FILE - This Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2019 image made available by NASA shows the Kuiper belt object originally called "Ultima Thule," about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, encountered by the New Horizons spacecraft. On Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019, NASA announced its official name "Arrokoth" which means "sky" in the language of the Native American Powhatan people.(NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute via AP, File)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The most distant world ever explored 4 billion miles away finally has an official name: Arrokoth. That means “sky” in the language of the Native American Powhatan people, NASA said Tuesday. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the snowman-shaped Arrokoth on New Year’s Day, 3 ¢ years after exploring Pluto. At the time, this small icy world 1 billion miles beyond Pluto was nicknamed Ultima Thule given its vast distance from us. “The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies,” lead scientist Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute said in a statement, “and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own.” The name was picked because of the Powhatan’s ties to the Chesapeake Bay region. New Horizons is operated from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland. The Hubble Space Telescope — which discovered Arrokoth in 2014 — has its science operations in Baltimore. The New Horizons team got consent for the name from Powhatan Tribal elders and representatives, according to NASA. The International Astronomical Union and its Minor Planet Center approved the choice.

Split Court appears ready to allow Trump to end DACA

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sharply at odds with liberal justices, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready Tuesday to allow the Trump administration to abolish protections that permit 660,000 immigrants to work in the U.S., free from the threat of deportation. That outcome would “destroy lives,” declared Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one the court’s liberals who repeatedly suggested the administration has not adequately justified its decision to end the seven-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Nor has it taken sufficient account of the personal, economic and social disruption that might result, they said. But there did not appear to be any support among the five conservatives for blocking the administration. The nine-member court’s decision is expected by June, at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign. President Donald Trump said on Twitter that DACA recipients shouldn’t despair if the justices side with him, pledging that “a deal will be made with the Dems for them to stay!” But Trump’s past promises to work with Democrats on a legislative solution for these immigrants have led nowhere. The president also said in his tweet that many program participants, brought to the U.S. as children and now here illegally, are “far from ‘angels,'” and he falsely claimed that “some are very tough, hardened criminals.” The program bars anyone with a felony conviction from participating, and serious misdemeanors may also bar eligibility.

Court lets shooting suit continue

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Tuesday that a survivor and relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting can pursue their lawsuit against the maker of the rifle used to kill 26 people. The justices rejected an appeal from Remington Arms, which argued it should be shielded by a 2005 federal law preventing most lawsuits against firearms manufacturers when their products are used in crimes. The case is being watched by gun control advocates, gun rights supporters and gun manufacturers across the country because it has the potential to provide a roadmap for victims of other mass shootings to circumvent the federal law and sue the makers of firearms. The court’s order allows the lawsuit filed in Connecticut state court by a survivor and relatives of nine victims who died at the Newtown, Connecticut, school on Dec. 14, 2012, to go forward. The lawsuit says the Madison, North Carolina-based company should never have sold a weapon as dangerous as the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle to the general public. It also alleges Remington targeted younger, at-risk males in marketing and product placement in violent video games. Opponents of the suit contend that gunman Adam Lanza alone is responsible for killing 20 first graders and six educators. He was 20 years old.

Attorneys to face off

WASHINGTON (AP) — The public impeachment inquiry hearings set to begin Wednesday will pit a Democratic attorney who built his reputation as a federal mob and securities fraud prosecutor against a GOP House Oversight investigator who helped steer some of the most notable probes of the Obama administration. The two attorneys with shiny resumes are hardly household names. Now, Daniel Goldman and Steve Castor will find themselves front and center at the televised hearings that mark a critical new phase in the probe into whether President Donald Trump abused the power of his presidency by pressing Ukraine’s leader to investigate a Trump political rival. Goldman, the investigations chief for Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Castor, the GOP chief investigative counsel, asked the bulk of the questions of witnesses during weeks of closed-door depositions with current and former administration officials and diplomats. Goldman spent about a decade as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. He stepped away from his gig as an MSNBC pundit and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice to jump into the trenches of Capitol Hill in the midst of the fourth impeachment inquiry of a president in U.S. history. “You’re going to see a prosecutorial approach,” said Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Goldman to successfully prosecute a Genovese family boss and two mob hit men for racketeering, two murders and an attempted murder.

1st Hispanic to lead US bishops

BALTIMORE (AP) — Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, an immigrant from Mexico, pledged to push for a more welcoming immigration system after winning election Tuesday as the first Hispanic to head the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “I’m humbled by your support,” said Gomez, whose predominantly Hispanic archdiocese of 4 million Catholics is the largest in the U.S. “I think it is a blessing for the Latino community.” The issue of immigration is personal to Gomez, who has relatives and friends on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. He described the situation at the border as a “tragedy” and said he witnessed the “suffering of the people there” during visits to south Texas cities last year. “It’s an essential cause,” he said of overhauling immigration policy. “Our encouragement to elected officials is to find a good, solid immigration reform that allows people to move legally.” Gomez, 67, has been vice president of the bishops’ conference for the past three years. He is considered a practical-minded conservative in terms of church doctrine but has made clear his disappointment over key immigration-control policies adopted by the Trump administration. —

Morales’ exit stymies left

The sudden resignation of Bolivia’s Evo Morales sent shockwaves throughout Latin America, where the indigenous leader had been the last survivor among a wave of leftist leaders swept to power two decades ago as commodity prices soared. But the upheaval that has recently rocked the region, threatening Trump allies and anti-imperialist governments alike, defies easy categorization. From Honduras to Chile, popular frustration with anemic economic growth, entrenched corruption and gaping inequality is driving the region’s middle classes to rebel against incumbents of all ideological bents in what has been dubbed the Latin American Spring. “Latin America has been the frog in the boiling pot for a long time,” said Marie Arana, the Peruvian-American author of a new book, “Silver, Sword & Stone,” exploring five centuries of abuse and economic exploitation of the region’s masses. “It’s gotten to the point where it’s less about ideology and more about practical matters as people for themselves see the rampant physical evidence that things are going wrong.” The angst is greatest among the region’s newly empowered middle class and the traditionally disenfranchised groups that made great strides when the left came to power at the end of the 1990s with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil. Around 90 million people entered the middle class in Latin America between 2000 and 2012, according to the United Nations, a feat that tracked with a boom in prices for the region’s copper, soy and oil exports. But as commodity prices have fallen, and leftist leaders once lionized for crusading against corruption are engulfed in scandals themselves, families earning enough for the first time in generations to pay taxes and send their kids to college are demanding higher-quality public services.

Israel targets Islamic Jihad leader

ERUSALEM (AP) — Israel on Tuesday targeted two senior commanders from the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, killing one in the Gaza Strip and missing the second in Syria as it stepped up its battle against Iran and its proxies across the region. The death of Bahaa Abu el-Atta and his wife as they slept in their home in eastern Gaza set off the heaviest fighting in months between Israel and Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militant group that is even more hard-line than Gaza’s Hamas rulers. Gaza militants fired scores of rockets into Israel throughout the day, some reaching as far as Tel Aviv, while Israeli warplanes responded with a series of airstrikes on Islamic Jihad targets. Eight others were killed, including at least seven militants. “Whoever thinks that it is possible to hurt our citizens and evade our long arm is mistaken,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a meeting of top security officials at Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv. He described Abu el-Atta as a “ticking time bomb” and “the main instigator of terrorism” from Gaza, responsible for many rocket attacks on Israel and planning more. He said the killing had been approved 10 days earlier, and that Israel had waited for the “optimal conditions” to hit him while minimizing civilian casualties. He said Israel was not interested in escalation but warned: “This could take time.”

China aims to build parks

XINING, China (AP) — There’s a building boom on the Tibetan plateau, one of the world’s last remote places. Mountains long crowned by garlands of fluttering prayer flags — a traditional landscape blessing — are newly topped with sprawling steel power lines. At night, the illuminated signs of Sinopec gas stations cast a red glow over newly built highways. Ringed by the world’s tallest mountain ranges, the region long known as “the rooftop of the world” is now in the crosshairs of China’s latest modernization push, marked by multiplying skyscrapers and expanding high-speed rail lines. But this time, there’s a difference: The Chinese government also wants to set limits on the region’s growth in order to design its own version of one of the U.S.’s proudest legacies — a national park system. In August, policymakers and scientists from China, the United States and other countries convened in Xining, capital of the country’s Qinghai province, to discuss China’s plans to create a unified park system with clear standards for limiting development and protecting ecosystems. The country’s economy has boomed over the past 40 years, but priorities are now expanding to include conserving key natural resources, says Zhu Chunquan, the China representative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a Switzerland-based scientific group.

Sanford suspends GOP challenge

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Mark Sanford dropped his challenge to President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday, saying the focus on impeachment has made it difficult for his campaign to gain traction. “You’ve got to be a realist,” Sanford said outside the New Hampshire statehouse. “What I did not anticipate is an impeachment.” The former South Carolina governor and congressman announced his decision to suspend his campaign on the eve of televised impeachment hearings in the U.S. House. He centered his campaign on warnings about the national debt but emphasized that the impeachment effort hurt his 2020 bid. “It was a long shot, but we wanted to try and interject this issue, how much we’re spending, into the national debate which comes along once every four years,” Sanford said. “I don’t think on the Republican side there is any appetite for a nuanced conversation on issues when there’s an impeachment overhead.” Sanford’s departure from the race is the latest blow to the struggling “Never Trump” movement that has failed to attract a marquee GOP challenge for Trump this cycle. The only major options available for Never Trump Republican primary voters are now former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld and former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh. Sanford did not commit to supporting either of the challengers’ campaigns Tuesday.

Vaping teen gets new lungs

DETROIT (AP) — A Michigan teenager was the recipient of what could be the first double lung transplant on a person whose lungs were severely damaged from vaping, health officials said Tuesday. Doctors at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit described to reporters Tuesday the procedure that saved the 17-year-old’s life and pleaded for the public to understand the dangers of vaping. The teen was admitted in early September to a Detroit-area hospital with what appeared to be pneumonia. He was transferred to Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit and taken Oct. 3 to Henry Ford Hospital where the transplant was performed Oct. 15. The double lung transplant is believed to be the first performed on a patient due to vaping. Doctors found an “enormous amount of inflammation and scarring” on the teen’s lungs, said Dr. Hassan Nemeh, surgical director of thoracic organ transplant at Henry Ford.