The Biden administration is preparing for a worst-case scenario if a conservative federal judge rules in favor of a lawsuit seeking to restrict access to one of the two drugs typically used to induce a medicated abortion.

Two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, can be taken by women at home and are used for just over half of U.S. abortions. But that could be quickly changed by a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion group in Texas that claims the Food and Drug Administration wrongly approved mifepristone for use more than 23 years ago.

The case is before a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump. A ruling in favor of the abortion opponents could immediately shut down the sale of the drug, but women would still have access to medicated abortions with a regimen of misoprostol.

Vice President Kamala Harris promised on Friday that the White House would push back on efforts to ban the drug, as she gathered a group of nearly a dozen doctors and abortion rights advocates to discuss a plan for responding to the looming threat to access to medical abortions.

“There are now partisan and political attacks attempting to question the legitimacy of a group of scientists and doctors who have studied the significance of this drug,” Harris said. “There is now an attempt by politicians to remove it from the ability of doctors to prescribe and the ability of people to receive.”

The lawsuit against mifepristone was filed by the Alliance for Defending Freedom, which was also involved in the Mississippi case that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned. It’s the latest fallout in the struggle over reproductive care that the Democratic administration must grapple with since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion last year.

Harris did not publicly lay out how the administration plans to respond if a ruling that halts the sale of the drug nationwide comes down on Friday.

‘Medication abortion is not going away’

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, meanwhile, was in California on Friday to meet leaders from Planned Parenthood to talk about access to the abortion drugs.

Dr. Kristyn Brandi said she told the vice president on Friday that the ruling could trigger widespread confusion over the accessibility of medicated abortion in the U.S. Brandi, who is chair of the Physicians for Reproductive Health, said she already fields calls at her New Jersey clinic from women asking if medicated abortion is legal in the state.

“It’s a really important thing to communicate with people: medication abortion is not going away,” Brandi said.

She added that Harris expressed support for immediately challenging the ruling if it shuts down access to mifepristone.

Clinics and telehealth providers have been preparing for a ruling that shuts down access to mifepristone, ordering more doses of misoprostol so they can offer medication abortions with just that one drug. They will have to change the way they counsel patients, telling them that misoprostol-only abortions are slightly less effective and sometimes more painful than abortions done with both drugs.

Abortions using both drugs “can be as effective as 98% or more,” while misoprostol-only abortions are up to about 95% effective, Melissa Grant, chief operating officer of the Carafem abortion clinic, told The Associated Press.

Mifepristone dilates the cervix and blocks the action of the hormone progesterone, which enables a pregnancy to continue. Misoprostol causes contractions that empty the uterus. Typically, mifepristone is taken by mouth first, followed by misoprostol a day or two later.

Studies show medication abortions are safe and effective, though with a slightly lower success rate than ones done by procedure in a clinic.

Another lawsuit filed

With the Texas decision pending, a dozen Democratic-controlled states filed their own lawsuit in federal court against the FDA on Thursday in Washington. The lawsuit seeks to make it easier for woman to access the drug and alleges that several FDA requirements for prescribing and dispensing it are “burdensome, harmful and unnecessary.”

When the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000 it placed several safety restrictions on its use, including limiting dispensing to specialty clinics and requiring women to pick up the drug in person. The Biden administration had sought to expand access to medicated abortions in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, with an FDA announcement this year that broadened the pill’s access through retail and mail-order pharmacies.

But several limitations remain, such as one that doctors must be specially certified to prescribe the drug.

Several medical groups have long opposed those requirements, pointing to the low rate of side effects seen with mifepristone compared with other medications that don’t carry any certification requirements.
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Trisha Thadani, City Hall reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, has covered a host of difficult topics: homelessness, the fentanyl crisis, flooding, and shootings. But for a time during the pandemic, her work ground to a halt.

“It was like drinking out of a firehose every day with all the news that we had to cover,” Thadani told VOA. “I was working and working, grinding myself to the bone, and then all of a sudden I hit a wall where I physically could not work anymore.”

Thadani’s father had passed away in February 2020. Then in March, COVID-19 restrictions forced her to work from home. The grief, isolation, and demands of the daily news cycle took a toll. Thadani says she had to take two months off to recover.

While Thadani describes her experience and absence as an “extreme example,” she said it underscores the importance of regular self-care, peer support, and mental health care for journalists who, in addition to personal tragedies, are exposed to traumatic stress as a part of their day-to-day jobs.

Facing onslaught of tragedy 

In the U.S., journalists often pivot from one tragedy to the next.

“The nature of breaking news is obviously very stressful because you’re moving really quickly. There’s a lot of pressure to get the story not only right, but to get it up fast,” Thadani told VOA.

“And then you also have to balance being compassionate with the subjects and understanding that you’re often getting people on the worst days of their lives,” she said. “And I think, as a whole, in journalism there isn’t great acknowledgement of the toll that that takes on us as reporters.”

The expectation to keep reporting came to the fore this week when Dylan Lyons, a 24-year-old Spectrum News 13 reporter, was shot dead and his colleague injured while on assignment.

Other reporters in Florida were visibly shaken as they reported on the incident from the same Orlando-area neighborhood that many, including Lyons, had traveled to earlier in the day to cover a breaking story.

But the culture in newsrooms like the Chronicle is beginning to change and more support is being made available.

Hearst hires therapist

Recently, Hearst, which owns the San Francisco Chronicle and dozens of other papers across the U.S., hired a trauma-informed therapist to support full and part-time staff at all Hearst-owned papers in California and Texas.

The therapist is available in-person one day a week at the Chronicle office and other days virtually, with staff able to access a set number of sessions for free.

“It’s 100% confidential. We don’t know who talks to her, who doesn’t, what the conversations are,” Renee Peterson, senior vice president of human resources for Hearst, told VOA.

Although previously Hearst brought in therapists for a few days at a time following incidents such as the Ghost Ship Fire at an events space in San Francisco or the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Peterson says focus groups and conversations with journalists, including Thadani, helped the company to realize the importance of providing consistent support.

Having a dedicated therapist assigned to a newsroom is a helpful resource, but building a culture that destigmatizes mental health care is essential, says Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

The Dart Center offers education and trauma-informed resources to newsrooms in an effort to create “more effective, ethical, and sensitive reporting on survivors of violence, conflict, and tragedy,” said Shapiro.

Trauma often permeates newsrooms

Journalists experience more trauma exposure than the general public and at rates comparable to first responders, according to a recent study by the University of Toronto and Reuters Institute.

Although people may typically associate trauma with “direct witnessing of violence and tragedy,” such as with war correspondents, it can reach all members of a newsroom, Shapiro said.

Graphic imagery, detailed descriptions, and what Shapiro calls “empathetic engagement” with victims of tragedies all contribute.

“Nearly all of the most divisive issues in our society have a significant trauma element and reporters who are never on the scene of violence are nonetheless in close engagement with those stories, are absorbing those details, and we carry them in our memories and on our souls and that’s a heavy load,” Shapiro told VOA.

The pressure is amplified when journalists relate to victims. For example, parents with children who were assigned to cover the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; people of color reporting on police brutality and violence against other people of color; or journalists at Spectrum News 13 in central Florida who this week had to cover the death and critical injury of colleagues targeted by a shooter.

Peer support vital, says expert

While journalists are exposed to high levels of trauma, they are also a resilient bunch, said Shapiro.

“It turns out that the very job which exposes us to trauma also does give us some sources of resilience: having a mission, having a job to do, having craft in the face of mayhem or violation, having ethics, having trusted colleagues; all of these are measurable buffers against some of the impact of trauma,” Shapiro told VOA.

Of all the factors, he said, social connection and peer support are the most important.

Al Tompkins, senior faculty member at Poynter, a nonprofit that provides resources and ethics trainings to newsrooms, agrees that peer support is a valuable resource.

“We shouldn’t underestimate the value of informal cohort support. Journalists often don’t realize how important it is to reach out to their colleagues,” Tompkins told VOA.

Tompkins said it’s important for veteran journalists to talk about mental health with younger colleagues, who, studies say, are part of a generation that suffers from traumatic stress at higher rates yet often resists speaking up for fear of being judged or appearing vulnerable.

Thadani credits veteran journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle for not only spearheading conversations that led to the hiring of an in-house therapist, but continuing to share their experiences in a way that normalizes struggles.

“It was helpful to hear [from] other reporters who I profoundly respect and look up to,” she said. “To have veteran reporters be so vulnerable, and open up about how they were struggling and then to see that and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, me too. It’s not just me … it’s because this is all very, very hard.’”
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Three mystery objects shot down by the U.S. military this month again compelled government officials to tamp down speculation of extraterrestrial connections.

Military and civilian sightings of unidentified flying objects have generated sensational headlines going back to the 1940s, repeatedly prompting reporters to ask government officials for explanations.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Representative Mike Turner told the Munich Security Conference, “I’m not going to release classified information in saying this: None of the objects shot over North America recently were Martians.”

President Joe Biden told a White House briefing: “The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.” 

On the campaign trail, presidential candidates have promised to make public government secrets about unidentified aerial phenomenon, but that changes once they get elected.

Donald Trump acknowledged being briefed on the topic, saying, “We’re watching for extraterrestrials,” while both stating that he did not particularly believe people who claimed to have seen UFOs and also wondered out loud if they’re real. 

Barack Obama told a late-night talk show that he asked about aliens after taking office and was told the U.S. government was not keeping aliens in a lab, as some ufologists have claimed. Obama did confirm that there are objects in the sky that move in an unexplainable manner. 

George W. Bush told a late-night TV talk show that he would not reveal anything he had been told on the topic as president, even to his curious daughter. 

Bill Clinton expressed interest in the phenomena, saying on a visit to Northern Ireland in 1996, “If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.” 

Jimmy Carter spoke of his own close encounter with a hovering, luminous object that changed from blue to red in 1969, a year before being elected governor of Georgia, calling it “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen.” Among the first candidates to promise the release of “every piece of information” on the subject, he reversed course following his 1976 election, saying public disclosure might have “defense implications” and pose a threat to national security.

Harry Truman may have been the U.S. president with the most firsthand knowledge of unexplained aerial phenomena as he was commander-in-chief in July of 1947 when something unusual occurred in Lincoln County, New Mexico. 

Roswell and UFOs

Decades later, I went there to interview some who claimed to have seen what happened.

Roswell, New Mexico has turned its UFO legacy into a tourist industry. Visitors to the sleepy desert town are greeted by dozens of pairs of walnut eyes gazing at them from alien-illustrated billboards and in windows of Roswell’s fast-food joints, gift shops and motels. 

The International UFO Museum and Research Center contains historical displays, documents and photographs alongside tacky UFO-themed art. While the museum may have converted few skeptics, conversations with some of those who were in the Roswell area in the summer of 1947 had me giving their tale a bit of credence. 

Nearly all Roswell’s witnesses had kept the story to themselves for about a half a century, fearing ridicule, remembering secrecy oaths they had signed or threats from military officers. 

Walter Haut was 76 years old when I met him in 1999. One of the few survivors at the core of the story, he paced the corridors of the Main Street attraction he helped create. Haut was a member of the elite 509th Composite Bomb Group, at the time the world’s only atomic air force, which had dropped the August 1945 warheads on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He spent the early post-war era as Roswell Army Air Field’s public information officer. On July 8, 1947, he was ordered by the commanding officer to issue an unprecedented press release stating the military had recovered a crashed flying saucer. 

By that time, flying saucers or flying discs had been in the headlines for days. (The acronym UFO for unidentified flying object was decades away. During World War Two, pilots had referred to the mysterious aircraft as “foo fighters.”) The Roswell incident was not an isolated one. During the previous two weeks there had been sightings in nearly every one of the 48 states.

Within hours of First Lt. Haut’s noontime press release, the story was on the Associated Press and United Press wires and the front pages of western U.S. afternoon newspapers. Later that day, high brass from outside New Mexico issued a new explanation that, in essence, said: Never mind, it’s just a balloon. 

The controversy is whether the subsequent announcement was the truth or a cover story and whether Col. William Blanchard’s order to Haut to distribute the flying saucer press was the result of some error or misunderstanding. Haut told me, “Very definitely no,” Blanchard did not make a mistake. “I’m sure Blanchard saw parts of the material.”

The debris of whatever came from the sky was scattered over a remote ranch about 135 kilometers northwest of Roswell. It was first spotted by rancher Mac Brazell, who was out on horseback July 3 inspecting the aftermath of an intense thunderstorm the night before. He picked up some of the baffling material and rode to see his closest neighbors, the Proctors, eight miles away. 

“Now I’d say it looked like plastic. But back then we didn’t have plastic,” said Loretta Proctor, who was 85 when I spoke with her during my New Mexico visit. 

Proctor, who died in 2013, said the material was tannish-brown with a purplish section containing figures. While extremely flexible, she said it couldn’t be burned or broken, even with hardy ranch tools. 

A mother of eight who drove a school bus over dirt roads for nearly 20 years, Proctor bristled at skeptics who portrayed Brazell and her family as confused, naïve country bumpkins. She pointed out the U.S. military “has told at least three different stories” about what crashed next to her ranch. 

The Pentagon’s latest version, released in 1994, said the crash was part of Project Mogul, an attempt to develop balloons that would fly at a constant high altitude to conduct acoustic monitoring of expected Soviet nuclear blasts. 

Glenn Dennis was a young mortician in Roswell in 1947. He believes the air force may have found alien bodies in the New Mexico desert as he received several phone calls from the Roswell base July 8 asking about acquiring child-size caskets and about preserving tissue in a body that had been out in the sun for a few days. He told me he was transporting a slightly injured enlisted man back to the base hospital later that day and saw strange debris in a slightly ajar door in the rear of a field ambulance and an unprecedented level of security inside the base hospital. He spotted a friend, who he described as a deeply religious nurse, in a corridor holding a towel to her face. 

“She screamed at me, ‘Glenn, get out as fast as you can!'” Dennis recounted. Moments later, he says he was threatened by an army captain who told him not to start rumors and if he mentioned what had happened, “somebody will be picking your bones out of the sand.” 

The following day he had lunch with the nurse from the base. He said she told him that she had been called in to take dictation in a makeshift autopsy theater that began with the words “crash bag, two small mutilated bodies.” Dennis said the convent-educated medical professional was nearly in shock as she sketched a four-fingered alien with a face remarkably similar to the big-eyed slit-mouthed creature that decades later became ubiquitous on T-shirts, key chains and coffee cups. Dennis said when he tried to ring her back at the base later that afternoon, she had vanished. Later in the week he was told she was no longer assigned to the base, and he never heard from her again.

“She asked me to take a secret oath never to reveal her name,” said Dennis, who was 73 when I spoke with him. “So I never did.” He died in 2015.

People’s recollections of events can change over time and be affected by things they hear, but I have encountered thousands of people during my half century as a journalist and believe I have developed a decent ability to detect when an interviewee is evasive, exaggerating or lying. Haut, Brazell and Dennis came across as forthright as any individuals I have interviewed.

Nonetheless, after decades of research, UFO investigators have failed to produce a smoking gun proving that aliens crashed at Roswell. There is one tantalizing piece of evidence, perhaps not a smoking gun, that may have been staring skeptics in the face for decades.

A few months before I showed up in Roswell in 1999, there was a digital enhancement of an AP photograph in the July 8, 1947 Ft. Worth Star-Telegram showing Air Force Brigadier General Roger Ramey and Col. Thomas DuBose posing next to pieces of a radar reflector from a weather balloon. In the general’s hand is what appears to be a telegram, which was previously unreadable. Various experts examining the digital enhancement pieced together unencrypted phrases from the teletype print that they contend include “Roswell NMEX,” “victims,” “emergency powers,” “weather balloons,” “story” and “disk.”  

Skeptics say some of those words are more likely people seeing what they wanted to see and the telegram could have been a news dispatch, rather than a military message.

The library of the University of Texas at Arlington says there is a $10,000 reward offered by a private individual for the “first person or group/lab that can provide a definitive read of the Ramey memo.” (E-mail: rameymemo@gmail.com if you have success).

“No one has collected the reward,” Kevin Randle, a member of the library’s research team about the memo, tells VOA. 

“We did a complete new scan of the [photograph’s] negative just before COVID but that didn’t real any new details,” says Randle, a retired military officer and author of books about UFOs and the Roswell incident. 

Another member of the research team, Brenda McClurkin, who was the head of the library’s special collections and archives, concurs. 

“Regardless of all the advances in technology the mystery still prevails,” she says.

Steve Herman is VOA’s chief national correspondent. He researched the Roswell Incident in 1999 while working for the Discovery Channel.   
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Fresh from a meeting with China’s top diplomat and a U.N. Security Council session regarding Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Central and South Asia next week for international talks that will put him in the same room as his Chinese and Russian counterparts.

The State Department announced late Thursday that Blinken would travel to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan before going to India for a meeting of the Group of 20 foreign ministers from the world’s largest industrialized and developing countries, including China and Russia.

The trip comes as tensions have soared between the U.S. and Russia and between the U.S. and China over Russia’s war in Ukraine and Chinese assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific. All three countries are competing fiercely to outdo each other in global influence.

U.S. officials have been tight-lipped about the prospects for Blinken having sit-down talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang or Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in New Delhi. But all three will be present in the Indian capital for the G-20 meeting. The State Department has said only that no meetings are scheduled.

The last time the group met — in Bali, Indonesia, in 2022 — Blinken held extensive talks with China’s then-foreign minister, Wang Yi, that led to a summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November.

And Wang, who has since been promoted, met with Blinken last weekend on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the first high-level talks since the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon and Blinken postponed a much-anticipated trip to Beijing.

A meeting between Blinken and Qin, who was formerly China’s ambassador to the U.S., would be their first in Qin’s current capacity.

The broader G-20 meeting is expected to focus on food and energy security, especially for developing countries, which have been hit by fallout from the Ukraine conflict. In Bali, a number of nations that have not outright condemned Russia for the war expressed deep concern about its impact on the prices and supply of food and fuel.

Before traveling to Delhi, Blinken will visit the Kazakh capital of Astana for talks with leaders there as well as a meeting of the so-called C5+1 group, made up of the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and the United States.

At that meeting, he will stress the U.S. “commitment to the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Central Asian countries,” the State Department said in a statement that mirrors the wording it has been using to support Ukraine against Russia.

Blinken will then go to Tashkent for talks with Uzbek officials.

 
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North Korea said it fired four strategic cruise missiles Thursday, continuing its rapid pace of launches, as it blasted the United States and its allies for escalating military tensions.

The four Hwasal-2 cruise missiles flew 2,000 kilometers in about two hours and 50 minutes before hitting a “preset target” in the sea off North Korea’s east coast, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

“The drill clearly demonstrated once again the war posture of the DPRK nuclear combat force bolstering up in every way its deadly nuclear counterattack capability against the hostile forces,” KCNA added, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Although South Korea and Japan typically issue alerts when North Korea launches missiles, they did not do so Thursday, raising the question of whether they detected the cruise missile exercise.

Later Friday, South Korea’s military disputed North Korea’s claim about the cruise missiles, without specifying what portion it believed was inaccurate.

“There is a difference between what South Korea-U.S. reconnaissance surveillance assets identified and what North Korea announced,” read a statement from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We are closely analyzing related matters in cooperation with the United States,” the statement added.

Cruise missiles typically fly at lower altitudes than ballistic missiles and are therefore harder for other countries to track and potentially intercept.

North Korea claims its cruise missiles are nuclear-capable. However, it is not clear whether it has built warheads small enough to be carried on such missiles.

Thursday’s cruise missile launch comes days after North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile — its ninth ICBM launch since the beginning of last year.

Even as it bolsters its defenses, North Korea has expressed outrage at the United States and its regional allies for expanding their own military activity.

In a statement Friday in KCNA, a North Korean Foreign Affairs Ministry official said the only way to prevent a “vicious cycle of escalating military tension” is for the United States to halt its military drills and deployment of advanced weaponry to the peninsula.

“The U.S. should bear in mind that if it persists in its hostile and provocative practices against the DPRK despite the latter’s repeated protest and warning, it can be regarded as a declaration of war against the DPRK,” said Kwon Jong Gun, the director general of the ministry’s U.S. Affairs Department.

On Thursday, the United States and South Korea announced they held a tabletop exercise at the Pentagon that focused on the possibility of North Korea using a nuclear weapon.

The drill was followed by a visit to a U.S. Navy base in the southeastern U.S. state of Georgia where key U.S. nuclear submarines are based, according to a joint statement.

The discussion-based exercise, known as a TTX, was meant to assure South Korean leaders of the U.S. defense commitment amid North Korea’s rapid nuclear weapons buildup.

“Given the DPRK’s recent aggressive nuclear policy and advancements in nuclear capabilities, the TTX scenario focused on the possibility of the DPRK’s use of nuclear weapons,” the joint statement said.

The U.S. side reaffirmed that “any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its Allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.”

Washington also vowed to “continue to field flexible nuclear forces suited to deterring regional nuclear conflict, including the capability to forward deploy strategic bombers, dual-capable fighter aircraft and nuclear weapons to the region.”

The United States and South Korea are discussing the possible deployment of a U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to South Korea next month, the Yonhap news agency reported Friday.

If agreed, the carrier would make a port call in South Korea and participate in the allies’ upcoming Freedom Shield joint military drill, Yonhap reported.

On Wednesday, U.S., South Korean, and Japanese warships participated in a ballistic missile defense drill, a relatively rare display of trilateral defense cooperation that has become more frequent as North Korea becomes more aggressive.

In a statement last week, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, vowed that her country will use the Pacific Ocean as a “firing range” if the U.S. and its allies continue their hostile actions.
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