By HYUNG-JIN KIM, Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s military fired warning shots after North Korean soldiers crossed the rivals’ tense border on Tuesday, South Korean officials said, the first known border intrusion by North Korea in nearly a year.

Violent confrontations and bloodshed have occasionally happened at the Koreas’ heavily fortified border, called the Demilitarized Zone. But Tuesday’s incident won’t likely escalate, as it didn’t cause any casualties on either side and North Korea hasn’t returned fire.

About 10 North Korean soldiers — some carrying weapons — violated the military demarcation line at the eastern section of the DMZ at 5 p.m. They returned to North Korea after South Korea broadcast warnings and fired warning shots, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.

South Korea’s military said it is closely monitoring North Korean activities. It said North Korea didn’t return fire.

In June last year, North Korean troops violated the border three times, prompting South Korea to fire warning shots. The incidents occurred when the Koreas were embroiled in Cold War-style campaigns like balloon launches and propaganda broadcasts, but they didn’t develop into a major source of tensions.

South Korea’s military assessed at the time that the North Korean soldiers didn’t deliberately commit the border intrusion and the site was a wooded area where military demarcation line signs weren’t clearly visible. Observers said the North Korean soldiers might have accidently crossed the border while adding anti-tank barriers, planting mines or engaging in other works to boost border defenses.

The motive for Tuesday’s border crossing by North Korean soldiers wasn’t immediately clear.

South Korea’s military said in late March that North Korea was resuming front-line works such as reinforcing barbed wire fences. South Korean media, citing the military, reported that North Korean soldiers might have unintentionally intruded into South Korea’s territory on Tuesday during a patrol mission ahead of unspecified front-line works.

In October, North Korea said it would build defense structures at the border to cope with “confrontational hysteria” by South Korean and U.S. forces. That was seen as an effort to beef up its front-line security posture and prevent its soldiers and citizens from defecting to South Korea.

The 248-kilometer (155-mile) -long, 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) -wide DMZ is one of the world’s most heavily armed borders. An estimated 2 million mines are peppered inside and near the border, which is also guarded by barbed wire fences, tank traps and combat troops on both sides. It’s a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Animosities between the Koreas are running high now as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continues to flaunt his military nuclear capabilities and align with Russia over President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Kim is also ignoring calls by Seoul and Washington to resume denuclearization negotiations.

Since his Jan. 20 inauguration, U.S. President Donald Trump has said he would reach out to Kim again to revive diplomacy. North Korea has not responded to Trump’s remarks and says U.S. hostilities against it have deepened since Trump’s inauguration. Experts say Kim could eventually return to talks with Trump, hoping that his advancing nuclear program would help North Korea win greater U.S. concessions.

South Korea, meanwhile, is experiencing a leadership vacuum after the ouster of President Yoon Suk Yeol last week over his ill-fated imposition of martial law. Yoon’s push to expand military drills with the U.S. had infuriated North Korea.

Associated Press writer Kim Tong-hyung contributed to this report.

By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders Tuesday aimed at boosting coal, a reliable but polluting energy source that’s long been in decline.

According to two senior White House officials, Trump will use his emergency authority to allow some older coal-fired power plants set for retirement to keep producing electricity to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue before the president’s announcement, expected Tuesday afternoon.

President Donald Trump departs after signing an executive order at an event to announce new tariffs in the Rose Garden of the White House, Wednesday, April 2, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Trump, a Republican, has long promised to boost what he calls “beautiful” coal to fire power plants and for other uses, but the industry has been in decline for decades.

The orders expected Tuesday will direct federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands, according to information from the White House officials.

The orders also will direct Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “acknowledge the end” of an Obama-era moratorium that paused coal leasing on federal lands and require federal agencies to rescind policies transitioning the nation away from coal production.

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The orders also seek to promote coal and coal technology exports and to accelerate development of coal technologies.

Trump has long suggested that coal can help meet surging electricity demand from manufacturing and the massive data centers needed for artificial intelligence.

“Nothing can destroy coal. Not the weather, not a bomb — nothing,” Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by video link in January. “And we have more coal than anybody.”

Energy experts say any bump for coal under Trump is likely to be temporary because natural gas is cheaper and there’s a durable market for renewable energy such as wind and solar power no matter who holds the White House.

Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

By CHRISTINA LARSON, Associated Press Science Writer

Three genetically engineered wolves that may resemble extinct dire wolves are trotting, sleeping and howling in an undisclosed secure location in the U.S., according to the company that aims to bring back lost species.

The wolf pups, which range in age from three to six months old, have long white hair, muscular jaws and already weigh in at around 80 pounds — on track to reach 140 pounds at maturity, researchers at Colossal Biosciences reported Monday.

This undated photo provided by Colossal Biosciences shows two pups that were genetically engineered with similarities to the extinct dire wolf. (Colossal Biosciences via AP)

Dire wolves, which went extinct more than 10,000 years ago, are much larger than gray wolves, their closest living relatives today.

Independent scientists said this latest effort doesn’t mean dire wolves are coming back to North American grasslands any time soon.

“All you can do now is make something look superficially like something else”— not fully revive extinct species, said Vincent Lynch, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the research.

Colossal scientists learned about specific traits that dire wolves possessed by examining ancient DNA from fossils. The researchers studied a 13,000 year-old dire wolf tooth unearthed in Ohio and a 72,000 year-old skull fragment found in Idaho, both part of natural history museum collections.

This undated photo provided by Colossal Biosciences shows Romulus and Remus, both 3-months old and genetically engineered with similarities to the extinct dire wolf. (Colossal Biosciences via AP)

Then the scientists took blood cells from a living gray wolf and used CRISPR to genetically modify them in 20 different sites, said Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro. They transferred that genetic material to an egg cell from a domestic dog. When ready, embryos were transferred to surrogates, also domestic dogs, and 62 days later the genetically engineered pups were born.

Colossal has previously announced similar projects to genetically alter cells from living species to create animals resembling extinct woolly mammoths, dodos and others.

Though the pups may physically resemble young dire wolves, “what they will probably never learn is the finishing move of how to kill a giant elk or a big deer,” because they won’t have opportunities to watch and learn from wild dire wolf parents, said Colossal’s chief animal care expert Matt James.

Colossal also reported today that it had cloned four red wolves using blood drawn from wild wolves of the southeastern U.S.’s critically endangered red wolf population. The aim is to bring more genetic diversity into the small population of captive red wolves, which scientists are using to breed and help save the species.

This technology may have broader application for conservation of other species because it’s less invasive than other techniques to clone animals, said Christopher Preston, a wildlife expert at the University of Montana who was not involved in the research. But it still requires a wild wolf to be sedated for a blood draw and that’s no simple feat, he added.

Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said the team met with officials from the U.S. Interior Department in late March about the project. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum praised the work on X on Monday as a “thrilling new era of scientific wonder” even as outside scientists said there are limitations to restoring the past.

“Whatever ecological function the dire wolf performed before it went extinct, it can’t perform those functions” on today’s existing landscapes, said Buffalo’s Lynch.

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

Texas was the first U.S. state to execute someone by lethal injection, but the idea for the novel method came from Oklahoma. Our northern neighbor was the first to adopt the plan to replace the spectacle of the electric chair with something more palatable for witnesses and the public. Texas was just the first to test it out on a person. 

Since 1982, when state officials injected Charlie Brooks—convicted of murder in Fort Worth—with a lethal cocktail of drugs dreamt up by Oklahoma’s medical examiner but untested in any research setting, Texas has led the country in lethal injections. Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (NYU Press, April 2025)—a new book by law professor, former prosecutor, and death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain—brings readers into the death chamber to bear disturbing witness to the reality of lethal injection.

The new book pulls back the curtain on the clinical facade and reveals all the places the lethal injection process goes wrong, from the laws to the drugs to the pushing of the plunger on the syringe. It shows how tough-to-implement protocols have backed state corrections departments into a corner, creating a poorly choreographed horror show masquerading as a medical procedure. 

As Lain puts it, lethal injection as we know it is based on “the illusion of science, the assumption of science.” 

Cover, Secrets of the Killing State (Courtesy)

The three-drug protocol first used by states (and still used by many) was intended to make sure the person on the gurney died. Extremely high doses of three drugs—each lethal in its own right—would ensure that if one drug failed, one of the other two would surely work. While the specific drugs have varied over time, largely based on availability, the basic game plan persisted. 

But this three-drug plan wasn’t reviewed by anyone before Oklahoma adopted it, followed the next day by Texas. Lain argues that every death penalty state that adopted the three-drug plan did so because no one was conducting any research into alternatives. Everyone was simply following the leader. 

“States had come to a consensus in adopting the three-drug protocol, but it was based on the assumption that other states knew what they were doing,” she writes. “They did not.”

Decades after these protocols were put in place, studies showed these drugs were interacting with each other in surprising ways. One drug, meant to stop the heart, was actually weakened by another in the trio, so people weren’t having heart attacks—they were suffocating slowly, Lain writes. Autopsy reports showed that one common drug used as an anesthetic wasn’t saving people from pain, but rather causing it.

This is not to mention what happens when state agencies use the wrong amounts of these drugs, or in some cases, the wrong drugs altogether. Supply chain issues and pharmaceutical companies’ resistance to having their products used off-label in lethal injections have led states to buck regulations in order to get execution drugs. Some states, including Texas, have been caught trying to illegally import the drugs from sketchy sellers.

Texas finally abandoned the three-drug approach in 2012, but not because of the concerns about efficacy or potentially torturous executions. It had just run into supply chain issues with one of the drugs it had previously been using. Now, the state uses a one-drug protocol, injecting prisoners with pentobarbital the same way a veterinarian puts an animal to sleep. 

But by 2020, more evidence had come to light that even this seemingly humane option was causing people to die painfully. The pentobarbital was destroying the lungs, causing people to “drown in their own fluids.” Lain also cites a 2020 report that showed Texas has botched many more executions using this one-drug protocol than it did under the three-drug plan. 

In 2022, Texas prisoners sued because the state was using expired vials of pentobarbital in its executions. A court found that prison officials were violating more than one state law by doing this, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wouldn’t allow that judge to stay any executions because of it. 

In explaining the legal and clinical aspects of lethal injections, Lain’s writing is far from sterile. She lays out her fact-based narratives in stomach-churning detail, while also plainly sharing her analysis of the facts with readers, often bordering on righteous indignation. At one point, she refers to lethal injection as a “hot mess.” Of a lawyer who suggested an unknown drug be used in executions based on a Google search, she opines: “The incompetence is outstanding.” 

The author talks about incompetence a lot in the book, but she notes that the people who are playing key roles in the executions—the prison guards pushing the syringes, the warden watching to see if anything goes wrong—aren’t meant to have the medical expertise necessary to prevent problems. But most doctors, with their solemn vow to “do no harm,” steer clear of the process. 

The incompetence problem, then, is inherent to the idea itself. Lain argues that lethal injection, at its core, is “less about a humane death, and more about a humane-looking death.” 

It can look humane because most of us don’t know much about the process, and that’s by design. Most of the public information we have about lethal injections comes from court proceedings. Texas doesn’t even conduct post-execution autopsies anymore. 

While the subject of the book is narrow, and often difficult to sit with, the author effectively provides entry points for people who might not normally wade into the death penalty debate. She dives into contract law, supply chains, off-the-books drug deals by state agents, and executions as currency in local politics, among other interesting roads that intersect with lethal injection.

Lain has been researching the death penalty for almost two decades, and she spent five years writing Secrets of the Killing State. In the book, she describes in great detail executions that were botched, cases in which states have been called out by the federal government for violating laws in the name of executions, and accounts from witnesses and participants that struck a nerve. 

“But the point is not the examples; it’s the patterns,” she writes. Here, she’s talking about state secrecy and obfuscation, but it really could be the thesis of the book. She provides a nearly overwhelming amount of evidence—the footnotes take up more than 70 pages—to back up her claim that lethal injection doesn’t provide the humane death it promises. 

“Executions are the government at its most powerful moment, and if we don’t know what is happening in that moment, then we cannot hold the government accountable for what it does and doesn’t do in our name.”

The post The Sordid, Unscientific Story Behind Lethal Injection appeared first on The Texas Observer.