Hantavirus

tracked

NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials in several countries are trying to identify and follow people who may have been exposed to hantavirus on a cruise ship. In addition to contact tracing, they are trying to learn more about the virus as fast as they can.

Questions include whether it has mutated and how exactly it spreads. Hantaviruses usually spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings.

While human cases are rare, small outbreaks have been documented around the world. And the Andes virus implicated in the outbreak unfolding on a cruise ship now in the Atlantic Ocean may be able to spread between people in rare cases.

US to revoke

passports

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department will begin revoking the U.S. passports of thousands of parents who owe a significant amount of unpaid child support. The department told The Associated Press on Thursday that the revocations would begin Friday and be focused on those who owe $100,000 or more.

That would apply to about 2,700 American passport holders. The revocation program, plans for which were first reported by the AP in February, soon will be greatly expanded to cover parents who owe more than $2,500 in unpaid child support. That’s the threshold set by a little-enforced 1996 law.

Ex-deputy

found guilty

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Jurors in Ohio have convicted a former sheriff’s deputy of reckless homicide in the shooting of a Black man who was carrying sandwiches into his grandmother’s home. But the judge declared a mistrial on the murder charge after they couldn’t agree on that count Thursday.

Jason Meade shot Casey Goodson Jr. five times in the back and once in the side as the 23-year-old returned home in Columbus in December 2020. Meade is the second white officer in Ohio to be convicted in the killing of a Black man since George Floyd’s death turned national attention on the issue.

There was no video of this shooting.