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For more than five decades, the Clean Air Act has prevented millions of premature deaths, hospitalizations, and lost work and school days. By one official reckoning in 2011, the act’s limits on harmful pollution has benefited the U.S. economy to the tune of $2 trillion by 2020, in contrast with $65 billion in costs to implement regulations.

But now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is abruptly changing how it enforces at least parts of the Clean Air Act by not calculating the economic benefits of some regulations. The seemingly inevitable result is that Americans will soon breathe noticeably dirtier air and see worse health outcomes, experts say.

“I don’t think anyone wants to go back to … not being able to see anything,” says Camille Pannu, an environmental law expert at Columbia University.

The EPA will no longer consider the dollar value of lives saved or other ill effects averted by placing limits on fine particulate matter with the designation PM_2.5 or ozone emissions in at least some cases, the New York Times reported on Monday. Instead, the agency will only calculate the cost to industry to enforce the act’s rules.

To get a sense of why this matters, it is important to understand what ozone and PM_2.5 do to our body. PM_2.5 describes particles that have a diameter smaller than 2.5 microns. They are tiny enough to enter the bloodstream, lodge deeply in the lungs and cross the blood-brain barrier. PM_2.5 has been liked to diabetes, obesity, dementia, cancer, low birth weight, and asthma. Ozone, a key ingredient of smog, is particularly dangerous for people with asthma and other lung diseases, especially children.

The Clean Air Act was enacted precisely because the health effects of bad air are population-wide and difficult to evaluate. In other words, without estimating costs, even imperfectly, “everything is costly, and nothing is worth regulating,” Pannu says.

In a document reviewed by the New York Times, an EPA official cited language that argued that how the dollar value of the benefits of the regulation was calculated “provided the public with false precision and confidence.” Yet experts point out that that is part of the point: the act’s authors “wanted to have EPA regulate even if the science was uncertain,” says Lisa Heinzerling, an environmental law expert at Georgetown University.

Different presidential administrations have taken distinct approaches to totaling up the value of those benefits, but the science underlying these estimates is well established.

For decades, researchers have compared places with higher and lower levels of pollutants and have looked at differences in premature deaths and other negative health outcomes while controlling for other factors that could affect those numbers. Those analyses are then combined with economic studies that estimate the “value of a statistical life” by looking at, for example, the amount of lost wages incurred when a parent stays home with a child who is experiencing an asthma attack. Because this work has been going on for so long, it means researchers can feel confident in the value they arrive at, says Rachel Rothschild, an environmental law expert at the University of Michigan.

Independent analyses have also been conducted that showed PM_2.5’s “harms were so significant” and “the benefits [of the Clean Air Act] were so enormous” that they far outweighed the costs of implementing the law, Rothschild says. The Clean Air Act’s regulations “pay for themselves; they pay for the entire EPA,” Heinzerling agrees.

A 2016 analysis from the University of Chicago found that people in the U.S. had gained 336 million life-years, a measure of how long people are expected to live in a healthy condition, since amendments to the Clean Air Act were passed in 1970. And in 2011, the EPA estimated that updates to the act made in 1990 would prevent more than 230,000 early deaths, 75,000 cases of bronchitis, 120,000 emergency room visits, and 17 million lost workdays by 2020. About 85 percent of these benefits stem from deaths avoided because of reductions in particular matter alone.

Estimates of cost are also inherently uncertain. And according to Rothschild, past EPA analyses have almost always found the agency overestimated those costs. She and others expect this move to be challenged in court.

It is also unclear how widely this new policy may be applied. Documents cited by the New York Times’ reporting suggest it will apply to proposals from the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, with the consequences including repeals of limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The Times also cited similar language to what the EPA emails mentioned in a regulatory impact analysis posted on Monday concerning limits on nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide from combustion turbines at gas-burning power plants. Such plants are in demand at data centers to fuel their considerable power needs.

The EPA is legally required to provide its rationale and any data it is relying on to make such decisions, Heinzerling says.

In a statement in response to detailed questions from Scientific American, an EPA spokesperson said the agency is continuing to consider the impacts of PM_2.5 and ozone on human health, adding that “the agency will not be monetizing the impacts at this time.”

“EPA is fully committed to its core mission of protect human health and the environment,” the statement continued.

The EPA spokesperson also noted that the previous Biden administration did not calculate the value of health benefits for some rules under the Clean Air Act, including for PM_2.5. Rothschild says that some past administrations may have not quantified the benefits of every proposed regulation—particularly those that were very difficult to calculate. But, she says, “the health benefits from reducing particulate matter and ozone are some of the easiest to quantify and monetize out of all types of environmental pollution.”

“It’s disappointing that the EPA isn’t interested in making the best decision for the public,” Rothschild says.

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On Instagram, Morgan also shared a photo of an X-ray that showed his fracture.

Piers Morgan apologizes to Jay-Z and Beyoncé after Jaguar Wright interview

According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, femoral shaft fractures usually require surgery and take between three and six months to completely heal.

“A broken femur is a serious injury that requires immediate medical care,” the Cleveland Clinic explains. “Broken femurs are treated with surgery and physical therapy. It can take months for your broken femur to heal. You can break your femur by being in a car crash, falling or being shot. Elderly people who are prone to injuries from falls can break their femurs.”The Mayo Clinic also notes that a hip replacement is a surgery to remove and replace damaged sections of the hip joint, and replacement parts “are usually made of metal, ceramic, and hard plastic.”

Piers Morgan doubles down on Duchess Meghan’s Oprah interview: ‘I still don’t’ believe her

Morgan currently serves as host of the online talk show “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” He previously hosted “Piers Morgan Live” on CNN and has held roles at British tabloids, including News of the World and The Sun. Morgan, who has stirred backlash over the years for his commentary on topics including Duchess Meghan, is also a former judge on “America’s Got Talent.”

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Around the world, governments are contending with falling birthrates. But the problem is more acute for China: Fewer babies mean fewer future workers to support a rapidly growing cohort of retirees. A worsening economy has made addressing the challenge even more difficult.

“China is facing a severe challenge posed by an extremely low fertility rate,” said Wu Fan, a professor of family policy at Nankai University in eastern China.

China’s top leaders have redoubled their efforts to try to boost the national birthrate enough to reverse the decline, something that demographers have said is probably impossible now that China has crossed a demographic threshold where its fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman has over a lifetime, is so low that its population is shrinking.

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has called for a “new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” entreating officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.” Local officials have responded with increasingly ham-handed measures to get citizens to have babies, including tracking women’s menstrual cycles and issuing guidelines to reduce abortions that are medically unnecessary.

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Despite sweeping efforts to boost births, China’s population has shrunk and aged for a fourth straight year as deaths again outnumbered births. Credit…Wu Hao/EPA, via Shutterstock

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Americans are proud of their country’s science prowess: a majority believe it is important for the U.S. to be a world leader in science, according to the Pew Research Center’s latest report on trust in science.

The number of people who hold this view is five percentage points higher than it was in 2023, the last time Pew asked the same question, according to data from more than 5,000 people surveyed in October 2025.

But people who voted Democratic in the 2024 presidential election tended to hold a very different view than Republican voters on whether the country is living up to its promise. Between 2023 and 2025, the proportion of Democrats who believe that the U.S. is losing ground in science compared with other countries jumped by 28 percentage points. About two-thirds of Democrats now hold this view.

Republicans are more positive about the country’s standing in science—a complete switch in sentiment since the last time Pew asked this question, says Brian Kennedy, one of the authors of the new report and a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. And the split between both groups is far wider than it was at previous times when Pew asked the same question in the past five years, he says.

In 2022 and 2023, the difference between Democratic and Republican opinion was “far more modest,” Kennedy says, with both groups responses’ within 7 percentage points of each other. “Now we see this much bigger difference between Republicans and Democrats in our relative standing in science compared to other countries.

Last year, the Trump administration cut federal funding for science. The administration slashed millions of dollars in grants for science across myriad disciplines and walked back its own research and regulations based on science, particularly in the areas of climate change, health, and medicine. Meanwhile, experts have warned of a “brain drain,” partly motivated by the administration’s strict immigration policies, with researchers choosing to study or live overseas instead of in the U.S.

Despite these cuts, the majority of Americans—84 percent—thought federal investments in science aimed at advancing knowledge were worthwhile. Republican voters, however, were more likely than their left-leaning peers to be open to private companies playing a key role in science, Kennedy says.

“One thing we’ve seen in our surveys over a number of years is that support for science funding is pretty widespread among both Republicans to Democrats,” he says. “This is a pretty consistent finding.”

Indeed, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have advanced several legislative efforts to claw back some of the targeted federal funding for science agencies.

Ultimately, the report shows that Americans’ trust in science and scientists remains broadly strong—but not as strong as it was before the COVID pandemic. During 2020 and 2021, public trust cratered. And while it has recovered somewhat, it remains lower than it was before that period.

“There’s a broader context of trust and confidence going on in society,” Kennedy says. Still, he points out that Pew survey participants have consistently ranked scientists among the most trustworthy groups in society for the past 10 years. “Scientists have consistently ranked toward the top with the military, while elected officials generally were ranked toward the bottom,” he says.

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Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers / Contributor via Getty Images

Amanda Montañez; Source: Do Americans Think the Country Is Losing or Gaining Ground in Science? Pew Research Center, January 15, 2026 (data)

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I’ll never forget the moment the nurse asked me, “Are you ready to hold your daughter?” With tears running down my cheeks, I nodded.

It was nearly six years ago that I became a father, and I can say without a doubt that being a dad has made me a more emotional and well-rounded person. I never used to cry at a sad movie—not even Bambi’s mom got me! Now, I’m probably sobbing at 50% of Bluey episodes.

I certainly wasn’t the type to acknowledge, let alone have, deep, introspective thoughts about my emotions. I still have room to grow in that department, but my 5- and 3-year-olds have helped me improve tenfold.

While we often discuss how parenthood impacts mothers, too little attention is given to fathers and the changes they, too, face as they enter this chapter of their lives.

One father who recently discussed the topic is rapper and fashion icon A$AP Rocky, who spoke about parenting, among other topics, during a recent lengthy interview with W Magazine.

How A$AP Rocky Says He’s Changed Since Becoming a Father

The New York City native rose up through the rap scene in the early 2010s, blending fashion, innovative music trends, and pure confidence into a highly successful multi-decade career. These days, the 37-year-old rapper, born Rakim Mayers, is in a new era: fatherhood.

The rapper, who shares three children with fellow musician Rihanna, said that becoming a dad has caused him to let his guard down.

“I am way more emotional,” he told W Magazine, adding that before kids, he was “probably cold-hearted.” 

But now? “I’m a loving kind of fella,” he shared.

This is a noticeable change from the guarded persona that once defined his music and public identity. Fatherhood, he said, opened doors he didn’t even know were closed.

However, that doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge. When asked what he’d do if someone tried to date his daughter, Rocky said, “I’m going to pray for them.”

Jokes aside, Rocky’s perspective reflects a bigger evolution that many fathers experience for the first times in their lives. I’m no exception to that.

How These Changes Reflect My Own Experience

I wouldn’t say that I was necessarily emotionally guarded. It’s more that becoming a parent has made me realize certain emotional traits about myself I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to otherwise.

For instance, I’ve always struggled with anxiety and, sometimes, a crippling need to be achieving something. Most people who know me well could tell you that. However, it was really put into a new perspective when I saw my children with my exact anxiety mannerisms.

I’m not exaggerating when I say exact. It was like going into a time machine to see a 3-foot-tall me having the same nervous reaction. This has helped me prioritize identifying when anxiety is taking over, or ideally, even before it gets to that point.

And conversely, I’m now more able to connect with my daughter and son. When I can see them going through that emotional anguish, I tell them I know how those butterflies in the stomach or weight on the chest feels. I’ve been there, and that’s OK, I say.

This is not a self-awareness I would have had without children.

So while I cry at movies more, and can help my kids work through tough emotional moments, becoming a father has made even more of a difference than that. It feels like my whole DNA has changed.

It makes sense, according to Zachary Barnes, PhD, a father of two and associate professor of literacy who researches self-regulation in children at Austin Peay State University. He adds that we need more fathers speaking up about the emotional demand of fatherhood.

“Being a father literally unlocks a part of your brain that deals with attachment. That is such a powerful thing,” says Dr. Barnes. “The moment I was able to hold my sons for the first time, I cried. And parenthood is all about meeting the emotional needs of your children. You are now practicing empathy every single day, and that will make you more emotional.”

How Other Fathers Can Embrace Their Own Emotions

Many fathers are probably caught off guard, experiencing this flood of emotions for the first time. I know I was. I did expect it to be a world-changing experience. But I definitely wasn’t expecting the waterworks. And I didn’t expect to feel the level of foundational pride and joy with every life stage my kids enter.

Aneal Bharath, an educational psychologist, former school counselor, and child protection officer, says that if fatherhood has “cracked you open in ways you didn’t expect, you’re not broken.”

“You’re changing,” Bharath says. “That emotional intensity isn’t weakness; it’s evidence that you care. Permit yourself to feel it. You’re not just raising children, you are reshaping what fatherhood looks like for them when it’s their turn, if they so choose.”

Like myself, Dr. Barnes says there are certain videos or TV episodes that he just can’t watch the same way now as a parent. The same is true with my social media habits.

Now, more than probably half of the accounts I follow online are dad content. That isn’t just for the funny and relatable TikToks, but also for the content creators who open up and discuss the hardships that come with day-to-day fatherhood.

“When we see those with big platforms talking about it, that is extremely helpful,” says Dr. Barnes. “I still think it can be hard for us fathers to talk about how we are feeling about fatherhood. The ups and downs. The happiest moments when your children walk for the first time, and the scary moments when you have to rush your kid to the hospital because of how sick they are. These experiences are all training your emotional capabilities.”

The emotional growth isn’t just a benefit for myself. Experts agree it’s also a huge gain for your family.

“That softer, more present, emotionally available version of you? That’s not a downgrade,” Bharath says. “That’s the dad your family actually needs.”

And it feels great to be the dad your children need. After all, that’s what it’s all about, right?

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A$AP Rocky. Photo: GettyImages/Mike Coppola

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Hmmmm … Is this what fear in politics looks like inside? Do sycophants live in fear?

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The president escalated his drive to take charge of the Danish territory, targeting Denmark and seven other European countries with a 10 percent rate.

President Trump announced in a social media post on Saturday morning his latest strategy to get control of Greenland: He is slapping new tariffs on a bloc of European nations until they come to the negotiating table to sell Greenland.

Greenland is a territory of Denmark, which will be hit with a 10 percent tariff on all goods sent to the United States beginning on Feb. 1, Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post. Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, and Finland, fellow NATO members that have expressed solidarity with Denmark in its refusal to yield to Mr. Trump’s demands, will also be subject to the 10 percent tariff. If those nations do not relent, he added, the rate will increase to 25 percent on June 1, “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The leaders of Europe reacted Saturday with unified outrage to Mr. Trump’s latest coercions on the massive island in the North Atlantic. So, too, did lawmakers in Washington, including some members of the president’s own party. And the abrupt announcement of new tariffs seemed to throw a trade deal Mr. Trump had struck with the European Union into serious doubt.

In his post, Mr. Trump argued that the United States needed to control Greenland as a bulwark against Chinese and Russian ambitions in the Arctic, although the United States already has the right to expand its military presence in Greenland under a 1951 agreement with Denmark.

The president’s new threat comes as the Supreme Court weighs overturning the legal authority that the president would probably use to impose these tariffs. The court is set to rule in the coming weeks on Mr. Trump’s use of an emergency law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the president has used to threaten tariffs at a whim against numerous countries over the past year.

If the court rules against Mr. Trump, he may not be able to impose tariffs like this.

The United States currently charges a 10 percent tariff on British imports and a 15 percent tariff on imports from the European Union, after striking limited trade deals with both governments last year. The new tariffs would presumably be imposed on top of that, and it remains to be seen how other trading partners would respond. Tariffs are paid by importers, not by the products’ country of origin, with the costs often passed on to American consumers.

Just one day ago, during a health care event at the White House, Mr. Trump mused publicly about doing something like this. “I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland,” he said, almost parenthetically.

A day later, the 445-word post he put up was striking in its language about American allies. It reiterated the worldview Mr. Trump has espoused for decades, which holds that the United States has been getting ripped off and that payback has been a long time coming.

“We have subsidized Denmark, and all of the Countries of the European Union, and others, for many years by not charging them Tariffs, or any other forms of remuneration,” he wrote. “Now, after Centuries, it is time for Denmark to give back — World Peace is at stake!”

He wrote about “all that we have done for them, including maximum protection, over so many decades.”

The post and its threat of new tariffs were a marked escalation in Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign, and European leaders reacted swiftly on Saturday.

President Emmanuel Macron of France wrote on social media, “No intimidation or threat will influence us — neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world when we are confronted with such situations.”

He added that “tariff threats are unacceptable” and that “Europeans will respond in a united and coordinated manner should they be confirmed. We will ensure that European sovereignty is upheld.”

The Swedish prime minister weighed in with a furious response, saying, “We won’t allow ourselves to be blackmailed. Denmark and Greenland alone decide questions that affect Denmark and Greenland.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said in a statement that “applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is completely wrong,” adding, “We will of course be pursuing this directly with the US administration.”

The leaders of Britain’s main opposition parties were unanimous in their condemnation of Saturday’s announcement. The Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, said that Mr. Trump was “completely wrong” and that the tariffs were a “terrible idea” for both the United States and Britain.

Nigel Farage, an ally of Mr. Trump whose populist right-wing Reform U.K. party leads Britain’s political polls, made a rare statement in opposition to the president’s policies on social media.

“We don’t always agree with the US government, and in this case, we certainly don’t. These tariffs will hurt us,” he wrote.

Lukas A. Lausen, the director of global trade at the Danish Confederation of Industry, said the tariffs would increase prices and cost jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.

Earlier this week, a delegation from Denmark and Greenland came to Washington to meet with officials from the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Little was achieved.

The Danish foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, said in a statement on Saturday that President Trump’s social media post “comes as a surprise” and that Denmark was in “close contact with the European Commission and our other partners on the issue.”

Mr. Trump’s post startled even Republicans in Washington, some of whom reacted publicly on Saturday.

Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said in a social media post that the move was “foolish policy” and he likened it to something President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would do. He added in an interview with CNN, “I feel like it’s incumbent on folks like me to speak up and say these threats and bullying of an ally are wrong.”

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Horses can smell human fear—and it changes their behavior.

That’s the takeaway of a rather unusual experiment that involved making horses smell material soaked in human sweat and observing what they did next. The findings were published today in PLOS One.

Horses exposed to samples of sweat from people who had had a scary experience appeared more afraid themselves: the animals were easily startled, hesitated to come up to the researchers, and became less likely to interact with unknown objects.

“Our emotions are central when interacting with horses,” says Plotine Jardat, lead author of the study and a horse behavior and welfare researcher at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment. “If your horse does not cooperate on an exercise you are proposing, maybe trying it another day when you feel differently can be a game changer.”

Researchers already knew that horses can respond to humans’ emotional cues, including facial expressions and tones of voice. But the new study went further by investigating whether horses could smell different emotions emanating from humans without those visual or oral cues.

In the experiment, a group of people with cotton pads under their armpits watched movie clips geared to produce a sense of joy; these included the dance scene in the film Singin’ in the Rain and the song “We Go Together” from the movie Grease. The researchers then asked the participants—armed with new cotton pads—to watch 20 minutes from the horror film Sinister to stimulate fear.

The sweat samples were then stapled into a custom muzzle for the horses to wear. To limit the stress on each test horse, an “audience horse” served as a witness to the behavior tests.

The researchers first measured how often a test horse would interact with the experimenter, depending on what it was smelling, both while it was being groomed and while the experimenter stood slightly apart from the animal. Horses that smelled the fear samples touched the experimenter less than those in a control group or those that smelled joyful sweat samples.

The team then tested the horses’ reactivity by opening an umbrella near a bucket of food. Once again, horses that smelled the fear sweat showed a different reaction than those that smelled anything else. Their physical reactions to being startled were stronger, and their heart rates were higher.

The last test involved presenting the horses with a novel object—a sculpture of sorts, made of linoleum, plastic and string. The researchers recorded how often a horse gazed at the object and how often the animal touched it. The horses in the fear group touched the novel object less often and stared at it from a distance more than their peers did.

Taken together, the horses’ reactions indicate they can sense fear from odor alone, the researchers conclude. What the study doesn’t answer is why horses can apparently do this: the ability could be a result of domestication, or it could stem from some underlying mammalian characteristic. But regardless, perhaps don’t go up to a horse immediately after watching a horror film.

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Camille Loiseau/500px via Getty Images

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Nasa is preparing to roll out its most powerful rocket yet before a mission to send astronauts around the moon and back again for the first time in more than 50 years.

The Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida as early as 6 February, taking its crew on a 685,000-mile round trip that will end about 10 days later with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

The flight will mark only the second test of Nasa’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the first with a crew onboard. The four astronauts will live and work in the Orion capsule, testing life support and communications systems and practising docking manoeuvres.

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire private astronaut sworn in as Nasa’s administrator in December, said on Thursday the mission was “probably one of the most important human spaceflight missions in the last half-century”.

It will be the second time in space for three Nasa astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the first for Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian astronaut. Koch will become the first woman, and Glover the first person of colour, to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

The astronauts will not land on the moon or enter lunar orbit, but will be the first to travel around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission follows an uncrewed test flight in 2022 and paves the way for Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts near the lunar south pole as early as next year.

“These are the kinds of days that we live for,” John Honeycutt, the chair of the Artemis II mission management team, told a press briefing on Friday. “It really doesn’t get much better than this: we are making history.”

“It’s a big deal,” said David Parker, the former head of the UK Space Agency and a visiting professor at the University of Southampton. “It is a step towards what we in the space world always dreamed of: the sustained human and robotic exploration of the moon and, one day, on to Mars.”

Some paint the return to the moon as a second space race, with the US competing against China, which hopes to put its own boots on the moon by 2030. “I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat Nasa or beat America back to the moon,” Sean Duffy, Nasa’s former acting administrator, said in September. “We’re going to win.”

The SLS rocket and Orion capsule stand nearly 100 metres tall, with the rocket carrying more than enough liquid propellant to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. When burned through the rocket’s engines, it produces sufficient thrust to fly to the moon at speeds of up to 24,500mph.

But first, the rollout. As early as Saturday morning, Nasa’s crawler-transporter 2, an enormous tracked vehicle, will start lugging the 5,000-tonne rocket and spacecraft from the vehicle assembly building to the launchpad. The four-mile journey can take up to 12 hours.

Nasa will then work through a preflight checklist. If all goes to plan, engineers will move on to a wet dress rehearsal, loading the rocket with more than 700,000 gallons of propellant, conducting a trial countdown and demonstrating that they can remove the propellant safely.

Any substantial problems would require the rocket to be rolled back to the vehicle assembly building for repairs. In recent days, technicians have been working on a bent cable in the rocket’s flight termination system, a faulty valve used to pressurise the Orion capsule, and leaks in equipment that pumps oxygen into the spacecraft.

The entire process must go smoothly for the mission to launch on 6 February. If technical problems or bad weather intervene, Nasa has identified 14 other dates to launch before mid-April. “We’re going to fly when we are ready,” said Honeycutt. “From launch through the mission days to follow, the crew’s safety is going to be our number one priority.”

After liftoff, the crew will loop twice around the Earth. Before heading to the moon, the Orion capsule will separate from the rocket’s upper stage. The astronauts will then fly the spacecraft manually, using cameras and the view outside the window, to approach and retreat from the jettisoned stage. This will give Nasa a sense of how Orion handles for future Artemis missions where crews will dock and undock in lunar orbit.

For all Nasa’s preparations and the astronauts’ extensive training, the mission could still throw up some surprises. “This is a test flight, and there are things that are going to be unexpected,” said Jeff Radigan, Artemis II’s lead flight director.

A final push from Orion’s European service module will send the crew to the moon. The astronauts will travel more than 230,000 miles from Earth, passing around the far side of the moon, before looping back in a giant figure-of-eight trajectory. During the voyage, the crew will practise emergency procedures and test Orion’s radiation shelter, designed to protect them from harmful solar flares.

More than 50 years after humans went to the moon, it is time to get excited again – and perhaps a little nervous. “Every rocket launch is a nail-biter,” Parker said. “We’re putting astronauts on a rocket, and it’s flown only once before, so of course it’s a nail-biter. But I’m confident Nasa will only launch when they are ready.”

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The Artemis II crew members, from left, Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch, stand in front of the Orion capsule. Photograph: Kim Shiflett/AP

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Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement responding to the injunction that “D.H.S. is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters.”

She said agents had faced assaults, had fireworks launched at them, and had the tires of their vehicles slashed. She added that despite “grave threats,” agents had “followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to protect themselves, the public and federal property.”

Ms. McLaughlin did not say whether the department planned to appeal the ruling.

Minnesota residents have clashed with federal agents since late 2025, when the federal government began an immigration enforcement campaign that it named Operation Metro Surge. Judge Menendez’s order applies only to federal agents in Minnesota who are participating in that campaign.

Judge Menendez, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., clarified in her order that “the court’s injunction does nothing to prevent defendants from continuing to enforce immigration laws.” The injunction did not include explicit protections for recording of agents or other provisions sought by the plaintiffs.

The case is the latest in a series of legal challenges across the country, including in California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., where civil and immigrant rights organizations have sought to curb the tactics of federal agents.

In Illinois, where immigration agents amassed for several weeks last year, a federal judge issued a sweeping injunction that placed several limits on how agents could use force and interact with protesters. An appellate court later blocked that ruling, calling it too broad and too prescriptive.

Tensions have been especially high in Minnesota since the killing of Ms. Good last week and the shooting of another man, who was injured, by an agent this week. Federal officials have accused Ms. Good of trying to ram the agent who shot her with her car. Minnesota officials have disputed that notion, and a New York Times video analysis suggests that Ms. Good, a U.S. citizen, was steering away from the agent when he opened fire. In the most recent shooting, officials said that the man, whom they described as being in the country illegally, was resisting arrest and had assaulted an agent with a shovel or a broom.

In recent weeks, protesters have been gathering in small groups and in large crowds, yelling at agents to leave Minnesota. In the lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota and law firms on behalf of activists, the plaintiffs claimed that federal agents had violated their constitutional rights by using excessive force. They said agents had intimidated, harassed, or arrested protesters who had not interfered with agents.

Lawyers for the Trump administration pushed back against those claims in court and have repeatedly described protesters in Minnesota as violent and unruly. They also argued against the injunction, saying that it “would place this court in the business of micromanaging D.H.S. officers’ conduct throughout Minnesota.” Federal officials have said their surge of immigration agents in Minnesota, a state led by Democrats, is necessary to crack down on illegal immigration and root out fraud in social service programs.

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Minnesota residents have clashed with federal agents since late 2025, when the federal government began an immigration enforcement campaign that it named Operation Metro Surge. Credit…David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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