The Texas Supreme Court on Friday dealt essentially a final blow to abortion clinics’ best hopes of stopping a restrictive law that has sharply curtailed the number of abortions in the state since September and will now fully stay in place for the foreseeable future. The ruling by the all-Republican court was not unexpected, but it slammed the door on what little path forward the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed Texas clinics after having twice declined to stop a ban on abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy. It spells the coming end to a federal lawsuit that abortion clinics filed even before the restrictions took effect in September — and were then rejected at nearly every turn, and in nearly every court, for six months. “There is nothing left, this case is effectively over with respect to our challenge to the abortion ban,” said Marc Hearron, attorney for the …

Thousands of refugees in Indonesia are finding themselves shut out of public services including travel and shopping because of a bureaucratic glitch that prevents them from proving they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Indonesia is a transit country for 13,175 refugees, more than half of whom are from Afghanistan. Unlike some countries where refugees are kept In camps, refugees in Indonesia can roam freely and use public facilities. Most live around the Jakarta greater metropolitan area. In 2020, the country launched “Peduli Lindungi,” a digital COVID-19 contact-tracing app giving vaccinated residents access to public facilities and mass transit. The program, however, requires people to upload their 16-digit government-issued civil registry number before they are vaccinated. Only citizens, permanent residents and foreigners with work visas have the number; refugees – more than 56% of whom have been vaccinated — do not. The U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, with the support of Indonesian …

An American private spaceflight company mocks the head of Russia’s space program following a war or words on Twitter. Plus, teams find an early explorer’s ship at the bottom of the sea, and NASA’s photos from the moon command cash at an auction. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

Researchers have discovered the remarkably well-preserved wreck of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, in 10,000 feet of icy water, a century after it was swallowed up by Antarctic ice during what proved to be one of the most heroic expeditions in history. A team of marine archaeologists, engineers and other scientists used an icebreaker ship and underwater drones to locate the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, near the Antarctica Peninsula. The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust’s search expedition Endurance22 announced the discovery on Wednesday. Images and video of the wreck show the three-masted wooden ship in pristine condition, with gold-leaf letters reading “Endurance” still affixed to the stern and the ship’s lacquered wooden helm still standing upright, as if the captain may return to steer it at any time. “This is by far the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen,” said Mensun Bound, the director of …

The World Health Organization expressed concern Wednesday that many countries are drastically reducing COVID-19 testing, inhibiting the ability of public health professionals to monitor where the coronavirus is, how it’s spreading and how it’s evolving. During a briefing at agency headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that while cases and deaths were declining globally and many countries had lifted restrictions, the pandemic was far from over, “and it will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere.” Tedros said the WHO on Wednesday published new guidelines on self-testing for COVID-19 and recommended that self-tests be offered in addition to professionally administered testing services. He said evidence showed that users can reliably and accurately self-test, and that self-testing may reduce inequalities in testing access. The WHO chief said he hoped the new guidance would also help increase access to testing, which is too expensive for many low-income countries, …

A man who received the first heart transplant from a pig two months ago has died, the University of Maryland Medical Center said Wednesday.  Doctors did not say the specific reason David Bennett, 57, died Tuesday, only saying his condition had been worsening over the past several days.  “We are grateful for every innovative moment, every crazy dream, every sleepless night that went into this historic effort,” Bennett’s son, David Bennett Jr., said in a statement released by the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end.”  Prior to the January 7 transplant, Bennett had been in poor health and was ineligible for a human heart.  Organ transplants from animals — xenotransplantation — have largely failed because the human body rejects them almost immediately, but in this case, the pig had been genetically modified with human genes in …

Ahead of World Tuberculosis Day (March 24), the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is calling for governments to renew the fight against the respiratory illness, which kills over one million people each year. In South Africa, a hotspot for TB, a mobile screening team is trying to make up for disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. Linda Givetash reports from Johannesburg. …

An expert group convened by the World Health Organization said Tuesday it “strongly supports urgent and broad access” to booster doses, in a reversal of the U.N. agency’s previous insistence that boosters weren’t necessary and contributed to vaccine inequity. In a statement, WHO said its expert group concluded that immunization with authorized COVID-19 vaccines provide high levels of protection against severe disease and death amid the global circulation of the hugely contagious omicron variant. It said vaccination, including the use of boosters, was especially important for people at risk of severe disease. Last year, WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a moratorium on booster doses while dozens of countries embarked on administering the doses, saying rich countries should immediately donate those vaccines to poor countries instead. WHO scientists said at the time they would continue to evaluate incoming data. Numerous scientific studies have since proven that booster doses of …

COVID-19 can cause the brain to shrink, reduce grey matter in the regions that control emotion and memory, and damage areas that control the sense of smell, an Oxford University study has found. The scientists said that the effects were even seen in people who had not been hospitalized with COVID, and whether the impact could be partially reversed or if they would persist in the long term needed further investigation. “There is strong evidence for brain-related abnormalities in COVID-19,” the researchers said in their study, which was released on Monday. Even in mild cases, participants in the research showed “a worsening of executive function” responsible for focus and organizing, and on an average brain sizes shrank between 0.2% and 2%. The peer-reviewed study, published in the Nature journal, investigated brain changes in 785 participants aged 51–81 whose brains were scanned twice, including 401 people who caught COVID between their …

Chocolate makers are expected to raise prices this year due to higher costs of cocoa from exporters like Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer. Hershey, the largest producer of chocolate products in the United States, said last month it will raise prices on its products across the board due to the rising cost of ingredients.    Meanwhile, chocolate makers like Dana Mroueh said they are seeing cocoa prices rise in Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa producer.   “We’ve noticed the price of cocoa is going up these few years, especially organic cocoa. So, from the beginning to today, those five years, we can say the price has risen 20 percent,” Mroueh said.   Demand for chocolate in America increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cocoa producers in Ivory Coast are struggling to keep up with that demand.    Experts say one reason is the impact of climate change. …

Hammered by climate change and relentless deforestation, the Amazon rainforest is losing its capacity to recover and could irretrievably transition into savannah, with dire consequences for the region and the world, according to a study published Monday.    Researchers warned that the findings mean the Amazon could be approaching a so-called tipping point faster than previously understood.     Analyzing 25 years of satellite data, researchers measured for the first time the Amazon’s resilience against shocks such as droughts and fires, a key indicator of overall health.  Resilience has declined across more than three-quarters of the Amazon basin, home to half the world’s rainforest, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.  In areas hit hardest by destruction or drought, the forest’s ability to bounce back was reduced by approximately half, co-author Tim Lenton, director of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, told AFP.  “Our resilience measure changed …

Duke University doctors say a baby is thriving after a first-of-its-kind heart transplant — one that came with a bonus technique to try to help prevent rejection of the new organ. The thymus plays a critical role in building the immune system. Doctors have wondered if implanting some thymus tissue that matched a donated organ might help it survive without the recipient needing toxic anti-rejection medicines. Easton Sinnamon of Asheboro, North Carolina, received his unique transplant last summer when he was 6 months old. But Duke waited to announce it until Monday after doctors learned the specially processed thymus implants appear to be functioning like they’d hoped — producing immune cells that don’t treat the tot’s new heart like foreign tissue. Doctors eventually will try weaning Easton off the immune-suppressing drugs required after a transplant, said Dr. Joseph Turek, Duke’s chief of pediatric cardiac surgery. The research is in very early …

Afghanistan faces a serious risk of backtracking to its notoriously high maternal mortality rates because of sudden drops in foreign funding, a shortage of health care workers, mobility restrictions and worsening poverty, health professionals have told VOA.   More than 1,600 Afghan mothers were dying for every 100,000 live births in 2001. With strong technical and financial support from donors, the country reduced the rate to about 640 deaths by 2018.   Donors were spending about $1 billion annually on Afghanistan’s health sector, but all development funding ceased immediately when the Taliban returned to power in August.   The abrupt funding shortage crippled the country’s donor-dependent public health system amid a global pandemic and a nearly universal poverty rate in the country.   By September 2021, more than 80% of the country’s health care facilities were reported as dysfunctional because of a lack of funding and medical supplies and a …

Trafficking in pangolins continues to rise in Malawi as the country registers a drop in ordinary wildlife crime, such as trafficking in elephant tusks and rhino horns. Wildlife authorities say pangolin-related arrests in Malawi more than tripled between 2019 and 2020. Police in Malawi say a month rarely passes with no pangolin-related arrest. Authorities fear this may lead to extinction of the endangered mammals. The latest is the arrest last Thursday of five people in Mangochi district, in the south of Malawi after they were found selling a live pangolin. “The four suspects are Malawian while their accomplice is a well-known businessman from Pakistan,” said Ameena Tepani Daudi, who speaks for the police in the district. “The five were arrested at the Pakistan national’s house following a tip from members of the community. We found all of them in a bedroom while negotiating about selling price. And the pangolin was …

A new variant of the coronavirus found in white-tailed deer in Canada was later discovered in a person who lived nearby and had contact with the deer population, according to a recent study. The researchers say it’s possible the deer transmitted the virus to the human. Emerging evidence that COVID-19 is gaining a foothold in wildlife could have negative long-term consequences for humans, according to Nükhet Varlik, associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. “Even if we managed to vaccinate the entire human population, the disease can still come back — from the animals back to us — which is, in fact, what happened with some of the other historical pandemics,” Varlik says. “So, in the long term, I don’t think COVID can be eradicated, to be honest.” Six out of every 10 infectious diseases in people are zoonotic, meaning they pass between species, from animals to humans. Examples of …

The head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, is again threatening to end service to the International Space Station, saying Russia will stop supplying rocket engines to the United States and may curtail cooperation on the station in retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. NASA says operations on the orbiting observatory are normal.   In an interview with Russian state television Thursday, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said, considering the situation, “We can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what.” Rogozin said Russia has delivered 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S. since the 1990s, of which 98 have been used to power Atlas launch vehicles. The Washington Post said the engines are also used by United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing to launch national security missions for …