The replacement crew for the International Space Station was launched late Friday, paving the way for the return home of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two NASA astronauts stuck on the space station for nine months.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 7:03 p.m. from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying Crew-10 members: NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov. The crew is part of a routine six-month rotation.
Crew-10 and the Dragon spacecraft are expected to reach the space station around 11:30 p.m. Saturday.
Returning to Earth alongside Wilmore and Williams will be NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Their return is scheduled for Wednesday, to allow for an overlap of the two crews to brief the new team.
Wilmore and Williams arrived aboard the International Space Station in June 2024 and expected to stay in space for about 10 days. But their return was delayed after mechanical issues with their spacecraft, which, after weeks of troubleshooting was subsequently sent back to Earth without them. Their return was continually pushed back due to other technical delays.
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A California jury Friday imposed a $50 million fine on Starbucks in the case of a delivery driver burned by a scalding cup of hot tea at a company location in Los Angeles.
Michael Garcia was picking up three drinks in 2020 but one, he claimed, was “negligently” unsecured and spilled in his lap. He claimed that he consequently “suffered severe burns, disfigurement, and debilitating nerve damage to his genitals” and he was taken to an emergency room by paramedics.
“Michael Garcia’s life has been forever changed,” his attorney, Nick Rowley, said.
“No amount of money can undo the permanent catastrophic harm he has suffered, but this jury verdict is a critical step in holding Starbucks accountable for flagrant disregard for customer safety and failure to accept responsibility,” he added.
Starbucks said it planned to appeal the verdict.
“We sympathize with Mr. Garcia, but we disagree with the jury’s decision that we were at fault for this incident and believe the damages awarded to be excessive,” company spokesperson Jaci Anderson said in a statement.
“We have always been committed to the highest safety standards in our stores, including the handling of hot drinks,” she added.
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U.S. President Donald Trump promised to seek accountability for those who pursued legal cases against him when he was out of office, speaking Friday at the Justice Department.
“Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over, and they are never going to come back. They’re never coming back,” Trump said.
During his years out of office, the department twice indicted Trump on charges that he illegally stored classified documents at his Florida estate and that he worked to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Both cases were dismissed after Trump won election in November, with the department citing a long-standing policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
“Now, as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred. The American people have given us a mandate, a mandate like few people thought possible,” Trump said.
Trump has fired prosecutors who investigated him during the Biden administration and scrutinized thousands of FBI agents who investigated some supporters of the president who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called Trump’s speech a “staggering violation of [the] traditional boundary between independent criminal law enforcement and presidential political power.”
Speaking outside Justice shortly after Trump spoke, Raskin said, “No other president in American history has stood at the Department of Justice to proclaim an agenda of criminal prosecution and retaliation against his political foes.”
Trump has long been critical of both the department and the FBI. He has installed political allies into top leadership positions at both of those agencies. FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi attended Friday’s talk.
In introducing Trump, Bondi said, “We all work for the greatest president in the history of our country. … He will never stop fighting for us, and we will never stop fighting for him and for our country.”
During his speech, Trump promised “historic reforms” at the agencies and said, “Under the Trump administration, the DOJ and the FBI will once again become the premier crime fighting agencies on the face of the Earth.”
His speech had echos of his campaign rallies, with music blaring from speakers before Trump entered the department’s Great Hall and his address hitting on some of the main themes from his campaign, including border security and fighting violent crime.
On crime, Trump said that homicides, property crime and robberies rose during the Biden administration.
“I have no higher mission as president of the United States than to end this killing and stop this law breaking and to making America safe again. And that’s what you’re all about in this room. We want to protect Americans, and we protect everybody that’s in our country,” he said.
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The U.S. Senate is set to pass a stopgap spending bill Friday that would avert a partial government shutdown, although many Democrats are expressing anger over plans by their party’s leadership to support the measure.
The measure cleared its first Senate hurdle early Friday evening, 62-38.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the bill earlier this week to meet a March 14 deadline to keep the government running.
Senate Democrats have fractured over whether to support the short-term continuing resolution (CR) that would fund the government for the next six months, reduce total government spending by about $7 billion from last year’s levels and shift money to the military and away from non-defense spending.
Much of the party’s anger Friday was directed at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who announced Thursday night that while he disliked the bill, a shutdown was a “far worse option.”
Speaking on the Senate floor Friday morning, Schumer said not passing the Republican funding bill would give more power to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort led by Elon Musk, including which agencies would be shut down.
“A shutdown would allow DOGE to shift into overdrive,” he said.
Dozens of House Democrats, who opposed the funding measure in the lower chamber, sent a letter to Schumer on Friday, expressing their “strong opposition” to his plan to vote for the bill.
Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Senate Democrats to go against their leader.
In a Friday statement, she wrote, “America has experienced a Trump shutdown before — but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse.”
Trump has called on Congress to pass the funding bill and on Friday praised Schumer for supporting it. “Congratulations to Chuck Schumer for doing the right thing — Took ‘guts’ and courage!” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Appropriations bills require a 60-vote threshold for passage in the Senate, which means Republicans need to secure at least eight Democratic votes.
Schumer previously called for the Senate to pass an earlier version of the CR that Democrats were involved in negotiating.
“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input, from congressional Democrats,” Schumer said on the Senate floor late Wednesday.
The House passed the short-term spending measure Tuesday by a vote of 217-213. One Democrat voted for the bill and one Republican against it. The chamber went out of session for the rest of the week starting Tuesday afternoon, putting pressure on senators to pass its version of the CR.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson quelled dissent from within his Republican Party to pass the spending measure. He told reporters Tuesday the seven-month continuing resolution was an important step toward implementing Trump’s agenda of rooting out government waste and abuse through DOGE.
“It allows us to move forward with changing the size and scope of the federal government. There is a seismic shift going on in Washington right now. This is a different moment than we have ever been in. The DOGE work is finding massive amounts of fraud, waste and abuse,” Johnson said. “We have a White House that is actually dedicated to getting us back onto a fiscally responsible track.”
Independent watchdogs and analysts, however, say DOGE is using overly broad claims of fraud to generate support for large-scale cuts to federal programs and offices.
Representative Thomas Massie was the lone Republican holdout, despite Trump’s post Monday night on Truth Social calling for Massie to lose his seat if he voted against the spending measure.
The continuing resolution buys lawmakers time to reach a compromise on Senate and House versions of government spending for the next fiscal year, which begins in October, a key tool for implementing Trump’s domestic policy agenda.
At question is how and when to enact a proposed extension of the 2017 tax cuts and how to pay down the U.S. deficit without cutting key safety net programs that help American voters.
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U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff said a Hamas statement issued Friday announcing it had agreed to release an American-Israeli soldier was, in reality, a condition of a “bridge” ceasefire proposal offered by U.S. officials earlier this week.
Early Friday, the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas issued a statement saying it had agreed to release Edan Alexander, believed to be the last living American hostage held in Gaza, as well as the bodies of four other hostages after receiving a proposal from mediators to resume negotiations on the second phase of a Gaza ceasefire deal.
The statement said the proposal had been offered by unnamed mediators as part of the work in Qatar to restart ceasefire negotiations. The United States, Egypt and host Qatar have been mediating the ceasefire talks.
Hamas expressed its “complete readiness to begin negotiations and reach a comprehensive agreement on the issues of the second phase.”
Later Friday, in a joint statement issued along with the National Security Council, Witkoff’s office explained he and National Security Council Senior Middle East Director Eric Trager had presented the bridge proposal to extend the current ceasefire beyond Ramadan and Passover and allow time to negotiate a framework for a permanent ceasefire.
In the statement, Witkoff said that under the proposal, Hamas would release additional living hostages in exchange for prisoners, and that the extension of the phase-one ceasefire would allow more time for humanitarian aid to resume into Gaza.
He said the U.S. had its Qatari and Egyptian mediating partners convey to Hamas “in no uncertain terms” that the new proposal would have to be implemented soon and Edan Alexander would have to be released immediately.
“Unfortunately, Hamas has chosen to respond by publicly claiming flexibility,” Witkoff said in the statement, “while privately making demands that are entirely impractical without a permanent ceasefire.”
In a statement released on the X social media platform, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that while Israel had accepted “the Witkoff framework,” Hamas “continues to wage psychological warfare against hostage families.”
The statement went on to say that the prime minister would convene his ministerial team Saturday evening for a detailed briefing from the negotiating team and “decide on steps to free the hostages and achieve all our war objectives.”
Hamas is believed to be holding 24 living hostages taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that triggered its war with Israel. The group also is holding the bodies of 34 others who were either killed in the initial attack or in captivity, as well as the remains of a soldier killed in 2014.
In comments to FOX Business news Friday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she was wary of taking Hamas statements at face value but emphasized that U.S. President Donald Trump was working “diligently” to bring hostages home.
Witkoff told reporters at the White House early in March that gaining the release of Alexander was a “top priority.”
A ceasefire has been in place since January. During the first phase of the three-phase ceasefire, Hamas exchanged 33 Israeli hostages and five Thais for some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
Israel has been pressing Hamas to accept an extension of the first phase, which ended March 2. Hamas had said it wanted to move to the second phase of the agreement, which would involve the release of more hostages and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
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The U.S. bird population is declining at an alarming rate, according to a report published Thursday by an alliance of science and conservation groups.
Habitat loss and climate change are among the key contributing factors to the bird population losses, according to the 2025 U.S. State of the Birds report.
More than 100 of the species studied, have reached a “tipping point,” losing more than half their populations in the last 50 years. The report revealed that the avian population in all habitats is declining, including the duck population, previously considered a triumph of conservation. “The only bright spot is water birds such as herons and egrets that show some increases,” Michael Parr, president of the American Bird Conservancy, told Reuters.
The decline in the duck population fell by approximately 30% from 2017, but duck population numbers still remain higher, however, than their 1970 numbers, according to an Associated Press account on the report.
“Roughly one in three bird species (229 species) in the U.S. requires urgent conservation attention, and these species represent the major habitats and systems in the U.S. and include species that we’ve long considered to be common and abundant,” Amanda Rodewald, faculty director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Center for Avian Population Studies told Reuters.
Included among the birds with highest losses, Reuters reported, are the mottled duck, Allen’s hummingbird, yellow-billed loon, red-faced cormorant, greater sage-grouse, Florida scrub jay, Baird’s sparrow, saltmarsh sparrow, mountain plover, Hawaiian petrel, Bicknell’s thrush, Cassia crossbill, pink-footed shearwater, tricolored blackbird and golden-cheeked warbler. Some of the birds in this “red alert” group are already protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the news agency said.
“For each species that we’re in danger of losing, it’s like pulling an individual thread out of the complex tapestry of life,” Georgetown University biologist Peter Marra. who was not involved in the new report, told AP. While the outlook may seem dire, it is not without hope, said Marra, who noted the resurgence of the majestic bald eagle.
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Officials tell VOA the shortage of amphibious warfare ships has reached a breaking point. While the ships make up just 10% of the fleet, they are the go-to alternative to aircraft carriers when commanders need something more precise or expedient. VOA Pentagon Correspondent Carla Babb reports.
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PENTAGON — U.S. government lawyers are expected to face off with attorneys for civil and immigration rights groups over the use of a U.S. naval base in Cuba to hold migrants slated for deportation.
Arguments in the two lawsuits over operations at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, filed against the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Kristi Noem, are set for a U.S. District Court in Washington on Friday.
The suits allege that the U.S. government has overstepped its bounds by denying migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay access to legal representation and also by attempting to send migrants to the base’s facilities without the proper legal authority in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
DHS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the upcoming hearing, but they have repeatedly denied the allegations while criticizing the groups bringing the lawsuits.
“The American Civil Liberties Union appears far more interested in promoting open borders and disrupting public safety missions than in protecting the civil liberties of Americans,” a DHS spokesperson told VOA in a statement earlier this month, declining to be named.
“They should consider changing their name,” the spokesperson added, further describing the legal challenges as “baseless.”
President Donald Trump first raised the idea of using the U.S. naval base in Cuba as part of his administration’s plans for mass deportations shortly after taking office in January.
Homeland Security’s Noem said the base, which features a secure prison to hold captured terrorists, would be used to house “the worst of the worst.”
Trump and other U.S. officials also suggested the base could be used to hold up to 30,000 migrants while they awaited deportation.
Those plans, however, never fully materialized.
The U.S. began sending what officials described as “high threat illegal aliens” to Guantanamo Bay’s detention center in early February, followed by other nonviolent migrants, who stayed at other facilities.
At times, the facilities held close to 200 detainees, many of whom were deported to Honduras, Venezuela or other countries.
But despite efforts to prepare the facilities for more migrants, capacity has been limited.
According to a U.S. defense official, who spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity, the prison as currently configured can hold only 130 detainees, while the base’s Migrant Operations Center and a temporary tent city can hold, at most, 550 people.
As VOA first reported, DHS officials decided to remove all 40 remaining migrants from the prison and other facilities at Guantanamo Bay this past Tuesday, flying them instead to the U.S. southern state of Louisiana.
Neither DHS nor its subagency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have responded to requests for comment on the decision to evacuate migrants from the naval base or on their status or whereabouts since being returned to the U.S. mainland.
The move — and lack of communication — has drawn criticism from immigrants’ rights groups, including some of those involved in the current litigation.
“The arbitrary and secret shuttling of people between Guantanamo and the U.S. demonstrates a complete disregard for human dignity, an affront to the rule of law, and a waste of public resources,” said the International Refugee Assistance Project’s Pedro Sepulveda.

“No one should be detained at Guantanamo,” Sepulveda added. “The Trump administration must stop these ill-conceived and cruel transfers and stop detaining immigrants at Guantanamo once and for all.”
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U.S. lawmakers are running out of time to pass a short-term continuing resolution, or CR, that will fund the government past a March 14 deadline.
“Democrats need to decide if they’re going to support funding legislation that came over from the House, or if they’re going to shut down the government. So far, it’s looking like they plan to shut it down,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on the Senate floor Thursday.
Appropriations bills require a 60-vote threshold for passage in the Senate, which means Republicans need to secure at least eight Democratic votes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for the Senate to pass an earlier version of the CR that Democrats were involved in negotiating.
“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input, from congressional Democrats,” Schumer said on the Senate floor late Wednesday.
Democratic senators say they are concerned about easing the way for the Trump administration to continue large-scale changes to the federal government and social safety net programs.
“I don’t want a government shutdown,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen said in a statement Thursday. “And that’s why I’d like to vote on a bill to keep the government open for 30 days while we have a bipartisan negotiation. But I will not support this Republican House bill that simply gives Elon Musk more fuel and more tools to dismantle big parts of the federal government in order to rig it for people like himself and the very rich.”
“Voting against the CR will hurt the American people and kill the incredible momentum that President [Donald] Trump has built over the past 51 days,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this week.
The Republican-majority House of Representatives passed a short-term spending measure Tuesday by a vote of 217-213. The House went out of session for the rest of the week starting Tuesday afternoon, putting pressure on senators to pass its version of the CR.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson quelled dissent from within his Republican party to pass the spending measure. He told reporters Tuesday the seven-month continuing resolution was an important step toward implementing Trump’s agenda of rooting out government waste and abuse through the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.
“It allows us to move forward with changing the size and scope of the federal government. There is a seismic shift going on in Washington right now. This is a different moment than we have ever been in. The DOGE work is finding massive amounts of fraud, waste and abuse,” Johnson said. “We have a White House that is actually dedicated to getting us back onto a fiscally responsible track.”
Independent watchdogs and analysts, however, say DOGE is using overly broad claims of fraud to generate support for large-scale cuts to federal programs and offices.
Representative Thomas Massie was the lone Republican holdout, despite Trump’s post Monday night on Truth Social calling for Massie to lose his seat if he voted against the spending measure.
The continuing resolution buys lawmakers time to reach a compromise on Senate and House versions of government spending, a key tool for implementing Trump’s domestic policy agenda.
At question is how and when to enact a proposed extension of the 2017 tax cuts and how to pay down the U.S. deficit without cutting key safety net programs that help American voters.
Senate leadership has proposed passing the tax cuts in a separate bill later this year.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Social media giant Meta on Thursday announced it would begin testing its new “Community Notes” feature across its platforms on March 18, as it shifts away from third-party fact-checking toward a crowd-sourced approach to content moderation.
Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the new system in January as he appeared to align himself with the incoming Trump administration, including naming a Republican as the company’s head of public policy.
The change of system came after years of criticism from supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, among others, that conservative voices were being censored or stifled under the guise of fighting misinformation, a claim professional fact-checkers vehemently reject.
Meta has also scaled back its diversity initiatives and relaxed content moderation rules on Facebook and Instagram, particularly regarding certain forms of hostile speech.
The initiative, similar to the system already implemented by X (formerly Twitter), will allow users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads to write and rate contextual notes on various content.
Meta said approximately 200,000 potential contributors in the United States have already signed up across the three platforms.
The new approach requires contributors to be over 18 with accounts more than six months old that are in good standing.
During the testing period, notes will not immediately appear on content and the company will gradually admit people from the waitlist and thoroughly test the system before public implementation.
Meta emphasized that the notes will only be published when contributors with differing viewpoints agree on their helpfulness.
“This isn’t majority rules,” the company said.
Moreover, unlike fact-checked posts that often had reduced distribution, flagged content with Community Notes will not face distribution penalties.
Notes will be limited to 500 characters, must include supporting links and will initially support six languages commonly used in the United States: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese.
“Our intention is ultimately to roll out this new approach to our users all over the world, but we won’t be doing that immediately,” the company said.
“Until Community Notes are launched in other countries, the third party fact checking program will remain in place for them,” it added.
Meta said that it would not be “reinventing the wheel” and will use X’s open-source algorithm as the basis of its system.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last month warned that the rollbacks to fact-checking and moderation safeguards were “reopening the floodgates” of hate and violence online.
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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a wave of regulatory rollbacks on Wednesday including a repeal of Biden-era emissions limits on power plants and automobiles, as well as reduced protections for waterways.
The announcements from Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency align with the president’s vows to slash regulations to boost industries from coal to manufacturing and ramp up oil and minerals production. But they are also destined to weaken bedrock environmental rules imposed by past presidencies to protect air and water quality and fight climate change. “Today is the most consequential day of deregulation in American history,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video message posted on X.
In total, his agency announced more than 30 deregulatory measures in a dizzying succession of press releases. Zeldin started the day by announcing he will narrow the definition of waterways that receive protection under the Clean Water Act — a move that could ease limits on runoff pollution from agriculture, mining, and petrochemicals.
The agency later said it would review the Biden-era clean power plant rule that seeks to reduce carbon emissions from power plants to fight global warming and would also roll back greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy- and light-duty vehicles for model year 2027 and later.
The power and transport industries together make up around half of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and were vital targets in former President Joe Biden’s efforts to slow climate change. The agency also said it will take steps to undo a scientific finding from 2009 that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health, a provision that forms the bedrock of the EPA’s greenhouse-gas regulations so far.
The so-called “endangerment finding” came as a result of a Supreme Court ruling in the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA case that greenhouse gases are covered by the Clean Air Act.
The EPA under former President Barack Obama finalized the finding in 2009, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – Joe Biden’s signature climate law – codified language deeming greenhouse gases are air pollutants.
Obama’s EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said Wednesday was “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”
Environmental groups said they will fight the rollback.
“This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. Other environmental groups slammed Trump’s broader deregulation agenda.
“EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is driving a dagger straight into the heart of public health,” said Abel Russ, a director at the Environmental Integrity Project.
Industry groups expressed support for the announcements. “Voters sent a clear message in support of affordable, reliable and secure American energy, and the Trump administration is answering the call,” said Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute.
The National Mining Association, which represents some coal miners, applauded the rollback of the clean power plant rule, saying it was “long overdue” as datacenters and AI increased electricity demand.
Decades of precedent
The Trump administration plans to roll back other air and water regulations that have been in place for decades for the power industry.
The EPA, for example, said it will reconsider mercury and air toxics rules that had been updated under Biden that it says were designed to target coal-fired power plants. It also said it plans to revisit standards set under the Biden administration to reduce soot and air particulate matter.
Reuters had reported that review earlier in the day.
The EPA also announced measures that would dial back regulations for the oil and gas industry, including required reporting of methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure. It would also consider allowing the reuse of drilling wastewater, potentially for agriculture and industry.
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