The average age of cars and trucks in the U.S. has hit a record 11.8 years, as better quality and technology allows people to keep them on the road longer.

The 2019 figures from data provider IHS Markit show that the rate of increase is slowing, but the average age is still expected to go over 12 years early in the next decade. The average age is up 0.1 years from 2018.

People are feeling comfortable keeping vehicles longer because they’re built better than in the past, said IHS Markit Director of Global Automotive Aftermarket Mark Seng.

“The quality is higher, lasting longer, withstanding the weather,” Seng said.

Financing longer

Plus, original owners are keeping their vehicles longer and maintaining them better because they’re financing them for longer, six or even seven years in many cases, he said.

“That helps improve the overall life of the vehicle,” he said.

Western states have the oldest vehicles at 12.4 years, while in the Northeast the average age is only 10.9 years. That’s largely because of less stop-and-start traffic that wears on a vehicle. Weather conditions also play a part.

Montana has the oldest average age at 16.6 years, while the youngest is Vermont, with an average age of 9.9 years.

The aging vehicles should be a boon to repair shops, which may want to change strategies to cater to owners of older vehicles who may want to spend less on parts, Seng said.

The number of light vehicles in use in the U.S. also hit a record of more than 278 million this year, according to IHS, which tracks vehicle registrations nationally.
 

U.S. President Donald Trump responded Thursday to the Supreme Court’s decision to block his administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the upcoming U.S. census by saying he’d asked his lawyers whether there was a way to delay the nationwide head count.  
 
In a tweet hours after the court announced its decision, Trump said it “seems totally ridiculous” that the government could not question people about their citizenship on the census, which takes place once every 10 years. 
 
The Supreme Court ruled the administration’s explanation — that the citizenship question was meant to better enforce the Voting Rights Act — was “more of a distraction” from the issue than an explanation. 
 
Opponents of the citizenship question say it would intimidate noncitizens into not answering the census, ultimately leaving them underrepresented in Congress.  
 
Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberal justices in the 5-4 ruling. 

The nation’s highest court also announced Thursday that it was rejecting a request to intervene in states’ redistricting efforts.  Redrawing the boundaries of voting districts is meant to ensure proportional representation in state legislatures as the population grows and changes locations.  
 
Republicans in the state of North Carolina and Democrats in the state of Maryland have been accused of redrawing the lines of voting districts to keep power in the hands of the ruling party. 
 
The chief justices said manipulation of the electoral map, a practice known colloquially as gerrymandering, is a problem for state governments to solve, not the Supreme Court. 
 
Thursday was the final day of rulings by the Supreme Court before its summer break.

Twitter will begin labeling tweets by world leaders that violate its rules, but that it says still serve the “public interest,” the company announced in a blog post Thursday. The function will apply only to verified government officials and political candidates with over 100,000 followers.

Twitter’s rules ban content that glorifies or encourages violence, promotes terrorism or carries out targeted harassment of other users. In the past, the company kept tweets by world leaders on the platform even when they broke the rules. The new disclaimers, Twitter said, are meant to clarify how decisions are made about keeping offending tweets online.

“Our highest priority is to protect the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” the blog post says. “An important part of that is ensuring our rules and how we enforce them are easy to understand.”

The decision to remove a tweet will depend on its potential to cause harm, particularly physical, its potential to provide context and unique perspectives to users, and its value in holding the official responsible.

“A critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable,” says the post.

A task force with representatives from Twitter’s trust and safety, legal, public policy and regional teams will make decisions regarding rule-breaking tweets by world leaders.

If a tweet is marked, Twitter’s algorithms and search functions won’t actively spread the content, ensuring fewer people see it. Users won’t get push notifications and won’t be able to see labeled tweets in safe search, top tweets, live events pages or the explore function.

Response to Trump?

Some published reports tie the new disclaimers to U.S. President Donald Trump, who has run afoul of Twitter’s rules before. He could find some of his own tweets slapped with a disclaimer. A Twitter spokesperson told Buzzfeed News that the move wasn’t aimed at any particular leader. 

Though meant to clarify Twitter’s decision-making process, the new policy could leave the company vulnerable to criticism from people with views that violate its rules. Some conservatives, including the president, have lambasted the platform for what they view as censorship of their speech.

“They [Twitter] make it very hard for people to join me on Twitter and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message,” Trump told Fox Business on Wednesday. 

The disclaimers won’t be applied to any content posted to Twitter before Thursday.

Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper says he came away with no firm commitments from NATO allies to participate in a global effort to secure international waterways against Iran.

He says the U.S. will provide more details to allies next month on how the Iranian threat has escalated and how they can work together to deter further aggression.

The U.S. has blamed Iran for recent attacks on oil tankers near the Persian Gulf.

A senior U.S .official says allies expressed interest in Esper’s request during their meetings in Brussels.  The official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

NATO allies have expressed reluctance to get involved in any military effort to help secure the region. Europe wants more emphasis on minimizing the chances of war.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s administration did not give an adequate explanation for its plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, delivering a victory to New York state and others challenging the proposal.

The justices partly upheld a federal judge’s decision barring the question in a win for a group of states and immigrant rights organizations that challenged the plan. The mixed ruling does not definitively decide whether the question could be added at some point.

The Republican president’s administration had appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts blocked the inclusion of the census question.

A group of states including New York and immigrant rights organizations sued to prevent the citizenship question from being included in the decennial population count. Opponents have said the question would instill fear in immigrant households that the information would be shared with law enforcement, deterring them from taking part.

The census, required by the U.S. Constitution, is used to allot seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and distribute some $800 billion in federal funds. The intent of the citizenship question, opponents said, is to manufacture a deliberate undercount of areas with high immigrant and Latino populations, costing Democratic-leaning regions seats in the House, benefiting Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.

The administration argued that adding a question requiring people taking part in the census to declare whether they are a citizen was needed to better enforce a voting rights law, a rationale that opponents called a pretext for a political motive.

Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled on Jan. 15 that the Commerce Department’s decision to add the question violated a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. Federal judges in Maryland and California also have issued rulings to block the question’s inclusion, saying it would violate the Constitution’s mandate to enumerate the population every 10 years.

Furman said the evidence showed that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross concealed his true motives for adding the question and that he and his aides had convinced the Justice Department to request a citizenship question.

Businesses also rely on census data to make critical strategic decisions, including where to invest capital.

Citizenship has not been asked of all households since the 1950 census, featuring since then only on questionnaires sent to a smaller subset of the population.

The Census Bureau’s own experts estimated that households corresponding to 6.5 million people would not respond to the census if the citizenship question were asked.

While only U.S. citizens can vote, non-citizens comprise an estimated 7 percent of the population.

Evidence surfaced in May that the challengers said showed that the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question was intended to discriminate against racial minorities.

Documents created by Republican strategist Thomas Hofeller, who died last year, showed that he was instrumental behind the scenes in instigating the addition of the citizenship question.

He was an expert in drawing electoral district boundaries that maximize Republican chances of winning congressional elections.

Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that asking census respondents whether they are American citizens “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redrawing electoral districts based on census data.

Hofeller suggested the voting rights rationale in the newly disclosed documents.

The Trump administration called the newly surfaced evidence “conspiracy theory.”

A federal judge in Maryland is reviewing the Hofeller evidence.

Most people living in the United States will be asked to fill out the census, whether online or on paper, by March 2020.

Indonesia’s top court ruled Thursday against a challenge to the country’s election results that alleged massive and systematic fraud, paving the way for Joko Widodo’s second term as president.

The Constitutional Court, which took a marathon nine hours to publicly read its reasoning on all aspects of the case, said the legal team of the losing candidate, former Gen. Prabowo Subianto, had failed to prove allegations that included millions of fake voters and biased state institutions. The court’s ruling is final.

Thousands of police and soldiers were deployed to boost security in Jakarta on Thursday as authorities strove to avoid a repeat of deadly riots last month.

The legal challenge’s failure was widely expected after documents filed with the court showed that much of the evidence for the alleged fraud in the April 17 election was printouts of news articles.

The evidence purporting to show police bias in favor of Widodo included allegations from an anonymous Twitter account. The hearings were broadcast on national TV and showed the testimony of some witnesses disintegrating under questioning from the panel of judges.

The legal challenge appeared to be partly an attempt to strengthen the hand of Subianto’s party, Gerindra, which has been negotiating with Widodo’s governing coalition for Cabinet positions.

Minutes after the ruling, Subianto said he had “respect” for it, reducing the risk of more violent protests but also raising the possibility of his party joining Widodo’s government and leaving the world’s third-largest democracy without a significant parliamentary opposition.

“The ruling is very disappointing for us and our supporters, but we have committed to obey the constitution and we respect the Constitutional Court’s decision,” he said.

Subianto, linked to human rights abuses during the authoritarian rule of Suharto, also lost to Widodo in 2014 and has now made four unsuccessful bids for the presidency.

The official election results showed Widodo won 55.5% of the vote but also revealed a polarized electorate. Subianto, who allied himself with groups that want Islamic rather than secular law to prevail in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, won big victories in conservative provinces.

Nine people died in what police said were orchestrated riots in Jakarta after the official results were released May 21. Amnesty International has said police used disproportionate force against protesters that resulted in unlawful killings and other human rights violations.

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North Korea says it will not rely on South Korea as a go-between in any further negotiations with the United States to break a deadlock over the North’s nuclear weapons program.

In a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency Thursday, Kwon Jong Gun, the head of the U.S. affairs department in North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, dismissed claims by South Korean President Moon Jae-in that Seoul was holding informal talks between Pyongyang and Washington aimed at bringing the two sides back to the negotiating table.

Kwon said it would be better for the South Korean authorities to “mind their own internal business.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump signed a vaguely worded agreement at their historic summit in Singapore last year for the North to denuclearize. But working-level talks broke down after a February summit between Trump and Kim in Hanoi, Vietnam, ended in no deal.

Kim was unhappy with the pace of U.S. sanctions relief, while Trump was upset Kim would not commit to completely giving up his nuclear program.

North Korea has given the United States until the end of the year to offer a more flexible deal. Kwon said the bilateral talks will not “be held by themselves” if Washington continues to repeat the “resumption of dialogue like a parrot” without coming forward with any “realistic proposals.”

But while nuclear talks between U.S. and North Korean officials are stalled, Kim and Trump have been exchanging letters and pictures for the past year, and both men say their relationship remains warm.

Kwon’s remarks came just days after President Trump’s planned visit to Seoul after attending the G20 summit in Japan.

A new drug rehabilitation center on the Kenyan coast is working to help heroin addicts turn their lives around. The facility, run by the Kenya Red Cross, opened six months ago in the remote village of Lamu. The center is renewing hope for addicts, many of whom have easy access to hard drugs and often turn to a life of crime.

In the kitchen of the drug rehabilitation center of the Kenya Red Cross in Lamu, Musa Mohamed, 43, a former drug user, is stirring a pan full of chicken and herbs.

Musa is one of the 18 clients in the center. He started using heroin 14 years ago after his friends promised him it would improve his love life.

“I tried once, and after trying I found out that it was true. Then I kept on trying and after a couple of days I wanted to stop and I was addicted already so I wasn’t able to stop,” he said.

Thousands of users

Kenya’s National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse (NACADA) says there are 40,000 heroin users across the Kenyan coast. Many reside in Lamu, frequenting drug dens.

Red Cross volunteer Nurein Mohamed visits the drug dens. Here, the heroin high collides with the bleak reality of life as a desperate drug addict.

Forty-three-year-old Yusuf Yunus wants to break the drug’s hold.

“Now I have two children of mine who will get in trouble,” he said. “I don’t know what to do because I am high. I am not healthy for them and I don’t know how to get money. I cannot help my children when I am high.”

Medication, counseling

The rehabilitation center helps by giving clients medication to suppress withdrawal symptoms. They also take part in group counseling.

The manager of the Lamu center, Christine Mosiori, says high unemployment and easy access to drugs are fueling the drug problem.

“When you combine these things it makes it easy for someone to just get into the drugs, the idleness, and also the availability of these drugs where they live,” she said.

The program of the Kenya Red Cross takes three months, after which the clients go back on the street. To prevent relapsing, the Red Cross provides vocational training. Musa says he won’t go back using drugs.

“My first daughter is 14 years now. She about the adolescent age and she is studying. So I don’t want to hurt my daughter and my family,” he said. “So I said enough is enough and I don’t think I’ll go back behind. Now it’s just going in front.”

Pleased with progress

Despite the magnitude of the drug problem, Mosiori says she is happy with what she and her colleagues have achieved in six months.

“I feel that what we have done so far has helped our clients,” Mosiori said. “Even those we have discharged, we have followed them up so far and they are actually doing very well back home. So I feel that our program has been beneficial.”

As the clients kneel for Islamic prayers, they share a bond of fighting against a stressful addiction. They pray that one day soon, they will regain control over themselves and their futures.

The immediate superior of a Navy SEAL standing trial charged with murdering a helpless Iraqi prisoner and shooting unarmed civilians testified Wednesday he had complete confidence in the defendant’s combat tactics and decision-making.

Master Chief Petty Officer Brian Alazzawi, the first defense witness called to the stand in the trial of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, also described how one of the main accusers in the case had seemed to harbor a grudge against Gallagher.

Gallagher, a decorated career combat veteran, has denied all charges and says he is wrongly accused. The high-profile court-martial, conducted at U.S. Naval Base San Diego, has drawn the attention of President Donald Trump, who intervened months ago to ease the conditions of Gallagher’s pretrial confinement.

The judge later released Gallagher from custody altogether while the proceedings remained under way. The war crimes case stems from his 2017 deployment in Mosul, Iraq.

The Navy opened its investigation in September 2018, about a year after Gallagher and the platoon he led returned from Iraq.

Gallagher is charged with premeditated murder of a wounded, teenage Islamic State fighter in his custody by stabbing the youth in the neck with a knife. He also is charged with attempted murder in the wounding of two civilians, a school girl and an elderly man, shot from a sniper’s perch.

Medic said he did it

In a stunning setback to the government’s case last week, a Navy SEAL medic testifying for prosecutors asserted it was he, not Gallagher, who caused the Iraqi detainee’s death by blocking the youth’s breathing tube in what he described as a mercy killing.

Prosecutors accused the medic, Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, of changing his story under oath. Sources close to the case said Wednesday the Navy is examining possible grounds under terms of Scott’s immunity agreement that might allow him to be prosecuted for perjury.

The thrust of Gallagher’s defense has been that fellow SEAL team members testifying against him, several under grants of immunity, are disgruntled subordinates fabricating the allegations to force him from the Navy.

Disgruntled comrades

Testimony from Alazzawi, a multiple Bronze Star recipient who served as Gallagher’s supervising chief in Mosul, bolstered that narrative.

He told jurors some SEAL team members had complained about items they suspected Gallagher of taking from a platoon care package, and that one of the group, then-Petty Officer Craig Miller, also complained of poor tactics and unnecessary risks by Gallagher.

Alazzawi, however, said Miller and others among the disaffected troops were “very junior” personnel who were untrained for the daytime sniper operations the unit was engaged in under Gallagher’s direction.

“I’ve had nothing but confidence in Chief Gallagher’s tactics and quality of his decisions,” Alazzawi said.

Miller testified last week for the prosecution that he saw Gallagher inexplicably stab the Islamic State prisoner in the neck at least twice with a custom-made knife as the detainee was being treated for severe injuries.

Alazzawi said Wednesday that Miller did not accuse Gallagher of the stabbing, or of firing on civilians, until after the care package theft was investigated and it became clear no reprimand was coming.

Spotter testifies

Another Navy SEAL called by the defense, Joshua Graffam, disputed the charge that Gallagher shot an unarmed elderly man by the Tigris River.

Graffam said he was acting as Gallagher’s “spotter” in a sniper’s perch when the shooting occurred, and the person he targeted for Gallagher was an Islamic State fighter dressed in black.

“I was confident it was a good shot. I never saw the elderly man in white,” Graffam said. He added, under questioning, that he would feel confident deploying with Gallagher again.

Vaccination against the virus that causes almost all cervical cancer is having a major impact on stopping infections and should significantly reduce cases of the disease within a decade, researchers said Wednesday.

Presenting results of an international analysis covering 60 million people in high-income countries, scientists from Britain and Canada said they found “strong evidence” that vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV) works “to prevent cervical cancer in real-world settings.”

“We’re seeing everything that we’d want to see. We’re seeing reductions in the key HPV infections that cause most cervical disease, and we’re seeing reductions in cervical disease,” said David Mesher, principal scientist at Public Health England, who worked on the research team.

Marc Brisson, a specialist in infectious disease health economics at Canada’s Laval University who co-led the study, said the results suggested “we should be seeing substantial reductions in cervical cancer in the next 10 years.”

Vaccines in 100 countries

HPV vaccines were first licensed in 2007 and have since been adopted in at least 100 countries worldwide. Britain’s GSK makes an HPV vaccine called Cervarix that targets two strains of the virus, while Merck makes a rival shot, Gardasil, which targets nine strains.

In countries with HPV immunization programs, the vaccines are usually offered to girls before they become sexually active to protect against cervical and other HPV-related cancers.

Brisson’s team gathered data on 60 million people over eight years from 65 separate studies conducted in 14 countries and pooled it to assess the vaccines’ impact.

They found that the two HPV types that cause 70% of cervical cancers, known as HPV 16 and HPV 18, were significantly reduced after vaccination, with an 83% decline in infections in girls ages 13 to 19 and a 66% drop in women ages 20 to 24 after five to eight years of vaccination.

Figures released in February by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer showed an estimated 570,000 new cases of cervical cancer were diagnosed worldwide in 2018, making it the fourth most common cancer in women globally.

Poorer countries could benefit

Each year, more than 310,000 women die from cervical cancer, the vast majority of them in poorer countries where HPV immunization coverage is low or non-existent.

Brisson urged governments in the most-affected countries to take note: “Our results show the vaccines are working, so I hope in the upcoming years we will … see rates of HPV vaccination increase in countries that need it most,” he said.
 

In a ruling that critics say could hinder access to public records, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it easier for the government and businesses to keep commercial information that is shared with federal agencies confidential.

The 6-3 decision, released Monday, came in a case that pitted a South Dakota newspaper, the Argus Leader, against the food marketing industry. The paper sought records about grocery store transactions in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s $67 billion-a-year food-stamp program for Americans with low- or no income.

The record request came under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that allows public access to federal documents and other records, although with certain exemptions.

One such exception, meant to protect trade secrets, was at the center of the case.

Overturning a 45-year precedent, the majority ruled that normally private commercial or financial information shared with the government on assurance of privacy is “confidential” and must be protected. Previously, such information was subject to release unless disclosing it would cause “substantial competitive harm” to the submitting company.   

The FOIA law was passed in 1966 and strengthened after the Watergate scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The law has become a vital tool for journalists and others working to shine a light on the inner workings of government.

Reaction to the court’s ruling has been mixed. 

Adam A. Marshall of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the decision is bad for government transparency. He said the effect may be limited, however, because the newspaper’s request was made before Congress amended the law in 2016 to make it harder for agencies to withhold information, even under the law’s exemptions.

“The state of FOIA is not great to begin with, and this certainly doesn’t help,” Marshall said. “I don’t think anyone would really say that FOIA is working well in terms of informing the public.”

The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is owned by Gannett Co., whose flagship paper is the national daily USA Today.

“The court’s decision effectively gives businesses relying on taxpayer dollars the ability to decide for themselves what data the public will see about how that money is spent,” USA Today publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth said in the paper’s report on the ruling.

In its FOIA filing, the Argus Leader sought the names and addresses of all grocery stores that participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and each store’s annual SNAP transaction data for five years.

The Agriculture Department disclosed the grocery stores’ names and addresses but not their SNAP transaction data, citing FOIA law exemption No. 4, which shields from disclosure “trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential.”

The Argus Leader then sued the department in federal court. The court’s ruling in favor of the paper was later appealed and upheld. Then the Agriculture Department dropped out of the case before the grocers appealed it to the Supreme Court.  

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court’s majority, said the prior requirement to show a “substantial competitive harm” to protect private information was a relic of the past.

Citing contemporary dictionaries, he said two conditions defined what is “confidential” under the FOIA law. “At least where commercial or financial information is both customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the government under an assurance of privacy, the information is ‘confidential,’ ” Gorsuch wrote.

In a dissent for the minority, Justice Stephen Breyer countered that just because a private company treats information as secret doesn’t alone justify not releasing it.

“The whole point of FOIA is to give the public access to information it cannot otherwise obtain,” Breyer wrote. “I fear the majority’s reading will deprive the public of information for reasons no better than convenience, skittishness or bureaucratic inertia.”

Evan Young, a partner at the law firm Baker Botts representing the Food Marketing Institute, said the ruling got it right.

“When it comes to an individual or company’s privacy, and for one reason or another the government has your information, for them to say the interest in your confidentiality and privacy would be harmed strikes me as an obvious one,” he said.

Argus Leader reporter Jonathan Ellis submitted the original FOIA request in 2011. Now, he hopes the decision won’t have a big impact.

“We’re just a small newspaper in South Dakota,” Ellis said. “I feel bad that I submitted a FOIA request … that today was used by the Supreme Court to limit FOIA.

“It’s unfortunate that the Supreme Court has decided to side with the industry to keep the information secret,” he added.

U.S. President Donald Trump, without offering evidence, on Wednesday directly accused former special counsel Robert Mueller of committing a crime, saying Mueller had illegally “terminated” FBI communications as part of his Russia investigation. 

The Justice Department declined to comment. 

“Mueller terminated them illegally. He terminated all of the emails. … Robert Mueller terminated their text messages together. He terminated them. They’re gone. And that’s illegal. That’s a crime,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network, referring to two former Federal Bureau of Investigation employees who exchanged disparaging messages about the president. 

Trump made the remarks ahead of Mueller’s scheduled testimony before lawmakers next month about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow. 

The Republican president, who formally launched his re-election bid last week, repeatedly railed against Mueller’s probe during the two-year investigation and accused several of the team’s investigators of being Democrats targeting him. 

He has also accused Mueller, a Republican, of having a business conflict of interest tied to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, as well as for meeting with him early in Trump’s White House term about the possibility of leading the FBI a second time. 

Mueller, who was subpoenaed, will testify about his report in front of the Democratic-led House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on July 17. 

In his report released in April, Mueller found that Russia did meddle in the 2016 U.S. election but that there was insufficient evidence to establish whether the Trump campaign illegally conspired with Russia to influence the vote. He also laid out a number of instances in which Trump may have obstructed justice but stopped short of concluding the president had committed a crime, in part because of a Justice Department legal opinion that says sitting presidents shouldn’t be indicted.

At least 15 people were killed and 75 wounded in a stampede at a stadium after a military parade in Madagascar’s capital Wednesday to mark the country’s independence day, authorities said.

Joseph Ravoahangy Andrianavalona Hospital confirmed the casualties, said General Richard Ravalomanana, Secretary of State for the Gendarmerie.

Defense Minister General Richard Rakotonirina said it was unclear what had caused the stampede. Some witnesses told Reuters people were trying to push their way into Mahamasina stadium but that authorities had only opened one small door.

Inside a locked vault at Johnson Space Center is treasure few have seen and fewer have touched.

The restricted lab is home to hundreds of pounds of moon rocks collected by Apollo astronauts close to a half-century ago.  And for the first time in decades, NASA is about to open some of the pristine samples and let geologists take a crack at them with 21st-century technology.

What better way to mark this summer’s 50th anniversary of humanity’s first footsteps on the moon than by sharing a bit of the lunar loot.

“It’s sort of a coincidence that we’re opening them in the year of the anniversary,” explained NASA’s Apollo sample curator Ryan Zeigler, covered head to toe in a white protective suit with matching fabric boots, gloves and hat.

“But certainly the anniversary increased the awareness and the fact that we’re going back to the moon.”

With the golden anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s feat fast approaching – their lunar module Eagle landed July 20, 1969, on the Sea of Tranquility – the moon is red-hot again.   

After decades of flip-flopping between the moon and Mars as the next big astronaut destination, NASA aims to put astronauts on the lunar surface again by 2024 at the White House’s direction. President Donald Trump prefers talking up Mars. But the consensus is that the moon is a crucial proving ground given its relative proximity to home – 240,000 miles (386,000 kilometers) or two to three days away.

Zeigler’s job is to preserve what the 12 moonwalkers brought back from 1969 through 1972 – lunar samples totaling 842 pounds (382 kilograms) – and ensure scientists get the best possible samples for study.

Some of the soil and bits of rock were vacuum-packed on the moon – and never exposed to Earth’s atmosphere – or frozen or stored in gaseous helium following splashdown and then left untouched. The lab’s staff is now trying to figure out how best to remove the samples from their tubes and other containers without contaminating or spoiling anything. They’re practicing with mock-up equipment and pretend lunar dirt.

Compared with Apollo-era tech, today’s science instruments are much more sensitive, Zeigler noted.
“We can do more with a milligram than we could do with a gram back then. So it was really good planning on their part to wait,” he said.

The lunar sample lab has two side-by-side vaults: one for rocks still in straight-from-the-moon condition and a smaller vault for samples previously loaned out for study. About 70 percent of the original haul is in the pristine sample vault, which has two combinations and takes two people to unlock. About 15 percent is in safekeeping at White Sands in New Mexico. The rest is used for research or display.

Of the six manned moon landings, Apollo 11 yielded the fewest lunar samples: 48 pounds or 22 kilograms. It was the first landing by astronauts and NASA wanted to minimize their on-the-moon time and risk. What’s left from this mission – about three-quarters after scientific study, public displays and goodwill gifts to all countries and U.S. states in 1969 – is kept mostly here at room temperature.

Armstrong was the primary rock collector and photographer. Aldrin gathered two core samples just beneath the surface during the 2 1/2-hour moonwalk. All five subsequent Apollo moon landings had longer stays. The last three – Apollo 15, 16 and 17 – had rovers that significantly upped the sample collection and coverage area.

“Fifty years later, we’re still learning new things … incredible,” said the lab’s Charis Krysher, holding a clear acrylic marble embedded with chips of Apollo 11 moon rock in her gloved hand.

By studying the Apollo moon rocks, Zeigler said, scientists have determined the ages of the surfaces of Mars and Mercury, and established that Jupiter and the solar system’s other big outer planets likely formed closer to the sun and later migrated outward.

“So sample return from outer space is really powerful about learning about the whole solar system,” he said.

Andrea Mosie, who’s worked with the Apollo moon rocks for 44 years and was a high school intern at Johnson Space Center in July 1969, remembers the Polaroid photos and handwritten notes once accompanying each sample. She sometimes gets emotional when talking to children about the moonshots and does her best to dispel any notion that the rocks aren’t from the moon and the lunar landings never happened.

“The samples are right here and they’re still in a pristine state,” she assures young skeptics.

Most of the samples to be doled out over the next year were collected in 1972 during Apollo 17, the final moonshot and the only one to include a geologist, Harrison Schmitt. He occasionally visits the lunar sample lab and plans to help open the fresh specimens.

The nine U.S. research teams selected by NASA will receive varying amounts.

“Everything from the weight of a paperclip, down to basically so little mass you can barely measure it,” Zeigler said.

Especially tricky will be extracting the gases that were trapped in the vacuum-sealed sample tubes. The lab hasn’t opened one since the 1970s.

“If you goof that part up, the gas is gone. You only get one shot,” Zeigler said.

The lab’s collection is divided by mission, with each lunar landing getting its own cabinet with built-in gloves and stacks of stainless steel bins filled with pieces of the moon. Apollo 16 and 17, responsible for half the lunar haul, get two cabinets apiece.

The total Apollo inventory now exceeds 100,000 samples; some of the original 2,200 were broken into smaller pieces for study.

Sample processor Jeremy Kent is hopeful that “we will get some more samples here in the lab to work on.”

There’s space for plenty more.
 

Pope Francis on Wednesday expressed sadness over the fate of the father and young daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande while trying to cross into the United States.

“With immense sadness,  the Holy Father has seen the images of the father and his baby daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande River while trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States,” the Vatican’s interim spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti, said in a statement.

“The pope is profoundly saddened by their death, and is praying for them and for all migrants who have lost their lives while seeking to flee war and misery,” he said.

Photographs, which have been widely published around the world, show the bodies of a father and his 23-month-old daughter face down along the banks of the Rio Grande near Matamoros, Mexico, across the river from Brownsville, Texas.

Earlier, in off-the-cuff comments during his weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square, the pontiff complimented the people of Mexico for being “so welcoming to migrants. God bless you.” A group of Mexicans attending the audience cheered and waved a Mexican flag in response.

Francis has frequently been vocal in his support of Mexico’s efforts to help migrants and critical of the U.S. for blocking them at the border. During a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in 2016, he criticized then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, suggesting that anyone who wanted to build a wall along the border was “not a Christian.”

In April, the pontiff donated $500,000 to help migrants in Mexico, offering assistance to local projects that provide food, lodging and basic necessities.

A beauty pageant winner is accusing Gambia’s former dictator of raping her four years ago.

The young woman is one of several now coming forward and accusing Yahya Jammeh of sexual violence while he was in power.

Jammeh fled into exile in the reclusive nation of Equatorial Guinea in 2017 after losing the presidential election and initially refusing to step down.
 
The young woman, Fatou Jallow, plans to testify before Gambia’s truth and reconciliation commission that is investigating crimes committed during Jammeh’s rule.
 
Human Rights Watch described Jammeh as a sexual predator who lavished gifts on young women and their families before violently attacking them.
 
The human rights organization says it will take international pressure for Jammeh to be extradited from Equatorial Guinea.

This week, Zimbabwe is hosting the first United Nations and Africa Union summit on wildlife.  The country is seeking permission to sell its $600 million stock of elephant ivory and rhino horns to fund conservation programs.  But as Columbus Mavhunga reports from the resort town of Victoria Falls, those living near game parks have other issues they want addressed.