A new report showed greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union rose in 2015, the first increase since 2010, even as European officials on Thursday urged the United States to remain part of a global climate pact.

Emissions grew by 0.5 percent compared with 2014, mainly due to increases from transportation and a colder winter, the European Environment Agency said.

Greenhouse gases are a major contributor to man-made climate change and most countries around the world have pledged to reduce emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The report was released as the EU is trying to emphasize its commitment to combating global warming, with senior European officials appealing to President Donald Trump not to quit the Paris accord. Trump was scheduled to announce his decision Thursday afternoon in Washington.

“Higher emissions were caused mainly by increasing road transport, both passenger and freight, and slightly colder winter conditions in Europe, compared to 2014, leading to higher demand for heating,” the European Environment Agency said.

It noted that improvements in fuel efficiency failed to offset the growth in traffic.

“Road transport emissions — about 20 percent of total EU greenhouse gas emissions — increased for the second year in a row in 2015, by 1.6 percent,” the agency said.

It noted, however, that the EU has achieved a long-term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2015 of 22.1 percent despite economic growth of 50 percent.

This decoupling of economic growth from emissions during the 25-year period occurred due to a mix of green policies, such as encouraging the use of renewable energy and improving fuel efficiency, and changes in European economies that have seen a shift away from heavily polluting industries toward service jobs.

Milder winters have also contributed to a decline in heating fuel use, the agency said.

AP-WF-06-01-17 1407GMT

 
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Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s entry into the commercial space race has been revealed.

Allen posted a picture of a plane nicknamed the “Roc” on Twitter, showing an extremely unusual and enormous plane that he hopes will eventually launch rockets into space.

The Roc has six engines, two fuselages, 28 wheels and is built by Allen’s company Stratolaunch Systems.

The plane has a wingspan of more than 117 meters, the longest ever built, and weighs more than 227,000 kilograms. To put the wingspan into perspective, it is longer than an official soccer pitch, which measure between 100 and 110 meters.

The aircraft is 72.5 meters from nose to tail and stands 15.2 meters tall from the ground to the top of the tail.

In his tweet, Allen said the plane was being taken out of its hangar for fuel testing. Next will come engine testing and taxi testing.

“Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be actively conducting ground and flightline testing at the Mojave Air and Space Port,” Stratolaunch Systems CEO Jean Floyd said. “This is a first-of-its-kind aircraft, so we’re going to be diligent throughout testing and continue to prioritize the safety of our pilots, crew and staff.”

The plane’s maximum takeoff weight can be up to 589,000 kilograms. The company says the plane will first launch an Orbital ATK Pegasus XL rocket, but that it will be capable of launching up to three rockets in one flight.
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The U.S. state of Ohio filed a lawsuit Wednesday against five prescription drug manufacturers, saying they used deceptive practices that fueled an opioid addiction epidemic.

“These drug manufacturers led prescribers to believe that opioids were not addictive, that addiction was an easy thing to overcome, or that addiction could actually be treated by taking even more opioids,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said. “They knew they were wrong, but they did it anyway.”

Five companies

The state wants the companies to stop misrepresenting the drugs, to pay damages for the amount of money the state spent on excessive opioid prescriptions and resulting addiction treatments for patients, and to reimburse patients as well.

The lawsuit names Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Allergan, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and its subsidiary Cephalon, and Johnson & Johnson with its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals.

A Janssen statement called the lawsuit legally and factually unfounded and said the company has acted appropriately and responsibly. Purdue said it shares DeWine’s concerns about the opioid crisis and wants to work together on a solution.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says opioids are most commonly given for moderate-to-severe pain after surgery or injury, but that in recent years there has been an increase in their prescription for chronic pain “despite serious risks and the lack of evidence about their long-term effectiveness.”

Tens of thousands died

Opioids, including prescription varieties, and heroin killed a record 33,000 people in the United States in 2015, according to the CDC.

Ohio’s lawsuit says 2.3 million people, or nearly 20 percent of its population, were prescribed an opioid drug last year, and that the drugs are the main source of unintentional overdose deaths in the state. It called the opioid crisis in the state “catastrophic.”

“Because they know prescribing doctors and other health care providers rely on drug companies’ statements in making treatment decisions, drug companies must tell the truth when marketing their drugs and ensure that their marketing claims are supported by science and medical evidence. Defendants broke these simple rules and helped unleash a health care crisis that has had far-reaching financial, social and deadly consequences in the state of Ohio.”

Crisis across US

The effects of the opioid crisis have been felt across the United States, and Ohio is not the first to sue drug companies. Kentucky settled a lawsuit with Purdue in 2015, while a group of 27 states did so with Purdue as well in 2007. Oregon also reached a settlement with another drug maker, Insys, in 2015.

U.S. President Donald Trump pledged during his campaign last year that he would fight the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged many of the rural areas and small towns where Trump received strong support.

The president has created a drug addiction task force, but critics of the budget proposal he unveiled last month said his planned cuts in government spending would hurt the opioid epidemic fight.

Trump’s spending plan would slash funding for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy by 95 percent, eliminating its drug-free communities and high-intensity drug trafficking programs that each have bipartisan congressional support.
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SpaceX is taking recycling to a whole new realm — all the way to orbit.

On this week’s supply run to the International Space Station, SpaceX will launch a Dragon capsule that’s already traveled there. The milestone comes just two months after the launch of its first reused rocket booster for a satellite.

“This whole notion of reuse is something that’s very, very important to the entire space industry,” NASA’s space station program manager Kirk Shireman said at a news conference Wednesday.

While the concept is not new — the space shuttles, for instance, flew multiple times in orbit — it’s important for saving money as well as technical reasons, he noted.

New shield, parachutes

This particular Dragon flew to the station in 2014. SpaceX refurbished it for Thursday evening’s planned launch, providing a new heat shield and fresh parachutes for re-entry at mission’s end. There were so many X-rays and inspections that savings, if any, were minimal this time, said Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability for SpaceX.

For this trip, the Dragon is packed with 6,000 pounds of station cargo, including mice and flies for medical research.

While the Falcon booster to be used this time is new, SpaceX will attempt to land it at Cape Canaveral following liftoff so it, too, can be reused. So far, first-stage boosters have flown back and landed vertically four times on the designated X at the Air Force station; even more touchdowns have occurred on ocean platforms, all part of an effort to save time and money.

The private SpaceX and NASA are discussing the possibility of flying a reused booster on an upcoming delivery mission.

Dragons for astronauts

Koenigsmann told reporters more and more reused capsules will carry cargo to the space station, each possibly flying three times. Dragon capsules are being developed to carry astronauts to the space station as early as next year; it’s too soon to say whether those, too, will be recycled, he said.

Wednesday marked the fifth anniversary of the return of the first Dragon capsule to visit the space station. This will be the 12th Dragon visit overall and the 11th under NASA contract. The Dragon is the only unmanned supply ship that returns to Earth; the others are filled with trash and burn up on re-entry.

And by SpaceX’s count, this will be the 100th launch from NASA’s historic Launch Complex 39-A at Kennedy Space Center. It’s the same spot from which men flew to the moon and shuttles soared until their retirement in 2011. SpaceX is leasing the pad from NASA.

Fairly good weather is forecast for the 5:55 p.m. EDT liftoff.

Two of the space station’s five residents, meanwhile, are scheduled to return to Earth on Friday via a Russian Soyuz capsule. A Russian and Frenchman will be headed home, leaving two Americans and one Russian in orbit.
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Nearly 40 years ago, a respected doctor wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine with some very good news: Out of nearly 40,000 patients given powerful pain drugs in a Boston hospital, only four addictions were documented.

Doctors had been wary of opioids, fearing patients would get hooked. Reassured by the letter, which called addiction “rare” in those with no history of it, they pulled out their prescription pads and spread the good news in their own published reports.

And that is how a one-paragraph letter with no supporting information helped seed a nationwide epidemic of misuse of drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin by convincing doctors that opioids were safer than we now know them to be.

On Wednesday, the journal published an editor’s note about the 1980 letter and an analysis from Canadian researchers of how often it has been cited — more than 600 times, often inaccurately. Most used it as evidence that addiction was rare, and most did not say it concerned only hospitalized patients, not outpatient or chronic pain situations such as bad backs and severe arthritis that opioids came to be used for.

‘Key bit of literature’

“This pain population with no abuse history is literally at no risk for addiction,” one citation said. “There have been studies suggesting that addiction rarely evolves in the setting of painful conditions,” said another.

“It’s difficult to overstate the role of this letter,” said Dr. David Juurlink of the University of Toronto, who led the analysis. “It was the key bit of literature that helped the opiate manufacturers convince front-line doctors that addiction is not a concern.”

Hospital databases were so limited in 1980 that researchers can’t be confident there weren’t more problems, or cases discovered after patients were discharged, Juurlink said.

The letter was written by Dr. Hershel Jick, a drug specialist at Boston University Medical Center, and a graduate student.

“I’m essentially mortified that that letter to the editor was used as an excuse to do what these drug companies did,” Jick told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. “They used this letter to spread the word that these drugs were not very addictive.”

Jick said his letter referred only to people getting opioids in the hospital for a short period of time and had no bearing on long-term outpatient use. He also said he testified as a government witness in a lawsuit years ago over the marketing of pain drugs.

Use grew in the 1990s when drugs like OxyContin came on the market, and more people using opioids for chronic pain developed dependence.

New note

The new editor’s note in the journal says: “For reasons of public health, readers should be aware that this letter has been ‘heavily and uncritically cited’ as evidence that addiction is rare with opioid therapy.”

The journal’s top editor, Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, said, “People have used the letter to suggest that you’re not going to get addicted to opioids if you get them in a hospital setting. We know that not to be true.”

The journal also published a report from Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, pledging to work to develop new ways to reverse and prevent overdoses, to treat addiction, and to find novel, nonaddictive drugs for chronic pain.

In the next six weeks, NIH will hold three workshops with drug company leaders to identify next steps, Collins said. The goal is to cut in half the usual amount of time to develop new treatments — a target borrowed from the Cancer Moonshot project launched by former Vice President Joe Biden to make a decade’s worth of progress toward cures in half that time.

Other partnerships

Details have not been worked out, but it could resemble similar partnerships on Alzheimer’s, diabetes and some other diseases where scientists from government and industry determine pressing needs, develop a work plan and split the cost, Collins said.

“Industry’s interest in this has been muted until recently,” Collins said. Now, “they feel the responsibility and the opportunity to take part in this and they’re not going to stand back and watch.”

With the Food and Drug Administration wanting to speed work on new pain drugs, “the stars are aligning,” Collins said. “I think we can make real progress now.”
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