8 Apr 2024

Huge crowds await a total solar eclipse in North America. Clouds may spoil the view

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By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press aerospace writer

MESQUITE, Texas (AP) — Millions of spectators along a narrow corridor stretching from Mexico to the U.S. to Canada eagerly awaited Monday’s celestial sensation — a total eclipse of the sun — even as forecasters called for clouds.

The best weather was expected at the tail end of the eclipse in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, as well as New Brunswick and Newfoundland in Canada.

It promised to be North America’s biggest eclipse crowd ever, thanks to the densely populated path and the lure of more than four minutes of midday darkness in Texas and other choice spots. Almost everyone in North America was guaranteed at least a partial eclipse, weather permitting. The show got underway in the Pacific shortly before noon EDT with totality expected to sweep North America over the next few hours.

An amateur astronomer prepares her telescope a day before a total solar eclipse in Mazatlan, Mexico, Sunday, April 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

A sign in the town square greets visitors in Paris, Texas, Sunday, April 7, 2024. Paris is one of many small towns along the route where the eclipse can be observd from. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)

Sara Luneau, 57, poses at Jay Peak ski resort in Jay, Vermont, Monday, April 8, 2024. Luneau and her 16-year-old niece are among the lucky 100 or so skiers and snowboarders who will get a chance to ride the tram to the top of the mountain and view the eclipse from nearly 4,000 feet elevation. (AP Photo/Susan Haigh)

Eclipse glasses are shown at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indianapolis, Monday, April 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Synthia Nguyen and Jen Cerna from Washington, DC, claimed a prime spot on the lawn along the rapids in Niagara Falls State Park, to view the solar eclipse, Monday, April 8, 2024, in Niagara Falls, N.Y. (AP Photo/Carolyn Thompson)

Vicki and Craig Musser, of Vernon Hills, Ill. take a selfie with a total eclipse themed race car at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indianapolis, Monday, April 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

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In Texas, the south-central region was locked in clouds, but it was a little bit better to the northeast, said National Weather Service meteorologist Cody Snell.

“Dallas is pretty much a 50-50 shot,” he said.

The cliff-hanging uncertainty added to the drama. But the overcast skies in Mesquite near Dallas didn’t rattle Erin Froneberger, who was in town for business and brought along her eclipse glasses.

“We are always just rushing, rushing, rushing,” she said. “But this is an event that we can just take a moment, a few seconds that it’s going to happen and embrace it.”

Sara Laneau, of Westfield, Vermont, woke up at 4 a.m. Monday to bring her 16-year-old niece to nearby Jay Peak ski resort to catch the eclipse after a morning on the slopes.

“This will be a first from me and an experience of a lifetime,” said Laneau, who was dressed in a purple metallic ski suit with a solar eclipse T-shirt underneath.

At Niagara Falls State Park, tourists streamed in under cloudy skies with wagons, strollers, coolers and lawn chairs. Park officials expected a large crowd at the popular site overlooking the falls.

For Monday’s full eclipse, the moon was due to slip right in front of the sun, entirely blocking it. The resulting twilight, with only the sun’s outer atmosphere or corona visible, would be long enough for birds and other animals to fall silent, and for planets, stars and maybe even a comet to pop out.

The out-of-sync darkness lasts up to 4 minutes, 28 seconds. That’s almost twice as long as it was during the U.S. coast-to-coast eclipse seven years ago because the moon is closer to Earth. It will be another 21 years before the U.S. sees another total solar eclipse on this scale.

Extending five hours from the first bite out of the sun to the last, Monday’s eclipse begins in the Pacific and makes landfall at Mazatlan, Mexico, before moving into Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and 12 other U.S. states in the Midwest, Middle Atlantic and New England, and then Canada. Last stop: Newfoundland, with the eclipse ending in the North Atlantic.

It will take just 1 hour, 40 minutes for the moon’s shadow to race more than 4,000 miles (6,500 kilometers) across the continent.

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Eye protection is needed with proper eclipse glasses and filters to look at the sun, except when it ducks completely out of sight during an eclipse.

The path of totality — approximately 115 miles (185 kilometers) wide — encompasses several major cities this time, including Dallas; Indianapolis; Cleveland; Buffalo, New York; and Montreal. An estimated 44 million people live within the track, with a couple hundred million more within 200 miles (320 kilometers). Add in all the eclipse chasers, amateur astronomers, scientists and just plain curious, and it’s no wonder the hotels and flights are sold out and the roads jammed.

Experts from NASA and scores of universities are posted along the route, poised to launch research rockets and weather balloons, and conduct experiments. The International Space Station’s seven astronauts also will be on the lookout, 270 miles (435 kilometers) up.

Susan Haigh in Jay, Vermont; Carolyn Thompson in Niagara Falls, New York; and Julie Walker in New York contributed.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

8 Apr 2024

Actor Jonathan Majors avoids jail time, sentenced to counseling for assaulting ex-girlfriend

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By PHILIP MARCELO (Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — Actor Jonathan Majors has been ordered to complete a yearlong counseling program but avoided jail time Monday for assaulting his ex-girlfriend in a high-profile case that derailed the once-promising star’s career.

The 34-year-old star of “Creed III” and other films had faced up to a year behind bars after he was convicted of misdemeanor assault by a Manhattan jury in December.

In court Monday, Judge Michael Gaffey sentenced Majors to conditional discharge after noting that both sides in the case agreed the charges did not warrant jail time.

He said Majors must complete a 52-week, in-person batterer’s intervention program in Los Angeles, where the actor lives. He also has to continue with the mental health therapy his lawyers say he’s been participating in. Majors faces a year in jail if found in violation of the terms, which also included a no contact order with his former girlfriend, Grace Jabbari.

Majors, dressed in all black and accompanied by his girlfriend, actor Meagan Good, declined to address the court and left the courthouse without speaking to reporters.

His lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, said the actor did not want to make any public statement that Jabbari could use against him in the civil suit she’s filed against the actor.

Majors, she added, is “committed to growing as a person” and will complete any court-mandated programs “with an open heart” even as he maintains his innocence and plans to appeal.

“He’s lost his whole career,” Chaudhry said in court. “This has been the most challenging year of his life.”

But Jabbari, fighting back tears as she addressed the court, said Majors refuses to acknowledge his guilt and remains a danger to those around him.

“He’s not sorry. He has not accepted responsibility, ” she said. “He will do this again and he will hurt other women. He believes he is above the law.”

Jabbari said Majors had made her believe the two were in a loving relationship, but, in reality, he isolated her from the rest of the world and cut her off from family and friends.

“I was so emotionally dependent on him,” she said. “I became a different person around him — small, scared and vulnerable.”

Rather than acknowledge his actions, Majors has been openly critical of the court proceedings, launching a “high-powered PR campaign” that included a nationally televised interview, added Assistant District Attorney Kelli Galloway as she argued for a sentence of violence counseling for Majors.

Following the December guilty verdict, Majors was immediately dropped by Marvel Studios, which had cast him as Kang the Conqueror, a role envisioned as the main villain in the entertainment empire’s movies and television shows for years to come.

The conviction stemmed from an altercation last March in which Jabbari accused him of attacking her in the backseat of a chauffeured car, saying he hit her head with his open hand, twisted her arm behind her back and squeezed her middle finger until it fractured.

Majors claimed the 31-year-old British dancer was the aggressor, flying into a jealous rage after reading a text message from another woman on his phone. He maintained he was only trying to regain his phone and get away from Jabbari safely.

Majors had hoped his two-week criminal trial would vindicate him. In a television interview shortly after his conviction, he said he deserves a second chance.

But the California native and Yale University graduate still faces Jabbari’s civil suit, which she filed last month in Manhattan federal court. In the suit, Jabbari accuses Majors of assault, battery, defamation and inflicting emotional distress, claiming he subjected her to escalating incidents of physical and verbal abuse during their relationship. The two met in 2021 on the set of Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” in which Majors played Kang.

Majors’ lawyers have declined to respond to the claims, saying only that they are preparing to file counterclaims against Jabbari.

The actor had his breakthrough role in 2019’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” He also starred in the HBO horror series “Lovecraft Country,” which earned him an Emmy nomination, and as the nemesis to fictional boxing champ Adonis Creed in the blockbuster “Creed III.”

As for Marvel, a looming question remains whether the studio will recast the role of Kang or pivot in a new direction.

Majors’ departure was among a recent series of high-profile setbacks for the vaunted superhero factory, which has earned an unprecedented $30 billion worldwide from 33 films.

___

Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo

8 Apr 2024

Vatican blasts gender-affirming surgery, surrogacy and gender theory as violations of human dignity

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VATICAN CITY — The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that reject God’s plan for human life.

The Vatican’s doctrine office issued “Infinite Dignity,” a 20-page declaration that has been in the works for five years. After substantial revision in recent months, it was approved March 25 by Pope Francis, who ordered its publication.

In its most eagerly anticipated section, the Vatican repeated its rejection of “gender theory,” or the idea that one’s gender can be changed. It said God created man and woman as biologically different, separate beings, and said people must not tinker with that plan or try to “make oneself God.”

“It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document said.

It distinguished between gender-affirming surgeries, which it rejected, and “genital abnormalities” that are present at birth or that develop later. Those abnormalities can be “resolved” with the help of health care professionals, it said.

The document’s existence, rumored since 2019, was confirmed in recent weeks by the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, a close Francis confidant.

He had cast it as something of a nod to conservatives after he authored a more explosive document approving blessings for same-sex couples that sparked criticism from conservative bishops around the world, especially in Africa.

And yet, the document takes pointed aim at countries — including many in Africa — that criminalize homosexuality. It echoed Francis’ assertion in a 2023 interview with The Associated Press that “being homosexual is not a crime,” making the assertion now part of the Vatican’s doctrinal teaching.

The new document denounces “as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation.”

The document is something of a repackaging of previously articulated Vatican positions, read now through the prism of human dignity. It restates well-known Catholic doctrine opposing abortion and euthanasia, and adds to the list some of Francis’ main concerns as pope: the threats to human dignity posed by poverty, war, human trafficking and forced migration.

In a newly articulated position, it says surrogacy violates both the dignity of the surrogate mother and the child. While much attention about surrogacy has focused on possible exploitation of poor women as surrogates, the Vatican document focuses almost more on the resulting child.

“The child has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver,” the document said. “Considering this, the legitimate desire to have a child cannot be transformed into a ‘right to a child’ that fails to respect the dignity of that child as the recipient of the gift of life.”

The Vatican published its most articulated position on gender in 2019, when the Congregation for Catholic Education rejected the idea that people can choose or change their genders and insisted on the complementarity of biologically male and female sex organs to create new life.

It called gender fluidity a symptom of the “confused concept of freedom” and “momentary desires” that characterize post-modern culture.

The new document from the more authoritative Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith quotes from that 2019 education document, but tempers the tone. Significantly, it doesn’t repeat the 1986 language of a previous doctrinal document that said homosexual people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual actions are “intrinsically disordered.”

The Rev. James Martin, who has called for the Catholic Church to extend greater outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, said the gender terminology was similar to past declarations. But he welcomed the condemnation of legislation and violence against LGBTQ+ people.

“That cannot be repeated too often as an offense against human dignity. The LGBTQ person, like everyone else, has infinite dignity,” he said in an email.

Francis has made reaching out to LGBTQ+ people a hallmark of his papacy, ministering to trans Catholics and insisting that the Catholic Church must welcome all children of God.

But he has also denounced “gender theory” as the “worst danger” facing humanity today, an “ugly ideology” that threatens to cancel out God-given differences between man and woman. He has blasted in particular what he calls the “ideological colonization” of the West in the developing world, where development aid is sometimes conditioned on adopting Western ideas about gender and reproductive health.

“It needs to be emphasized that biological sex and the sociocultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated,’” the new document said.

Transgender activists immediately called the document “hurtful” and devoid of the voices and experiences of real trans people, especially in its distinction between transgender people and intersex people.

“The suggestion that gender-affirming health care — which has saved the lives of so many wonderful trans people and enabled them to live in harmony with their bodies, their communities and (God) — might risk or diminish trans people’s dignity is not only hurtful but dangerously ignorant,” said Mara Klein, a nonbinary, transgender activist who has participated in Germany’s church reform project.

“Seeing that, in contrast, surgical interventions on intersex people — which if performed without consent especially on minors often cause immense physical and psychological harm for many intersex people to date — are assessed positively just seems to expose the underlying hypocrisy further,” Klein said.

The document comes at a time of some backlash against transgender people, including in the United States where Republican-led state legislatures are considering a new round of bills restricting medical care for transgender youths — and in some cases, adults. In addition, bills to govern youths’ pronouns, sports teams and bathrooms at school are also under consideration, as well as some books and school curriculums.

“On top of the rising hostility towards our communities, we are faced with a church that does not listen and refuses to see the beauty of creation that can be found in our biographies,” Klein said in an email.

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8 Apr 2024

Ukraine and Russia trade fresh accusations of targeting a major nuclear power plant

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By ILLIA NOVIKOV (Associated Press)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia and Ukraine are trading fresh accusations over renewed threats to Europe’s largest nuclear plant that has been caught up in the war, with Moscow alleging Ukraine was behind drone attacks on the facility that were witnessed by U.N. inspectors and Kyiv accusing Russia of disinformation tactics.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday called the drone attacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine “a very dangerous provocation.”

“This is a very dangerous practice that has very bad, negative consequences in the future,” Peskov said during his daily conference call with reporters.

The U.N.’s atomic watchdog agency on Sunday confirmed drone strikes on one of the plant’s six reactors, which caused one casualty, but did not attribute responsibility to either side.

The Associated Press was unable to verify either side’s claims in the area of heavy fighting where independent journalists are not allowed to enter.

An official at Energoatom, Ukraine’s atomic energy company, blamed Russia for the attacks, saying they were “a provocation” orchestrated to malign Ukraine.

The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

The plant has repeatedly been caught in the crossfire since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and seized the facility shortly after. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body, has frequently expressed alarm about the plant amid fears of a potential nuclear catastrophe.

The strikes did not compromise the nuclear facility, which the Kremlin’s forces have been occupying and running in southern Ukraine since shortly after the war began more than two years ago, the IAEA said. The plant’s six reactors have been shut down for months, and IAEA inspectors are stationed at the site.

Propaganda and disinformation have been used as weapons by both sides during the conflict, and both sides have accused each other on other occasions of planning attacks on the plant.

Last July, Ukraine and Russia accused each other of planning to attack the Zaporizhzhia plant, though neither side provided evidence to support their claims.

Even with its reactors shut down, the plant still needs power and qualified staff to operate crucial cooling systems and other safety features.

The IAEA team did not observe structural damage to the “systems, structures and components” important to the nuclear safety of the plant, it said. They reported superficial scorching to the top of a reactor dome.

The damage “has not compromised nuclear safety, but this is a serious incident (with the) potential to undermine (the) integrity of the reactor’s containment system,” the IAEA said on X, formerly Twitter.

IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said the main reactor containment structures took at least three direct hits. “This cannot happen,” he said on X.

Zaporizhzhia is one of four regions that Russia illegally annexed in September 2022.

The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said Russian authorities are seeking “to use Russia’s physical control over the (plant) to force international organizations, including the IAEA, to meet with Russian occupation officials to legitimize Russia’s occupation of the (plant) and by extension Russia’s occupation of sovereign Ukrainian land.”

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Associated Press Writer Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine