10 things you need to know today: April 21, 2023

1. SpaceX Starship rocket explodes during 1st test flight

SpaceX's giant Starship rocket exploded Thursday, minutes after liftoff for its first test flight. The nearly 400-foot rocket, which Elon Musk's space-flight company hopes will one day transport astronauts to the moon and later Mars, wasn't carrying any people or satellites. Several of the 33 main engines failed to fire as the rocket left the launch pad in Texas and climbed 24 miles before exploding four minutes into its flight. Musk tweeted that SpaceX had "learned a lot" from the "exciting test launch," and would put the lessons to use for the next flight in a few months. "To get this far is amazing," SpaceX's Kate Tice said on the livestream. "Everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake."

The Associated Press

2. NATO chief makes surprise visit to Ukraine

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday made a surprise visit to Kyiv, his first since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Stoltenberg met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and paid tribute to Ukrainian soldiers who have died trying to drive out Russian forces. Zelensky said the support that citizens and leaders in NATO countries have shown for Ukraine demonstrated that "it is time to take the appropriate decision" and admit Ukraine into the Western military alliance. Stoltenberg said the country's NATO bid would be on the agenda of the next NATO summit in July, and he invited Zelensky to participate. "Ukraine's future is in the Euro-Atlantic family, Ukraine's future is in NATO, all allies agree on that," he said.

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DW The Washington Post

3. House Republicans pass bill seeking sports transgender ban

The Republican-controlled House on Thursday passed a bill seeking to bar transgender athletes from competing in women's and girls' school sports. The Senate, controlled by a narrow majority of Democrats, is not expected to take up the legislation, and even if it did, the White House says President Biden would veto it. The House bill would bar transgender women and girls from playing on teams corresponding to their gender identity. The legislation would change federal law to make sex "recognized based solely on a person's reproductive biology and genetics at birth" for determining compliance in athletics under Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in education and school programs that receive federal funding.

CNN

4. Washington state lawmakers approve semi-automatic rifle ban

Washington's state legislature on Thursday passed a ban on dozens of semi-automatic rifles. Gov. Jay Inslee (D) is expected to sign the bill into law. Inslee said after the bill passed that Washington "will not accept gun violence as normal." The high-powered guns modeled after military rifles were banned nationwide in 1994, but the federal law expired in 2004. Several attempts to renew it have failed. The Washington law would prohibit the sale, distribution, manufacture, and import of AR-15s, AK-47s, and more than 50 similar rifles. In recent years, these weapons have been used in a series of deadly mass shootings in the United States. Republican state lawmakers opposed the restrictions, saying they violate gun rights protected by the state and federal constitutions.

The Seattle Times The Associated Press

5. BuzzFeed shuts down its news division

BuzzFeed announced Thursday that it is closing its news division and shifting its news coverage to HuffPost, which the company acquired from Verizon in 2020. The digital media company said the change was part of a plan to reduce its workforce by 180 positions, or 15 percent, in its second round of job cuts. The latest cuts will affect people in its business, content, technology, and administration offices, CEO Jonah Peretti told staff in an email, according to Reuters. BuzzFeed cut 12 percent of its staff in a first round of cuts in December. Peretti said the company had "faced more challenges than I can count" during the pandemic and the economic downturn for digital advertising that followed.

Reuters Variety

6. Arbitrators: MyPillow's Mike Lindell must pay computer expert who disproved vote fraud

A private arbitration panel has told MyPillow founder and prominent election denier Mike Lindell to pay computer forensics expert Robert Zeidman $5 million, after determining that Zeidman had met Lindell's challenge to show his data did not prove there was voter fraud in the 2020 election. Lindell offered the prize in his "Prove Mike Wrong" challenge at an August 2021 "cyber symposium" where he claimed his data proved that China interfered in the election. Zeidman, a 63-year-old Trump voter from Nevada, looked at Lindell's data and concluded that it didn't prove voter fraud and didn't even show any connection to the 2020 vote. Lindell Management, which created the contest, refused to pay him, so Zeidman appealed to the arbitration panel.

The Washington Post

7. U.S. reportedly positions troops for possible Sudan embassy evacuation

The Pentagon is putting military forces in place in Djibouti to be ready to evacuate staff from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum as fighting intensifies in Sudan's capital, multiple news outlets reported Thursday. At least one of the estimated 19,000 U.S. citizens in Sudan has died in the conflict as army forces led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the African nation's de facto leader, fight the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group headed by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dalago. Intense fighting in Khartoum has left much of the city's population of five million stranded, including embassy staff now sheltering in place at the U.S. compound. Sporadic fighting continued during a brief cease-fire this week, but some civilians managed to flee the city.

Politico CBS News

8. Conservative talk show host Larry Elder enters GOP presidential race

Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder entered the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, saying it is his "patriotic duty" to serve the country. Elder, who ran unsuccessfully in California's 2021 recall campaign, announced his bid on Tucker Carlson's Fox News program. He is a longshot in a race dominated by former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who hasn't officially announced he's running. The field also includes former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and probably Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is exploring a bid. On the Democratic side, President Biden is expected to formally announce his bid for reelection as soon as next week, The Associated Press reports.

The New York Times The Associated Press

9. Greenland, Antarctica ice sheets melting at disastrous pace

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, home to nearly all of the Earth's freshwater ice, are melting at a pace that has increased six-fold over the past 30 years, according to a report published Thursday in the journal Earth System Science Data. The melting, driven by record levels of pollution that pushed up global temperatures, melted enough ice to make an ice cube 12 miles high. The seven years with the greatest melting of the ice sheets have occurred in the last decade. "This is a huge amount of ice," study lead author Inès Otosaka told CNN. "This is very worrying, of course, because 40 percent of the global population lives in coastal areas," and the melting freshwater ice causes sea levels to rise globally.

CNN Earth System Science Data

10. Crowds descend on remote Australia town to see rare solar eclipse

Thousands of people traveled to the remote town of Exmouth in Western Australia to watch a rare total solar eclipse. The sky darkened for 60 seconds as the moon blocked out the sun, casting a 25-mile-wide shadow. Areas across the Asia-Pacific region could see a partial eclipse. It was first visible in the Indian Ocean around sunrise, and last over the Pacific at sunset. People in Western Australia, Timor-Leste, and West Papua had the best vantage points. Exmouth, a reef-side tourist town with a population of under 3,000, was filled with tourists and scientists. One visitor from the United States, identified by the BBC only as Henry, said the experience was "mind-blowing."

BBC News