📌 Vegas Airport Safety Issues, Mass Killing in Kashmir

A federal review of helicopter safety at US airports revealed dangerous flying conditions at the Las Vegas airport.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday that the potential for a collision between air tour helicopters and planes at Harry Reid International Airport led the agency to change flying rules. In the first three weeks after implementation, collision alerts for planes dropped by 30%.

The FAA said after the collision in D.C. between an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people, it planned to use artificial intelligence to dig into the millions of reports it collects to assess other places with busy helicopter traffic.

The FAA examined Boston, New York, Baltimore-Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, the Gulf Coast, and other cities and areas.

The FAA’s acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, said Las Vegas quickly became a concern once the agency dug into the data.

Agreements with helicopter operators didn’t clearly define vertical and lateral separation requirements when helicopters were approaching the airport.

Also, air traffic controllers in the tower weren’t issuing traffic advisories between returning helicopters and airplanes. Rocheleau promised to take additional actions in Las Vegas and at other airports where the FAA identifies concerns.

Gunmen shot and killed at least 26 tourists Tuesday at a resort in Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said.

Police blamed militants fighting against Indian rule for the attack in Baisaran meadow, some 3 miles from the disputed region’s resort town of Pahalgam. At least 36 people were wounded, many of them seriously, two senior police officers said.

The two officers said at least four militants fired at dozens of tourists from close range. Most of the killed tourists were Indian, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with departmental policy.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Police and soldiers were searching for the attackers. Vice President JD Vance, who was visiting India, called it a “devastating terrorist attack.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on X, “The United States stands with India.”

Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan each administer a part of Kashmir — both claim the territory. Militants in the Indian-controlled Kashmir have fought New Delhi’s rule since 1989. Muslim Kashmiris support uniting the territory, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict. In March 2000, at least 35 civilians were shot and killed in a southern village in Kashmir while then-US President Bill Clinton was visiting India. It was the region’s deadliest attack in the past couple of decades.

Differences are noticeable when comparing photos of the Earth taken from outer space 50 years apart.

New images of the planet reveal changes to the Earth's surface since the "Blue Marble,” the first shot of the whole Earth and the only one by a human. It was taken on December 7, 1972 (pictured left), about 18,000 miles above Earth on Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the Moon.

Previous Apollo missions had snapped the Earth, partly hidden by shadow. The hugely influential Earthrise, for instance, shows the planet as it rises behind the Moon. Up until this point, our view of home had been fragmented, with no real way to visualize the planet in its entirety.

The image offers a view of the Earth from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctic South polar ice cap. Heavy cloud hangs over the Southern Hemisphere, and almost the entire coastline of Africa can be seen. NASA credits the image to the entire crew. It is reported to be one of the most reproduced images.

Comparing the two images, a striking difference is the reduced Antarctic ice sheet. "You can see the shrinking cryosphere — the shrinking ice sheet and the loss of the snow," said Nick Pepin, a climate scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. This, he said, is a major indicator of climate change.

“The dominant thing that you can see on the [new] image is deforestation and the loss of vegetation,” as the Earth's land cover switches from greenery to desert, Pepin said. The picture was taken by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, a satellite one million miles away between the Sun and the Earth.

The Trump administration intends to phase out synthetic dyes that enhance color in common foods like candy and cereals.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his agency is making the move as a first step to improve the nation's food supply and address chronic disease.

"We are going to get rid of the dyes and then one by one, we're going to get rid of every ingredient and additive in food that we can legally address," he said.

FDA commissioner Marty Makary said the agency will work with the industry to voluntarily eliminate six common dyes by the end of 2026. It will ban two colorants, Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B, and it's asking food companies to speed up the timeline for removing the banned colorant Red No. 3.

Melissa Hockstad, president and CEO of the Consumer Brands Association, which represents US packaged food manufacturers, defended the industry's current ingredients: "The ingredients used in America's food supply have been rigorously studied … and have been demonstrated to be safe," she said.

She did not specify whether the group's members would comply with the administration's new proposal, but she noted the industry is increasing its use of alternatives to synthetic colorants.

The US Supreme Court appears inclined to let religious parents have their way in LGBT educational lessons.

Christian and Muslim parents in Maryland are seeking to keep their elementary school children out of certain classes when storybooks with LGBT characters are read.

The nine justices heard arguments on Tuesday in an appeal by parents with children in public schools in Montgomery County, located just outside of Washington, after lower courts declined to order the local school district to let children opt out when these books are read.

The parents, who include Muslim, Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox plaintiffs, contend that the school board’s policy of prohibiting opt-outs violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections for free exercise of religion. President Donald Trump’s administration backed them in the case.

But the court’s three liberal justices raised concerns about how far opt-outs for students could go beyond storybooks in public schools, offering examples of subjects such as evolution, interracial marriage, or women working outside the home that might come up in classes.

The Montgomery County district in 2022 approved a handful of storybooks that feature lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters as part of its English language-arts curriculum to better represent the diversity of families.

Both Ukraine and Russia appear to be signaling readiness for a continuation of peace talks.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday Ukraine was ready for talks with Russia "in any format" once a ceasefire is set, while the

Financial Times

reported President Vladimir Putin had offered to halt Russia's invasion at the current front lines.

Zelenskiy said any discussions regarding the terms of a peace deal should only happen once the fighting has stopped and that it would be impossible to agree on everything quickly.

Zelensky said his delegation would have a mandate to discuss a full or partial ceasefire at talks with European and US officials in London on Wednesday, in a follow-up to last week's Paris meeting. The White House said Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, will travel to Russia later this week for talks with Putin.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the

Financial Times

reported that Putin offered at a meeting with Witkoff in St. Petersburg this month to halt Russia's invasion across the front line and relinquish its claims to full control of four Ukrainian regions.

A pair of villages in Leicestershire, England, faced off in an unusual local sport known as "bottle kicking.”

The annual Hallaton Bottle Kicking event took place Easter Monday and saw residents of the villages of Hallaton and Medbourne competing to transport three "bottles" — small wooden barrels — across a stream on the border of the two villages.

Two of the "bottles" are filled with beer, and the third, known as the "dummy," is solid wood. Bottle kicking is a sport that goes back more than 1,000 years, to pagan times, and some local historians believe it dates back up to 2,000 years. Legend has it that bottle kicking is the game that inspired rugby.

Members of the Hallaton team, which won this year's contest, were lifted onto the Butter Cross, a local stone monument, to drink from an open barrel before the rest of the beer was distributed to the crowd.