The flight debut of NASA’s mega moon rocket faces additional delays following a string of failed fueling tests.  Officials said Monday it will be challenging to meet a launch window in early to mid-June. The next opportunity to send an empty capsule to the moon on a test flight would be at the end of June or July.  The 30-story Space Launch System rocket has been on the pad at Kennedy Space Center for the past month. It will return to the hangar next week for valve and fuel leak repairs. The problems cropped up earlier this month, preventing NASA from filling the rocket’s fuel tanks for a critical dress rehearsal.  The rocket will likely spend weeks in the hangar before heading back to the pad for a testing redo, said launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.  Managers are considering various options for getting back on track.  “It’s just a matter of …

Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after six months aboard their country’s newest orbital station in the longest crewed mission to date for China’s ambitious space program. The Shenzhou 13 space capsule landed in the Gobi desert in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, shown live on state TV. During the mission, astronaut Wang Yaping carried out the first spacewalk by a Chinese woman. Wang and crewmates Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu beamed back physics lessons for high school students. China launched its first astronaut into space in 2003 and landed robot rovers on the moon in 2013 and on Mars last year. Officials have discussed a possible crewed mission to the moon. On Saturday, state TV showed images from inside the capsule as it traveled at 200 meters per second over Africa before entering the atmosphere. The trio were the second crew aboard Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace. …

The World Health Organization says a variety of crises are adversely impacting the health of millions and blocking needed humanitarian aid in war-torn hotspots around the world.    War, climate disasters, and COVID-19 are threatening global health and undermining the capacity to build and maintain economically viable and stable societies.  These multiple crises are most pronounced in war-torn countries. Ukraine, a once thriving society, is now shattered. Since Russia invaded 51 days ago, thousands of civilians, including children, have been killed or injured. The WHO has confirmed 119 attacks on health care personnel and facilities since the start of the war there.  WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said health services are severely disrupted, particularly in the east of the country, now the epicenter of the fighting. “For the sake of humanity, I urge Russia to come back to the table and to work for peace,” he said. “In the meantime, humanitarian …

The first all-private charter to the International Space Station. Plus, a look back in history at a moon mission gone wrong, and an auction offering some of the most-expensive dust on Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

Climate change will accelerate at an unprecedented pace if governments don’t act soon, according to a recent report by the United Nations. For many people, such news can spur conflicting emotions. Hopelessness that it’s all too late? A sense of urgency to do something? VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with a few young people about their concerns for the fate of the planet. …

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban into law Thursday as the state joined a growing conservative push to restrict access ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could limit the procedure nationwide. The new law marks a significant blow to abortion access in the South, where Florida has provided wider access to the procedure than its regional neighbors. The new law, which takes effect July 1, contains exceptions if the abortion is necessary to save a mother’s life, prevent serious injury or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It does not allow for exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking. Under current law, Florida allows abortions up to 24 weeks. “This will represent the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation,” DeSantis said as he signed the bill at the “Nación …

Businessman Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter, saying the social media giant “needs to be transformed as a private company.” He is already Twitter’s largest shareholder, owning more than 9% of the company, and a regulatory filing showed he offered $54.20 per share to buy the rest. That price would value the company at about $43 billion and represents a 38% premium above the stock’s closing price on April 1, the last trading day before Musk bought his 9%. “My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk said. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. …

The pandemic plunged 77 million more people into extreme poverty last year and many developing countries can’t recover because of the crippling cost of debt repayments — and that was before the added impact of the war in Ukraine, a U.N. report said Tuesday. The report said rich countries could support their recovery from pandemic slumps with record amounts borrowed at ultra-low interest rates. But the poorest countries spent billions of dollars servicing their debts and faced much higher borrowing costs, preventing them from spending on improving education and health care, protecting the environment and reducing inequality. According to the U.N., 812 million people lived in extreme poverty — on $1.90 a day or less — in 2019, and by 2021 amid the pandemic the number had risen to 889 million. The report is on financing to achieve U.N. development goals for 2030, including ending poverty, ensuring quality education for …

2021 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, and new data and research are offering more insights into how it got that bad.  The main reason for the increase in deaths? COVID-19, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work on death statistics.  The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally. It showed there were 3.465 million deaths last year, or about 80,000 more than 2020’s record-setting total.  Early last year, some experts were optimistic that 2021 would not be as bad as the first year of the pandemic — partly because effective COVID-19 vaccines had finally become available.  “We were wrong, unfortunately,” said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher.  COVID-19 deaths rose in 2021 — to more than 415,000, up from 351,000 the year before — as new coronavirus variants emerged and an unexpectedly large number of Americans refused to get vaccinated …

The U.S. said on Tuesday it had seized RaidForums, a popular website used by hackers to buy and sell stolen data, and at the same time unsealed charges against the website’s founder and chief administrator Diego Santos Coelho. Coelho, 21, of Portugal, was arrested in the United Kingdom on Jan. 31, and remains in custody while the United States seeks his extradition to stand trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Justice Department said. The department said it had obtained court approval to seize three different domain names that hosted the RaidForums website: raidforums.com, Rf.ws and Raid.lol. Among the types of data that were available for sale on the site included stolen bank routing and account numbers, credit cards information, log-in credentials and social security numbers. In a parallel statement, Europol also lauded the takedown saying the RaidForums online marketplace had been seized in …

The World Health Organization said on Monday it is tracking a few dozen cases of two new sub-variants of the highly transmissible omicron strain of the coronavirus to assess whether they are more infectious or dangerous. It has added BA.4 and BA.5, sister variants of the original BA.1 omicron variant, to its list for monitoring. It is already tracking BA.1 and BA.2 — now globally dominant — as well as BA.1.1 and BA.3. The WHO said it had begun tracking them because of their “additional mutations that need to be further studied to understand their impact on immune escape potential.” Viruses mutate all the time but only some mutations affect their ability to spread or evade prior immunity from vaccination or infection, or the severity of disease they cause. For instance, BA.2 now represents nearly 94% of all sequenced cases and is more transmissible than its siblings, but the evidence so far …

Facing an existential threat from climate change, Mumbai, India’s financial hub has embarked an ambitious climate action plan that aims to make the city carbon-neutral by 2050. It is the first city to set a timeline to reach zero emissions in South Asia, one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to rising temperatures. In recent years, the coastal city has witnessed more bursts of torrential rain, storm surges and cyclones, in addition to rising sea levels. Built on a narrow strip along the Arabian Sea, the city’s low-lying areas where millions of poor people live in shanties, and the city’s southern tip, home to glitzy office towers, the stock exchange and legislature, are especially vulnerable, according to climate scientists. “Mumbai will become a climate-resilient metropolis,” Maharashtra state Chief Minister, Uddhav Thackeray said last month, unveiling the plan. Mumbai is Maharashtra’s capital. The goal is ambitious — Mumbai wants to achieve …

For many in the U.K., the pandemic may as well be over. Mask requirements have been dropped. Free mass testing is a thing of the past. And for the first time since spring 2020, people can go abroad for holidays without ordering tests or filling out lengthy forms. That sense of freedom is widespread even as infections soared in Britain in March, driven by the milder but more transmissible omicron BA.2 variant that’s rapidly spreading around Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere. The situation in the U.K. may portend what lies ahead for other countries as they ease coronavirus restrictions. France and Germany have seen similar spikes in infections in recent weeks, and the number of hospitalizations in the U.K. and France has again climbed — though the number of deaths per day remains well below levels seen earlier in the pandemic. In the U.S., more and more Americans are testing …