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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA's first crewed moon mission in more than 50 years is underway.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansenlaunched Wednesday evening on a 10-day journeyto circle Earth and the moon.

"After a brief, 54-year intermission, NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Wednesday at a post-launch news briefing.

The launch of the Artemis II mission was the first time thatNASA's Space Launch System rocketand Orion spacecraft carried human passengers into orbit.

The flight is intended as a step toward a planned moon landing in 2028.

An estimated 250,000 space fans flocked to central Florida to see the Artemis II mission lift off. Though a few minor issues cropped up during the countdown, they were resolved quickly, and the rocket made a stunning ascent through cloudless skies.

Now that the astronauts have reached space, they will have little downtime. For their first 8½ hours in orbit, the crew is tasked with testing out the Orion capsule's various systems, including the potable water dispenser, the toilet and the air quality control system.

Another crucial test is to practice a docking procedure using the Space Launch System's upper stage as a target. The technology demonstration will be crucial for future Artemis missions, during which astronauts will need to dock with a commercially built lunar lander before they travel down to the moon's surface.

On Thursday, NASA will prepare for a major engine burn to send the Orion capsule toward the moon. Called the trans-lunar injection burn (TLI), the crucial maneuver is scheduled to take place roughly 24 hours into the mission. Flight controllers will meet earlier in the day to decide whether to proceed with the burn, which would put the astronauts on an irreversible path around the moon.

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"We're looking to make sure that the life-support systems work, the vehicle's healthy," Norm Knight, director of NASA's Flight Operations Directorate, said after the launch. "Once we commit to TLI, they have to function."

If all goes according to plan, theArtemis II astronautswill spend the following three days journeying to the moon.

Their next major milestone will come Monday, when they are scheduled to fly around the moon. When they do, they could venture farther from Earth than any humans have before, surpassing the distance record of 248,655 miles set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.

Over the course of the flyby, the Artemis II astronauts will come within 4,000 to 6,000 miles of the moon's surface,according to NASA. From that vantage point, the moon should appear about the size of a basketball held at arm's length.

As the astronauts swing around the moon, they will become the first to see parts of the lunar surface with human eyes. That is because the far side of the moon always faces away from Earth.

After the flyby, the astronauts will spend the final few days of the mission traveling back to Earth. They are scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on April 10.

Artemis II is a key part of NASA's efforts to return astronauts to the moon and establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface. The agency eventually hopes to build a base on the moon.

Next year, NASA aims to launch the Artemis III mission, which will conduct technology demonstrations in low-Earth orbit with the commercially built moon landers. SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing landers to carry NASA astronauts from lunar orbit down to the moon's surface, so the mission could test one or both.

Then, NASA aims to launch the Artemis IV mission sometime in 2028 to land on the moon.

Over 100 self-driving taxis in China stopped mid-traffic due to a system malfunction, stranding passengers in busy streets

NEED TO KNOW

• No injuries were reported, though videos posted online showed widespread disruption and at least one crash involving a halted vehicle.

• The incident adds to growing concerns about autonomous vehicle safety, following recent issues in the U.S. involving driverless cars

Passengers in Wuhan, China, were left stranded in the middle of busy streets after a large group of self-driving taxis stopped working at the same time.

A mass outage involving at least 100 robotaxis caused the vehicles to halt mid-traffic on Tuesday evening, with authorities later attributing the disruption to a "system malfunction." Officials did not provide further details, and no injuries were reported, per theAssociated Press.

Videoscirculating on social media showed driverless cars sitting motionless in active roadways, some blocking lanes and intersections.In one clip, a crash involving a stopped vehicle could be seen, though theBBC reportedthere were no injuries and that passengers were able to exit the vehicles safely.

The vehicles are operated by Apollo Go, an autonomous ride-hailing service run by Chinese tech company Baidu. The company has been expanding its robotaxi operations across China and has plans to grow internationally, according toCNBC.

For passengers inside the cars, the experience was both confusing and unsettling.

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According to the Associated Press, one passenger told Chinese media that their robotaxi stopped shortly after turning a corner. A message displayed on the vehicle's screen read, "Driving system malfunction. Staff are expected to arrive in 5 minutes." When no one arrived, the passenger pressed an SOS button and was again told that help was on the way. The rider was ultimately able to open the door and exit the vehicle on their own.

The Wuhan incident comes amid a series of recent issues involving self-driving vehicles, both in the United States and abroad.

Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE's free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

In December, a widespreadpower outage in San Franciscoleft roughly 130,000 homes and businesses without electricity, PEOPLE reported at the time. During the blackout, driverless cars were unable to function properly without traffic signals, stopping in the middle of roads and contributing to traffic jams.

Read the original article onPeople

The Afghan man had fled the Taliban for refuge in upstate New York when U.S. immigration authorities ordered him deported to Uganda. The Cuban woman was working at a Texas Chick-fil-A when she arrested after a minor traffic accident and told she was being sent to Ecuador.

Immigration Third Country Deportations

There's the Mauritanian man living in Michigan told he'd have to go to Uganda, the Venezuelan mother in Ohio told she'd be sent to Ecuador and the Bolivians, Ecuadorians and so many others across the country ordered sent to Honduras.

They are among more than 13,000 immigrants who were living legally in the U.S., waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they suddenly faced so-calledthird-countrydeportationorders, destined for countries wheremost had no ties, according to the nonprofit group Mobile Pathways, which pushes for transparency in immigration proceedings.

Yet few have been deported, even as the White House pushes forever more immigrant expulsions. Thanks to unexplained changes in U.S. policy, many are now mired in immigration limbo, unable to argue theirasylumclaims in court and unsure if they'll be shackled and put on a deportation flight to a country they've never seen.

Some are in detention, though it's unclear how many. All have lost permission to work legally, a right most had while pursuing their asylum claims, compounding the worry and dread that has rippled through immigrant communities.

And that may be the point.

"This administration's goal is to instill fear into people. That's the primary thing," said Cassandra Charles, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, which has been fighting the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda. The fear of being deported to an unknown country could, advocates believe, drive migrants to abandon their immigration cases and decide to return to their home countries.

Things may be changing.

In mid-March, top Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal officials told field attorneys with the Department of Homeland Security in an email to stop filing new motions for third-country deportations tied to asylum cases. The email, which has been seen by The Associated Press, did not give a reason. It has not been publicly released, and DHS did not respond to requests to explain if the halt was permanent.

But the earlier deportation cases? Those are continuing.

An asylum-seeker says she's in panic over possibly being sent to a country she doesn't know

In 2024, a Guatemalan woman who says she had been held captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted by members of powerful gang arrived with her 4-year-old daughter at the U.S.-Mexico border and asked for asylum. She later discovered she was pregnant with another child, conceived during a rape.

In December, she sat in a San Francisco immigration courtroom and listened as an ICE attorney sought to have her deported.

The ICE attorney didn't ask the judge that she be sent back to Guatemala. Instead, the attorney said, the woman from the Indigenous Guatemalan highlands would go to one of three countries: Ecuador, Honduras or across the globe to Uganda.

Until that moment, she'd never heard of Ecuador or Uganda.

"When I arrived in this country, I was filled with hope again and I thanked God for being alive," the woman said after the hearing, her eyes filling with tears. "When I think about having to go to those other countries, I panic because I hear they are violent and dangerous." She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from U.S. immigration authorities or the Guatemalan gang network.

There have been more than 13,000 removal orders for asylum-seekers

ICE attorneys, the de facto prosecutors in immigration courts, were first instructed last summer to file motions known as "pretermissions" that end migrants' asylum claims and allow them to be deported.

"They're not saying the person doesn't have a claim," said Sarah Mehta, who tracks immigration issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. "They're just saying, 'We're kicking this case completely out of court and we're going to send that person to another country.'"

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The pace of deportation orders picked up in October after a ruling from the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals, which sets legal precedent inside the byzantine immigration court system.

The ruling from the three judges -– two appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the third a holdover from the first Trump administration -- cleared the way for migrants seeking asylum to be removed to any third country where the U.S. State Department determines they won't face persecution or torture.

After the ruling, the government aggressively expanded the practice of ending asylum claims.

More than 13,000 migrants have been ordered deported to so-called "safe third countries" after their asylum cases were canceled, according to data from San Francisco-based Mobile Pathways. More than half the orders were for Honduras, Ecuador or Uganda, with the rest scattered among nearly three dozen other countries.

Deported migrants are free, at least theoretically, to pursue asylum and stay in those third countries, even if some have barely functioning asylum systems.

Deportations have been far more complicated than the government expected

Immigration authorities have released little information about the third-country agreements, known as Asylum Cooperative Agreements, or the deportees, and it's unclear exactly how many have been deported to third countries as part of asylum removals.

According to Third Country Deportation Watch, a tracker run by the rights groups Refugees International and Human Rights First, fewer than 100 of them are thought to have been deported.

In a statement, DHS called the agreements "lawful bilateral arrangements that allow illegal aliens seeking asylum in the United States to pursue protection in a partner country that has agreed to fairly adjudicate their claims."

"DHS is using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system," said the statement, which was attributed only to a spokesperson. There are roughly 2 million backlogged asylum cases in the immigration system.

But deportations clearly turned out to be far more complicated than the government expected, restricted by a variety of legal challenges, the scope of the international agreements and a limited number of airplanes.

Mobile Pathways data, for example, shows that thousands of people have been ordered deported to Honduras — despite a diplomatic agreement that allows the country to take a total of just 10 such deportees per month for 24 months. Dozens of people ordered to Honduras in recent months did not speak Spanish as their primary language, but were native speakers of English, Uzbek and French, among other languages.

And while hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants have been ordered sent to Uganda, a top Ugandan official said none have arrived. U.S. authorities may be "doing a cost analysis" and trying to avoid dispatching flights with only a few people on board, Okello Oryem, the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs, told The Associated Press.

"You can't be doing one, two people" at a time," Oryem said. "Planeloads -– that is the most effective way."

Many immigration lawyers suspect that the March email ordering a halt in new asylum pretermissions could indicate a shift toward other forms of third-country deportations.

"Right now they haven't been able to remove that many people," said the ACLU's Mehta. "I do think that will change."

"They're in a hiring spree right now. They will have more planes. If they get more agreements, they'll be able to send more people to more countries."

Associated Press reporters Garance Burke in San Francisco, Joshua Goodman in Miami, Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, Marlon González in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Molly A. Wallace in Chicago contributed to this report.

MIAMI (AP) — Jaylen Brown scored 43 points, Jayson Tatum had his first triple-double of the season and the Boston Celtics rode the strength of a record-setting first quarter to beat the Miami Heat 147-129 on Wednesday night.

Celtics Heat Basketball

Tatum finished with 25 points, 18 rebounds and 11 assists for Boston, which scored 53 points in the first quarter — a franchise record that tied the second-highest total for an opening quarter in NBA history. Sam Hauser added 23 for the Celtics, who are 31-0 when scoring at least 117 points this season and are 10-1 in their last 11 games following a loss.

The Celtics led by as many as 27, then saw the lead trimmed to as little as nine early in the fourth quarter. Boston (51-25) holds the No. 2 spot in the Eastern Conference race, four games behind No. 1 Detroit.

Bam Adebayo had 29 points and 10 rebounds for Miami, which tied a franchise record by hitting 24 3-pointers. The Heat made 24 on three other occasions.

Davion Mitchell scored 21, while Tyler Herro and Pelle Larsson each scored 18 and Jaime Jaquez Jr. added 17 for the Heat (40-37).

Miami remained in the No. 10 spot in the East play-in race. The Heat are a half-game behind No. 8 Orlando and No. 9 Charlotte, teams both with 40-36 records.

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The Celtics made 11 of their first 13 shots on the way to the sizzling start, then closed the first quarter on a 24-3 run that turned a one-point deficit into a 20-point lead — and that burst came in just over four minutes.

Boston's lead was 80-57 at halftime and the Celtics scored the first four points of the second half to push the margin to 27.

Up next

Celtics: Visit Milwaukee on Friday.

Heat: Host Washington on Saturday.

AP NBA:https://apnews.com/hub/nba

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles RamsAll-Prowide receiverPuka Nacuais in rehab and was there before he was sued for assault and battery by a woman who says he made an antisemitic statement and bit her on the shoulder on New Year's Eve, according to his attorney.

"He was in (rehab) a substantial period of time before any of these allegations broke ... and he's scheduled to be there for a while longer," Levi McCathern told The California Post.

McCathern told the newspaper Nacua's decision to enter rehab was not a direct response to the lawsuit his accuser filed against him late last month, but an attempt "to improve his overall behavior in every aspect of his life."

Nacuaissued an apology last Decemberafter performing a gesture that plays upon antisemitic tropes while appearing on an internet livestream.

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Nacua has been one of the most productive receivers in NFL history over his first three seasons with the Rams, who drafted him in the fifth round out of BYU in 2023. He led the league with 129 catches last season and had 1,715 yards receiving and 10 touchdowns.

Nacua is eligible to sign a contract extension with the Rams this offseason.

AP NFL:https://apnews.com/NFL