TAMPA — Tampa Bay Lightning star Nikita Kucherov left Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final following what his teammate called “a dangerous play” by Colorado Avalanche defenseman Devon Toews.
Kucherov left the game with 6:05 remaining in the third period of Tampa Bay’s eventual 6-2 victory over the Avalanche that cut Colorado’s series lead to 2-1.
As the Lightning winger handled the puck, Toews stuck his stick in Kucherov’s back and then pushed him along the ice and into the boards as Kucherov fell to one knee.
Kucherov got up and briefly went after Toews. He did come out for the ensuing power play after Toews was whistled for a cross-check, but then went to the Lightning trainers’ room.
“It’s one of those plays you don’t want to see,” said Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman. “It’s a dangerous play. You never want to see that. We’ll see if anything happens — probably not. But it’s a dangerous play.”
The Toews cross-check happened around two minutes after Kucherov hit Avalanche defenseman Josh Manson along the end boards on a hit that could have warranted a penalty. Manson finished the game for Colorado.
Coach Jon Cooper said there was no update on Kucherov’s status.
“No update on any of the players, unfortunately. We’ll do that tomorrow,” Cooper said.
As for the Toews cross-check, Cooper said the incident speaks for itself.
“When you get asked questions like that, you’re looking for an answer that everybody in the building already knows,” said Cooper. “It’s a game. It’s a contact game. But guys know what they’re doing. Smart, savvy players know what they’re doing with their stick. We all saw it.”
Kucherov is the Lightning’s leading postseason scorer with seven goals and 19 assists for 26 points in 20 games. He had two assists in the Game 3 win.
Raw sewage flooded the rooms used as health clinics inside a former church on Kensington Avenue that promised a safe haven in Philadelphia’s opioid addiction crisis.
Some employees worried about safety for themselves and their clients at a shelter with no locks on the front door.Others dealt with rodents in food prep areas.
And some say they faced sexual harassment that long went unpunished.
The Inquirer has found that Prevention Point Philadelphia, a prominent nonprofit serving people in addiction, has allowed these kinds ofinternal problems to jeopardize clients, employees, and the lifesaving mission that made it a leader in addiction treatment.
Prevention Point runs the oldest needle exchange program in the city and the only permanent site where drug users can trade in contaminated needles for clean ones. Providing this service means the nonprofit organization technically operates outside of state law, which bans such needle exchanges.
This has left Prevention Point facing little accountability since it pioneered in Philadelphia an approach to addiction called harm reduction, which seeks to keep drug users alive whether or not they’re ready to quit.
Its mission is combating an epidemic of addiction in a city that recorded 1,214 deaths in 2020 from drug overdoses. Prevention Point draws 24,000 people through its doors each year — from adjoining streets to the suburbs and beyond — as it works to fill a regional void in addiction health care by offering services that range from needle drops to HIV testing to housing assistance.
Eight former Prevention Point staffers have approached The Inquirer since last fall to talk about the environment at Prevention Point. Reporters corroborated their accounts in hours of interviews, spoke with the organization’s leaders, and reviewed the few public records available on its operations from the city and state health departments.
The investigation has found years of compounding problems at the health organizationsupported by $9.6 million a year in city funding, an investment that falls short of what many Kensington community members feel is needed to address the full scope of addiction-related social issues challenging the neighborhood.
» READ MORE: For years, Kensington residents have pleaded with Philadelphia officials for comprehensive solutions to a citywide addiction crisis that’s most visible in their neighborhood.
Employees once had to use their coffee mugs to bail out a sewage spill in the main building. Meanwhile, the organization’s homeless shelters, at the time located in two former storefronts farther up the avenue, were infested with bedbugs and rats, and at one point had no locks on the doors.
There were shootings and stabbings outside the buildings, and employees said they felt unsupported by management when they raised concerns about the organization’s attention to security.
A culture of open sexual harassment of employees was detailed by five former staffers. Several say they and other coworkers felt ignored or dismissed by management when they tried to bring up problems.
In an interview, Prevention Point officials acknowledged many of the problems, but said they needed time to address them.
Nearly two years after the sewage backup, the organization relocated its homeless shelter to a newly renovated building at nearby Episcopal Hospital’s campus, but still runs health clinics at the old site. Officials said it has not flooded with raw sewage since 2021.
Recently, the organization also has investigated sexual harassment internally, overhauled its reporting system for complaints, and fired an employee found to have sexually harassed coworkers, officials said. The allegations of sexual harassment were first reported by Billy Penn.
Executive director Jose Benitez blamed some of the problems on Prevention Point’s rapid growth, but said clients were never exposed to serious health risks.
“We grew exponentially in the last four years and needed to build infrastructure. Being financially responsible, we figured out how to build infrastructure slowly so that we could streamline what we’re doing,” he said. He added: “To hear some of the allegations — it’s kind of like, they have kernels of truth, and in some cases, they’re being exaggerated, and in other cases, it’s just flat-out not true.”
Oversight is minimal. The state has no role in licensing or regulating the nonprofit. Prevention Point officials say they work closely with city agencies that handle addiction programming, and city officials say they regularly visit and monitor the organization.
However, city officials could not provide documentation of that oversight. The city appears to have taken few actions to address concerns despite being aware of employee complaints. City building inspectors also repeatedly flagged deteriorating conditions at its buildings, and independent financial audits have raised red flags over poor financial controls.
While acknowledging problems at the organization, the city’s Deputy Managing Director Eva Gladstein said in a statement that Prevention Point provides “highly effective, often lifesaving care.”
Former employees say that complex and compounding problems enabled unsafe conditions to fester: Prevention Point was a first-of-its-kind nonprofit that grew without guardrails, sufficient funding, or oversight. Management was unresponsive to employee complaints in a stressful workplace culture where harassment ran rampant. There also was the stigma of addressing drug use through harm reduction — and the pressure to succeed as one of the only groups doing so.
“Much like the pandemic is highlighting a lot of issues that have existed, Prevention Point’s rapid growth has been fuel to the fire — and they’ve never built a solid foundation for themselves,” said Tiff Rodriguez, a former case manager at the organization and Kensington resident who’s been vocal about issues she encountered there.
Despite the recent changes, those who have worked at Prevention Point remain alarmed. Many don’t know what worries them more — the dangerous conditions they say they worked through, or that discussing them publicly could undermine the city’s main source of help for people with nowhere else to turn.
“I don’t hate Prevention Point,” said Eva Fitch, a former employee who left the organization in September 2021. “I believe in its mission more than anything else. But it doesn’t feel like you can treat people this way and uphold that mission.”
Since its inception at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Prevention Point has occupied a unique position in Philadelphia’s health-care infrastructure.
In the 1980s, drug users came to Philadelphia for its cheap, pure heroin providing a high that would last for hours. Kensington rapidly became the epicenter of the trade, at one point earning a reputation as one of the East Coast’s largest open-air drug markets. But each injection also put drug usersat risk of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, especially when they shared needles.
Increasingly concerned AIDS activists launched what would become Prevention Point by handing out clean syringes in Kensington.
State officials threatened to arrest them, but in 1992, then-Mayor Ed Rendell told state authorities to arrest him first. He used an executive order to allow Prevention Point to operate in defiance of the state’s syringe exchange ban.
By the mid-2010s, Prevention Point would be credited with preventing more than 10,000 HIV infections from injection drug use. It also courted controversy in the community — where many residents feel that the city has not done enough to curb drug use and sales, burdening Kensington with social problems that wouldn’t be accepted in other neighborhoods.
Today, dozens of states have passed laws legalizing such exchanges — but not Pennsylvania.
In most states where syringe exchanges are legal, they areoverseen by state health departments. But Pennsylvania’s ban leaves syringe exchanges across the state operating largely with the blessingof local municipalities. The state’s Department of Health does not license or oversee the operation, nor does its Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.
And when a pandemic arrived, making delivering health care safely even more challenging, existing issues at Prevention Point reached a crisis point.
Inside the church building and two converted storefronts that housed Prevention Point’s programs, conditions were deteriorating while the needs of people in addiction surged during the pandemic. Shelter spaces that were never especially clean became downright unsanitary, employees say.
Chyna Parker, a former staffer at one of the respite centers who left in January 2020, remembers rats and mice scurrying out of the refrigerator where guests’ food was prepared, or running across her feet in the kitchen.
One time, a guest called her over to their cot, screaming, when a mouse was swimming at the bottom of their coffee cup.
Eventually, a staff member brought in a stray cat off the street to help hunt the rodents in the building. “It was completely disgusting,” Parker recalled.
When bedbugs swarmed cots and furniture, management gave staffers bottles of rubbing alcohol to spray on themselves before and after shifts, Parker said.
And there was the sewage.
Parker recalled a handful of instances where she turned on the kitchen sink to clean a dish, and the tap water was brown and smelly. The same happened in the bathroom, where solid pieces of sewage ran from the brown sink water when she tried to wash her hands.
The response when she raised concerns tomanagement: silence.
At the shelters, most of the residents were still in active addiction — and afraid of being caught using drugs. So they shoved needles down sinks and in toilets, clogging the plumbing and causing backups.
Courtney Lane, a former housing case manager at Prevention Point, said that for the majority of her three and a half years there — ending in August 2021 — the shelters didn’t consistently have containers to dispose of used needles, because Prevention Point thought it would encourage drug use. She watched sewage overflowing into shelter bathrooms.
“I remember one time getting like a Roto-Rooter, like an industrial-sized one, and there just being hundreds and hundreds of syringes coming up. It was just like the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lane said.
Used needles discarded in plastic trash bags poked workers — who were not trained to handle needles — emptying the garbage, she said. Fitch said workers weren’t given protective gloves to prevent needle sticks.
Prevention Point officials said all buildings were equipped with syringe disposal containers, and the employees who told The Inquirer otherwise were wrong.
Records from the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections show that since 2019, officials conducted 11 investigations into conditions at the main church building, nine at its shelter across the street, and two at another shelter farther up Kensington Avenue.
Collectively, L&I cited Prevention Point for 64 code violations across those three properties over the same time period, for everything from trash to serious fire code violations. In its most recent visits to the church building this year, inspectors repeatedly flagged multiple fire hazards that have persisted for months, including a lack of extinguishers, obstructed exits, and fuel canisters being stored indoors. Prevention Point spokesperson Cari Feiler Bender said issues with L&I have been addressed.
In the summer of 2021, the main church building experienced a massive sewage backup while management was out on a staff retreat.
Former staffer Corey Nedev immediately worried about the sewage causing infections in his immunocompromised patients in the HIV treatment division, and other patients in the clinic with open wounds — a common side effect of injection drug use.
“In our HIV clinic, we can’t sit there drawing your blood in a room that can put you into sepsis,” Nedev said.
A maintenance manager told Nedev to scoop raw sewage out of his clinic room with a coffee mug. Meanwhile, others tried to contact leadership. Weak and vulnerable patients were directed upstairs into a former sanctuary without electricity. It was almost unbearably hot, but there was no sewage.
Eventually, Nedev said, a cleaning crew came in to clean up the sewage. Yet staffers noticed feces on chairs and in sinks when they returned to the building. Rodriguez said shecalled the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nedev said a maintenance manager slammed a door on him when he raised concerns about the feces in his clinic offices. Frustrated and feeling unheard by management, Nedev resigned shortly after the incident.
Benitez, the organization’s executive director, blamed the sewage spillover on construction on another lot, and noted that the building was cleaned within two days.
Late last year, the organization closed its Kensington Avenue shelters and moved them both to a building on Episcopal Hospital’s campus. Current employees, who spoke with The Inquirer at their employers’ direction, said the improvements include more space for clients and staff and a building renovated around Prevention Point’s needs.
City officials said they had learned of the sewage incident in the main building after the OSHA complaint was filed. They inspected the facility and determined that Prevention Point “had appropriately addressed the issue.”
Prevention Point staffers said leadership brushed aside their concerns about routine exposure to violence and trauma in a neighborhood where shootings and violence related to the drug trade are common. The police unit that patrols the surrounding neighborhood has recorded 273 shooting victims over the past year — or about 10% of all those shot citywide.
Two of the former staffers who detailed concerns about safety inside also lived in the community, a former industrial hub that’s long been home to working-class families with a fierce devotion to the neighborhood, which they have felt is neglected, underserved and underfunded by the city.
» READ MORE: This Kensington outreach worker saved dozens from overdose. Then the trauma became too much.
At one of the old shelters on Kensington Avenue, the locks on the building didn’t work, a problem particularly during understaffed evening hours. It wasn’t unusual for guests to bring in friends from outside, sneaking them by the evening workers, Parker said.
One night in 2019, a drug dealer burst through the unlocked door of the shelter, with a gun drawn, pointing in staffers’ faces and moving toward guests, looking for someone who owed them money, according to Parker, the former homeless shelter staffer.
Prevention Point officials deny this incident happened. “There was trouble with a lock. We tried to get the landlord to fix it. And eventually it got fixed. That did take a tiny bit of time,” said Bender.
In February 2020, one of Prevention Point’s clients fatally stabbed a man outside one of the organization’s shelters. Lane, the former housing case manager, said she had spoken to her supervisor for weeks about the client’s mental health.
Deeply distressed by the stabbing, Lane said she asked her supervisor for time off, which was refused.
“They kept being like, ‘People die, it’s just how it’s gonna be.’”
“They kept being like, ‘People die, it’s just how it’s gonna be.’”
Benitez said the organization was in the process of getting the man a mental health evaluation — although not because his behavior struck anyone else at the organization as unusual. “The reason the person was being evaluated was because we needed it for the next step in his housing placement,” he said.
This February, a client was shot outside the main building. Krystal Perea, who worked as a case manager, happened to be outside at the time, and helped the injured man on the sidewalk, offering emergency first aid.
Two days later, a panicked coworker ran up to Perea’s desk in the main building, saying the shooter was inside and looking for her, Perea said. The alleged shooter believed, falsely, that Perea had called the police.
Security staff, she said, laughed at her terror. “The head of security was saying he knows the shooter, and he’s not going to do anything, he just wants to have a conversation,” she said. “They were joking about my situation.”
Perea managed to slip out a back exit. She had planned to quit the job anyway, and spent her last few days at Prevention Point working from home.
After the shooting, she was told not to come back even on a part-time basis. “A close friend of mine who is in leadership broke it down and said, ‘It’s because you’re a liability,” she said.
Benitez said the alleged shooter never came into the building. Perea also disobeyed a lockdown order to help the man wounded in the shooting, he said.
“We took appropriate measures,” he said. Staffers also spread word to the security team to keep an eye out for the suspected shooter.
Prevention Point spokesperson Bender said that Perea was not asked to stay away from the organization. She added: “Kensington is a difficult place. There’s a lot of people dealing with trauma, there’s a lot of participants dealing with many, many things in their lives. And Prevention Point can only control so much in the world, right? They can’t control what happens on the street.”
Sexual harassment happened all around Prevention Point, from stairwells to stockrooms, five employees told The Inquirer, providing detailed accounts that in many cases they also reported to managers, they said.
Rodriguez, the former case manager, said she witnessed fellow staffers enduring sexual harassment and assault, including a male staffer kissing a female staffer without her consent. Several staffers had restraining orders against other staffers, she said.
Nedev, who worked in the HIV clinic, recalled staffers commenting on their coworkers’ bodies as they walked up and down stairs.
A manager who has since left the organization but is concerned even now about retaliation, said that after a coworker reported being sexually harassed, someone in the two-person human resources department called the coworker a “whore” and a “home wrecker.” As it turned out, the accused harasser was dating an HR employee, said the manager, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
In November 2018, Parker, who worked in Prevention Point’s low-barrier shelter, reported for an afternoon shift to prepare dinner for her guests. From the stockroom, Parker heard another line staff worker call her frantically, pointing to something on the ground.
When Parker bent over to look, the staffer pushed himself behind her, groping her and smiling. Shaken, Parker called her friend Tatyana Woodard — a fellow line staff worker and, like Parker, a Black trans woman — and heard her story repeated back to her. The same staffer had harassed Woodard the year before, and had also made transphobic comments toward her in front of the guests they were serving.
Later, Parker learned that other Prevention Point residents had also reported her harasser to management in separate, previous incidents — and said he was moved from other shelters after past incidents of harassment. The staffer was fired two weeks after Parker’s report.
Several employees said that it was widely known that members of a security team hired by the city to guard Prevention Point’s main building were soliciting sex from female clients, many of whom engaged in sex work to survive on the streets in Kensington. Fitch said she heard directly from clients who had been solicited by members of the security team.
The security guards would refuse to pay the women after sexual encounters in security offices and the basement of the main building — and then refuse to protect them while they were seeking services at Prevention Point, staffers said. The security team was eventually replaced.
Benitez said rumors of sexual misconduct by the security team had been investigated by the security company that employed them and were deemed unfounded. City officials said they had not been informed of these allegations.
In 2021, a group of employees successfully lobbied management to conduct an investigation into serial sexual harassment claims.
No staffers interviewed by The Inquirer ever saw the report or learned what was in it. Benitez said Prevention Point is not legally allowed to share details of the report because of employee confidentiality rules.
The organization has since overhauled its sexual harassment protocol, he said, making it easier to report incidents of harassment and holding trainings for employees.
Employees who have left Prevention Point say they’re still deeply committed to the organization’s core mission: helping people in addiction stay alive. But they no longer trust that it is acting in the best interests of employees and clients.
Rodriguez, who said she was fired last fall after a dispute with a superior, still struggles with the guilt she feels when former clients call her asking for help — or just to tell her they miss her.
“On the street, there aren’t many people you can trust — and so many of us have built those relationships with clients. To be torn apart from them with no transition time, no warning — now they’re completely unstable emotionally,” Rodriguez said. “I had one client break down crying, saying, ‘I’ll never forgive you for leaving me like this.’”
“I had one client break down crying, saying, ‘I’ll never forgive you for leaving me like this.’”
Other staffers who spoke with The Inquirer said they left Prevention Point to protect their own mental health — and remain worried about the clients they left behind.
Lane said she watched the stress of the job and lack of support from higher-ups eat away at coworkers, some of whom were in recovery themselves. Over her time at the center, she said, she watched several colleagues relapse or become homeless on the streets of Kensington, “basically discarded.”
“People are trying to help but they’re also dealing with a lot from being in recovery themselves, and then the stress of being in a working environment that’s unsupportive, super chaotic and toxic,” Lane said. “No one’s checking on us, you know?”
Parts of South Florida were hit with heavy rain, local flooding and wind Saturday as a storm system that had previously battered Mexico moved across the state. Flooding rains also threatened the northwestern Bahamas.
Officials in Miami warned drivers about road conditions as many cars were stuck on flooded streets.
“This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Traveling during these conditions is not recommended. It’s better to wait. Turn around, don’t drown,” the city of Miami tweeted.
The city was towing stranded vehicles from flooder roadways. At least one tree had fallen over a house in Pompano Beach, displacing its residents, according to CBS Miami.
Tow trucks move past cars abandoned in a flooded street caused by a deluge of rain from a tropical rain storm passing through the area on June 04, 2022 in Miami, Florida. The system dumped at least six to 10 inches of rain in the area causing flooding.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said the storm, once known as Agatha in the Pacific Ocean, will be known as Alex in the Atlantic Ocean basin, if it reaches tropical storm status.
As of 8 p.m. ET, the storm’s center was located about 105 miles northeast of Fort Pierce, Florida, and about 885 miles west-southwest of Bermuda. It was moving northeast at 18 mph with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.
The storm is expected to reach tropical storm strength off Florida’s eastern coast by Saturday night and is expected to strengthen through Monday as it moves away from Florida and into the Atlantic Ocean.
In Cuba, the storm killed three people, damaged dozens of homes in Havana and cut off electricity in some areas, according to authorities. Heavy rainfall continued on Saturday, but was diminishing as the weather system moved away from the island.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said most government services, such as bus routes and trains, planned to operate as normal over the weekend. Canal levels in South Florida have been lowered to minimize flooding from heavy rains.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially began Tuesday. This is an unusually early start to the storm season but not unprecedented for Florida.
The National Hurricane Center predicts that rainfall up to 10 inches (25 centimeters) is possible in South Florida, including the Florida Keys. The storm is not expected to produce huge winds or major storm surge. But local flooding is likely.
The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 300,000 people die every year due to pregnancy-related causes.
A study finds that complex human childbirth and cognitive abilities are a result of walking upright.
Childbirth in humans is much more complex and painful than in great apes. It was long believed that this was a result of humans’ larger brains and the narrow dimensions of the mother’s pelvis. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now used 3D simulations to show that childbirth was also a highly complex process in early hominin species that gave birth to relatively small-brained newborns – with important implications for their cognitive development.
Complications are common for women during and following pregnancy and childbirth. The majority of these issues arise during pregnancy and are either avoidable or curable. However, childbirth is still dangerous. The World Health Organization estimates that 830 people die every day due to causes related to childbirth and pregnancy. Furthermore, for every woman that dies due to childbirth, another 20-30 encounter injury, infection, or disabilities.
Four major complications are responsible for 75% of maternal deaths: severe bleeding (typically after birth), infections, high blood pressure during pregnancy, and complications from delivery. Other common issues include unsafe abortions and chronic conditions such as cardiac diseases and diabetes.
All of this shows how human birthing is much more difficult and painful than that of large apes. This was long believed to be due to humans’ bigger brains and the limited dimensions of the mother’s pelvis. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now shown, using 3D simulations, that birthing was likewise a highly complicated procedure in early hominin species that gave birth to relatively small-brained newborns – with significant consequences for their cognitive development.
The fetus normally navigates a narrow, convoluted birth canal by bending and turning its head at different phases during human delivery. This complicated procedure has a significant risk of birth complications, which may range from extended labor to stillbirth or maternal death. These issues were long thought to be the outcome of a conflict between humans adjusting to upright walking and our larger brains.
The dilemma between walking upright and larger brains
Bipedalism developed around seven million years ago and dramatically reshaped the hominin pelvis into a real birth canal. Larger brains, however, didn’t start to develop until two million years ago, when the earliest species of the genus Homo emerged. The evolutionary solution to the dilemma brought about by these two conflicting evolutionary forces was to give birth to neurologically immature and helpless newborns with relatively small brains – a condition known as secondary altriciality.
A research group led by Martin Häusler from the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich (UZH) and a team headed up by Pierre Frémondière from Aix-Marseille University have now found that australopithecines, who lived about four to two million years ago, had a complex birth pattern compared to great apes. “Because australopithecines such as Lucy had relatively small brain sizes but already displayed morphological adaptations to bipedalism, they are ideal to investigate the effects of these two conflicting evolutionary forces,” Häusler says.
Birth simulation of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) with three different fetal head sizes. Only a brain size of maximum 30 percent of the adult size (right) fits through the birth canal. Credit: Martin Häusler, UZH
The typical ratio of fetal and adult head size
The researchers used three-dimensional computer simulations to develop their findings. Since no fossils of newborn australopithecines are known to exist, they simulated the birth process using different fetal head sizes to take into account the possible range of estimates. Every species has a typical ratio between the brain sizes of its newborns and adults. Based on the ratio of non-human primates and the average brain size of an adult Australopithecus, the researchers calculated a mean neonatal brain size of 180 g. This would correspond to a size of 110 g in humans.
For their 3D simulations, the researchers also took into account the increased pelvic joint mobility during pregnancy and determined a realistic soft tissue thickness. They found that only the 110 g fetal head sizes passed through the pelvic inlet and midplane without difficulty, unlike the 180 g and 145 g sizes. “This means that Australopithecus newborns were neurologically immature and dependent on help, similar to human babies today,” Häusler explains.
Prolonged learning is key to cognitive and cultural abilities
The findings indicate that australopithecines are likely to have practiced a form of cooperative breeding, even before the genus Homo appeared. Compared to great apes, the brains developed for longer outside the uterus, enabling infants to learn from other members of the group. “This prolonged period of learning is generally considered crucial for the cognitive and cultural development of humans,” Häusler says. This conclusion is also supported by the earliest documented stone tools, which date back to 3.3 million years ago – long before the genus Homo appeared.
Reference: “Dynamic finite-element simulations reveal early origin of complex human birth pattern” by Pierre Frémondière, Lionel Thollon, François Marchal, Cinzia Fornai, Nicole M. Webb, and Martin Haeusler, 19 April 2022, Communications Biology. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03321-z
On April 8, SpaceX launched Axiom 1 (Ax-1), the first-ever all-private crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
Ax-1 ferried four passengers to the ISS, where they and their Dragon spacecraft remained for more than two weeks. That Dragon, a vehicle named Endeavour, returned to Earth on April 25, splashing down off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where it and its crew were safely recovered.
In an article (opens in new tab) published on Monday (May 23), the website Space Explored alleged that Endeavour experienced an issue during its mission that could have had disastrous consequences during last month’s homecoming.
Related:Amazing photos of SpaceX’s Ax-1 private astronaut mission
The Space Explored report, citing unnamed sources at NASA and SpaceX, claims that hypergolic propellant — fuels paired to instantly combust on contact — leaked into Endeavour’s heat shield during the mission. (Dragon’s Draco thrusters use hypergolic propellants.)
“It is believed that this hypergolic propellant impacted the integrity of the heat shield, causing dangerously excessive wear upon reentry,” Space Explored wrote (opens in new tab). The report goes on to speculate that SpaceX’s Crew-4 mission for NASA, which launched toward the ISS on April 27, could suffer a similar issue when it heads home this September.
But NASA says that such fears are unfounded. The agency has issued a statement refuting the heat shield claims, which Space Explored included in an update of the article.
“The data associated with Dragon’s recent crew reentries was normal — the system performed as designed without dispute. There has not been a hypergol leak during the return of a crewed Dragon mission nor any contamination with the heat shield causing excessive wear,” the NASA statement reads, in part.
“SpaceX and NASA perform a full engineering review of the heat shield’s thermal protection system following each return, including prior to the launch of the Crew-4 mission currently at the International Space Station,” the NASA statement continues. “The heat shield composite structure (structure below the tile) was re-flown per normal planning and refurbishment processes. The thermal protection system on the primary heat shield for Crew-4 was new, as it has been for all human spaceflight missions.”
The NASA statement went on to discuss preparations for SpaceX’s next crewed mission to the ISS, Crew-5, announcing that testing had revealed an issue with that mission’s Dragon vehicle.
“In early May, a new heat shield composite structure intended for flight on Crew-5 did not pass an acceptance test,” the statement says. “The test did its job and found a manufacturing defect. NASA and SpaceX will use another heat shield for the flight that will undergo the same rigorous testing prior to flight.”
NASA’s other commercial crew provider, Boeing, wrapped up a crucial uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft on Tuesday (May 25). In a press conference following Starliner’s landing, Steve Stich, manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, took some time to comment on the Crew-5 heat shield swap.
Stich elaborated on the testing process applied to spacecraft components such as heat shields: “We put them through a battery of tests, and those tests actually apply physical loads to that heat shield — the kind of loads we’ll see during the aerodynamic reentry sequence and also at the splashdown event.”
Stich said that the Crew-5 heat shield failed its “landing loads” test, citing a problem with the unit’s manufacturing. X-rays helped determine that the heat shield would not be viable, and the decision was made to use the next one in line.
“We could tell there was some damage inside the heat shield from that test,” Stich said, “and so we knew we couldn’t go forward and fly that heat shield.” NASA and SpaceX teams therefore “moved up another heat shield in the flow, and we’ll do similar kinds of X-rays and testing on that,” he added.
Provided those and other tests reveal no major issues, Crew-5 is scheduled to launch sometime in September.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)or onFacebook (opens in new tab).
Other higher population centers threatened include Albuquerque in New Mexico and Colorado Springs in Colorado.
“A dangerous and dire weather situation will take shape today,” the National Weather Service (NWS) in Albuquerque said. “Extremely critical fire weather is possible today when very strong winds will combine with exceptionally low humidity, above normal temperatures, and an unstable airmass.”
Some sites in the southern and central high plains are seeing “extremely critical strength winds” — meaning sustained winds of at least 30 mph — and temperatures were already in the 80s across eastern Colorado, the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) said in a Friday afternoon update.
More than 10 million people from Arizona to Nebraska are under red flag warnings Friday, meaning conditions are perfect for wildfires to start and to spread.
“Any fire that starts will have the potential to spread rapidly, and would be difficult if not impossible to control,” the NWS office in Boulder said.
Numerous fire warnings and evacuations were issued Friday afternoon, from New Mexico to Nebraska.
Extreme winds with gusts between 55-65 mph are fueling dangerous wildfire conditions in the San Miguel and Mora counties in New Mexico.
More than 20 communities are already under evacuation order with at least eight communities ordered to prepare for evacuation due to the 3,000-acre Calf Canyon Fire, according to a joint release from both counties.
“When the winds are this bad…and it’s so dry here, we need everyone to be prepared to potentially have to evacuate at a moment’s notice,” Wendy Mason, State Forestry Wildfire Prevention and Communications Coordinator, told CNN.
Mason says planes are not able to capture acreage data due of the winds.
Relative humidity values as low as 5% and sustained winds of 30 to 40 mph with gusts from 60 to 70 mph are possible.
Some areas could see scattered wind gusts reaching 80 mph, strong enough to topple trees or knock over utility poles.
Wind gusts topped hurricane-force Friday afternoon in Colorado and New Mexico. Raton, New Mexico, reported a gust of 75 mph and Springfield, Colorado, reached 76 mph.
“These winds could potentially be catastrophic for ongoing wildfires or any new ignitions,” the NWS in Albuquerque said.
Dry thunderstorms are also a concern, according to the SPC.
These thunderstorms can produce lightning that can start new fires, with very little to no rain. The area at greatest risk for dry thunderstorms overlaps parts of the “extremely critical”fire threat near the Colorado/Kansas border down to the New Mexico/Texas border.
Much of the area is suffering from prolonged, severe drought that’s a symptom of the growing climate crisis. New Mexico’s drought area has more than tripled since January and now covers more than 60% of the state.
Friday’s is the seventh extreme fire danger issued since December, and the number of people in the extreme risk area — 4.2 million — is higher than all the previous six combined.
Last year, there were only two extreme risk days. That followed seven in 2020 and 11 in 2019.
In the past two years, Colorado has experienced the three largest wildfires in its history, Gov. Jared Polis said Friday in announcing a wildfire preparedness package designed to provide relief for people affected by the fires and invests $15 million in tools to fight future fires.
“We know that this issue is about more than just one fire,” Polis said. “It’s really about tackling the increased fire threat. It’s a combination of climate, drought, increased population, and increased utilization of our wild lands, all conspiring together to lead to higher risk levels than Colorado has ever had in our history.”
More than 19,700 wildfires have been reported this year, more than any year-to-date period of the last 10 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The 10-year-average for the period is 13,720.
CNN’s Brandon Miller and Hannah Sarisohn contributed to this report.
A mom nearly died after claiming doctors repeatedly dismissed her symptoms, saying she was just “getting fat”.
Sarah McInnes, 38, complained to her GP of ballooning by two dress sizes from a 12 to a 16 in just four weeks, in January of this year.
Initially, doctors had told her the unusual weight gain was because she was scoffing too much food, even though her diet hadn’t changed.
But she had in fact been living with an undiagnosed condition for 20 years that was fast becoming life-threatening.
Sarah, from Kilbirnie, Scotland, had suffered pain for years and said it felt like she was “carrying a rucksack full of rocks”.
In January, Sarah was sent for a pelvic scan after one doctor spoke up – telling other medics he disagreed with their theories.
It was then that a two-stone, 46 inch cyst was discovered taking up almost the entirety of Sarah’s abdomen, crushing her other organs.
Her belly was larger than many women at full term with a single baby, and bigger than she was at nine-months pregnant with her twin boys.
Sarah, a mum-of-three, said: “I’d heard their excuses so much that I started to believe them.
“It was always just ‘You’re fat, you’re obese, you need to eat less.
Picture of Sarah McInnes’ rash caused by endometriosis in September 2021.Triangle News
“It was driving me mad, I wasn’t eating very much and I’d been on so many diets trying to lose the extra weight, but it never shifted.”
Sarah underwent a grueling four-and-a-half hour surgery in March, in which she also had to have a hysterectomy and part of her stomach removed.
Before the op husband Allan, 44, had to sign a waiver agreeing that he understood there was a 50 percent chance that Sarah might not make it through the surgery.
During the operation, doctors discovered Sarah had been suffering with endometriosis.
Endometriosis is a condition where tissue similar to the lining of the womb can grow on other organs like the fallopian tubes, ovaries, and bowels.
It can be extremely painful, particularly during a period, make sex and going to the toilet excruciating, and cause fertility issues.
The condition typically gets worse, epsecially if left untreated.
Sarah said: “The doctor told me that in the 25-years he’s been doing that specific operation for endometriosis, he’s never seen it that bad.
“I’m just so glad to be here.”
Picture of Sarah McInnes with son Kyle, 19 (back left), James, 19 (back right) and Mark, 9 (front right).Triangle News
Ignored ‘hundreds of times’
Sarah first started noticing endometriosis symptoms back in 2000, at the age of 16.
She would pass out from excruciating period cramps, vomit and have to take days off school due to the pain.
The mom described the pain from the condition as “the worst I’ve ever felt” – worse than labor pain.
But despite going to her GP to complain over two decades, all the signs of Sarah’s agonizing condition weren’t linked.
One in ten women of reproductive age in the UK suffer from endometriosis, but it takes an average of eight years to get a diagnosis.
Sarah said: “I’d imagine it took at least a couple of hundred visits to my GP, and at least six or seven visits to A&E to get diagnosed.
“They just said ‘sometimes girls have to deal with bad period pains,’ or that it’s ‘women’s troubles’.”
One callous female doctor even asked Sarah if she believed she was the only woman in the world who experienced period pains.
But Sarah’s pain got so bad she couldn’t bear to leave her bed, eventually having to give up work in retail six years ago.
She stopped spending time and bonding with her three boys, twins Kyle and James, 19, and Mark, nine, resulting in bouts of depression.
It is believed Sarah’s cyst had been growing for five years, since 2017.
That year, Sarah broke out in a bright pink rash with painful, sore patches all over her legs, chest and face – a symptom of endometriosis.
Picture of Sarah McInnes, 38, before her operation in March 2022.Triangle News
She now faces a hideous wait to determine whether the ginormous ovarian cyst is cancerous.
Cysts are common in people with endometriosis, and most of the time they are not deadly.
But because Sarah’s was left undiagnosed for so long, and was allowed to grow so large, medics fear it could have dire consequences.
Sarah said: “Doctors told me that because it had been left for years and years, and because it had become stuck to all my organs, there’s a really high chance that it could be cancerous.
“All this time dealing with my illness and the pain has put a massive strain on us especially my husband, Allan, who has been amazing.”
Sadly removing the cyst and parts of the endometriosis has only mildly reduced Sarah’s symptoms.
Due to growths on her bowls not being able to be removed without risking serious issues, going to the toilet is hell and Sarah is still in lots of pain.
She said: “I was hoping once this was all over it would be done and dusted, but my pain level has only just gone down to about a five or six and I still struggle every day.
Picture of Sarah with her husband Allan. Triangle News
“The pain is constant and the back pain too.
“I wish I was normal, with a normal life where I can go to work, go on holiday and enjoy time with my children and friends but I can’t.
“And I won’t ever be able to do that, because all my symptoms were ignored for so long.”
Sarah’s husband had to take on the brunt of the childcare, as well as quitting his job as a warehouse assistant to take on the role of Sarah’s full-time carer.
Emma Tegala from Endometriosis UK said: “Shockingly, it takes on average eight years to get a diagnosis of endometriosis in the UK.
“Sadly, we regularly hear stories from those with the condition who are initially told that severe pelvic pain and painful periods are normal.”
Emma said a lack of awareness about endometriosis, its symptoms crossing over with other conditions, and taboo around discussing periods play into the condition being diagnosed so late.
Craig McArthur, Director of East Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership and Primary Care Lead for Ayrshire said: “NHS Ayrshire & Arran has a duty to protect patient confidentiality, therefore, we are unable to provide further comment.
“We take all patients’ feedback, comments, concerns, or complaints very seriously and we would encourage anyone who is unhappy with our services to contact us directly with any concerns they have.”
This story originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission.
Dr. Byerley suggested her mother-in-law imagine if, once out of every 10 times she used the restroom in a given day, she died. “Oh, 10 percent is terrible,” she recalled her mother-in-law saying.
Dr. Byerley’s estimates showed, for instance, that an average 40-year-old vaccinated over six months ago faced roughly the same chance of being hospitalized after an infection as someone did of dying in a car crash in the course of 170 cross-country road trips. (More recent vaccine shots provide better protection than older ones, complicating these predictions.)
For immunocompromised people, the risks are higher. An unvaccinated 61-year-old with an organ transplant, Dr. Byerley estimated, is three times as likely to die after an infection as someone is to die within five years of receiving a diagnosis of stage one breast cancer. And that transplant recipient is twice as likely to die from Covid as someone is to die while scaling Mount Everest.
With the most vulnerable people in mind, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, set out last month to determine how low cases would have to fall for people to stop indoor masking without endangering those with extremely weakened immune systems.
He imagined a hypothetical person who derived no benefit from vaccines, wore a good mask, took hard-to-get prophylactic medication, attended occasional gatherings and shopped but did not work in person. He set his sights on keeping vulnerable people’s chances of being infected below 1 percent over a four-month period.
To achieve that threshold, he found, the country would have to keep masking indoors until transmission fell below 50 weekly cases per 100,000 people — a stricter limit than the C.D.C. is currently using, but one that he said nevertheless offered a benchmark to aim for.
“If you just say, ‘We’ll take masks off when things get better’ — that’s true I hope — but it’s not really helpful because people don’t know what ‘better’ means,” Dr. Faust said.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska responded to Chinese threats Friday after a congressional visit to Taiwan.
Sasse was one of six lawmakers who flew on a diplomatic visit to the Republic of China, often referred to as Taiwan. Sasse was in a group with senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Rob Portman of Ohio, Republican Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson and Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez. After the Chinese government warned the U.S. its actions were “dangerous,” Sasse released a reply.
“The CCP can’t bully the American people or their representatives in the United States Congress,” Sasse wrote. “Chairman Xi should remember two things: First, Congress plays a foundational role in the interpretation of the Taiwan Relations Act; second, the American people have no love of tyrants and instead instinctively support the freedom-loving people of Taiwan.”
CHINA ACCUSES US, TAIWAN OFFICIALS OF ‘PLAYING WITH FIRE’ WITH UKRAINE COMPARISONS
“As President Tsai Ing-wen and I discussed today, the entire world knows that Chairman Xi approved and enabled Vladimir Putin’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” Sasse added. “Xi likes to talk about territorial sovereignty, but the entire world has seen clearly his immoral and foolish decision to side with Putin as he targets civilians in an independent neighboring country.”
In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office, members of an American congressional delegation, from left, Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas; Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb.; Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio; Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.; Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.; and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., pose for a photo with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, center right, and other Taiwanese officials during a meeting at the Presidential Office in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, April 15, 2022. (Taiwan Presidential Office via AP)
The bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers flew to Taiwan for an official visit Thursday, defying threats from the Chinese government.
Lawmakers from both the House and Senate landed in the country Wednesday morning to a warm welcome from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. The Chinese government soon released a statement condemning the visit.
“As the world sees more clearly who Putin and Xi are, they rally more enthusiastically to the side of Ukraine and Taiwan,” Sasse concluded in his statement Friday.
Sens. Lindsey Graham, Bob Menendez, Richard Burr, Rob Portman and Ben Sasse and Rep. Ronny Jackson were greeted on their arrival to Taiwan Thursday, April 14, 2022. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan)
China on Thursday accused U.S. and Taiwanese officials of “playing with fire” after comparisons between the Ukraine-Russia war have been levied against Beijing and Taipei.
Mainland China argues Taiwan is a rogue region of China and not an independent country. The U.S. has tenuously respected that designation for decades, even while sending military aid and occasional visits from U.S. officials to support Taiwan.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
“There is a new wave of tensions across the Taiwan Strait,” Chinese spokesman Wang Webin told reporters. “The root cause is that the authorities in Taiwan keep pushing the independence agenda by soliciting your support and that some in the U.S. attempt to use Taiwan to contain China.
In this Jan. 19, 2021, file photo, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times via AP, Pool File)
“They have been colluding with each other,” he added.
Fears that China may move to invade Taiwan have risen in recent years, thanks to China’s increasing aggression in the region, including frequent air force flights near Taiwan’s airspace.
Fox News’ Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
A tornado emergency was declared by the National Weather Service office in Little Rock, Arkansas, for a confirmed large and destructive tornado.
“A large, extremely dangerous, and potentially deadly tornado is on the ground,” the National Weather Service said in a tweet at 8:34 p.m. CT. “To protect your life, TAKE COVER NOW!”
The weather service said the tornado was reported by an observer at Little Rock Air Force Base.
At 8:19 p.m. CT, the weather service reported the tornado was located over Olmstead, or near the air base, moving east at 35 mph. Olmstead is about 15 miles north of downtown Little Rock.
As the storm system moved through the state, several tornado warnings were issued and the weather service’s Storm Prediction Center said there were five tornado reports in Arkansas.
There were more than two dozen hail reports in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
The University of Central Arkansas canceled Tuesday classes after the severe weather.
“Due to a power outage and some isolated flooding on campus, all classes are canceled on Tuesday, April 12. The campus will remain open and business operations will continue,” the university said in a tweet. The university is located in Conway, Arkansas, just over 30 miles north of Little Rock.
The weather service also issued a severe thunderstorm watch for parts of Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee, including the city of Memphis, until 4 a.m.
