What happened
Scotland’s parliament has voted down legislation that would have allowed assisted dying for some terminally ill adults. MSPs rejected the proposal 69 votes to 57 – with one abstention – following a late-night debate at Holyrood.

The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, introduced by Liberal Democrat MSP Liam McArthur (pictured above), sought to permit mentally competent adults who were expected to die within six months to request medical help to end their lives.

Who said what
This was a “knife-edge” vote, said Andrew Learmonth and Rebecca McCurdy in The Herald, which followed “one of the most intense and emotionally charged debates in the Parliament’s history”.

McArthur had urged colleagues to support the proposal, saying it would give people “more choice, more dignity and more compassion at the end of their lives”. But opponents warned of potential risks to vulnerable people. Independent MSP Jeremy Balfour said passing the bill would mean “opening a Pandora’s box” and argued that there could be “no meaningful protection against coercion”.

What next?
While the bill has fallen, the issue is not settled, according to analysts. Holyrood could consider new assisted dying legislation in the future.

What happened
A Utah mother who wrote a children’s book about grief following her husband’s death has been convicted of his murder. Kouri Richins spiked her husband Eric’s drink with five times the fatal dose of fentanyl in 2022 after opening multiple life insurance policies on him without his knowledge.

Who said what
“She wanted to leave Eric Richins, but did not want to leave his money,” said prosecutor Brad Bloodworth. The trial revealed that Richins was $4.5 million (£3.4 million) in debt, and the prosecution claimed that the murder was motivated by her desire to inherit her husband’s estate and start a new life with a man with whom she was having an affair. 

Richins (pictured above with her late husband Eric) did not testify in her defence, but her lawyers argued that the prosecution had not proven its case. “They want you to make inferences based on paper-thin evidence. They want you to do their job for them. Tell them ‘no’,” defence attorney Wendy Lewis told the jury.

What next?
Richins faces a term of 25 years to life in prison when she is sentenced in May.

Nasa crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to change the space rock’s trajectory in 2022. Now, scientific observations have shown that the mission had more far-reaching effects than previously thought, affecting both the struck asteroid and the larger one that it orbits. This could be a promising answer to the question of how to protect the planet from future cosmic threats.

Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) spacecraft was intentionally crashed into a small asteroid called Dimorphos in September 2022. The goal of the mission was to “prove that if a killer space rock ever threatened Earth in the future, humans could deflect it”, said The New York Times. The hit was quite the success, altering not only the orbit of Dimorphos around a larger asteroid, Didymos, but also the orbit of the pair around the Sun, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.

While shifting the orbit by just 150 milliseconds per circle around the Sun may seem insignificant, “given enough time, even a tiny change can grow to a significant deflection”, said Thomas Statler, the lead scientist for solar system small bodies at Nasa, in a release.

Nasa, in a similar guardian vein, is also developing its Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which “could spot dark, risky asteroids that have remained nearly invisible from Earth-based observatories”, said CNN. Being able to identify potential threats in space along with knowing how to change their orbit goes “hand in hand with how space agencies envision protecting the Earth”.