time.”
One of his most recorded songs, “Me and Bobby McGee,” was written based on a recommendation from Monument Records founder Fred Foster. Foster had a song title in his head called “Me and Bobby McKee,” named after a female secretary in his building. Kristofferson said in an interview in the magazine, Performing Songwriter, that he was inspired to write the lyrics about a man and woman on the road together after watching the Frederico Fellini film, “La Strada.”
Joplin, who had a close relationship with Kristofferson, changed the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a man and cut her version just days before she died in 1970 from a drug overdose. The recording became a posthumous No. 1 hit for Joplin.
Hits that Kristofferson recorded include “Why Me,” “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do),” “Watch Closely Now,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “A Song I’d Like to Sing” and “Jesus Was a Capricorn.”
In 1973, he married fellow songwriter Rita Coolidge and together they had a successful duet career that earned them two Grammy awards. They divorced in 1980.
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Cape Canaveral, Florida — The two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June welcomed their new ride home with Sunday’s arrival of a SpaceX capsule.
SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness high over Botswana as the two craft soared 420 kilometers above Earth.
NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX following concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first Starliner test flight with a crew, and NASA decided the thruster failures and helium leaks that cropped up after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to risk the test pilots’ return. So Starliner returned to Earth empty earlier this month.
The Dragon carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain at the space station until February, turning what should have been a weeklong trip for Wilmore and Williams into a mission lasting more than eight months.
Two NASA astronauts were pulled from the mission to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.
NASA likes to replace its station crews every six months or so. SpaceX has provided the taxi service since the company’s first astronaut flight in 2020. NASA also hired Boeing for ferry flights after the space shuttles were retired, but flawed software and other Starliner issues led to years of delays and more than $1 billion in repairs.
Starliner inspections are underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with post-flight reviews of data set to begin this week.
“We’re a long way from saying, ‘Hey, we’re writing off Boeing,'” NASA’s associate administrator Jim Free said at a pre-launch briefing.
The arrival of two fresh astronauts means the four who have been up there since March can now return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule in just over a week. Their stay was extended a month because of the Starliner turmoil.
Although Saturday’s liftoff went well, SpaceX said the rocket’s spent upper stage ended up outside its targeted impact zone in the Pacific because of a bad engine firing. The company has halted all Falcon launches until it figures out what went wrong.
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Sacramento, California — California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a landmark bill aimed at establishing first-in-the-nation safety measures for large artificial intelligence models Sunday.
The decision is a major blow to efforts attempting to rein in the homegrown industry that is rapidly evolving with little oversight. The bill would have established some of the first regulations on large-scale AI models in the nation and paved the way for AI safety regulations across the country, supporters said.
Earlier in September, the Democratic governor told an audience at Dreamforce, an annual conference hosted by software giant Salesforce, that California must lead in regulating AI in the face of federal inaction but that the proposal “can have a chilling effect on the industry.”
The proposal, which drew fierce opposition from startups, tech giants and several Democratic House members, could have hurt the homegrown industry by establishing rigid requirements, Newsom said.
“While well-intentioned, SB 1047 does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data,” Newsom said in a statement. “Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it. I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology.”
Newsom on Sunday instead announced that the state will partner with several industry experts, including AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, to develop guardrails around powerful AI models. Li opposed the AI safety proposal.
The measure, aimed at reducing potential risks created by AI, would have required companies to test their models and publicly disclose their safety protocols to prevent the models from being manipulated to, for example, wipe out the state’s electric grid or help build chemical weapons. Experts say those scenarios could be possible in the future as the industry continues to rapidly advance. It also would have provided whistleblower protections to workers.
The legislation is among a host of bills passed by the legislature this year to regulate AI, fight deepfakes and protect workers. State lawmakers said California must take action this year, citing hard lessons they learned from failing to rein in social media companies when they might have had a chance.
Proponents of the measure, including Elon Musk and Anthropic, said the proposal could have injected some levels of transparency and accountability around large-scale AI models, as developers and experts say they still don’t have a full understanding of how AI models behave and why.
The bill targeted systems that require more than $100 million to build. No current AI models have hit that threshold, but some experts said that could change within the next year.
“This is because of the massive investment scale-up within the industry,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in April over what he saw as the company’s disregard for AI risks. “This is a crazy amount of power to have any private company control unaccountably, and it’s also incredibly risky.”
The United States is already behind Europe in regulating AI to limit risks. The California proposal wasn’t as comprehensive as regulations in Europe, but it would have been a good first step to set guardrails around the rapidly growing technology that is raising concerns about job loss, misinformation, invasions of privacy and automation bias, supporters said.
A number of leading AI companies last year voluntarily agreed to follow safeguards set by the White House, such as testing and sharing information about their models. The California bill would have mandated that AI developers follow requirements similar to those commitments, said the measure’s supporters.
But critics, including former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argued that the bill would “kill California tech” and stifle innovation. It would have discouraged AI developers from investing in large models or sharing open-source software, they said.
Newsom’s decision to veto the bill marks another win in California for big tech companies and AI developers, many of whom spent the past year lobbying alongside the California Chamber of Commerce to sway the governor and lawmakers from advancing AI regulations.
Two other sweeping AI proposals, which also faced mounting opposition from the tech industry and others, died ahead of a legislative deadline in August. The bills would have required AI developers to label AI-generated content and ban discrimination from AI tools used to make employment decisions.
The governor said earlier this summer he wanted to protect California’s status as a global leader in AI, noting that 32 of the world’s top 50 AI companies are located in the state.
He has promoted California as an early adopter as the state could soon deploy generative AI tools to address highway congestion, provide tax guidance and streamline homelessness programs. The state also announced last month a voluntary partnership with AI giant Nvidia to help train students, college faculty, developers and data scientists. California is also considering new rules against AI discrimination in hiring practices.
Earlier in September, Newsom signed some of the toughest laws in the country to crack down on election deepfakes and measures to protect Hollywood workers from unauthorized AI use.
But even with Newsom’s veto, the California safety proposal is inspiring lawmakers in other states to take up similar measures, said Tatiana Rice, deputy director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a nonprofit that works with lawmakers on technology and privacy proposals.
“They are going to potentially either copy it or do something similar next legislative session,” Rice said. “So it’s not going away.”
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New York — Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making, self-financed epic “Megalopolis” flopped with moviegoers, while the acclaimed DreamWorks Animation family film “The Wild Robot” soared to No. 1 at the weekend box office.
“The Wild Robot,” Chris Sanders’ adaptation of Peter Brown’s bestseller, outperformed expectations to launch with $35 million in ticket sales in U.S. and Canada theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday. “Wild Robot” was poised to do well after critics raved about the story of a shipwrecked robot who raises an orphan gosling. Audiences agreed, giving the film an A CinemaScore. “Wild Robot” is likely to set up a long and lucrative run for the Universal Pictures release.
Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, predicts “The Wild Robot” “may take a page from the ‘Elemental’ playbook by opening to respectable box office and then looking toward long-term playability.” Pixar’s “Elemental,” which like “The Wild Robot” wasn’t a sequel, debuted with a modest $30 million but went on to gross nearly $500 million worldwide.
Family movies, led by the year’s biggest hit “Inside Out 2,” have particularly powered the box office this year. David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter for Franchise Entertainment, said the genre should reach $6 billion worldwide in 2024 — which, he noted, “is back to pre-pandemic levels.”
“Megalopolis,” Coppola’s vision of a Roman epic set in modern-day New York, was never expected to perform close to that level. But the film’s $4 million debut was still sobering for a movie that Coppola bankrolled himself for $120 million. Following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, critics have been mixed on Coppola’s first film in 13 years. Audiences gave it a D+ CinemaScore.
By any financial measure, “Megalopolis” was a mega-flop. But from the start, the 85-year-old Coppola maintained money wasn’t his concern. Coppola fashioned the film, which he first began developing in the late 1970s, as a grand personal statement about human possibility.
“Everyone’s so worried about money,” Coppola told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the film’s release. “I say: Give me less money and give me more friends.”
Studios passed on “Megalopolis” after Cannes. Lionsgate ultimately stepped forward to distribute it, for a fee. Coppola also picked up the tab for most of its $15 million in marketing costs. The film, which stars Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel and Aubrey Plaza, also played in about 200 IMAX locations, which accounted for $1.8 million of its ticket sales.
After three weeks atop the box office, Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” slid to second place with $16 million in its fourth weekend of release. The Warner Bros. sequel to the 1988 “Beetlejuice,” starring Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, has amassed $250 million domestically in a month of release.
Third place went to “Transformers One,” the Transformers prequel starring Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. After its lower-than expected debut last weekend, the Paramount release collected $9.3 million on its second weekend.
“Megalopolis” was even bested by the Indian Telugu-language action film “Devara: Part 1.” It grossed $5.1 million in its opening weekend, good enough for fourth place.
Also debuting in theaters was Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” an affectionate dramatization of the sketch-comedy institution on the night it first aired in 1975. On the same weekend the NBC series began its 50th season, Reitman’s movie launched in five New York and Los Angeles theaters and collected $265,000, good for a strong $53,000 per-theater average. “Saturday Night” goes nationwide in two weeks.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
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“The Wild Robot,” $35 million.
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“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” $16 million.
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“Transformers One,” $9.3 million.
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“Devara: Part 1,” $5.1 million.
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“Speak No Evil,” $4.3 million.
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“Megalopolis,” $4 million.
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“Deadpool & Wolverine,” $2.7 million.
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“My Old Ass,” $2.2 million.
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“Never Let Go,” $2.2 million.
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“The Substance,” $1.8 million.
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WASHINGTON — The first rocky planet ever spotted orbiting a burned out star called a white dwarf offers a glimpse of what may be in store for Earth billions of years from now — showing it is possible our planet might survive the death of the sun, albeit as a cold and desolate outpost in space.
The planet, with a mass about 1.9 times that of Earth, is orbiting the white dwarf about 4,200 light-years away from our solar system near the bulge at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, according to a study using data from Hawaii-based telescopes. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 9.5 trillion kilometers.
The white dwarf began as an ordinary star one or two times the mass of the sun. Its current mass is about half the sun’s. Stars with a mass less than eight times the sun’s end their lives as a white dwarf, the most common type of stellar remnant.
Before its host star’s death, the planet orbited at a distance possibly placing it in the “habitable zone” — not too hot and not too cold, where liquid water could exist on the surface and perhaps support life. It originally orbited at about the same distance as Earth is to the sun. Following its star’s demise, it is at 2.1 times that distance.
“It’s currently a freezing world because the white dwarf, which is in fact smaller than the planet, is extremely faint compared to when it was a normal star,” said University of California, San Diego astronomer Keming Zhang, lead author of the study published on Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The sun, roughly 4-1/2 billion years old, is destined to become a white dwarf.
“At the end of our sun’s life, it will puff up to enormous size — astronomers call it a red giant — and gently blow off its outer layers in a wind,” University of California, Berkeley astronomer and study co-author Jessica Lu said. “As our sun loses mass, the planets’ orbits will expand to larger sizes. Eventually, the sun loses all of its outer layers and leaves behind a hot compact core. This is called a white dwarf.”
Earth won’t always be habitable
Astronomers have debated whether Earth — the third planet from the sun, with Venus the second and Mars the fourth — would be engulfed and destroyed when the sun expands during its red giant phase, estimated to occur 7 billion years from now. It will become a white dwarf a billion years after that.
“Theoretical models disagree as to whether Earth could survive. Venus will most certainly be engulfed whereas Mars will most certainly survive. Our modeling shows that this planet very likely had a similar orbit to Earth before its host star became a red giant. It implies that Earth’s chances for survival may be higher than currently thought,” Zhang said.
Until now, only gas-giant planets larger than Jupiter, our solar system’s biggest planet, had been spotted orbiting white dwarfs.
The white dwarf is orbited by two bodies — the Earth-like planet and, further out, a brown dwarf, an object bigger than a planet but smaller than a star.
The planet endured tough times during its star’s death throes.
“It may have been a lava planet when the star became a red giant, then eventually cooled down to its current freezing state,” Zhang said.
As the sun ages and heats up, our solar system’s habitable zone would move outward. Earth will remain habitable for less than about a billion more years from now, by which point its oceans likely will have evaporated, Zhang said.
Does this mean certain doom for humankind — or whatever life still resides on Earth?
“We must migrate out of Earth prior to the 1-billion-year time scale,” Zhang said.
By the time the sun becomes a red giant, certain large moons in the outer solar system like Jupiter’s Ganymede and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus may offer a refuge, Zhang added.
“There’s hope,” Zhang said.
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new york — U.S. suicides last year remained at about the highest level in the nation’s history, preliminary data suggests.
A little more than 49,300 suicide deaths were reported in 2023, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number that could grow a little as some death investigations are wrapped up and reported.
Just under 49,500 were reported in 2022, according to final data released Thursday. The numbers are close enough that the suicide rate for the two years are the same, CDC officials said.
U.S. suicide rates have been rising for nearly 20 years, aside from a two-year drop around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. So “a leveling off of any increase in suicide is cautiously promising news,” said Katherine Keyes, a Columbia University public health professor who studies suicide.
Indeed, there’s reason for optimism. A 2-year-old national crisis line allows anyone in the U.S. to dial 988 to reach mental health specialists. That and other efforts may be starting to pay off, Keyes said, but it “really remains to be seen.”
Experts caution that suicide — the nation’s 11th-leading cause of death in 2022 — is complicated and that attempts can be driven by a range of factors. Contributors include higher rates of depression, limited availability of mental health services, and the availability of guns. About 55% of all suicide deaths in 2022 involved firearms, according to CDC data.
The CDC’s Thursday report said:
—Suicide was the second-leading cause of death for people ages 10–14 and 20–34, and the third-leading cause for people ages 15–19.
—Deaths continue to be more common among boys and men than girls and women. The highest suicide rate for any group — by far — was in men ages 75 and older, at about 44 suicides per 100,000 men that age.
—Among women, the highest rate was in those who were middle-aged, about 9 per 100,000. But more dramatic increases have been seen in teens and young women, with the rate for that group doubling in the last two decades.
—The overall suicide rate in 2022 and 2023 was 14.2 per 100,000. It also was that high in 2018. Before then, it hadn’t been that high since 1941.
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MUNICH — The head brewmaster for Weihenstephan, the world’s oldest brewery, has a secret: He really likes alcohol-free beer.
Even though he’s quick to say he obviously enjoys real beer more, Tobias Zollo says he savors alcohol-free beer when he’s working or eating lunch. It has the same taste but fewer calories than a soft drink, he said, thanks to the brewery’s process of evaporating the alcohol.
“You can’t drink beer every day — unfortunately,” he joked last week at the Bavarian state brewery in the German town of Freising, about 30 kilometers north of Munich.
Zollo isn’t alone in his appreciation for the sober beverage. Alcohol-free beer has been gaining popularity in recent years as beer consumption shrinks.
At Weihenstephan, which was founded as a brewery in 1040 by Benedictine monks, non-alcoholic wheat beer and lager now make up 10% of the volume. The increase over the last few years, since they started making alcohol-free drinks in the 1990s, mirrors the statistics for the rest of Germany’s beer industry.
“The people are unfortunately — I have to say that as a brewer — unfortunately drinking less beer,” Zollo said Friday, the day before Oktoberfest officially started. “If there’s an alternative to have the crisp and fresh taste from a typical Weihenstephan beer, but just as a non-alcoholic version, we want to do that.”
Even at Oktoberfest — arguably the world’s most famous ode to alcohol — alcohol-free beer is on the menu.
All but two of the 18 large tents at the festival offer the drink through the celebration’s 16 days. The sober beverage will cost drinkers the same as an alcoholic beer — between 13.60 and 15.30 euros ($15.12 and $17.01) for a 1-liter mug — but save them from a hangover.
“For people who don’t like to drink alcohol and want to enjoy the Oktoberfest as well, I think it’s a good option,” Mikael Caselitz, 24, of Munich said Saturday inside one of the tents. “Sometimes people feel like they have more fun with alcohol, which is not a good thing because you can also have fun without alcohol.”
He added: “If you want to come and drink alcohol-free beer, nobody will judge you.”
This year marked the first time an alcohol-free beer garden opened in Munich. “Die Null,” which means “the zero” in German, served non-alcoholic beer, mocktails and other alcohol-free drinks near the city’s main train station this summer but was scheduled to close a few day before Oktoberfest opened.
Walter König, managing director of the Society of Hop Research north of Munich, said researchers have had to breed special hops varieties for alcohol-free beer. If brewers use the typical hops for alcohol-free beer, the distinct aroma gets lost when the alcohol is reduced during the brewing process.
But customers don’t care about that, König said Friday as he prepared for Oktoberfest.
“They only want to know that what they are tasting is as good as traditional beers with alcohol,” he said.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — SpaceX launched a rescue mission for the two stuck astronauts at the International Space Station on Saturday, sending up a downsized crew to bring them home but not until next year.
The capsule rocketed into orbit to fetch the test pilots whose Boeing spacecraft returned to Earth empty earlier this month because of safety concerns. The switch in rides left it to NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexander Gorbunov to retrieve Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Because NASA rotates space station crews approximately every six months, this newly launched flight with two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams won’t return until late February. Officials said there wasn’t a way to bring them back earlier on SpaceX without interrupting other scheduled missions.
By the time they return, the pair will have logged more than eight months in space. They expected to be gone just a week when they signed up for Boeing’s first astronaut flight that launched in June.
NASA ultimately decided that Boeing’s Starliner was too risky after a cascade of thruster troubles and helium leaks marred its trip to the orbiting complex. The space agency cut two astronauts from this SpaceX launch to make room on the Dragon capsule’s return leg for Wilmore and Williams.
Wilmore and Williams watched the liftoff via a live link sent to the space station, prompting a cheer of “Go Dragon!” from Williams, NASA deputy program manager Dina Contella said.
Williams has been promoted to commander of the space station, which will soon be back to its normal population of seven. Once Hague and Gorbunov arrive Sunday, four astronauts living there since March can leave in their own SpaceX capsule. Their homecoming was delayed a month by Starliner’s turmoil.
Hague noted before the flight that change is the one constant in human spaceflight.
“There’s always something that is changing. Maybe this time it’s been a little more visible to the public,” he said.
Hague was thrust into the commander’s job for the rescue mission based on his experience and handling of a launch emergency six years ago. The Russian rocket failed shortly after liftoff, and the capsule carrying him and a cosmonaut catapulted off the top to safety.
Rookie NASA astronaut Zena Cardman and veteran space flier Stephanie Wilson were pulled from this flight after NASA opted to go with SpaceX to bring the stuck astronauts home. Promised a future space mission, both were at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, taking part in the launch livestream. Gorbunov remained on the flight under an exchange agreement between NASA and the Russian Space Agency.
“Every crewed launch that I have ever watched has really brought me a lot of emotion. This one today was especially unique,” a teary-eyed Cardman said following the early afternoon liftoff. “It was hard not to watch that rocket lift off without thinking, ‘That’s my rocket and that’s my crew.'”
Moments before liftoff, Hague paid tribute to his two colleagues left behind: “Unbreakable. We did it together.” Once in orbit, he called it a “sweet ride” and thanked everyone who made it possible.
Earlier, Hague acknowledged the challenges of launching with half a crew and returning with two astronauts trained on another spacecraft.
“We’ve got a dynamic challenge ahead of us,” Hague said after arriving from Houston last weekend. “We know each other and we’re professionals and we step up and do what’s asked of us.”
SpaceX has long been the leader in NASA’s commercial crew program, established as the space shuttles were retiring more than a decade ago. SpaceX beat Boeing in delivering astronauts to the space station in 2020, and it is now up to 10 crew flights for NASA.
Boeing has struggled with a variety of issues over the years, repeating a Starliner test flight with no one on board after the first one veered off course. The Starliner that left Wilmore and Williams in space landed without any issues in the New Mexico desert on September 6, and has since returned to Kennedy Space Center. A week ago, Boeing’s defense and space chief was replaced.
Delayed by Hurricane Helene pounding Florida, the latest SpaceX liftoff marked the first for astronauts from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX took over the old Titan rocket pad nearly two decades ago and used it for satellite and station cargo launches, while flying crews from Kennedy’s former Apollo and shuttle pad next door. The company wanted more flexibility as more Falcon rockets soared.
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PERRY, Florida — Hurricane Helene caused dozens of deaths and billions of dollars of destruction across a wide swath of the southeastern United States, and more than 3 million customers went into the weekend without power and, for some, a continued threat of floods.
Helene blew ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday packing winds of 225 kilometers per hour and then quickly moved through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee. The storm uprooted trees, splintered homes and sent creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.
Western North Carolina was essentially cut off because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. There were hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in eastern Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from the roof of a hospital that was surrounded by water from a flooded river.
The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley on Saturday and Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said. Several flood and flash flood warnings remained in effect in parts of the southern and central Appalachian Mountains, while high wind warnings also covered parts of Tennessee and Ohio.
Among the at least 44 people killed in the storm were three firefighters, a woman and her 1-month-old twins, and an 89-year-old woman whose house was struck by a falling tree. According to an Associated Press tally, the deaths occurred in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.
When the water hit knee-level in Kera O’Neil’s home in Hudson, Florida, she knew it was time to escape.
“There’s a moment where you are thinking, ‘If this water rises above the level of the stove, we are not going to have much room to breathe,’” she said, recalling how she and her sister waded through chest-deep water with one cat in a plastic carrier and another in a cardboard box.
Evacuations and record rainfall
In North Carolina, a lake featured in the movie “Dirty Dancing” overtopped a dam and surrounding neighborhoods were evacuated, although there were no immediate concerns it would fail.
People also were evacuated from Newport, Tennessee, a town of about 7,000 people, amid concerns about a dam near there, although officials later said the structure had not failed.
Tornadoes hit some areas, including one in Nash County, North Carolina, that critically injured four people.
Atlanta received a record 28.24 centimeters of rain in 48 hours, the most the city has seen in a two-day period since recordkeeping began in 1878, Georgia’s Office of the State Climatologist said on the social platform X. Some neighborhoods were so badly flooded that only car roofs could be seen poking above the water.
Moody’s Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage.
Climate change has exacerbated conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and turning into powerful cyclones sometimes in a matter of hours.
Big Bend region hit hard
Florida’s Big Bend is a part of the state where salt marshes and pine flatwoods stretch into the horizon, and where the condo developments and strip malls that have carved up so much of the state’s coastlines elsewhere are largely absent.
It’s a place where Susan Sauls Hartway and her 4-year-old Chihuahua mix, Lucy, could afford to live within walking distance of the beach on her salary as a housekeeper.
At least, until her house was carried away by Helene. Friday afternoon, Hartway wandered around her street near Ezell Beach, searching for where the storm may have deposited her home.
“It’s gone. I don’t know where it’s at. I can’t find it,” she said of her house.
Born and raised in rural Taylor County, Hartway said there is nowhere in the world she would rather be, even after Helene. But she’s watched as wealthier residents from out of state have bought up second homes here. She wonders how many of them will sell out — and what will happen to the locals who have nowhere else to go.
“There’s so many people down here … this was all they had,” she said.
The community has taken direct hits from three hurricanes since August 2023.
All five who died in one Florida county were in neighborhoods where residents were told to evacuate, said Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff in Pinellas County in the St. Petersburg area. Some who stayed ended up having to retreat to their attics to escape the rising water. He said the death toll could rise as crews go door-to-door in flooded areas.
More deaths were reported in Georgia and the Carolinas, including two South Carolina firefighters and a Georgia firefighter who died when trees struck their trucks. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin reported at least one death in his state.
Power loss and infrastructure damage
President Joe Biden said he was praying for survivors, and the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency headed to the area. The agency deployed more than 1,500 workers, and they helped with 400 rescues by late Friday morning.
Officials urged people who were trapped to call for rescuers and not tread floodwaters, warning they can be dangerous due to live wires, sewage, sharp objects and other debris.
In Georgia, an electrical utility group warned of “catastrophic” damage to utility infrastructure, with more than 100 high-voltage transmission lines damaged. And officials in South Carolina, where more than 40% of customers were without power, said crews had to cut their way through debris just to determine what was still standing in some places.
The hurricane came ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 30 kilometers northwest of where Hurricane Idalia hit last year at nearly the same ferocity. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the damage from Helene appears to be greater than the combined effects of Idalia and Hurricane Debby in August.
The destruction extended far beyond Florida.
Historic flooding expected
A mudslide in the Appalachian Mountains washed out part of an interstate highway at the North Carolina-Tennessee state line.
Another slide hit homes in North Carolina, and occupants had to wait more than four hours to be rescued, said Ryan Cole, the emergency services assistant director in Buncombe County. His 911 center received more than 3,300 calls in eight hours Friday.
“This is something that we’re going to be dealing with for many days and weeks to come,” Cole said.
Forecasters warned of flooding in North Carolina that could be worse than anything seen in the past century. The Connecticut Army National Guard sent a helicopter to help.
Helene was the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted an above-average season this year because of record-warm ocean temperatures.
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PREK TAKEO, Cambodia — The Mekong River is a lifeline for millions in the six countries it traverses on its way from its headwaters to the sea, sustaining the world’s largest inland fishery and abundant rice paddies on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.
Cambodia’s plan to build a massive canal linking the Mekong to a port on on its own coast on the Gulf of Thailand is raising alarm that the project could devastate the river’s natural flood systems, worsening droughts and depriving farmers on the delta of the nutrient-rich silt that has made Vietnam the world’s third-largest rice exporter.
Cambodia hopes that the $1.7 billion Funan Techo canal, being built with Chinese help, will support its ambition to export directly from factories along the Mekong without relying on Vietnam, connecting the capital Phnom Penh with Kep province on Cambodia’s southern coast.
At an August 5 groundbreaking ceremony, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said the canal will be built “no matter what the cost.” By reducing costs of shipping to Cambodia’s only deep-sea port, at Sihanoukville, the canal will promote, “national prestige, the territorial integrity and the development of Cambodia,” he said.
Along with those promises comes peril. Here is a closer look.
The threat to the Mekong
The Mekong River flows from China through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. It supports a fishery that accounts for 15% of the global inland catch, worth more than $11 billion annually, according to the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. Flooding during the wet season makes the Mekong Delta one of the world’s most productive farm regions.
The river already has been disrupted by dams built upstream in Laos and China that restrict the amount of water flowing downstream, while rising seas are gnawing away at the southern edges of the climate-vulnerable Mekong Delta.
Brian Eyler, director of the Washington-based Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program, warns that high embankments along the 100-meter-wide, 5.4-meter-deep canal will prevent silt-laden floodwater from flowing downstream to Vietnam. That could worsen drought in Vietnam’s rice bowl and Cambodia’s floodplains, an area stretching over roughly 1,300-square kilometers.
The view from Vietnam’s rice bowl
A drier Mekong Delta is a concern for Vietnam’s agricultural sector, which powers 12% of its economy. The southwestern provinces of An Giang and Kien Giang would likely be most impacted. The delta’s latticework of rivers crisscrossing green fields is vital for Vietnam’s own plans of growing “high quality, low emission rice” on 1 million hectares of farmland by 2030. The aim is to cut earth-warming greenhouse gases, lower production costs and increase farmers’ profits.
Water from the river is “essential” not just for Vietnam’s more than 100 million people but also for global food security, said Nguyen Van Nhut, director of rice export company Hoang Minh Nhat.
Vietnam’s exports of 8.3 million metric tons of rice in 2023 accounted for 15% of global exports. Most was grown in the Mekong Delta. The amount of silt being deposited by the river has already dropped and further disruptions will worsen salinity in the area, hurting farming, Nhat said.
“This will be a major concern for the agriculture sector of the Mekong delta,” he said.
Cambodia’s view
Cambodia says the canal is a “tributary project” that will connect to the Bassac River near Phnom Penh. President Hun Sen claimed on social media platform X that this means there would be “no impact on the flow of the Mekong River.”
But blueprints show the canal will connect to the Mekong’s mainstream and in any case the Bassac consists entirely of water from the Mekong, Eyler said.
Cambodian authorities are downplaying the potential environmental impacts of the project. “This is their logic-defying basis for justifying no impact to the Mekong River,” he said.
A document submitted in August 2023 to the Mekong River Commission — an organization formed for cooperation on issues regarding the Mekong — does not mention using water from the canal for irrigation, though Cambodia has since said it plans to do so. The Stimson Center added it was “logical” that irrigation would be needed during dry months, but that would require negotiating an agreement with the other Mekong countries.
The Mekong River Commission told The Associated Press all major projects on the Mekong River “should be assessed for their potential transboundary impacts.” It said it was providing technical support to “increase transparency and cooperation among concerned countries.”
Sun Chanthol, the Cambodian deputy prime minister who oversees the project, didn’t respond to a request for comments.
Nationalistic rhetoric and tense neighbors
Cambodia has rejected criticism of the canal, which is widely seen as an effort by the country’s ruling elite to curry support for Prime Minister Hun Manet, who succeeded his father Hun Sen, who led Cambodia for 38 years.
The canal is to be built jointly by Chinese state-owned construction giant China Road and Bridge Corporation and Cambodian companies. But it is enveloped in nationalistic rhetoric. The canal would provide Cambodia a “nose to breathe through” by reducing its dependence on Vietnam, Hun Sen has said.
Vietnam has avoided openly criticizing its neighbor, instead communicating its concerns quietly. Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang said at a press conference in May that Hanoi had asked Cambodia to share information and assess the environmental impacts of the project to “ensure the harmony of interests” of Mekong countries.
Many Cambodians remain suspicious of Vietnam’s intentions, believing it may want to annex Cambodian territory. Given the contentious past between the two countries, bigger and richer Vietnam is taking care not to appear to be impinging on Cambodian sovereignty, said Nguyen Khac Giang, an analyst at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.
“Although in Vietnam, there are big concerns,” he said.
Lost in Cambodia’s nationalistic rhetoric are the concerns of people like Sok Koeun, 57, who may lose her home.
The tin-roofed cottage where she has lived with her family since 1980 is right where the canal is due to be built. The river provides her with fish to feed her family when she struggles to get by selling sugarcane juice and recycling plastic cans.
No one has been in touch, she says, to answer her mounting questions: Will she get compensated? Will she get land? Or cash? Where will they go?
“I only learned about it (the canal) just now,” she said.
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SAO PAULO/BRASILIA BRAZIL — Brazil’s Supreme Court said on Friday that social platform X still needs to pay just over $5 million in pending fines, including a new one, before it will be allowed to resume its service in the country, according to a court document.
Earlier this week, the Elon Musk-owned U.S. firm told the court it had complied with orders to stop the spread of misinformation and asked it to lift a ban on the platform.
But Judge Alexandre de Moraes responded on Friday with a ruling that X and its legal representative in Brazil must still agree to pay a total of $3.4 million in pending fines that were previously ordered by the court.
In his decision, the judge said that the court can use resources already frozen from X and Starlink accounts in Brazil, but to do so the satellite company, also owned by Musk, had to drop its pending appeal against the fund blockage.
The judge also demanded a new $1.8 million fine related to a brief period last week when X became available again for some users in Brazil.
X, formerly known as Twitter, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a person close to X, the tech firm will likely pay all the fines but will consider challenging the fine that was imposed by the court after the platform ban.
X has been suspended since late August in Brazil, one of its largest and most coveted markets, after Moraes ruled it had failed to comply with orders related to restricting hate speech and naming a local legal representative.
Musk, who had denounced the orders as censorship and called Moraes a “dictator,” backed down and started to reverse his position last week, when X lawyers said the platform tapped a local representative and would comply with court rulings.
In Friday’s decision, Moraes said that X had proved it had now blocked accounts as ordered by the court and had named the required legal representative in Brazil.
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Abuja, Nigeria — Leaders in Africa say the fight against malaria on the continent is facing significant funding gaps due to the ongoing global financial crisis and the impact of climate change.
African leaders this week met in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly and called for a concerted effort to avert a funding crisis they say could set back decades of progress in the fight against malaria.
The African Leaders Malaria Alliance, or ALMA, which hosted the high-level meeting, said if malaria funding continues to shrink, there will be an expected additional 112 million cases and some 280,000 deaths by the year 2029.
Africa already accounts for an estimated 236 million malaria cases — or 95% of the global total — and 97% of deaths. Nigeria accounts for nearly a third of that burden.
Guinea-Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embalo, who serves as chair of ALMA, said that Africa stands at a critical moment in the fight against malaria.
“We must act urgently to protect lifesaving malaria intervention,” he said. “This is very important because our target is to finish with malaria in Africa.”
Experts said Africa needs up to $6.3 billion in malaria funding annually to eliminate the disease and called for continued support for malaria financing within the global funding framework.
ALMA also said the impact of climate change and growing resistance to insecticide and antimalarials are further hampering progress against the disease in Africa.
Ngashi Ngongo, head of the Executive Office at the Africa Union, said, “Achieving the elimination of malaria alongside progress toward other endemic diseases such as HIV and TB will lay the foundation for reducing Africa’s disease burden and further propel the achievement of universal health coverage on the continent.
“This progress is essential for strengthening health systems, and it is a necessity as we prepare for future pandemics, which are inevitable,” he said.
Following the World Health Organization’s approval last year, the first malaria vaccines are being introduced into routine child immunization schedules across Africa.
And on Thursday in New York, Nigerian health authorities signed a deal with U.S.-based drone company Zipline to use artificial intelligence-powered drones to expand access to medical supplies, including blood and vaccines.
Abdu Muktar, who is the national coordinator of Nigeria’s Unlocking Healthcare Value-Chain Initiative, commended the “very bold agenda” for producing health care products locally.
“But now we also have to be able to deliver,” he said. “What Zipline is doing is using technology to make sure you deliver. You’ll be able to reduce wastage in whatever it is — vaccines, therapeutics. You’ll be able to be accountable. … You are able to reach more people.”
In 2022, governments of malaria-endemic countries contributed about $1.5 billion toward combatting the disease.
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After Russia invaded Ukraine, Yuliia Lebedynska moved to Brussels with her daughter and granddaughter. She was an entrepreneur in Ukraine but in Belgium, she found herself in a Ukrainian women’s choir. Valentina Vasileva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: David Gogokhia
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According to the International Energy Agency, the world now invests almost twice as much in clean energy as it does in fossil fuels. But with that shift comes environmental risks related to the mining of critical minerals. VOA’s Jessica Stone looks at how nations are navigating the environmental challenges of creating a renewable future.
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HONG KONG — Hong Kong welcomed a new pair of giant pandas gifted by Beijing on Thursday with a lavish ceremony, raising hopes for a boost to the city’s tourism.
An An and Ke Ke are the third pair of giant pandas to be sent to the city from mainland China since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Their arrival came after their new neighbor, Ying Ying, gave birth to twins last month and became the world’s oldest first-time panda mother on record.
With the addition of the new bears, the twins, and their father, Le Le, Hong Kong now houses six pandas.
Chief Executive John Lee on Tuesday said An An is a 5-year-old male panda who is agile, intelligent and active, while Ke Ke, a 5-year-old female, is good at climbing, cute and has a gentle temperament.
The new arrivals will undergo two months of quarantine and adapt to their new home at Ocean Park, a zoo and aquarium that has long been a favorite of residents and tourists. Lee expressed hope that the public could meet the new bears in mid-December.
In October, the government will invite residents to propose new names that showcase the pandas’ characteristics.
Tourism industry representatives are optimistic about the potential impact of housing six pandas, hoping it will boost visitor numbers in Hong Kong. Officials have encouraged businesses to capitalize on the popularity of the new bears and newborn cubs to seize opportunities in what some lawmakers have dubbed the “panda economy.”
Pandas are widely considered China’s unofficial national mascot. The country’s giant panda loan program with overseas zoos has long been seen as a tool of Beijing’s soft-power diplomacy. Giant pandas are only found in China’s southwest and their population is under threat from development.
But caring for pandas in captivity is expensive. A zoo in Finland agreed with Chinese authorities to return two loaned giant pandas to China more than eight years ahead of schedule because they were too costly for the facility to maintain amid declining visitors.
Hong Kong’s Ocean Park has been hosting pandas since 1999, when the first pair, An An and Jia Jia, arrived in the financial hub shortly after it was handed back to China.
Jia Jia, who died at 38 in 2016, is the world’s oldest-ever panda to have lived in captivity. The average lifespan for a panda in the wild is 18 to 20 years, while in captivity it’s 30 years, according to the Guinness World Records.
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Washington — Johnny Cash now stands among the most famous politicians, trailblazers and activists of American history as he became the first professional musician to be honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol.
Congressional leaders from both parties and members of the Cash family were among the several hundred guests who gathered Tuesday for the unveiling of the statue. They shared their memories of a man who grew up on an Arkansas cotton farm and turned a love of music into a decades-long career that gave voice to the struggles and triumphs of everyday Americans.
“Some may ask: Why should a musician have a statue here in the halls of the great American republic?” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at the unveiling ceremony. “The answer is pretty simple. It’s because America is about more than laws and politics.”
Each state selects two statues to place within the Capitol. The Cash statue is the second new figure Arkansas has sent to replace two existing images that had represented the state at the U.S. Capitol for more than 100 years. Another statue depicting civil rights leader Daisy Bates was unveiled at the Capitol earlier this year. Bates mentored the nine Black children who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
The state’s legislature in 2019 voted to replace Arkansas’ two prior statues, which depicted little-known figures from the 18th and 19th centuries, with Bates and Cash.
Known as the “The Man in Black,” Cash was a vivid storyteller who sang with a deep voice songs like “I Walk The Line,” “Ring of Fire,” “Jackson” and “A Boy Named Sue.” The statue depicts the singer with a guitar slung across his back and a Bible in his hand. Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse created the statue.
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said artistic creativity is an important part of the country’s growth, and Cash’s “substance” and “swagger” inspired generations of artists from every genre imaginable. He quoted singers such as Bob Dylan and Snoop Dogg about Cash’s impact.
“He called Johnny Cash a real American gangster. That a compliment from Snoop Doggy Dogg,” Jeffries said as the audience laughed. “What a life, what a legend, what a legacy.”
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders led a group of Arkansas lawmakers at the ceremony. She said she grew up in a musical family where “after God and country, came Johnny Cash.” She noted how Cash struggled with addiction but went on to perform for prisoners and held a deep religious faith. She described him as a “hymn-singing Christian” who also experienced difficult times.
“When so much in today’s world is fake, Johnny Cash was very real,” Sanders said.
Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, said her father would have viewed the statue “as the ultimate” honor in his life. She said her father’s hard upbringing instilled in him a strong work ethic and that he loved the idea of America as a place of dreams and refuge.
“This man was a living redemption story,” Rosanne Cash said. “He encountered darkness and met it with love.”
Cash was born in Kingsland, a tiny town about 100 kilometers south of Little Rock. He died in 2003 at age 71. His achievements include 90 million records sold worldwide spanning country, rock, blues, folk and gospel. He is among the few artists inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Cash’s statue will be the newest added to the Capitol since one from North Carolina depicting the Rev. Billy Graham was unveiled in May.
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WASHINGTON — An executive at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike apologized in testimony to Congress for sparking a global technology outage over the summer.
“We let our customers down,” said Adam Meyers, who leads CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence division, in a hearing before a U.S. House cybersecurity subcommittee Tuesday.
Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has blamed a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
“Everywhere Americans turned, basic societal functions were unavailable,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said. “We cannot allow a mistake of this magnitude to happen again.”
The Tennessee Republican likened the impact of the outage to an attack “we would expect to be carefully executed by a malicious and sophisticated nation-state actor.”
“We’re deeply sorry and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again,” Meyers told lawmakers while laying out the technical missteps that led to the outage of about 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Meyers said he wanted to “underscore that this was not a cyberattack” but was, instead, caused by a faulty “rapid-response content update” focused on addressing new threats. The company has since bolstered its content update procedures, he said.
The company still faces a number of lawsuits from people and businesses that were caught up in July’s mass outage.
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