Today's national story

Portland launches all-hands effort to curb fentanyl

What happened?
Oregon, Portland, and Multnomah County jointly declared a 90-day state of emergency for central Portland on Tuesday to tackle the city's fentanyl crisis. Leaders and first responders will work together to connect fentanyl users with treatment resources and crack down on drug sales.

Who said what?
"Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly addictive," Gov. Tina Kotek (D) said. There is "tremendous value" in "bringing leaders from different disciplines in a room" to forge a solution, added Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler.

The commentary
"Many cities are struggling" with fentanyl fallout, but Portland also faces legalized public drug use, The New York Times reported. That fueled "homeless encampments and crime," tarnishing "one of the most desirable places to live" in the U.S. Wheeler is "eager to reverse the unsavory narrative that still haunts Portland," despite big drops in crime and violence, Courtney Vaughn wrote at the Portland Mercury.

What next?
"The emergency declaration seems unlikely to draw much political pushback," the Times reported, but Kotek faces "a bigger dispute" as she pushes to roll back a 2020 voter-approved drug legalization law.

Today's SCIENCE Story

Moths don't actually love a flame, study finds

What happened?
People have been wondering for hundreds of years why moths are drawn to flames. It turns out they aren't, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. Instead of flying toward bright lights, moths and other insects use dorsal sensors to fly perpendicular to them, and when the light source is a candle or headlights instead of the sun, they flutter in circles or upside-down and sometimes crash.

Who said what?
"For millions of years, insects oriented themselves by sensing that the sky is light, the ground is dark," Harvard entomologist Avalon Owens told The Associated Press. Once humans harnessed fire and invented artificial lights, insects developed "a navigational problem," said University of North Carolina biologist Tyson Hedrick.

What next?
This research could help minimize the "collateral damage" from bug zappers and light pollution, but it only explains what happens when insects are already close to artificial light, Peter Oboyski at the Essig Museum of Entomology told Business Insider. "Why are they drawn to the light from further distances" is "a much harder question to answer."

It's not all bad

Five children born deaf can now hear after participating in a novel gene therapy trial. The kids have an inherited mutation of the OTOF gene, but researchers believe the success of the gene therapy in their cases "really opens the door to developing other treatments for different kinds of genetic deafness," said Zheng-Yi Chen, a professor at Harvard Medical School. The six children in the trial had a harmless virus containing part of OTOF's sequence injected into their cochlea.

Under the radar

Shark populations still declining despite finning bans

Efforts to protect marine life are expanding rapidly, and one of the most consequential conservation pushes has been to ban the finning of sharks â€” cutting off the fin and throwing the shark back to die. But while numerous countries have enacted legislation to save the ocean's apex predators, new evidence suggests the legislation may be making the situation worse.Â

Many of the finning bans took effect in the early 2010s. However, even as these regulations were being enacted, shark deaths from finning "increased from at least 76 to 80 million sharks between 2012 and 2019," the study found. Around 25 million of these deaths were from protected species, according to the study.Â

"Despite myriad regulations intended to curb shark overfishing, the total number of sharks being killed by fisheries each year is not decreasing. If anything, it's slightly increasing," Darcy Bradley, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy and co-author of the study, told Forbes.Â

Why is this happening? It "may be due in part to the increased availability of sharks resulting from anti-finning regulations,"Â Carleton University scientist Laurenne Schiller, another co-author of the study, told National Geographic.

There is a glimmer of hope. The study found that "the more accountable a government is to its citizens ... the fewer sharks died as a result of fishing in its waters," The Washington Post reported. The overfishing of sharks is "not an intractable problem," Boris Worm, a biologist at Dalhousie University, told the Post. "It's something that's very fixable. It's very doable."

On this day

January 31, 1865

Congress passes the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in the U.S. The amendment passed in the House by a 119-56 vote after passing in the Senate the prior year. Most states ratified the amendment in the months after its passage, though it would continue to be ratified by states throughout the Reconstruction Era.

TODAYâ€™S newspaperS

'Far right sees a secret agent, not a pop star'

The U.S. political standoff at the U.S.-Mexico border features prominently on Wednesday's front pages. The New York Times also dips into the conservative conspiracy theories surrounding Taylor Swift, the NFL and President Joe Biden's reelection campaign. "Far right sees a secret agent, not pop star," the Times says. Swift "is driving the movement behind Donald J. Trump bonkers."

â–ºÂ See the newspaper front pages

Tall tale

Nappy ending â€¦

A Japanese man who became a little too relaxed in a massage chair fell asleep and didn't wake up until the store was closed and he was locked inside. Once he realized what had happened, the man started posting photos of the dark store on social media. When the police arrived, probably because he triggered an alarm, The Independent reported, the officers patted him down to make sure he wasn't a shoplifter, then set him free.

Later today

Problems are part of the human condition, but not all of them are equal in weight. The Week will almost certainly be dipping into the zany conspiracy theories surrounding Taylor Swift, but this evening's newsletter will also dig into the very real problem of maternal mortality among Black women in the United States.

Thanks for reading,
Peter

Morning Report was written and edited by Catherine Garcia, Justin Klawans, Harold Maass and Peter Weber, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.

Image credits, from top: Olga Maltseva / AFP / Getty Images;Â John Moore / Getty Images;Â Zffoto / Getty Images;Â Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images

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