By MARCIA DUNN

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA ran into exasperating fuel leaks during a make-or-break test of its new moon rocket Monday, calling into question how soon astronauts could take off for a trip around the moon.

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The leaks — reminiscent of the rocket’s delayed debut three years ago — sprang just a couple hours into the daylong fueling operation at Kennedy Space Center.

Launch controllers began loading the 322-foot rocket with super-cold hydrogen and oxygen at midday. More than 700,000 gallons had to flow into the tanks and remain on board for several hours, mimicking the final stages of an actual countdown.

But excessive hydrogen quickly built up near the bottom of the rocket. Hydrogen loading was halted at least twice as the launch team scrambled to work around the problem using techniques developed during the previous Space Launch System countdown in 2022. That first test flight was plagued by hydrogen leaks before finally soaring without a crew.

The four astronauts assigned to the mission — three Americans and one Canadian — monitored the critical dress rehearsal from nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Houston, home to Johnson Space Center. They have been in quarantine for the past 1½ weeks, awaiting the practice countdown’s outcome.

Monday’s fueling demo will determine when they can blast off on the first lunar voyage by a crew in more than half a century.

At best, NASA could launch commander Reid Wiseman and his crew to the moon no sooner than Sunday. The rocket must be flying by Feb. 11 or the mission will be called off until March. The space agency only has a few days in any given month to launch the rocket, and the extreme cold already has shortened February’s launch window by two days.

Running behind because of the bitter cold snap, the countdown clocks began ticking Saturday night, giving launch controllers the chance to go through all the motions and deal with any lingering rocket problems. The clocks were set to stop a half-minute before reaching zero, just before engine ignition.

The nearly 10-day mission will send the astronauts past the moon, around the mysterious far side and then straight back to Earth, with the goal of testing the capsule’s life support and other vital systems. The crew will not go into lunar orbit or attempt to land.

NASA last sent astronauts to the moon during the 1960s and 1970s Apollo program. The new Artemis program aims for a more sustained lunar presence, with Wiseman’s crew setting the stage for future moon landings by other astronauts.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By JON GAMBRELL and SUZAN FRASER, Associated Press

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Turkey is attempting to bring both the U.S. and Iranian officials to the negotiating table, possibly by the end of the week, in hopes of easing the threat of U.S. military action against Iran.

Neither the U.S. nor Iran has confirmed whether they plan to take part in any negotiations. Two Turkish officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said Turkey is trying to organize a meeting between U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian leaders. The meeting could take place as soon as the end of the week, one of the officials said.

The military has moved the USS Abraham Lincoln and several guided-missile destroyers into the Middle East, but it remains unclear whether President Donald Trump will decide to use force against the Iranian government, as he has suggested he might do in retribution for their devastating crackdown on last month’s protests.

“Trump is trying to calibrate a response to Iran’s mass killing of protesters that punishes Iranian leaders without also embroiling the United States in a new, open-ended conflict in the region,” the New York-based Soufan Center think tank said Monday.

An Arab diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting has not been confirmed said there had been discussions about Turkey hosting a high-level meeting to bring Arab and Muslim countries together with the United States and Iran.

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Turkey’s role

Trump also has sought to pressure Iran to make a deal that would constrain its nuclear program. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Witkoff met multiple times last year in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program in Rome and Oman, but never finalized a deal. On June 13, Israel launched attacks on Iran that sparked a 12-day war between the countries, effectively halting those talks. The U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear sites during the war.

Baghaei of the Iranian Foreign Ministry declined to give any specifics about the possibility of talks in Ankara. The U.S. didn’t immediately comment on the possible talks.

Witkoff is expected to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli security officials on Tuesday, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly about the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity. He will travel to Abu Dhabi later in the week for Russia-Ukraine talks, the official said.

EU sanctions

Also on Monday, Iran said it had summoned all European Union ambassadors in the country to protest the bloc’s listing of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard as a terror group.

The 27-nation bloc agreed to list the Guard as a terror group last week over its part in the crackdown on nationwide protests in January that killed thousands of people and saw tens of thousands of others detained.

Other countries, including the U.S. and Canada, have previously designated the Guard as a terrorist organization. While the move is largely symbolic, it adds to the economic pressure squeezing Iran.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told journalists that the ambassadors had begun to be summoned on Sunday and that process went into Monday.

“We think that in coming days, a decision will be made about a reciprocal action,” Baghaei said.

Iran’s parliamentary speaker said Sunday that the Islamic Republic now considers all EU militaries to be terrorist groups, citing a 2019 law. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, said it was keeping diplomatic channels open with Tehran, despite the tensions, and urged restraint from military action.

The Guard emerged from Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution as a force meant to protect the Shiite cleric-overseen government and was later enshrined in its constitution. It operates in parallel with the regular armed forces and has expanded into private enterprise, allowing it to thrive.

The Guard’s Basij force likely was key in putting down the demonstrations, starting in earnest from Jan. 8, when authorities cut off the internet and international telephone calls for the nation of 85 million people. Videos that have come out of Iran via Starlink satellite dishes and other means show men likely belonging to its forces shooting and beating protesters.

On Monday, the U.K. government joined a number of countries that sanctioned Iran’s interior minister, who oversees the country’s police, and nine other Iranians for their alleged role in facilitating the crackdown. They were subjected to immediate asset freezes and travel bans.

Strait of Hormuz drill

Baghaei also said an exercise by the Guard in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a fifth of all of the global oil trade passes, was “ongoing based on its timetable.”

Iran warned ships last week that a drill would be carried out on Sunday and Monday, but prior to Baghaei’s comments hadn’t acknowledged it taking place. The U.S. military’s Central Command issued a strong warning to Iran not to harass its warships and aircraft or impede commercial vessels moving through the strait.

Satellite photos taken Sunday by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by The Associated Press showed small vessels moving at speed in the strait between Iran’s Qeshm and Hengam islands, some distance away from the corridor commercial vessels take. The Guard relies on a fleet of small, fast-attack ships in the strait.

Asked whether Iran could face a war, Baghaei told the public “don’t worry at all.” He declined to discuss whether Trump set a deadline for Iran to respond to Washington’s demands regarding the protests and Iran’s nuclear program.

State television host

Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported on Monday that prosecutors in Tehran filed charges against the head of state television’s Ofogh channel, as well as producers and the host of a program who mocked those killed in the crackdown.

The program, which aired Saturday, saw the host reference allegations made abroad about Iran hiding bodies of the dead in freezers to bring out as victims if the U.S. attacks the country. The host asked viewers a multiple-choice question about where Iran would hide the bodies, listing things like ice cream freezers and supermarket refrigerators.

The crackdown on the demonstrations killed at least 6,848 people, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which has been accurate in other rounds of unrest in Iran. It fears more may be dead. The AP has been unable to independently assess the death toll. An additional 49,930 people have been arrested, the Human Rights Activists News Agency said.

As of Jan. 21, Iran’s government put the death toll at a far lower 3,117, saying 2,427 were civilians and security forces, labeling the rest “terrorists.” In the past, Iran’s theocracy has undercounted or not reported fatalities from unrest. However, the country’s presidency published a list of names Sunday it said belonged to 2,986 of those killed, something it hasn’t done in past protests.

Suzan Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. Sam McNeil in Brussels, Aamer Madhani and Matthew Lee in Washington, Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Sylvia Hui in London contributed to this report.

Stillwater Area High School will move to block scheduling next fall, with each student taking four classes one day and three different classes the next.

The change will give students more opportunities to take elective courses and allow for fewer, longer classes per day. It also will cut down on the number of transitions in hallways, where behavior problems often arise, officials say. The school, which serves students from ninth through 12th grades, has 2,705 students.

The new seven-period schedule will be broken down into odd/even days. Odd days (e.g., Mon/Wed/Fri) would include periods 1, 3, 5, and 7, while even days (e.g., Tue/Thu) would cover periods 2, 4, 6, and a flexible period of time for students to meet with teachers, collaborate with peers, connect with clubs or catch up on homework.

Moving to seven classes each semester instead of six means students will be able to take up to eight additional elective courses over four years. Currently, students who take a world language class and a music class have no room in their schedules for any other electives, said Principal Rob Bach.

“Their schedule is full for four years, and that doesn’t even leave room for some of the other requirements that they need just to graduate from high school,” he said.

Some students take required physical education and health classes online so they “were already adding a seventh class to their schedule,” he said. In addition, a new required class, personal finance, was added this year.

“As those requirements go up, that old vehicle simply was not a good model to get kids the kinds of experiences that they wanted or needed,” Bach said. “We knew that we were going to have to figure out if we were going to offer really competitive programming and the kinds of experiences that kids wanted, we knew we were going to have to create more opportunities in the schedule.”

At the same time, district officials didn’t want to just add another class period on to the day, he said.

“The number of transitions that kids go through every day having seven classes in a day is a lot, and kids are under stress,” he said.

St. Paul, other districts use it

The 85-minute class periods will allow for deeper exploration of material, more time to start and finish work in class and built-in opportunities for students to ask questions and get help, according to district officials.

“If you have seven classes every single day, each of those class periods gets shorter and shorter, so if you only have a 45-minute class, a lot of times you’re just going an inch deep and a mile wide,” he said. “We’re trying to slow things down for kids, give them an opportunity to really, truly get in depth, have class discussions, get your intervention in class, maybe even have time for homework in class so that there’s less of that to do outside, all of those kinds of things.”

Other districts in the east metro have moved to block scheduling in recent years. At Hill-Murray School in Maplewood, one of the largest private schools in the metro area, students follow a block schedule that consists of four 70-minute classes on one day and four different classes the next day.

Seven classes a day can be “cognitively overwhelming,” for students who then need to transition between classes more often, according to district officials.

St. Paul Public Schools moved to block scheduling for its high schools in the 2022-2023 school year. Middle schools in the district joined the move and transitioned to block scheduling for the 2025-2026 school year, with half of district middle schools already following block scheduling.

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Bach said he recently took a group of Stillwater students to tour Edina High School and Wayzata High School, each of which has a block schedule. “They were a little bit nervous on the front end about what an 85-minute class period might look like, but every single one of them, when we were done at the end of the day, came out of it saying, ‘Mr. Bach, we’ve got to do something like this in Stillwater. This is great.’ They loved it.”

Stillwater Area School Board Chair Alison Sherman said switching to a block schedule will provide more opportunities for students.

“We want to meet the needs of our learners so that we can keep them in our schools,” she said. “We have amazing teachers and school environments that benefit our kids.”

College credits

The change in scheduling means more opportunities for students to take classes for college credit at the high school.

Starting next year, students will be able to earn an associate degree while still in high school. Instead of students traveling to Century College, Bethel University or the University of Northwestern to enroll in those school’s Post Secondary Enrollment Option, or PSEO, programs, students at SAHS will be able to earn dual college and high school credits at the school.

PSEO courses are attractive because they aren’t associated with a tuition fee, and books are distributed to students at no cost. But having those students enrolled in PSEO off site means the district is losing state funding.

This year, 342 Stillwater students are enrolled in full or part-time PSEO, Bach said. The majority (272) take classes at Century College, with the rest divided between Bethel (25), Northwestern (11), the University of Minnesota (10) and others, he said.

Bach has been meeting with families to extol the benefits of taking college courses at the high school instead.

“One of the key messages that I’ve told families is that when your kid leaves to go do PSEO, they’re a college student, and colleges treat your kids so much more independently,” he said.

At the high school, “there is absolutely a higher level of expectation on our staff in terms of how they’re going to communicate with parents,” he said.

About 19 percent of students have failed a PSEO online class, compared with 3 percent of those taking a class through the high school, he said. “Why is that? Because our teachers are expected to reach out,” he said. “ They’re expected to communicate with parents. They’re expected to say, ‘Hey, you know what? I see your kid struggling. Let’s talk about a plan to get them back on track,’ all of that kind of stuff. That doesn’t happen when kids leave our entity.”

The first class eligible to graduate from Stillwater Area High School with an A.A. degree will be this year’s current ninth grade class, he said.

Students also will be able to take concurrent enrollment courses for college credit through Minnesota State University, Mankato and the University of Minnesota, and complete the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum, which is a package of general education courses accepted for transfer to other state colleges and universities, with the possibility of earning up to 60 total college credits.

Industry certifications

The school also for the first time will offer industry certifications in two fields: Certified Nursing Assistant and Digital Technologies, said Carissa Keister, the district’s chief of staff.

“Students can graduate with job-ready skills and certifications,” she said. “We’re really being even more proactive in trying to expand those credit opportunities on campus so kids aren’t leaving us to go somewhere else.”

Also starting this fall: an online academy with nine core classes taught by Stillwater teachers.

“Again, we’re trying to meet the needs of kids,” Keister said. “A lot of them are looking at online opportunities, especially post-Covid, so we want to make sure that we have the option for them to take classes again with our great teachers here in Stillwater, and to have that support and be part of the Stillwater community and still have the opportunity to do online learning.”

Students will have the option of taking some asynchronous classes online and some in person at first, but district officials hope to eventually have a full online program option for students, Keister said.

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Online courses will have the same standards and support as in-person classes, and offer more flexibility for students.

“This would give them the option to take maybe two or three classes and then be done for the day,” she said. “They can go to work, they can do their extracurricular activities, and then they can do their online learning at night. … What we’re really hearing from our students and our families is they want to learn when they want to learn. They don’t want to have to sit at a desk from this time to this time.”

The cost of instituting the new programs will be about $800,000, but a portion of that will be offset through staffing adjustments, Keister said.

Pioneer Press education reporter Imani Cruzen contributed to this report. 

By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservative activist Ed Martin has been removed as head of the Justice Department group tasked with scrutinizing the federal prosecutions of President Donald Trump and is no longer working out of department headquarters, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Martin remains the department’s pardon attorney, but is now working out of a building across Washington that houses some Justice Department offices, the person said. Martin had previously been working on the fourth floor at Justice Department headquarters, which houses the deputy attorney general’s office.

It was not immediately clear why Martin was no longer in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office last year, but another person familiar with the matter said the group under his leadership was not making much progress. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal personnel matter.

Efforts to reach Martin by telephone and email weren’t immediately successful Monday.

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Martin has been a leading figure in — and cheerleader for — Trump’s campaign to use the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies, including former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. A judge dismissed the Comey and James prosecutions in November, concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges at Trump ’s urging was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

Last January, Trump installed Martin as interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin, who had no prior prosecutorial experience, immediately injected partisan politics into the nation’s largest U.S. Attorney’s office. He fired and demoted subordinates who worked on politically sensitive cases, including Capitol riot prosecutions. He posted on social media about potential targets of investigations. And he oversaw the dismissal of hundreds of Jan. 6 cases after Trump’s sweeping act of clemency for all Capitol riot defendants.

But the president yanked Martin’s nomination to keep the job on a more permanent basis two days after a key Republican senator said he could not support Martin for the job. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina opposed Martin’s nomination because of his outspoken advocacy for rioters who attacked the Capitol.

Martin was a leader of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement. He spoke at a rally in Washington on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack and later served on the board of a nonprofit that raised money to support Capitol riot defendants and their families.

Last May, Trump picked Fox News host Jeanine Pirro to replace Martin as the top federal prosecutor. Martin immediately moved over to department headquarters to serve as pardon attorney.