Cape Canaveral, Florida — The two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June welcomed their new ride home with Sunday’s arrival of a SpaceX capsule. SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness high over Botswana as the two craft soared 420 kilometers above Earth. NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX following concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first Starliner test flight with a crew, and NASA decided the thruster failures and helium leaks that cropped up after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to risk the test pilots’ return. So Starliner returned to Earth empty earlier this month. The Dragon carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will …

WASHINGTON — The first rocky planet ever spotted orbiting a burned out star called a white dwarf offers a glimpse of what may be in store for Earth billions of years from now — showing it is possible our planet might survive the death of the sun, albeit as a cold and desolate outpost in space. The planet, with a mass about 1.9 times that of Earth, is orbiting the white dwarf about 4,200 light-years away from our solar system near the bulge at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, according to a study using data from Hawaii-based telescopes. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 9.5 trillion kilometers. The white dwarf began as an ordinary star one or two times the mass of the sun. Its current mass is about half the sun’s. Stars with a mass less than eight times the sun’s end …

new york — U.S. suicides last year remained at about the highest level in the nation’s history, preliminary data suggests.  A little more than 49,300 suicide deaths were reported in 2023, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number that could grow a little as some death investigations are wrapped up and reported.  Just under 49,500 were reported in 2022, according to final data released Thursday. The numbers are close enough that the suicide rate for the two years are the same, CDC officials said.  U.S. suicide rates have been rising for nearly 20 years, aside from a two-year drop around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. So “a leveling off of any increase in suicide is cautiously promising news,” said Katherine Keyes, a Columbia University public health professor who studies suicide.  Indeed, there’s reason for optimism. A 2-year-old national crisis line allows anyone in …

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — SpaceX launched a rescue mission for the two stuck astronauts at the International Space Station on Saturday, sending up a downsized crew to bring them home but not until next year.  The capsule rocketed into orbit to fetch the test pilots whose Boeing spacecraft returned to Earth empty earlier this month because of safety concerns. The switch in rides left it to NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexander Gorbunov to retrieve Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.  Because NASA rotates space station crews approximately every six months, this newly launched flight with two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams won’t return until late February. Officials said there wasn’t a way to bring them back earlier on SpaceX without interrupting other scheduled missions.  By the time they return, the pair will have logged more than eight months in space. They expected to be gone just a week when …

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PERRY, Florida — Hurricane Helene caused dozens of deaths and billions of dollars of destruction across a wide swath of the southeastern United States, and more than 3 million customers went into the weekend without power and, for some, a continued threat of floods. Helene blew ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday packing winds of 225 kilometers per hour and then quickly moved through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee. The storm uprooted trees, splintered homes and sent creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams. Western North Carolina was essentially cut off because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. There were hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in eastern Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from the roof of a hospital that was surrounded …

PREK TAKEO, Cambodia — The Mekong River is a lifeline for millions in the six countries it traverses on its way from its headwaters to the sea, sustaining the world’s largest inland fishery and abundant rice paddies on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Cambodia’s plan to build a massive canal linking the Mekong to a port on on its own coast on the Gulf of Thailand is raising alarm that the project could devastate the river’s natural flood systems, worsening droughts and depriving farmers on the delta of the nutrient-rich silt that has made Vietnam the world’s third-largest rice exporter. Cambodia hopes that the $1.7 billion Funan Techo canal, being built with Chinese help, will support its ambition to export directly from factories along the Mekong without relying on Vietnam, connecting the capital Phnom Penh with Kep province on Cambodia’s southern coast. At an August 5 groundbreaking ceremony, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet …

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Abuja, Nigeria — Leaders in Africa say the fight against malaria on the continent is facing significant funding gaps due to the ongoing global financial crisis and the impact of climate change. African leaders this week met in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly and called for a concerted effort to avert a funding crisis they say could set back decades of progress in the fight against malaria. The African Leaders Malaria Alliance, or ALMA, which hosted the high-level meeting, said if malaria funding continues to shrink, there will be an expected additional 112 million cases and some 280,000 deaths by the year 2029. Africa already accounts for an estimated 236 million malaria cases — or 95% of the global total — and 97% of deaths. Nigeria accounts for nearly a third of that burden. Guinea-Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embalo, who serves as chair of ALMA, …

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According to the International Energy Agency, the world now invests almost twice as much in clean energy as it does in fossil fuels. But with that shift comes environmental risks related to the mining of critical minerals. VOA’s Jessica Stone looks at how nations are navigating the environmental challenges of creating a renewable future. …

HONG KONG — Hong Kong welcomed a new pair of giant pandas gifted by Beijing on Thursday with a lavish ceremony, raising hopes for a boost to the city’s tourism. An An and Ke Ke are the third pair of giant pandas to be sent to the city from mainland China since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Their arrival came after their new neighbor, Ying Ying, gave birth to twins last month and became the world’s oldest first-time panda mother on record. With the addition of the new bears, the twins, and their father, Le Le, Hong Kong now houses six pandas. Chief Executive John Lee on Tuesday said An An is a 5-year-old male panda who is agile, intelligent and active, while Ke Ke, a 5-year-old female, is good at climbing, cute and has a gentle temperament. The new arrivals will undergo two months of …

GENEVA — Police in northern Switzerland said Tuesday that several people have been detained and a criminal case opened in connection with the suspected death of a person in a “suicide capsule.” The “Sarco” capsule is presumably designed to allow a person sitting in a reclining seat inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes. Exit International, an assisted suicide group based in the Netherlands, said it is behind the 3D-printed device that cost over $1 million to develop. Swiss law allows assisted suicide so long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive,” according to a government website. A law firm informed prosecutors in Schaffhausen canton that an assisted suicide …

Egypt’s second-largest city, Alexandria, lies in the Eastern Mediterranean, a top climate change hotspot that has dealt with record global air and ocean temperatures this year. Egypt-based photojournalist Hamada Elrasam presents scenes of everyday life that have been impacted by the changing climate phenomenon in the low-lying metropolis that has survived over two millennia, only to find itself on this century’s climate frontlines. Written in collaboration with Elle Kurancid. …

wyoming, iowa — Taking a late-summer country drive in the Midwest means venturing into the corn zone, snaking between 12-foot-tall green, leafy walls that seem to block out nearly everything other than the sun and an occasional water tower. The skyscraper-like corn is a part of rural America as much as cavernous red barns and placid cows. But soon, that towering corn might become a miniature of its former self, replaced by stalks only half as tall as the green giants that have dominated fields for so long. “As you drive across the Midwest, maybe in the next seven, eight, 10 years, you’re going to see a lot of this out there,” said Cameron Sorgenfrey, an eastern Iowa farmer who has been growing newly developed short corn for several years, sometimes prompting puzzled looks from neighboring farmers. “I think this is going to change agriculture in the Midwest.” The short corn …

United Nations, United States — The United Nations on Sunday adopted a “Pact for the Future” aimed at addressing sprawling 21st-century challenges ranging from conflict to climate change and human rights, despite last-minute objections from a group of countries led by Russia. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who organized the “Summit of the Future,” had billed it as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to reshape human history by rekindling international cooperation. As an opening act for the annual high-level week of the U.N. General Assembly, which begins Tuesday, dozens of heads of state and government gathered for the signing of the text. In the adopted version, leaders pledged to bolster the multilateral system to “keep pace with a changing world” and to “protect the needs and interests of current and future generations” facing “persistent crisis.” “We believe there is a path to a brighter future for all of humanity,” the document says. The pact outlines …