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Johnson says Senate deal ends 'national nightmare'

admin - Latest News - November 10, 2025
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Johnson says Senate deal ends ‘national nightmare’



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Nov. 10, 2025, 11:00 AM ESTBy Erika EdwardsCanada has lost its measles elimination status, the country’s Public Health Agency announced Monday, because of its inability to control an ongoing outbreak of the virus for at least a year.A World Health Organization group “reviewed recent epidemiological and laboratory data, confirming sustained transmission of the same measles virus strain in Canada for a period of more than one year,” the Public Health Agency of Canada said in a statement.Canada eliminated measles in 1998, two years before the U.S. As of Monday, the country’s health officials had tallied 5,138 measles cases since October 2024. The outbreak began in New Brunswick, a province on the country’s eastern seaboard. Two babies, infected in utero, were born pre-term and died.The U.S. is also on the brink of losing its measles elimination status, as an outbreak that began in January continues to spread across the country. The outbreak started in West Texas and stretched into New Mexico. At least 862 people — mostly in Texas — were infected. Three people died. Two were little girls who lived in the epicenter of the outbreak, Gaines County, Texas.Though cases have subsided in West Texas, the virus has continued to spread. Utah and Arizona are seeing an outbreak concentrated in a close-knit community that straddles the border between the states. As of last week, 1,681 measles cases had been confirmed in the U.S. in 2025, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most in more than 30 years. Who determines a nation’s measles elimination status?The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), part of the WHO, determines whether a country in North, South or Central America has maintained or lost its elimination status.In 2019, PAHO established a panel of independent experts, called the Regional Verification Commission, to do an annual review of how countries are able to control measles spread.The panel met last week in Mexico City to analyze the latest measles data submitted from countries with active outbreaks through October.There are multiple criteria for losing an official measles elimination status, including declines in vaccination rates. The most significant factor is ongoing measles transmission of the same strain of the virus for a full year.Canadian health officials will now have to come up with a plan to get back on track, including improving vaccination rates and “enabling better overall surveillance efforts,” the agency wrote. Measles is the most contagious virus known on the planet. The virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves the room. Anyone in that room who hasn’t been vaccinated against measles will likely get sick. Erika EdwardsErika Edwards is a health and medical news writer and reporter for NBC News and “TODAY.”
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Nov. 3, 2025, 12:00 AM ESTBy Evan BushSome orcas have a taste for liver — specifically, the livers of great white sharks. Videos taken by scientists in Mexico reveal how the crafty whales manage to snag bites of the apex predators’ fatty organs. Researchers filmed two orca hunts in the Gulf of California — one in 2020 and another in 2022. They show the pods attacking young great white sharks by flipping them on their backsides to stun them, then slicing their sides open to extract their livers. The team published the findings of their video studies in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science on Monday. In one of the videos, all members of the pod share the pink liver fat while the rest of the shark’s body sinks into the ocean’s depths. During the hunt, a sea lion lurks, seemingly trying to sneak away with a free meal. But the orcas blow bubbles, apparently to deter the pest. Erick Higuera-Rivas, a marine biologist and documentarian who filmed the hunts from a boat nearby, said he didn’t immediately recognize the significance of the footage until he went to edit it.“I saw in the monitor that the shark had the liver hanging out on the side, already popped off. And a few minutes later, they came up with the liver in their mouth,” said Higuera Rivas, who coauthored the study. “I was surprised that it could be a great white. I was not believing it.”Heather Bowlby, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada who was not involved in the research, said the footage offered a compelling reminder that even top predators must watch their backs. “We’re so conditioned to thinking of white sharks as the top of the food chain,” she said. “It is always amazing to be reminded they are prey.” Higuera-Rivas and his fellow researchers said the hunts appear to be the work of the same group of orcas, which they’ve named the “Moctezuma pod.” The pod frequents the waters off of Baja California and only hunt elasmobranchs — sharks and whales. Higuera-Rivas has been following the pod for more than a decade and filming their behavior, and he’s observed how the whiles adapt their behavior to whatever species the group is targeting. The only prior evidence that orcas hunt great white sharks comes from South Africa, where they have been preying on the sharks for years and extracting their livers, leaving shark carcasses to wash up on the beach. Alison Towner, a marine biologist at Rhodes University who has studied the phenomenon in South Africa, said the behavior in Mexico is similar but not identical. The orcas in Mexico have been preying upon young sharks, whereas those in South Africa have primarily targeted adults. The orca groups likely learned the behavior independently, Towner said. “Seeing this behaviour in Mexico suggests that specific orca groups have developed their own strategies for hunting sharks,” she said via email. “The same organ is targeted, but the handling technique differs slightly from what we’ve documented in South Africa, which points to group-specific learning.” The new study shows that the orcas in Mexico have identified a weakness that makes great white sharks vulnerable. “When it flips the shark upside down, it forces the shark to get into the state that is called tonic immobility,” said Francesca Pancaldi, a coauthor of the study and a shark researcher at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marinas. “They freeze. It’s like a catatonic state. They just don’t do anything.” The liver is a fatty and nutritious organ that takes up about one-fourth of a sharks’ body, she added, which provides “a lot of energy.”Researchers in both South Africa and Mexico agreed that the behavior is not likely new for orcas. Rather, it’s new to scientists, who can now witness and document these hunts more easily because of improvements in drone technology. “I think it’s been going on for centuries. It’s just that it’s not easy to observe something like this,” Pancaldi said.It’s possible, though, that changes to the climate have increased the interaction between great white sharks and the Moctezuma pod, she added. “We actually are seeing more presence of great white sharks in the Gulf of California in the last 10 years,” Pancaldi said, adding that the species is responsive to changes in ocean temperatures during climate patterns like El Niño. In South Africa, scientists took notice of orca attacks on great white sharks about a decade ago, Towner said. The attacks sent the sharks fleeing from the normal spots where they feed, rest and reproduce, called aggregation grounds. “IRepeated predation has caused white sharks to abandon former core aggregation sites entirely,” Towner said. “Many sharks have likely moved offshore or into less monitored regions, which reshapes the coastal ecosystem.” After the sharks left their hangouts, populations of cape fur seal and sevengill sharks climbed. That subsequently caused a crash in those species’ main prey — like small fish and small sharks — according to research published in Frontiers in Marine Science earlier this year.Towner said just two adult male orcas, named Port and Starboard, have been behind repeated attacks on the white sharks in South Africa. The attacks have put pressure on great white sharks, which are slow to grow and reproduce, and it’s possible that could happen in Mexico, too, if the behavior becomes more frequent, she said. Evan BushEvan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News.
November 10, 2025
Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 10, 2025, 5:57 AM ESTBy Chantal Da Silva, Ammar Cheikh Omar, Abigail Williams and Monica AlbaThe Oval Office is a long way from Abu Ghraib.When he’s greeted by President Donald Trump on Monday, Ahmad al-Sharaa will have completed his journey from jihadist leader to head of state receiving a warm White House welcome.Since toppling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Syria‘s interim leader has spent the past year transforming his global image while tackling deep divisions at home.Now, al-Sharaa, who has thrown off his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, will make history as the first Syrian president to visit the White House.“I think he’s doing a very good job,” Trump said last week, setting the tone for his landmark meeting with al-Sharaa, who would not have been able to set foot in the U.S. a year ago thanks to the $10 million bounty on his head. “It’s a tough neighborhood and he’s a tough guy, but I got along with him very well and a lot of progress has been made with Syria,” Trump said.During his Washington visit, Al-Sharaa is expected to commit to joining the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS, two U.S. officials told NBC News. It would be a significant step in his country’s engagement with the West.The State Department removed al-Sharaa and his interior minister from the Specially Designated Global Terrorist list on Friday, while the U.K. and Europe removed sanctions on al-Sharaa after the United Nations Security Council voted in favor of a U.S.-drafted resolution to do so.The Washington trip is “a high-level sign of the trust that the American administration has placed in al-Sharaa — and the hope that he will succeed in holding Syria together during this incredibly complicated transition period,” said Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.A ‘turning point’Al-Sharaa rose to power after leading Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, in toppling Assad’s regime last December.Since then, he has sought to distance himself from his past as a jihadist who had been jailed by U.S. forces in Iraq, trading military fatigues for smart suits and vowing to rebuild Syria and unify its myriad religious and ethnic groups.Trump’s approach, a dramatic shift for the U.S., has underscored al-Sharaa’s success in breaking the country’s decadeslong global isolation.The U.S. removed its terrorist designation for HTS, along with the bounty on al-Sharaa himself, before lifting a string of sanctions following a May meeting between the Syrian leader and Trump in Saudi Arabia.President Donald Trump and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.@PressSec / via XAl-Sharaa was in New York in September to address the United Nations General Assembly, but Syria’s Ministry of Information said that being welcomed to the White House marked a “major turning point” for the country.At home, however, al-Sharaa has struggled to unify a deeply divided Syria while grappling with broader threats: a resurgent ISIS, fraught relations with increasingly assertive neighbor Israel, and Russia’s determination to maintain its strategic foothold in Syria while giving safe haven to Assad.Syria has experienced flashes of violence, including deadly attacks against minority groups allegedly carried out in part by government forces. Growing tensions with Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria have also erupted into violent clashes.“He’s certainly being (very) smart,” John Jenkins, a former British diplomat who has previously served as head of mission in Syria, said of al-Sharaa in emailed comments.“A trip to D.C. makes him look respectable,” said Jenkins, an associate fellow at Chatham House and a leader at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics. But, he added,”the key issues are domestic.”And within Syria, opinions have been deeply divided.“He does not represent the Syrian people,” said Sami Zain Al-Din, a 72-year-old political activist from Sweida, a southern city that was rocked by deadly clashes involving the Druze community, which has close ties to Israel.For doctor Jalnar Hamad, doubts over al-Sharaa were balanced against hopes that his meeting with Trump could open a “new chapter” that could see Sweida “benefit from development or reconstruction programs,” she said.Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa with representatives of Syrian-American organizations in Washington D.C. on Sunday.AFP via Getty ImagesIlham Ahmed, co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council, the political arm of the Kurdish-led and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, said the Trump meeting was “an opportunity to redefine the position of the new Syrian state.” It’s also a chance for Trump to address “the rights of the Kurdish people and the coalition partners who fought terrorism on behalf of the world,” he said, referring to the SDF’s role against ISIS.Further sanctions lifted?Al-Sharaa will be hoping to emerge strengthened domestically, and key to that effort is his bid to remove remaining sanctions imposed on Syria during Assad’s rule.Already, “the pace with which sanctions have been eased on Syria since May has been absolutely spectacular,” Karam Shaar, a consultant on Syria and the research director at the Operations and Policy Center think tank in Turkey, said in a voice note.Shaar said he expected that two “main pieces of sanctions will have been either lifted or just about to be lifted” by the time al-Sharaa and Trump meet, including the removal of Syria from America’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism” and the repeal of sanctions under the Caesar Act, a 2019 law targeting the Assad regime.But sanctions will not be the only focus, with the effort to quell ISIS’ resurgence and relations with Israel also expected to play a central role.The U.S. ally has faced growing isolation on the global stage over its deadly assault in Gaza, but Trump has previously expressed hopes Syria would join other Arab nations in normalizing ties with Israel under the Abraham Accords, which were expanded again last week.It remains unclear whether Trump will push the matter during talks with al-Sharaa on Monday.Syria, historically a staunch ally of Iran, has never recognized Israel and has been locked in a state of conflict with the country since its establishment in 1948. Iranian proxy Hezbollah has also long been deeply embedded in Syria after joining the Assad regime’s military efforts.When Assad was in power, Israel routinely carried out airstrikes against what it said were Iranian-linked targets inside Syria, and since his ouster, it has deployed troops to a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone and has repeatedly launched airstrikes and incursions into Syria. Damascus has so far refused to retaliate, while both countries have kept the lines of communication open.Chantal Da SilvaChantal Da Silva reports on world news for NBC News Digital and is based in London.Ammar Cheikh OmarAmmar Cheikh Omar is a producer for NBC News.Abigail WilliamsAbigail Williams is a producer and reporter for NBC News covering the State Department.Monica AlbaMonica Alba is a White House correspondent for NBC News.
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