A nuclear power plant in Georgia has begun splitting atoms in one of its two new reactors, Georgia Power said Monday, a key step toward reaching commercial operation at the first new nuclear reactors built from scratch in decades in the United States. 

The unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said operators reached self-sustaining nuclear fission inside the reactor at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta. That makes the intense heat that will be used to produce steam and spin turbines to generate electricity. 

A third and a fourth reactor were approved for construction at Vogtle by the Georgia Public Service Commission in 2009, and the third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016. The company now says Unit 3 could begin commercial operation in May or June. 

Unit 4 is projected to begin commercial operation sometime between this November and March 2024. 

The cost of the third and fourth reactors was originally supposed to be $14 billion. The reactors are now supposed to cost more than $30 billion. That doesn’t include $3.68 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners after going bankrupt, which brings total spending to more than $34 billion. 

The latest set of delays at Unit 3 included a pipe part of a critical backup cooling system that was vibrating during startup testing. Construction workers had failed to install supports called for on blueprints. The company has also said it had to repair a slowly dripping valve and diagnose a problem involving water flow through reactor coolant pumps. 

Georgia Power said Unit 3 would continue startup testing to show that its cooling system and steam supply system will work at the intense heat and pressure that a nuclear reactor creates. After that, operators are supposed to link the reactor to the electrical grid and gradually raise it to full power. 

“We remain focused on safely bringing this unit online, fully addressing any issues and getting it right at every level,” Chris Womack, chairman, president and CEO of Georgia Power, said in a written statement. “Reaching initial criticality is one of the final steps in the startup process and has required tremendous diligence and attention to detail from our teams.” 

Georgia Power owns a minority of the two new reactors. The remaining shares are owned by Oglethorpe Power Corp., the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and the city of Dalton. Oglethorpe and MEAG would sell power to cooperatives and municipal utilities across Georgia, as well in Jacksonville, Florida, and parts of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. 

Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs. 

Vogtle is the only nuclear plant under construction in the United States. Its costs and delays could deter other utilities from building such plants, even though they generate electricity without releasing climate-changing carbon emissions. 
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The Italian health minister’s proposals to extend a smoking ban include the outdoor areas of bars and parks, according to details reported by local media, drawing the ire of right-wing Cabinet colleagues who labeled him a “communist.” 

Minister Orazio Schillaci, a technocrat with no party affiliation, said in January he would crackdown on smoking, including e-cigarettes, which are being widely used by teenagers. 

The new rules will include the outside areas of bars and at public transport stops, La Stampa newspaper reported on Monday. The prohibition will also be extended to parks if pregnant women and children are present, it said. 

Junior Culture Minister Vittorio Sgarbi, known for expressing his opinions, called Schillaci’s view “intimidating” and said such bans would instead encourage people to smoke. 

“This is something typical of an authoritarian and dictatorial communist regime,” Sgarbi told AdnKronos news agency. 

Italy’s top health institute (ISS) said some 24% of adult Italians were smokers last year — roughly 12.4 million people and the highest percentage recorded since 2009. 

The government passed a ban on smoking indoors in 2003, which came into force two years later. 

Health association Fondazione Umberto Veronesi estimates at least 43,000 people die in Italy every year for smoke-related reasons. 

But the proposed clampdown also faces skepticism from Deputy Prime Minister and League party leader Matteo Salvini, who quit cigarettes four years ago but said the open-air ban on e-cigarettes was “exaggerated.” 

“Electronic cigarettes are helping a lot of people to abandon regular cigarettes,” he added on Twitter. 

The Health Ministry did not reply to a request for comment. 

The proposals would need to be approved by the Cabinet before being passed to parliament. 
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A group of attorneys general from 45 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., demanded Monday that social media app TikTok produce materials as part of an investigation into its effect on young users’ mental health.   

“We know that social media is taking a devastating toll on young people’s mental health and well-being, and through our investigation we are getting a clearer sense of TikTok’s role,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.   

The investigation began last year when eight states, including California, Massachusetts and Tennessee, launched a bipartisan probe of TikTok, focusing on whether the popular video-sharing app is endangering young people and violating state consumer protection laws.    

On Monday, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti asked a Tennessee court to order TikTok to produce subpoenaed materials sought by the investigation. Attorneys general from across the United States filed a brief in support of the motion to compel TikTok to hand over the information.    

The Tennessee court petition alleges that TikTok has failed to preserve potentially relevant evidence in the investigation, including internal employee chat messages.   

It says TikTok has shared some internal messages in response to its request but said the company has rendered them “unrecognizable and nearly incomprehensible.”   

TikTok has not commented on the case.   

“We need to know more about the company’s business practices so we can keep our kids safe,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement Monday.   

California’s Department of Justice said in a statement that heavy use of social media is “strongly associated with self-harm, depression, and low self-esteem in teens — and every additional hour young people spend on social media is associated with an increased severity of the symptoms of depression.”   

The latest court challenge comes as TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, faces security concerns. The United States, Canada and the European Union have all banned the use of the app on government-issued devices.    

Like other social media apps, TikTok has also received criticism that it is not doing enough to protect younger users from inappropriate content.   

Last week, TikTok said it was developing a tool that would allow parents to block certain content on the app. The company also said parents will now be able to set time limits on the app for their teens, depending on the day of the week.   

Some information in this report came from Reuters. 
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Greenhouse gas emissions from the way humans produce and consume food could add nearly 1 degree of warming to the Earth’s climate by 2100, according to a new study.

Continuing the dietary patterns of today will push the planet past the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) limit of warming sought under the Paris climate agreement to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to the study published Monday in Nature Climate Change and will approach the agreement’s limit of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The modeling study found that most greenhouse gas emissions come from three major sources: meat from animals like cows, sheep and goats; dairy; and rice. Those three sources account for at least 19% of each food’s contribution to a warming planet, according to the study, with meat contributing the most, at 33%.

All emit large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, in the way they are currently farmed. The researchers calculated that methane will account for 75% of food’s share of warming by 2030, with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide accounting for most of the rest.

“I think the biggest takeaway that I would want [policymakers] to have is the fact that methane emissions are really dominating the future warming associated with the food sector,” said Catherine C. Ivanovich, a climate scientist at Columbia University and the study’s lead author.

Ivanovich and colleagues from the University of Florida and Environmental Defense Fund calculated the three major gases produced by each type of food over its lifetime based on current consumption patterns. Then they scaled the annual emissions over time by gas based on five different population projections.

And then they used a climate model frequently used by the United Nations’ panel on climate change to model the effects of those emissions on surface air temperature change.

Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who wasn’t involved in the study, said it used well-established methods and datasets “to produce a novel, sobering conclusion.”

“The study highlights that food is absolutely critical to hitting our Paris Agreement climate targets — failure to consider food is failure to meet our climate targets globally,” said Meredith Niles, a food systems scientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study.  

The study offered some ways to change global food production and consumption that could limit warming.

Many of these changes are already being called for or adopted. U.S. President Joe Biden touted the climate benefits of planting cover crops that can draw down carbon from the atmosphere in an April 2021 address to Congress. Multiple recent studies and reports have recommended eating less meat in order to reduce greenhouse gas creation by animals raised for consumption. And California started a mandatory food waste recycling program in 2021 to reduce the emissions created by decaying food.

But reducing methane may be the most important goal of all. Although methane is far more potent than carbon, it also is much shorter-lived — meaning cuts in methane emissions can have a quick benefit, Ivanovich said.

“So that’s going to help us stay under the dangerous warming target,” she said, “as well as give us some time to build up resilience and adaptation to climate change in the meantime.”

A major question that remains is whether food producers and consumers can change their behavior in order to achieve the reductions in greenhouse gases laid out in the study. There’s a roadmap, but will it be followed?

“Changing behavior, especially when we are bombarded with constant media extolling the benefits of everything from Coke to French fries, from pizza to burgers, is pretty damned difficult,” said Columbia University plant physiologist Lew Ziska in an email to the AP. “So, overall, while we need to change, whether we can change is … problematic.” 
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The United Nations announced Monday that it had taken a significant step towards trying to fill a key gap in the fight against climate change: standardized, real-time tracking of greenhouse gases.

The U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization has come up with a new Global Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Infrastructure that aims to provide better ways of measuring planet-warming pollution and help inform policy choices.

The WMO’s new platform will integrate space-based and surface-based observing systems, and seek to clarify uncertainties about where greenhouse gas emissions end up.

It should result in much faster and sharper data on how the planet’s atmosphere is changing.

“We know from our measurements that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are at record high,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas said. 

The three major greenhouses gases are carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Of those, CO2 accounts for around 66 percent of the warming effect on the climate.

“The increase in CO2 levels from 2020 to 2021 was higher than the average growth rate over the past decade, and methane saw the biggest year-on-year jump since measurements started,” Taalas said.

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change saw countries agree to cap global warming at “well below” two degrees Celsius above levels measured between 1850 and 1900 — and 1.5C if possible.

The WMO said there needed to be stronger scientific underpinnings of climate change mitigation actions taken under the agreement.

“There are still uncertainties, especially regarding the role in the carbon cycle of the ocean, the land biosphere and the permafrost areas,” Taalas said.

“We therefore need to undertake greenhouse gas monitoring within an integrated… framework in order to be able to account for natural sources and sinks.

“This will provide vital information and support for implementation of the Paris Agreement.”

The WMO held a symposium in late January that brought together experts from a wide range of fields to start fitting the jigsaw pieces together.

During a meeting last week, the agency’s executive council endorsed the plans they came up with, it said Monday.

Further approval will be needed from the World Meteorological Congress — the WMO’s top decision-making body — in May.

The decision to tie together WMO’s expertise in weather prediction and climate analysis “will be seen as a historic step”, said Lars Peter Riishojgaard, deputy director of the organization’s infrastructure department.
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Only a third of people in the world’s poorest countries can connect to the internet, the U.N. telecoms agency said Sunday, but low-flying satellites could bring hope to millions, especially in remote corners of Africa.

Tech giants including Microsoft have pledged to help populations hobbled by poor internet services to “leapfrog” into an era of online connectivity, with satellites set to play a key role as rival firms send thousands of new generation transmitters into low level orbit.

At the moment just 36% of the 1.25 billion people in the world’s 46 poorest countries can plug into the internet, the International Telecommunication Union said. By comparison, more than 90 percent have access in the European Union.

The ITU condemned the “staggering international connectivity gap” that it said had widened over the past decade.

The divide has been a key complaint at a U.N. summit of Least Developed Countries in Doha, where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told their leaders that “you are being left behind in the digital revolution.”

The digital dearth is particularly acute in some African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, where barely a quarter of the population of nearly 100 million can connect.

While internet access is easy in major DRC cities such as Kinshasa, huge rural zones and swathes of territory battled over by rival rebel groups for more than two decades are digital deserts.

The launch of thousands of Low-Earth Orbit satellites could bring speedy change and boost African hopes, tech experts promised at the Doha summit.

‘Leapfrog other nations’

Satellite coverage will play a key role in Microsoft’s vow to bring internet access to 100 million Africans by 2025, which was outlined ahead of the summit.

Microsoft announced a first phase for five million Africans in December and last week added a commitment to cover another 20 million people.

The initial five million will be served by Viasat, one of the companies sending constellations of satellites into space to compete with land-based fibre broadband.

Elon Musk’s Space X and Starlink are also putting thousands of satellites into an orbit between 400 and 700 kilometers (250 to 430 miles) above Earth.

Microsoft president Brad Smith told AFP that when he first saw the 20 million figure proposed by his team last year, he asked “is this real?”, but that he was now convinced it is possible.

“The technology costs have come down substantially and will continue to drop,” he said. “That is part of what makes it possible to move this fast to reach this size of population.

“Countries in Africa have the opportunity to leapfrog other nations when it comes to the regulatory structure for something like wireless communications,” he added.

“We can reach many more people than we could with fixed line technologies five or 10 or 15 years ago.”

Bandwidth bonanza

Richer countries have already largely allocated the available bandwidth for telecoms and television.

“In Africa the spectrum isn’t being used and so it is available and the governments are moving faster to bring this connectivity to more people,” Smith said.

Microsoft is working with Africa telecoms specialist Liquid Intelligent Technologies to provide internet for the second segment of 20 million people.

Providing internet and digital skills training for thousands of Africans was part of an effort to provide a private-sector alternative to “foreign aid”, Smith said, declaring that “we are bullish on what we believe digital technology can do for development.”

But the Microsoft president acknowledged that the private sector is “woefully under-developed and under-invested” in many LDC economies.

Liquid Intelligent says it has 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) of land fibre across Africa but is building a major satellite footprint.

“In hard-to-reach areas,” said Nic Rudnick, its deputy chief executive, “satellite is often the only technology or the most reliable technology for fast broadband that always works.”

 
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For the first time, United Nations members have agreed on a unified treaty to protect biodiversity in the high seas — nearly half the planet’s surface — concluding two weeks of talks in New York.

The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994, before marine biodiversity was a well-established concept.

An updated framework to protect marine life in the regions outside national boundary waters, known as the high seas, had been in discussions for more than 20 years, but previous efforts to reach an agreement had repeatedly stalled. The unified agreement treaty was reached late Saturday.

“We only really have two major global commons — the atmosphere and the oceans,” said Georgetown marine biologist Rebecca Helm. While the oceans may draw less attention, “protecting this half of earth’s surface is absolutely critical to the health of our planet.”

Now that long-awaited treaty text has been finalized, Nichola Clark, an oceans expert at the Pew Charitable Trusts who observed the talks in New York, said, “This is a once in a generation opportunity to protect the oceans — a major win for biodiversity.”

The treaty will create a new body to manage conservation of ocean life and establish marine protected areas in the high seas. And Clark said that’s critical to achieve the U.N. Biodiversity Conference’s recent pledge to protect 30% of the planet’s waters, as well as its land, for conservation.

The treaty also establishes ground rules for conducting environmental impact assessments for commercial activities in the oceans.

“It means all activities planned for the high seas need to be looked at, though not all will go through a full assessment,” said Jessica Battle, an oceans governance expert at the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

Many marine species — including dolphins, whales, sea turtles and many fish — make long annual migrations, crossing national borders and the high seas. Efforts to protect them — and human communities that rely on fishing or tourism related to marine life — have previously been hampered by a confusing patchwork of laws.

“This treaty will help to knit together the different regional treaties to be able to address threats and concerns across species’ ranges,” said Battle.

That protection also helps coastal biodiversity and economies, said Gladys Martínez de Lemos, executive director of the nonprofit Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense focusing on environmental issues across Latin America.

“Governments have taken an important step that strengthens the legal protection of two-thirds of the ocean and with it marine biodiversity and the livelihoods of coastal communities,” she said.

The question now is how well the ambitious treaty will be implemented.

The high seas have long suffered exploitation due to commercial fishing and mining, as well as pollution from chemicals and plastics. The new agreement is about “acknowledging that the ocean is not a limitless resource, and it requires global cooperation to use the ocean sustainably,” said Malin Pinsky, a biologist at Rutgers University.
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Drugs known as statins are the first-choice treatment for high cholesterol but millions of people who can’t or won’t take those pills because of side effects may have another option.

In a major study, a different kind of cholesterol-lowering drug named Nexletol reduced the risk of heart attacks and some other cardiovascular problems in people who can’t tolerate statins, researchers reported Saturday.

Doctors already prescribe the drug, known chemically as bempedoic acid, to be used together with a statin to help certain high-risk patients further lower their cholesterol. The new study tested Nexletol without the statin combination — and offers the first evidence that it also reduces the risk of cholesterol-caused health problems.

Statins remain “the cornerstone of cholesterol-lowering therapies,” stressed Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, who led the study.

But people who can’t take those proven pills “are very needy patients, they’re extremely difficult to treat,” he said. This option “will have a huge impact on public health.”

Too much so-called LDL or “bad” cholesterol can clog arteries and lead to heart attacks and strokes. Statin pills like Lipitor and Crestor – or their cheap generic equivalents – are the mainstay for lowering LDL cholesterol and preventing heart disease or treating those who already have it. They work by blocking some of the liver’s cholesterol production.

But some people suffer serious muscle pain from statins. While it’s not clear exactly how often that occurs, by some estimates 10% of people who’d otherwise qualify for the pills can’t or won’t take them. They have limited options, including pricey cholesterol-lowering shots and another kind of pill sold as Zetia.

Nexletol also blocks cholesterol production in the liver but in a different way than statins and without that muscle side effect.

The new five-year study tracked nearly 14,000 people who were unable to tolerate more than a very low dose of a statin. Half got daily Nexletol and half a dummy pill.

The main finding: Nexletol-treated patients had a 13% lower risk of a group of major cardiac problems. Then researchers teased apart those different conditions and found a 23% reduced risk of a heart attack, the biggest impact. The drug also cut by 19% procedures to unclog arteries. There wasn’t a difference in deaths, which researchers couldn’t explain but said might require longer to detect.

The data was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Saturday at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology. The study was funded by Nexletol maker Esperion Therapeutics.

The results are “compelling,” Dr. John H. Alexander of Duke University, who wasn’t involved with the study, wrote in the journal. They “will and should” spur use of the drug by patients unwilling or unable to take statins.

“It is premature, however, to consider bempedoic acid as an alternative to statins,” he cautioned. “Given the overwhelming evidence of the vascular benefits,” statins remain the top choice for most patients.
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India may issue an alert on cough syrup exported by Marion Biotech, whose products have been linked to deaths in Uzbekistan, after tests showed many of the company’s drug samples contained toxins, a drug inspector said Saturday.

Indian police arrested three Marion employees Friday and are looking for two directors after tests in a government laboratory found 22 of 36 syrup samples “adulterated and spurious.”

New Delhi is pursuing the issue even as the government has pushed back against allegations that cough syrup made by another Indian company, Maiden Pharmaceuticals, led to the deaths of children in Gambia last year.

Vaibhav Babbar, an inspector involved in the Marion probe, told Reuters the samples had been adulterated with ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol — the toxins that the World Health Organization says were found in the products sold by the two companies in the two countries.

As many as 70 children have died in Gambia and 19 in Uzbekistan.

More than 300 children, most under age 5, in Gambia, Indonesia and Uzbekistan died last year of acute kidney injury associated with contaminated medicines, the WHO said in January.

In addition, it said the Philippines, Timor Leste, Senegal and Cambodia might be affected because they may have the medicines on sale. It also called for “immediate and concerted action” among its 194 member states to prevent more deaths.

“Because Marion’s drugs have gone to so many countries, I pray nothing happens elsewhere,” Babbar said. “The health ministry could issue an alert. They may do it. It will be good to issue an alert.”

He said he did not know whether an alert was under active consideration.

An Indian health ministry spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Marion did not answer calls from Reuters and did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

A government alert would warn people in all countries to take the products off their shelves, though it carries no legal penalty.

Babbar said the drugs had also been exported to Kyrgyzstan and Cambodia.

Babbar has been part of a team that inspected Marion’s plant four times after Uzbekistan said in December the children died after consuming the company’s cough syrups. India suspended Marion’s production soon after.

Analysis by Uzbekistan’s health ministry showed the syrups, Ambronol and DOK-1 Max, were contaminated with unacceptable amounts of diethylene glycol or ethylene glycol, the WHO said in a January medical product alert. The United Nations health watchdog said it was important to detect and remove these substandard products from circulation.

The syrups were administered in doses higher than the standard for children, either by parents mistaking the product for anti-cold remedies or on the advice of pharmacists, according to the analysis.

India in October suspended production at Maiden for violating manufacturing standards after the WHO said four of its cough syrups may have killed dozens of children in Gambia.

Maiden has denied that its drugs were at fault for the deaths in Gambia, and tests by an Indian government laboratory found no toxins in them.
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The Hartbeespoort dam in South Africa used to be brimming with people enjoying scenic landscapes and recreational water sports. Now, the visitors are greeted to the sight of boats stuck in a sea of invasive green water hyacinth weed.

The spike in Harties – as Hartbeespoort is known – can be attributed to pollution, with sewage, industrial chemicals, heavy metals and litter flowing on rivers from Johannesburg and Pretoria.

“In South Africa, we are faced with highly polluted waters,” said Professor Julie Coetzee, who has studied water hyacinths for over 20 years and manages the aquatic weeds program at the Centre for Biological Control at Rhodes University.

Nutrients in the pollutants act as perfect fertilizers for the weed, a big concern for nearby communities due to its devastating impact on livelihoods.

Dion Mostert, 53, is on the verge of laying off 25 workers at his recreational boat company after his business came to a standstill because of the carpet of water hyacinths.

“The boats aren’t going anywhere. It’s affecting tourism in our town… tourist jobs,” Mostert said pointing towards his luxury cruise boat “Alba,” marooned in the weeds.

He has considered using herbicides, but admits it would only be a quick fix against the weed.

Scientists and community members have, however, found a unique way to deal with the invasion by introducing a water hyacinth eating bug called Megamelus scutellaris.

The tiny phloem-feeding insects are the natural enemy to the plants, both are originally from the Amazon basin in South America, and are released by thousands at a time.

The insects destroy the weed by attacking tissue that transports nutrients produced in the leaves during photosynthesis to the rest of the plant.

The insect army has previously reduced the expanse of water hyacinths to a mere 5% on the dam, Coetzee said. At times the weed has covered at least 50% of it.

Environmentalist Patrick Ganda, 41, mass rears the bugs at Grootvaly Blesbokspruit wetland conservancy southeast of Harties, once home to more than a hundred species of birds which attracted a lot of tourists.

But now, unable to find food such as fish and small plants with much of the wetland’s water covered in plants, there are only two to three species of birds left, he said.

Scientists warn that while the insects have been fairly successful in controlling the situation, more needs to be done to treat its cause, which authorities could tackle by tightening regulations on waste water management.

“We are only treating the symptom of a much larger problem,” says Kelby English, a scientist at Rhodes University.
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Walgreens says it will not start selling an abortion pill in 20 states that had warned of legal consequences if it did so.

The drugstore chain’s announcement Thursday signals that access to mifepristone may not expand as broadly as federal regulators intended in January, when they finalized a rule change allowing more pharmacies to provide the pill.

Here’s a closer look at the issue.

About the abortion pill

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone in 2000 to end pregnancy when used in combination with a second drug, misoprostol. The combination is approved for use up to the 10th week of pregnancy.

Mifepristone is taken first to dilate the cervix and block a hormone needed to sustain a pregnancy. Misoprostol is taken a day or two later, causing contractions to empty the uterus.

More than half of U.S. abortions are now done with pills rather than with a procedure, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. In rare cases, the drug combination can cause excess bleeding, requiring emergency care.

Widening access

For more than 20 years, the FDA limited dispensing of mifepristone to a subset of specialty offices and clinics due to safety concerns.

The agency has repeatedly eased restrictions and expanded access, increasing demand even as state laws make the pills harder to get for many women.

In late 2021, the agency eliminated an in-person requirement for getting the pill, saying a new scientific review showed no increase in safety complications if the drug is taken at home. That change also permitted the pill to be prescribed via telehealth and shipped by mail-order pharmacies.

Earlier this year, the FDA further loosened restrictions by allowing pharmacies such as Walgreens to start dispensing the drug after they undergo certification. That includes meeting standards for shipping, tracking and confidentially storing prescribing information.

States step in

Typically, the FDA’s authority to regulate prescription drug access has gone unchallenged. But more than a dozen states now have laws restricting abortion broadly — and the pills specifically — following last year’s Supreme Court decision overturning the federal right to abortion.

Last month, attorneys general in 20 conservative-led states warned CVS and Walgreens in a letter that they could face legal consequences if they sold abortion pills by mail in their states.

In addition to state laws, attorneys general from conservative states have argued that shipments of mifepristone run afoul of a 19th century law that prohibited sending items used in abortion through the mail.

Walgreens’ reaction

A Walgreens spokesperson says the company told the attorneys general that it will not dispense mifepristone in their states and it doesn’t plan to ship the drug to them as well.

But Walgreens is working to become eligible through the FDA’s certification process. It plans to dispense the pills where it can legally do so.

The company is not currently dispensing the pills anywhere.

Other drugstores

Rite Aid Corp. said it was “monitoring the latest federal, state, legal and regulatory developments” and would keep evaluating its policies. The Associated Press also sought comment from CVS Health Corp., retail giant Walmart and the grocery chain Kroger.

Some independent pharmacists would like to become certified to dispense the pills, said Andrea Pivarunas, a spokesperson for the National Community Pharmacists Association. She added that this would be a “personal business decision,” based partly on state laws. The association has no specifics on how many will do it.

Other legal issues

In November, an anti-abortion group filed a federal lawsuit in Texas seeking to revoke mifepristone’s approval, claiming the FDA approved the drug 23 years ago without adequate evidence of safety.

A federal judge could rule soon. If he sides with abortion opponents, mifepristone could potentially be removed from the U.S. market.

In January, abortion rights supporters filed separate lawsuits challenging abortion pill restrictions imposed in North Carolina and West Virginia.

Legal experts foresee years of court battles over access to the pills.
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Former President George W. Bush recently urged Washington lawmakers to reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, an initiative he launched two decades ago against one of deadliest diseases at the time. VOA Senior Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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More than 35 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, the dogs of Chernobyl roam among decaying abandoned buildings in and around the closed plant — somehow still able to find food, breed and survive.

Scientists hope that studying these dogs can teach humans new tricks about how to live in the harshest, most degraded environments, too.

They published the first of what they hope will be many genetics studies on Friday in the journal Science Advances, focusing on 302 free-roaming dogs living in an officially designated “exclusion zone” around the disaster site. They identified populations whose differing levels of radiation exposure may have made them genetically distinct from one another and other dogs worldwide.

“We’ve had this golden opportunity” to lay the groundwork for answering a crucial question: “How do you survive in a hostile environment like this for 15 generations?” said geneticist Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the study’s many authors.

Co-author Tim Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, said the dogs “provide an incredible tool to look at the impacts of this kind of a setting” on mammals overall.

Dogs’ DNA reveal differences

Chernobyl’s environment is singularly brutal. On April 26, 1986, an explosion and fire at the Ukraine power plant caused radioactive fallout to spew into the atmosphere. Thirty workers were killed in the immediate aftermath, while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning is estimated to eventually number in the thousands.

Researchers say most of the dogs they are studying appear to be descendants of pets that residents were forced to leave behind when they evacuated the area.

Mousseau has been working in the Chernobyl region since the late 1990s and began collecting blood from the dogs around 2017. Some of the dogs live in the power plant, a dystopian, industrial setting. Others are about 15 kilometers (9 miles) or 45 kilometers (28 miles) away.

At first, Ostrander said, they thought the dogs might have intermingled so much over time that they would be much the same. But through DNA, they could readily identify dogs living in areas of high, medium and low levels of radiation exposure.

“That was a huge milestone for us,” said Ostrander. “And what’s surprising is we can even identify families” — about 15 different ones.

Now researchers can begin to look for alterations in the DNA.

“We can compare them and we can say, ‘OK, what’s different, what’s changed, what’s mutated, what’s evolved, what helps you, what hurts you at the DNA level?'” Ostrander said. This will involve separating nonconsequential DNA changes from purposeful ones.

Data can give insight

Scientists said the research could have wide applications, providing insights about how animals and humans can live now and in the future in regions of the world under “continuous environmental assault” — and in the high-radiation environment of space.

Dr. Kari Ekenstedt, a veterinarian who teaches at Purdue University and was not involved in the study, said it’s a first step toward answering important questions about how constant exposure to higher levels of radiation affects large mammals. For example, she said, “Is it going to be changing their genomes at a rapid rate?”

Researchers have already started on the follow-up research, which will mean more time with the dogs at the site about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Kyiv. Mousseau said he and his colleagues were there most recently last October and didn’t see any war-related activity. Mousseau said the team has grown close to some dogs, naming one Prancer because she excitedly prances around when she sees people.

“Even though they’re wild, they still very much enjoy human interaction,” he said, “Especially when there’s food involved.”
…

Former President George W. Bush last week urged Washington lawmakers to continue to support the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), an initiative he launched two decades ago against one of deadliest diseases at the time.

Bush made his initial plea before Congress at his State of the Union address in 2003, when nearly 30 million people in Africa had the AIDS virus, including 3 million children under age 15.

“I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean,” Bush said at the time.

Fast forward to today: Bush, in Washington to mark his plan’s 20-year anniversary, said he made the trip to remind people that American taxpayers’ money is making a huge and measurable difference in providing lifesaving treatment to millions of people living with HIV/AIDS.

Check the results

“This program needs to be funded. And for the skeptics, all I ask is look at results. If the results don’t impress you, then nothing will impress you,” he told an audience February 24 at the U.S. Institute of Peace. PEPFAR is due for reauthorization this year.

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates was in attendance as well.

“HIV is still a huge problem. We’ve cut the death rates down substantially, but if we don’t continue to provide these medicines, then people’s viral load goes up, they become infected, and you get that exponential increase that we saw with all infectious diseases, including COVID,” Gates said.

The significance of the PEPFAR program boils down to the number of lives that have been affected, said David Kramer, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

“Over 25 million lives have been saved as a result of President Bush’s PEPFAR initiative. … And it was a vision that he [Bush] had to step in and help people that were in real need of help. He felt the U.S. was in a position to do so,” Kramer told VOA.

The program has brought other benefits, Kramer said.

“The infrastructure that was set up over the 20 years under PEPFAR and also with the Global Fund [to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria] provided important assistance to health workers and officials in dealing with other crises such as the COVID pandemic.”

Bipartisan backing

Since the legislation was signed into law in May 2003, PEPFAR has benefited from bipartisan support in Congress, even though funding for its abstinence programs — a requirement later removed in 2008 — had drawn criticism. Former President Donald Trump unsuccessfully proposed to reduce PEPFAR’s funding during his term.

Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, recognizes PEPFAR’s impact.

“When he announced PEPFAR 20 years ago, our people were dying, our countries were devastated. There was fear, there was pain and suffering. … So, we come here to honor President Bush, the American government, the American taxpayers for $100 billion that has been put in this program over 20 years and saved lives,” she told VOA.

She also said it was the partnerships that formed between PEPFAR, the Global Fund, UNAIDS, civil societies, governments and others that helped to turn the tide.

Former President of Tanzania Jakaya Kikwete, who joined Bush at the event and whom Bush referred to as his “pal,” recalled getting tested publicly to encourage others who were afraid to come forward.

“I remember the 14 of July, 2007, we launched this major campaign at a big square in Dar es Salaam. … The best thing is for my wife and I to lead by example, and we should not do it under a tent where no one sees it. It would be under the tent, but let’s have TV cameras beam in, blood being drawn, being taken to the labs. Of course, my veins were easy, but my wife’s had some problems. They pricked her several times. … I was very sorry for her, but I said, ‘That’s the price of leadership.'”

Kikwete was the first African leader to do so, a gesture that Bush saluted at the event.

Fight continues

With a worldwide target of ending AIDS by 2030, stopping new infections is a must, especially given 2021 data, Byanyima said.

“We had 1.5 million infections worldwide, most of these in sub-Saharan Africa. We had 650 thousand people who died in 2021 of AIDS-related illnesses. Not one of those new infections, not one of those deaths had to happen, because we have everything we need for prevention and for putting people on treatment,” she said.

She pointed out that new infections are being noticed among girls and women between the ages of 14 and 24, gay men, sex workers and young people who inject drugs.

“We know what needs to be done,” Byanyima said.

“For girls and young women, we know it’s about gender inequalities and opportunities to be in school where it’s safe,” she said. As for “gay men, transgender women, sex workers … it’s the criminal laws that are in place that stop them from coming forth to get prevention or treatment services. We know from our evidence that these laws that are there do not serve any purpose.”
…

Days after the Hong Kong government lifted its mask mandate, most Hong Kongers continue to wear the protective anti-COVID-19 coverings, a decision that for some people shows a continued concern about health and for others indicates distrust of the government.

Tam Mei Tak, a radio talk-show host and political commentator, told VOA Cantonese that many Hong Kongers have realized that “trusting the government is worse than relying on themselves” in the fight against the pandemic.

A poll of Hong Kong residents commissioned by the local South China Morning Post and released in April 2020 found seven in 10 were convinced they would have only themselves to thank rather than the government if the city won its battle against COVID-19.

The Hong Kong government officially lifted the mask mandate on Wednesday. It had been in effect for three years, making the former British territory the last “unmasked” city in the world. Since early December, just after China relaxed its stringent zero-COVID policy, Hong Kong has lifted most of its controls, including limiting public gatherings and requiring proof of vaccination for entering restaurants, bars and other venues.

Chief Executive John Lee told reporters on Tuesday that the mask order would be completely revoked the next day and citizens would no longer need to wear masks indoors, outdoors or on public transportation.

But during 2019 protests against a legislative bill that would have allowed people to be extradited to mainland China to face charges if it had not been withdrawn, the Hong Kong government enacted the Prohibition of Face Covering Regulation. It was seen as a law to prevent demonstrators from covering their faces, which made it harder for authorities to identify them.

When asked Tuesday whether the city government would abandon the regulation while lifting the mask mandate, Lee said the mask mandate was a public health concern and was different from the Prohibition of Face Covering Regulation.

Tam said that most citizens still wear masks because the Prohibition of Face Covering Regulation has not been revoked: “Since you ask me to do it, I would do the opposite. … This is a vote of no confidence in the government.”

Other Hong Kongers told VOA Cantonese they continued to wear masks to remain healthy.

One of them, Ah San, told VOA Cantonese she was wearing a no-longer-mandated mask “because I haven’t been sick while wearing a mask or had to go to the doctor. I haven’t had a cold in the past three years, so I think wearing a mask is better for protecting my own health.”

She added that “as the government doesn’t publish the data, we don’t know if there are infected people walking around on the street. So I think it’s more important to protect myself.”

Alice, a Hong Konger who runs a Japanese-style yakiniku restaurant and asked that her full name not be used to avoid attracting officials’ attention, told VOA Cantonese that the moment the “mask order” was lifted, she immediately posted photos of herself without a mask on social media. She said she felt very happy about going shopping without a mask that afternoon, thinking life had returned to what it was before COVID-19. But when she saw so many people wearing masks on the street, she said she felt a little guilty.

Simon Lee, a Hong Kong political commentator who now lives in Virginia, said that the reaction of Hong Kongers to the revocation of the mask mandate also reflected the public’s distrust of the Hong Kong government. He said many Hong Kongers believe that the city government’s pandemic prevention measures lacked scientific basis.

He said it was obvious over the past three years that “the public knew that the government had no real scientific basis for epidemic prevention, and instead everyone acted according to their own judgment.”

Simon Lee said, “Whether the government told you to wear a mask or not, it’s actually meaningless to Hong Kongers. You see that Hong Kongers themselves would wear masks when they were in ‘high-risk’ places, but sometimes they were feeling relaxed and having drinks at a bar, they didn’t wear a mask. It could actually be the same person. The point is that among [a person’s] many considerations, the government’s suggestion and position are the least relevant factors.”

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
…

The U.S. space agency NASA says two U.S. astronauts, another from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a Russian cosmonaut are safely aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after their Space-X Dragon crew capsule docked Friday with the orbiting laboratory.

Video from NASA showed U.S. astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev being greeted warmly by ISS crew members as they entered the space station about two hours after the docking.

The 41-year-old Alneyadi is the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from U.S. soil as part of a long-duration space station team.

Space-X says the new crew members will spend six months on the station, where they will conduct more than 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations,

NASA says the docking was delayed slightly as mission teams completed troubleshooting of a faulty docking hook sensor on the Dragon capsule. They verified all of the docking hooks were properly configured, and the docking process continued.

The new crew members temporally expand the ISS crew to 11. They join the Expedition 68 crew, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann, and Josh Cassada, Japanese space agency, JAXA, astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and Anna Kikina. 

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
…

One month after a freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, sending tons of toxic chemicals into the air and prompting a temporary evacuation of the town, the fallout from the accident continues, both on the ground where local residents complain of lingering effects, and in Washington, where the Biden administration is under assault from conservatives over the federal response.

There were no injuries reported as a result of the accident, but residents of the area nearby are complaining of a mix of symptoms that may be related to chemical exposure, including headaches, breathing difficulties and skin rashes. This is despite assertions by state and federal environmental officials who say they have tested air and water samples and have found no evidence of harmful levels of dangerous chemicals.

Contractors have removed millions of gallons of toxic liquids and hundreds of tons of contaminated solid waste from the crash site and affected areas. However, some experts have questioned the thoroughness of the testing being conducted, and have warned that a larger and more extensive effort is necessary.

In Washington, Republicans have used the accident to lash out at the Biden administration and its officials, calling the federal response to the disaster insufficient, despite Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, saying publicly that he has “no complaints” about the federal response, and that his state is “getting the help we need.”

In a more conspiratorial vein, members of conservative media organizations, including popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have worked to inject the issue of race into the response to the disaster. Carlson and others have insinuated that the Biden administration would have mounted a stronger response if the disaster had occurred in a community of color, rather than in the majority-white East Palestine.

Timeline of events

Shortly before 9 p.m. on Feb. 3, a 150-car freight train operated by railway firm Norfolk Southern was passing through East Palestine when about 50 cars derailed in a fiery crash that officials have speculated was caused by an overheated brake bearing on a single car.

Of the dozens of train cars that went off the rails, 11 contained hazardous materials, including five that were carrying vinyl chloride, a highly combustible gas. Others carried a variety of toxic chemicals, some of which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health say may cause cancer in people exposed to them.

Officials from the federal Environmental Protection Agency were on the ground in East Palestine within hours of the crash, the agency has said, with some 17 workers in place and performing air and water safety tests within the first 24 hours.

On Feb. 5, with state and federal agencies working to control the burning wreck, Governor DeWine ordered a mandatory evacuation of everyone within one mile of the site, warning that temperatures had risen drastically in one of the affected cars, making a catastrophic explosion possible.

The following day, the radius of the evacuation was expanded to two miles, as safety officials initiated a “controlled burn” of the vinyl chloride, meant to prevent an explosion. The result was an hours-long conflagration that sent plumes of dark black smoke into the air.

On Feb. 7, federal officials sampled the air and water in East Palestine and deemed it safe for residents to return to their homes. The mandatory evacuation order was lifted Feb. 9.

Norfolk Southern blamed

The train that crashed was owned and operated by Norfolk Southern, as were the tracks on which it was traveling when the crash occurred. In the weeks since, federal authorities, including the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, have blamed the company for the accident and said that it will be liable for cleanup and remediation costs.

“Let me be clear: Norfolk Southern will pay for cleaning up the mess they created and for the trauma they’ve inflicted on this community,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a news release issued Feb. 21.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg released a letter to the company, accusing it of resisting tougher safety regulations in the past and demanding reforms. “In this context, Norfolk Southern and your industry must demonstrate that you will not seek to supercharge profits by resisting higher standards that could benefit the safety of workers and the safety of American communities, like East Palestine,” he wrote.

For its part, the company has said that it is committed to cleaning up the town and compensating residents. In an open letter, Norfolk Southern President and CEO Alan Shaw, who visited the crash site, said that his company was aware of residents’ concerns and would work to address them.

“I hear you, we hear you,” Shaw said. “My simple answer is that we are here and will stay here for as long as it takes to ensure your safety and to help East Palestine recover and thrive.”

Residents frustrated

In the weeks since the crash, residents of East Palestine have expressed frustration with government agencies and Norfolk Southern. At one point, representatives of the railroad refused to appear at a public meeting, citing unspecified safety concerns.

Local officials have complained about what they see as insufficient attention being paid to their town. East Palestine’s mayor, Trent Conaway, took particular exception to the fact that President Joe Biden had visited Ukraine in February without coming to his town first.

“That was the biggest slap in the face,” Conaway said in an appearance on Fox News. “That tells you right now he doesn’t care about us. He can send every agency he wants to, but I found out this morning that he was in Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there and not to us … so I’m furious.”

Biden on Thursday told reporters that he has been working closely with “every official” in Ohio to respond to the crash. He seemed to suggest that he would eventually visit, saying, “I will be out there at some point.”

Researchers concerned

Professor Andrew J. Whelton, a professor of civil engineering and environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University, told VOA the residents have ample justification for their concerns about the health risks they face.

Whelton, who has consulted on numerous toxic spill cleanups, has personally traveled to East Palestine with a team to collect soil and water samples and said he experienced physical symptoms of toxic chemical exposure himself.

He said that in his view, federal and state officials have not communicated the severity of the danger facing the community there and appear not to have taken some basic preliminary analyses necessary to adequately clean things up.

“After you remove the acute health threats from the area, then the cleanup process will take years. But they haven’t removed the acute health threats from the area,” he said. “People are being exposed, still. That poses an immediate danger to life and safety.”

While officials have allowed people to return to their homes, saying that air and water tests show no harmful levels of dangerous chemicals, he said, “There are definitely areas in Palestine where it is unsafe to be, and officials have failed to notify people about those unsafe places.”

Political response

Republicans in Congress have used the disaster in East Palestine as fodder for attacks on the Biden administration, particularly Buttigieg.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “Even amidst a catalog of crises on his watch, from this and other recent train derailments to the meltdown in air travel back during the holiday season, Secretary Buttigieg has seemed more interested in pursuing press coverage for woke initiatives and climate nonsense than in attending to the basic elements of his day job.”

However, the response of lawmakers has not been completely partisan. Democratic and Republican senators from Ohio and Pennsylvania, the two states most affected by the crash, came together with other lawmakers to jointly sponsor the Railway Safety Act of 2023. The bill would broaden safety requirements for rail transportation, particularly for trains carrying hazardous materials.

Next week, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing at which Norfolk Southern CEO Shaw is expected to testify, as are officials from the EPA and the state of Ohio.

Conspiracy theories

The East Palestine disaster has provided material for commentators on the far right, who claim that there has been a conspiracy of silence from the mainstream media that has kept the disaster from receiving the level of attention it deserves. Many are focusing on the fact that East Palestine is a majority-white community, and attributing malevolent motives to the Biden administration.

Carlson, on his program, said, “East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative … That shouldn’t be relevant but as you’re about to hear, it very much is.” He went on to suggest that the administration would have acted differently if the disaster had affected a community of color. “But it happened to the poor town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten, and in the view of the people who lead this country, forgettable.”

Charlie Kirk, leader of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, described what he characterized as insufficient media coverage of the disaster as part of a “war on white people.”

“If this train derailment happened in downtown Atlanta in the densely populated Black neighborhoods, this would be the No. 1 news story,” he said.

Prominent Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan, a former member of Congress who lost a run for the Senate last year, ridiculed the attempt to inject racial politics into the story. “You guys want to talk about a train accident as an attack on white people?” Ryan said of Republicans, in an interview with The Washington Post. “We want to talk about how we rebuild these communities.”
…

Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power.

Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)

Carbon dioxide is released when fossil fuels such as oil, coal or natural gas are burned to powers cars, planes, homes and factories. When the gas enters the atmosphere, it traps heat and contributes to the warming of the the climate.

Extreme weather events intensified last year’s carbon dioxide emissions: Droughts reduced the amount of water available for hydropower, which increased the need to burn fossil fuels. And heat waves drove up demand for electricity.

Thursday’s report was described as disconcerting by climate scientists, who warn that energy users around the world must cut emissions dramatically to slow the dire consequences of global warming.

“Any emissions growth — even 1% — is a failure,” said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University and chairman of the Global Carbon Project, an international group. “We can’t afford growth. We can’t afford stasis. It’s cuts or chaos for the planet. Any year with higher coal emissions is a bad year for our health and for the Earth.”

Carbon dioxide emissions from coal grew 1.6% last year. Many communities, primarily in Asia, switched from natural gas to coal to avoid high natural gas prices that were worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the IEA said.

And as global airline traffic increased, carbon dioxide emissions from burning oil grew 2.5%, with about half the surge resulting from the aviation sector.

Global emissions have grown in most years since 1900 and have accelerated over time, according to data from IEA. One exception was the pandemic year of 2020, when travel all but came to a standstill.

Last year’s level of emissions, though a record high, was nevertheless lower than experts had expected. Increased deployment of renewable energy, electric vehicles and heat pumps together helped prevent an additional 550 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions, the IEA said.

Strict pandemic measures and weak economic growth in China also curtailed production, helping to limit overall global emissions. And in Europe, the IEA said, electricity generation from wind and solar power exceeded that of gas or nuclear for the first time.

“Without clean energy, the growth in CO2 emissions would have been nearly three times as high,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said in a statement.

“However, we still see emissions growing from fossil fuels, hindering efforts to meet the world’s climate targets. International and national fossil fuel companies are making record revenues and need to take their share of responsibility, in line with their public pledges to meet climate goals.”

Though emissions continue to grow at worrisome levels, a reversal that would help achieve the climate goals that nations have committed to remains possible, said John Sterman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan Sustainability Initiative.

Nations must subsidize renewables, improve energy efficiency, electrify industry and transportation, set a high price for carbon emissions, reduce deforestation, plant trees and rid the system of coal, Sterman argued.

“This is a massive, massive undertaking to do all these things, but that’s what’s needed,” he said.
…

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched a four-person crew on a trip to the International Space Station early Thursday, with a Russian cosmonaut and United Arab Emirates astronaut joining two NASA crewmates on the flight.

The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A live NASA webcast showed the 25-story-tall spacecraft ascending from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the predawn sky.

The launch was expected to accelerate the Crew Dragon to an orbital velocity of 28,164 kph, more than 22 times the speed of sound.

The flight came 72 hours after an initial launch attempt was scrubbed in the final minutes of countdown early on Monday due to a clog in the flow of engine-ignition fluid. NASA said the problem was fixed by replacing a clogged filter and purging the system.

The trip to the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting some 420 kilometers above Earth, was expected to take nearly 25 hours, with rendezvous planned for about 1:15 a.m. EST (0615 GMT) Friday as the crew begins a six-month science mission in microgravity.

Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Musk — billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla and social media platform Twitter — began sending American astronauts to orbit in May 2020.

The latest ISS crew was led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a onetime U.S. Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.

Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as the Crew 6 pilot, was making his first spaceflight.

The Crew 6 mission also is notable for its inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from U.S. soil as part of a long-duration space station team. UAE’s first-ever astronaut launched to orbit in 2019 aboard a Russian spacecraft.

Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 was Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 42, who like Alneyadi is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the team.

Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly aboard an American spacecraft under a renewed ride-sharing deal signed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Crew 6 team will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS occupants — three U.S. NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly to space, along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.

The ISS, about the length of a football field, has been continuously operated for more than two decades years by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The Crew 6 mission follows two recent mishaps in which Russian spacecraft docked to the orbiting laboratory sprang coolant leaks apparently caused micrometeoroids, tiny grains of space rock, streaking through space and striking the craft at high velocity.

One of the affected Russian vehicles was a Soyuz crew capsule that had carried two cosmonauts and an astronaut to the space station in September for a six-month mission now set to end in March. An empty replacement Soyuz to bring them home arrived at the space station Saturday.
…

NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a spot between two boulders during last September’s first test of a planetary defense system, sending debris hurtling into space and changing the rocky, oblong-shaped object’s path a bit more than previously calculated. 

Those were among the findings released by scientists on Wednesday in the most detailed account of the U.S. space agency’s proof-of-principle mission on using a spacecraft to change a celestial object’s trajectory — employing sheer kinetic force to nudge it off course just enough to keep Earth safe. 

“The DART test was phenomenally successful. We now know that we have a viable technique for potentially preventing an asteroid impact if one day we had the need to,” said planetary scientist Terik Daly of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, lead author of one of the DART studies published in the journal Nature.  

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided on September 26, 2022, at 22,530 kilometers per hour with Dimorphos, an asteroid about 150 meters in diameter, roughly 11 million kilometers from Earth. Dimorphos is a moonlet of Didymos, which is defined as a near-Earth asteroid and has a shape like a top spinning in space with a diameter of about 780 meters. Neither object imperils Earth.  

“We were trying to change the amount of time that it took for Dimorphos to orbit around Didymos by colliding head-on with Dimorphos,” said Northern Arizona University planetary scientist Cristina Thomas, lead author of another of the studies published in Nature.  

“The momentum of the collision and the momentum of the ejected material both acted to decrease the amount of time it takes Dimorphos to orbit by 33 minutes. This also results in the object orbiting a little bit closer to Didymos,” Thomas said. 

Before the impact, the orbital period was 11 hours, 55 minutes. It now is 11 hours, 22 minutes. NASA’s previous estimate, announced in October, was an orbital change of 32 minutes. The benchmark for success had been set as a change of at least 1 minute, 13 seconds. 

The scientists gave a blow-by-blow account of how the collision unfolded. 

“First, one of the spacecraft’s solar panels directly hit a large boulder near the impact site. Next, the second solar panel grazed another large boulder. Finally, the spacecraft bus — the box between the solar panels — hit between these two boulders,” Daly said. 

“We suspect that these two boulders were destroyed. After impact, ejecta [debris blasted into space] was launched from the surface for a period of time,” Daly added, saying satellite and telescope images showed a large amount of such material. 

The research also clarified details such as the precise location of the impact and the angle of impact. 

“People may think of the DART mission as a fairly straightforward experiment that is similar to playing billiards in space — one solid spacecraft impacts into one solid asteroid,” Thomas said. “However, asteroids are far more complex than just a solid rock. In fact, most asteroids are what we think of as rubble piles.” 

The $330 million DART mission was seven years in development. 

“We don’t know of any asteroids at this time that pose a threat to Earth, but we want to be ready for such a scenario,” Daly said. “It’s analogous to testing a car’s airbags. You make sure they work during a crash test instead of waiting to get in a real car accident to find out if they work.”
…

Eli Lilly will cut prices for some older insulins later this year and immediately give more patients access to a cap on the costs they pay to fill prescriptions. 

The moves announced Wednesday promise critical relief to some people with diabetes who can face thousands of dollars in annual costs for insulin they need in order to live. Lilly’s changes also come as lawmakers and patient advocates pressure drugmakers to do something about soaring prices. 

Lilly said it will cut the list prices for its most commonly prescribed insulin, Humalog, and for another insulin, Humulin, by 70% or more in the fourth quarter, which starts in October. 

List prices are what a drugmaker initially sets for a product and what people who have no insurance or plans with high deductibles are sometimes stuck paying. 

A Lilly spokeswoman said the current list price for a 10-milliliter vial of the fast-acting, mealtime insulin Humalog is $274.70. That will fall to $66.40. 

Likewise, she said the same amount of Humulin currently lists at $148.70. That will change to $44.61. 

Lilly CEO David Ricks said Wednesday that his company was making the changes to address issues that affect the price patients ultimately pay for its insulins. 

He noted that discounts Lilly offers from its list prices often don’t reach patients through insurers or pharmacy benefit managers. High-deductible coverage can lead to big bills at the pharmacy counter, particularly at the start of the year when the deductibles renew. 

“We know the current U.S. health care system has gaps,” he said. “This makes a tough disease like diabetes even harder to manage.” 

Patient advocates have long called for insulin price cuts to help uninsured people who would not be affected by price caps tied to insurance coverage. 

Lilly’s planned cuts “could actually provide some substantial price relief,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University who studies drug costs. 

She noted that the moves likely won’t affect Lilly much financially because the insulins are older, and some already face competition. 

Lilly also said Wednesday that it will cut the price of its authorized generic version of Humalog to $25 a vial starting in May. 

Lilly also is launching in April a biosimilar insulin to compete with Sanofi’s Lantus. 

Ricks said that it will take time for insurers and the pharmacy system to implement its price cuts, so the drugmaker will immediately cap monthly out-of-pocket costs at $35 for people who are not covered by Medicare’s prescription drug program. 

The drugmaker said the cap applies to people with commercial coverage and at most retail pharmacies. 

Lilly said people without insurance can find savings cards to receive insulin for the same amount at its InsulinAffordability.com website. 

The federal government in January started applying that cap to patients with coverage through its Medicare program for people 65 and older or those who have certain disabilities or illnesses. 

President Joe Biden brought up that cost cap during his annual State of the Union address last month. He called for insulin costs for everyone to be capped at $35. 

Biden said in a statement Wednesday that Lilly responded to his call. 

“It’s a big deal, and it’s time for other manufacturers to follow,” Biden said. 

Aside from Eli Lilly and the French drugmaker Sanofi, other insulin makers include the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. 

Representatives for both Sanofi and Novo Nordisk said their companies offer several programs that limit costs for people with and without coverage. 
…

The head of a U.S. government program to fight AIDS, Dr. John Nkengasong, says that in its 20 years of existence the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has saved 25 million lives.

PEPFAR, set up in 2003 under the administration of former U.S. president George W. Bush, has transformed the trajectory of HIV/AIDS, Nkengasong told reporters Tuesday while visiting South Africa.

“Twenty-five million lives have been saved, 5.5 million children have been born free of HIV/AIDS, health systems have been strengthened in a remarkable way,” he said.

Nkengasong, who comes from Cameroon, said there was once a “sense of hopelessness” in Africa, the continent worst-hit by HIV/AIDS, but since then countries’ economies have increased and life expectancy has improved.

Some 95% of the total $110 billion spent through PEPFAR was spent on Africa as it bore the brunt of the disease, he said.

“Before PEPFAR only 50,000 people, 50,000 people on the continent of Africa who were infected, were on treatment, 50,000. Today over 20 million people are receiving life-saving anti-retroviral therapy.” he said.

Nkengasong said the infrastructure rolled out across Africa as part of the U.S. government program was also useful during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The AIDS official said he was also “very positive” about the tools in the pipeline to combat HIV, including the roll out of pre-exposure prophylactics for HIV negative people that can be injected every three months and will stop the spread of new infections.
…

Two more people in Equatorial Guinea have died of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, a cousin of the Ebola virus, bringing the toll of fatalities to 11, the authorities say.

“Two days ago, the monitoring system recorded eight notifications, including the deaths of two people with symptoms of the disease,” Health Minister Mitoha Ondo’o Ayekaba said in a statement issued late Tuesday.

Work is underway “to strengthen assessment of the spread of the epidemic,” said the statement, read on national television.

“Forty-eight contact cases have been documented, four of whom have developed symptoms, and three who have been quarantined in hospital,” it added.

The Marburg virus is a rare but highly dangerous pathogen that causes severe fever, often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure.

It is part of the so-called filovirus family that also includes the Ebola virus, which has wreaked havoc in several previous outbreaks in Africa.

The central African state announced on February 13 that nine people had died from Marburg between January 7 and February 7.

The U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) held an emergency session the following day.

The national authorities have declared a health alert in the remote northeastern province of Kie-Ntem province and in the neighboring district of Mongomo, which are located on the border with Cameroon and Gabon.

Measures include a lockdown plan implemented in collaboration with the WHO.

In their statement of February 13, the authorities had reported only three cases of infection in addition to the fatalities — individuals who were being isolated with “mild symptoms” in hospital.

The natural host of the Marburg virus is the African fruit bat, which carries the virus but does not fall sick from it.

But the animals can pass the virus to primates in close proximity, including humans, and human-to-human transmission then occurs through contact with blood or other bodily fluids.

Fatality rates in confirmed cases have ranged from 24 percent to 88 percent in previous outbreaks, depending on the virus strain and case management, according to the WHO.

There are currently no approved vaccines or antiviral treatments.

Potential treatments, including blood products, immune therapies and drug therapies, as well as early candidate vaccines are being evaluated, the WHO says.
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The U.S. ambassador to China says Beijing needs to be more forthcoming about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a day after reports that the U.S. Energy Department concluded the outbreak likely began because of a Chinese laboratory leak.

Nicholas Burns told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event by video link Monday that China needs to “be more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the COVID-19 crisis.” Wuhan is the Chinese city where the first cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in December 2019.

His comments come a day after U.S. media reported that the Energy Department determined the pandemic likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan.

The department made its judgment in a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and key members of Congress, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the development, citing people who read the report.

The WSJ said the Energy Department intelligence agency was now the second U.S. intelligence agency after the FBI to conclude a Chinese lab leak was the probable cause of the pandemic, although U.S. spy agencies remain divided over the origins of the virus.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby echoed that sentiment.

“There has not been a definitive conclusion and consensus in the U.S. government on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Kirby told reporters Monday when asked about the WSJ report.

The Energy Department assessment was made with “low confidence,” while the FBI conclusion was determined with “moderate confidence,” according to the WSJ. Four other U.S. agencies have reportedly determined with “low confidence” that the virus was transmitted naturally through animals, while an additional two agencies remain undecided.

The reports again bring national attention to the question of what caused the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Energy Department’s conclusion marks a change from its earlier position that it was undecided on how the virus began. U.S. officials did not disclose what new intelligence brought about the change. The Energy Department’s analysis came from its network of national laboratories, giving it a perspective different from more traditional intelligence assessments.

On Sunday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN that “there is a variety of views in the intelligence community.”

“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other,” he said.

Scientists have also been divided on the issue, with some pointing to the live animal market in Wuhan as the most probable place the virus emerged, noting that animal-to-human transmission has been the pathway for many previously unknown pathogens. Other scientists, however, have given credence to the lab leak theory, noting that no animal source has been found and that Wuhan is a major site of coronavirus research.

The question of how the virus began has also exacerbated political divisions in the U.S., with Republicans more likely to back the lab leak hypothesis.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton was one of the first high-profile politicians to voice the theory that the virus originated in a lab setting, commenting in February 2020, when the predominant view was the virus had been transmitted from bats and spread at a food market in Wuhan.

After a growing number of scientists urged for both hypotheses to be seriously considered, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered an intelligence review into the origins of COVID-19 in May 2021.

A declassified intelligence assessment in October 2021 stated that both hypotheses were plausible but that intelligence agencies remained divided over which theory was correct. The report said there was consensus among intelligence agencies that the pandemic was not the result of a Chinese biological weapons program.

China has repeatedly denied that a lab leak occurred in Wuhan. It has placed limits on World Health Organization investigations to determine the origin of the virus.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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