What happened
The Dutch cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak docked off Spain’s Canary Islands yesterday so passengers could be evacuated to their home countries. They included all 17 American passengers from the MV Hondius, one of whom tested positive for the virus yesterday while another developed mild symptoms, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department said last night. One of five French passengers also tested positive after showing symptoms on the flight home, the French government said. Three passengers died since April 11 and at least five others have fallen ill with hantavirus symptoms. 

Who said what
Hantavirus is a rare and deadly virus usually spread by inhaling rodent droppings, but the Andes strain found in the infected passengers can spread through close human contact, the World Health Organization said. “This is not another Covid,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said yesterday. “And the risk to the public is low.” 

What next?
The U.S. passengers are arriving in Omaha this morning, where most will be monitored at the specialized National Quarantine Unit while the one who tested positive will be transferred to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, HHS said.

What happened
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday presided over the “most ‌scaled-back Victory Day parade in years,” Reuters said. Afterward, he told reporters he thought the Ukraine war was “coming to an end.” President Donald Trump on Friday said Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed to exchange 1,000 war prisoners and pause the fighting through today to mark the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

Who said what
Russia’s “markedly pared down” Victory Day parade “went forward amid veiled threats from Ukraine,” Radio Free Europe said. Zelenskyy “issued a mocking statement” beforehand “saying he was authorizing the Kremlin parade to be held” free from attacks. If Putin’s parade was “subdued” because he “feared a long-range Ukrainian drone strike” in Red Square, that’s “one more sign that the tide may be turning against Russia after four long years of death,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. 

What next?
Russia’s Ukraine offensive “has slowed to a crawl” and its “challenges on the battlefield complicate the narrative of imminent victory” Putin is “selling” Trump to convince him Kyiv needs to cede land in U.S. peace talks, The New York Times said. At its current rate, Moscow would need “more than three decades to seize full control of the Donbas.”

Scientists studying a distant region of the solar system near Pluto have discovered the unexpected: a very small celestial body with its own atmosphere. It was previously believed that such tiny objects located that far from the sun were incapable of having their own atmospheres, and the new finding could unlock insights into planets millions of miles away.

The 310-mile-wide world, officially designated 2002 XV93, is classified as a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) because it resides farther from the sun than the outermost planet, Neptune. Its characteristics were described by Japanese astronomers in a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

Though the icy body was identified many years ago, only now has it been observed to be “swaddled in a layer of air,” said The New York Times. This atmosphere appears to be “roughly 5 million to 10 million times thinner than Earth’s robust atmosphere and about 50 to 100 times thinner than Pluto's tenuous atmosphere,” said Reuters. 

At the edge of the solar system, any air that does “not float away would be expected to turn into ice and fall to the surface,” said the Times. So the discovery of this mini TNO’s atmosphere some 3.5 billion miles from the sun suggests that “some small ​icy bodies in the outer solar system may not be completely inactive or unchanging,” said lead study researcher Ko Arimatsu, the head of Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory. The finding indicates that “even in a distant, cold world, there ​are dynamisms we haven’t imagined,” said study co-author Junichi Watanabe, the director of Japan’s Koyama Space Science Institute.