January 6, 2023

The Biden administration is proposing tougher standards for a deadly air pollutant, saying that reducing soot from tailpipes, smokestacks and wildfires could prevent thousands of premature deaths a year. A proposal released Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency would set maximum levels of 9 to 10 micrograms of fine particle pollution per cubic meter of air, down from 12 micrograms set a decade ago under the Obama administration. The standard for particle pollution, more commonly known as soot, was left unchanged by former President Donald Trump, who overrode a scientific recommendation for a lower standard in his final days in

U.S. health officials on Friday approved a closely watched Alzheimer’s drug that’s been shown to modestly slow the early stages of the brain-robbing disease, albeit with potential safety risks that doctors and patients will have to weigh carefully. The drug, Leqembi, is the first that’s been convincingly shown to slow the decline in memory and thinking that defines Alzheimer’s by targeting the disease’s underlying biology. The Food and Drug Administration approved it specifically for patients with mild or early cases of dementia. An uncommon success Leqembi, from Japan’s Eisai and its U.S. partner Biogen, is a rare success in a

Prison guards in Myanmar on Friday shot and killed a political prisoner and wounded more than 60 other people – including eight critically – after inmates protested their beating of the victim a day earlier, Radio Free Asia has learned. The incident at Pathein Prison is the latest in a string of more than 15 violent crackdowns on protests by political prisoners – which authorities termed “riots” – in the nearly two years since Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup. On Thursday night, guards discovered a mobile phone in the possession of Wai Yan Phyo, a prisoner of conscience