A defunct Russian satellite has broken up into more than 100 pieces of debris in orbit, forcing astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter for about an hour and adding to the mass of space junk already in orbit, US space agencies said.

There were no immediate details on what caused the breakup of the Resurs-P1 Russian Earth observation satellite, which Russia declared dead in 2022.

US Space Command, tracking the debris swarm, said there was no immediate threat to other satellites.

The event took place at around 10am mountain time (1600 GMT) on Wednesday, Space Command said. It occurred in an orbit near the space station, prompting US astronauts onboard to shelter in their spacecraft for roughly an hour, Nasa’s Space Station office said.

Russian space agency Roscosmos, which operated the satellite, did not respond to a request for comment or publicly acknowledge the event on its social media channels.

More...

 

The tense interactions between judge Aileen Cannon and special counsel prosecutors in Donald Trump’s case over retaining classified documents came to a head this week when she again reprimanded one of the lead prosecutors on Monday for his tone.

We have reported for months about Cannon’s hostility to special-counsel prosecutors, but the recent stretch of hearings has also made clear how often they also shoot themselves in the foot.

Cannon is perhaps one of the easier judges to read at hearings, because she tends to ask questions only when she is skeptical of a position being advanced, whether by Trump’s lawyers or by prosecutors.

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for emergency abortions to go forward, at least for now, in Idaho. Less than 24 hours after Bloomberg News reported on the brief and accidental release of an opinion on the Supreme Court’s website, the justices officially announced that they had dismissed a pair of cases, Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, as “improvidently” – that is, mistakenly – granted, without ruling on the merits of the dispute.

Thursday’s unsigned order from the justices leaves in place an order by a federal judge in Idaho that temporarily blocks the state from enforcing its abortion ban, which carves out exceptions only to save the life of the mother and in cases of rape or incest, to the extent that it conflicts with a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. That 1986 law requires emergency rooms in hospitals that receive Medicare to provide “necessary stabilizing treatment” to patients who arrive with an “emergency medical condition.”

The Supreme Court is putting the Environmental Protection Agency’s air pollution-fighting “good neighbor” plan on hold while legal challenges continue, the conservative-led court’s latest blow to federal regulations.

The justices in a 5-4 vote on Thursday rejected arguments by the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled states that the plan was cutting air pollution and saving lives in 11 states where it was being enforced and that the high court’s intervention was unwarranted.

The Supreme Court on Thursday upended a high-profile bankruptcy settlement with the company that made oxycontin, toppling an agreement that shielded the family responsible for the drug’s marketing from future damages in exchange for paying $6 billion to victims of the opioid epidemic.

The 5-4 decision had sweeping implications for states, which intend to use settlement money for drug treatment programs, and for the Sackler family, which made its fortune selling a drug that fueled the nation's opioid epidemic. The ruling may also make it more difficult to resolve other high-profile bankruptcies.

“No one has directed us to a statute or case suggesting American courts in the past enjoyed the power in bankruptcy to discharge claims brought by nondebtors against other nondebtors, all without the consent of those affected,” Gorsuch wrote for an opinion that included Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

More...

 

The Biden administration is moving toward lifting a de facto ban on American military contractors deploying to Ukraine, four US officials familiar with the matter told CNN, to help the country’s military maintain and repair US-provided weapons systems.

The change would mark another significant shift in the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, as the US looks for ways to give Ukraine’s military an upper hand against Russia.

The policy is still being worked on by administration officials and has not received final sign-off yet from President Joe Biden, officials said.