WASHINGTON (AP) — Jill Biden on Wednesday praised her husband’s advocacy for U.S. service members before she sounded a red horn to start the Wounded Warrior Project’s annual Soldier Ride from the White House lawn.

“My husband often says that we have many obligations as a nation but only one sacred obligation: to support you and your families when we send you into harm’s way and when you return,” the first lady said about President Joe Biden, a Democrat who is seeking reelection to a second term.

“As president and as a military dad, he never loses sight of that conviction. And that’s why he’s working tirelessly to make sure that you and your families have what you need to thrive,” she said.

Jill Biden spoke about steps the president has taken to expand veteran access to quality home health care, provide benefits and care for veterans harmed by toxins and prevent homelessness and suicide among veterans. She also talked about help for spouses of active-duty and retired servicemembers.

The Bidens’ late son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, was a major in the Delaware Army National Guard who spent a year in Iraq. The first lady’s dad was a Navy signalman in World War II.

Biden unexpectedly joined the first lady after signing a $95 billion war aid bill and referred to the group of riders as the “spine of America.” The president started to take an apparent dig at former President Donald Trump, Biden’s likely Republican opponent in November, before he stopped himself.

The Wounded Warrior Project was founded in 2003 to help veterans and the families and caregivers of service members who suffered a physical or mental injury or illness while serving in the military on or after Sept. 11, 2001. Soldier Ride began in 2004 to help raise awareness for injured veterans. The tradition of starting the ride from the White House began in 2008.

The first lady hosted the event as part of Joining Forces, her White House initiative to support active-duty service members, veterans, their families and their caregivers.

Some public school teachers in Tennessee could gain new powers to carry concealed guns into the classroom, a year after a deadly school shooting in the state’s capital city stirred impassioned debate about the best ways to curb such violence.

The Republican-led Legislature in Tennessee gave final approval to the legislation Tuesday, just days after Republican governors in Iowa and Nebraska signed laws that also expand the potential for armed personnel in schools.

Tennessee lawmakers followed that up with another gun-rights measure Wednesday, giving final approval to legislation that would bar local extreme-risk-protection ordinances that allow guns to be removed from people judged to pose a threat to themselves or others.

Both bills head next to Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who pushed unsuccessfully last year for a statewide measure that would allow some version of extreme risk protection orders.

The legislative action highlights a national divide on public safety and gun policies, coming as Democratic-led legislatures in Colorado, Maine and Vermont all took steps toward imposing greater firearm restrictions.

Legislatures in about 20 states already have passed measures this year to expand gun rights or restrict access to firearms. Dozens more proposals are pending. The measures continue a trend from last year, when more than half the states enacted firearms legislation, with Democrats generally favoring more limits and Republicans more freedoms for gun owners.

A little over a year ago, a shooter opened fire at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, killing three children and three adults before police killed him.

Tensions ran high as lawmakers debated a response, peaking as the Republican majority expelled two Black Democratic House members last year for their role in a protest supporting gun control. Both lawmakers were subsequently reinstated.

Protests also broke out Tuesday after lawmakers passed the latest school gun legislation.

A previous Tennessee law already allowed some private school teachers and staff to carry guns.

The new measure would expand that to public schools with several conditions. Teachers and staff would first have to obtain a permit to carry a handgun, which requires passing a background check, getting mental health clearance and completing 40 hours of training in basic school policing. They also would need written authorization from the school’s principal and local law enforcement. And they wouldn’t be able to take guns into school events at stadiums, gymnasiums or auditoriums.

The legislation was one of several pro-gun bills passed this year in Tennessee.

On Monday, Lee signed a bill expanding the private school gun provisions to preschools. On Tuesday, Lee signed legislation requiring schools to provide age-appropriate instruction on firearm safety. And he signed legislation Tuesday prohibiting financial institutions from requiring special tracking codes for retail firearm sales.

About half of the U.S. states allow teachers or other school employees with concealed carry permits to bring guns onto school property, according to the Giffords Law Center, a gun control advocacy group.

About a half-dozen states have passed measures this year that could expand the ability of some people to bring guns into schools.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, signed legislation last Friday that creates new protections for teachers who carry guns in schools. A 2021 state law already allowed schools to authorize individuals to carry firearms, but some districts have been reluctant to embrace that because of concerns about insurance coverage.

The new Iowa law allows teachers and staff who undergo gun safety training to get a professional permit to carry guns in schools. If they do, they would be protected from criminal and civil liability for use of reasonable force. The law comes three months after a 17-year-old student opened fire at a school in Perry, Iowa, killing a a school principal and sixth-grade student and wounding several other people.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed legislation last Thursday that would authorize security staff in the state’s smallest school districts to carry guns. The law was pared back from an initial proposal that would have applied to all schools.

Republican-led legislatures in Kentucky, South Dakota and Utah also passed measures this year that could expand the ability of some people to bring guns into schools. A bill passed in Wyoming allots $480,000 to reimburse schools for the cost of training employees to carry guns on school property.

Contrary to the Republican-backed measures, lawmakers in various Democratic-led states have been forging ahead this year with measures to impose greater restrictions on guns.

After an Army reservist killed 18 people and wounded 13 others in Lewiston last year, Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills called for a variety of new laws aimed at preventing dangerous people from possessing guns.

The Democratic-led Legislature last week approved measures that would impose a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases and expand background checks on private gun sales. It also passed legislation to ban devices that convert semi-automatic firearms into rapid-firing weapons like machine guns, and enhance an existing law that allows judges to temporarily remove guns from people during a mental health crisis.

The Vermont House on Wednesday approved a bill that cracks down on the possession and transfer of so-called ghost guns, which are hard-to-trace firearms and their components that lack serial numbers and are increasingly being used in crimes. The amended legislation now goes back to the state Senate for consideration.

Supporters say it’s critical for Vermont to require background checks and serial numbers on these often privately made firearms to keep guns out of the hands of people prohibited from having them and as the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the legal fight over ghost guns.

Colorado’s Democratic-led Legislature is considering numerous gun-control proposals. Among several that recently passed the House, one would require gun dealers to get state permits and another would ask voters to impose a 9% tax on the sale of guns and ammunition.

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Associated Press writers Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee, and Lisa Rathke in Marshfield, Vermont, contributed to this report.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — One of the two pilots aboard an airplane carrying fuel reported there was a fire on the airplane shortly before it crashed and burned outside Fairbanks, killing both people on board, a federal aviation official said Wednesday.

The pilot had made radio contact about the in-fight emergency shortly after taking off, said Clint Johnson, head of the National Transportation Safety Board’s Alaska regional office. They were attempting to return to Fairbanks International Airport when they lost contact, he said.

The plane crashed about 7 miles (11 kilometers) outside Fairbanks, hitting a steep hill and sliding down an embankment to the bank of the Tanana River. Alaska State Troopers say no survivors were found.

The plane departed Fairbanks just before 10 a.m., loaded with 3,200 gallons (12,100 litres) of heating oil for Kobuk, an Inupiat village of less than 200 people located about 300 miles (480 kilometers) northwest of Fairbanks.

Johnson said there was also about 1,200 gallons of aviation fuel aboard the C54D-DC Skymaster plane, a World War II-era airplane that had been converted to a freighter.

It is difficult and expensive to get fuel to rural Alaska villages, which are remote and difficult to reach because of the state’s limited road system. The Northwest Arctic Borough said heating fuel in Kobuk was $15.45 a gallon in 2022.

The Alaska Energy Authority said barges usually deliver fuel to coastal communities. But in villages where barges can’t run or it’s not economically feasible, air tankers will deliver fuel — but that is even limited by sea or river ice, water levels or ice road availability.

The C54D-DC is a military version of the Douglas DC-4, which was a World War II-era airplane. The website www.airlines.net said standard passenger seating for a DC-4 was 44 during its heyday, but most have been converted to freighters.

The NTSB has three investigators on the scene.

The plane was registered to Alaska Air Fuel of Wasilla. Phone messages left for the company have not been returned.

The pilots’ names have not been released.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson, the necessity of providing Ukraine with weapons and other aid as it fends off Russia’s invasion is rooted in their earliest and most formative political memories.

McConnell, 82, tells the story of his father’s letters from Eastern Europe in 1945, at the end of World War II, when the foot soldier observed that the Russians were “going to be a big problem” before the communist takeover to come. Johnson, 30 years younger, came of age as the Cold War was ending.

As both men pushed their party this week to support a $95 billion aid package that sends support to Ukraine, as well as Israel, Taiwan and humanitarian missions, they labeled themselves “Reagan Republicans” an described the fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin in terms of U.S. strength and leadership. But the all-out effort to get the legislation through Congress left both of them grappling with an entirely new Republican Party shaped by former President Donald Trump.

While McConnell, R-Ky., and Johnson, R-La., took different approaches to handling Trump, the presumptive White House nominee in 2024, the struggle highlighted the fundamental battle within the GOP: Will conservatives continue their march toward Trump’s “America First” doctrine on foreign affairs or will they find the value in standing with America’s allies? And is the GOP still the party of Ronald Reagan?

“I think we’re having an internal debate about that,” McConnell said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m a Reagan guy and I think today — at least on this episode — we turned the tables on the isolationists.”

Still, he acknowledged, “that doesn’t mean they’re going to go away forever.”

McConnell, in the twilight of his 18-year tenure as Republican leader, lauded a momentary victory Tuesday as a healthy showing of 31 Republicans voted for the foreign aid; that was nine more than had supported it in February. He said that was a trend in the right direction.

McConnell, who has been in the Senate since 1985, said passing the legislation was “one of the most important things I’ve ever dealt with where I had an impact.”

But it wasn’t without cost.

He said last month he would step away from his job as leader next year after internal clashes over the money for Ukraine and the direction of the party.

For Johnson, just six months into his job as speaker, the political crosscurrents are even more difficult. He is clinging to his leadership post as right-wing Republicans threaten to oust him for putting the aid to Ukraine to a vote. While McConnell has embraced American leadership abroad his entire career, Johnson only recently gave complete support to the package.

Johnson has been careful not to portray passage as a triumph when a majority of his own House Republicans opposed the bill. He skipped a celebratory news conference afterward, describing it as “not a perfect piece of legislation” in brief remarks.

But he also borrowed terms popularized by Reagan, saying aggression from Russia, China and Iran “threatens the free world and it demands American leadership.”

“If we turn our backs right now, the consequences could be devastating,” he said.

Hard-line conservatives, including some who are threatening a snap vote on his leadership, are irate, saying the aid was vastly out of line with what Republican voters want. They condemned both Johnson and McConnell for supporting it.

“House Republican leadership sold out Americans and passed a bill that sends $95 billion to other countries,” said Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who opposed the bill. He said the legislation “undermines America’s interests abroad and paves our nation’s path to bankruptcy.”

Johnson has been lauded by much of Washington for doing what he called “the right thing” at a perilous moment for himself and the world.

“He is fundamentally an honorable person,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who brokered the negotiations and spent hours on the phone and in meetings with Johnson, McConnell and the White House.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Johnson and McConnell “both showed great resolve and backbone and true leadership at a time it was desperately needed.”

When McConnell began negotiations over President Joe Biden’s initial aid request last year, he quickly set the terms for a deal. He and Schumer agreed to pair any aid for Ukraine with help for Israel, Schumer said, and McConnell demanded policy changes at the U.S. border with Mexico.

On McConnell’s mind, he said, was that Trump was “unenthusiastic” about providing more aid to Kyiv. Yet McConnell, whose office displays a portrait of every Republican president since Reagan with the exception of Trump, had a virtually nonexistent relationship with the man he often refers to not by name, but simply as “the former president.”

Still, Trump would prove to hold powerful sway. When a deal on border security neared completion after months of work, Trump eviscerated the proposal as insufficient and a “gift” to Biden’s reelection. Conservatives, including Johnson, rejected it out of hand.

With the border deal dead, McConnell pushed ahead with Schumer on the foreign aid, with the border policies stripped out, solidifying their unusual alliance. The Senate leaders met weekly throughout the negotiation.

“We disagreed on a whole lot, but we really stuck together,” Schumer said.

“We just persisted. We could not give up on this.”

Meanwhile, a small group of GOP senators began working on an idea they thought could give Johnson some political wiggle room. Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma took an idea that Trump had raised — structuring the aid to Ukraine as a loan — and tried to make it reality.

Through a series of phone calls with Trump, several House members, as well as the speaker, they worked to structure roughly $9 billion in economic aid for Ukraine as forgivable loans — just as it was in the final package.

“Our approach this time was to make sure that the politics were set, meaning that President Trump is on board,” Mullin said.

The conversations culminated in Johnson making a quick jaunt to Florida, where he stood side by side with Trump at his Florida club just days before moving ahead with the Ukraine legislation in the House.

It was all enough, with Democratic help, to get the bill across the finish line. The legislation, which Biden signed into law on Wednesday, included some revisions from the Senate bill, including the loan structure and a provision to seize frozen Russian central bank assets to rebuild Ukraine. Nine GOP senators who had opposed the first version of the bill swung to “yes” largely because of the changes Johnson had made.

The result was a strong showing for the foreign aid in the Senate, even though the decision could prove costly for Johnson.

What comes next on Ukraine is anyone’s guess.

While the $61 billion for Ukraine in the package is expected to help the country withstand Moscow’s offensive this year, more assistance will surely be needed. Republicans, exhausted after a grueling fight, largely shrugged off questions about the future.

“This one wasn’t easy,” Mullin said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden picked up the endorsement of North America’s Building Trades Unions at a Wednesday event where the president and his allies set out to dismantle Republican Donald Trump’s reputation as a successful real estate developer.

“Donald Trump is incapable of running anything,” said Sean McGarvey, the organization’s president. “God help us if he gets anywhere near the White House in the future.”

The event, held in a Washington hotel ballroom with a boisterous crowd of union members, was another salvo in the battle for votes from blue collar workers. Trump has tried to chip away at Democrats’ traditional advantage with organized labor, while Biden has been adding to his roster of endorsements and trying to fend off his predecessor’s comeback bid.

Biden said unions would help him make Trump a “loser again,” and he mocked Trump’s inability to pass infrastructure legislation when he was president, saying “he never built a damn thing.”

The Democratic president repeatedly torched his likely Republican opponent as a callous businessman who turned firing people into entertainment as part of his long-running reality show “The Apprentice.”

“He looks down on us. I’m not joking. Think about it,” Biden said. “Think about the guys you grew up with that you’d like to get in the corner and just give him a straight left. I’m not suggesting you hit the president. But we all know those guys growing up.”

Biden recently campaigned in his childhood hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he’s increasingly used economic arguments to portray Trump as out of touch with workers’ concerns.

In this election, Biden said, “it’s either Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values.”

The endorsement adds to Biden’s considerable union support. The United Auto Workers backed him in January, and the United Steelworkers Union followed suit in March.

A Trump campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Trump has also sought support from organized labor, including meeting with the Teamsters earlier this year.

“Usually a Republican wouldn’t get that endorsement,” Trump said. “But in my case it’s different because I’ve employed thousands of Teamsters and I thought we should come over and pay our respects.”

Trump’s popularity with white working class voters has been a challenge for Democrats who puzzle over his appeal.

McGarvey promised “an unprecedented field program in key battleground states” to help defeat Trump this year.

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — U.S. Rep. Donald Payne Jr., of New Jersey, died Wednesday after a heart attack this month that left him hospitalized, officials said. He was 65.

In a statement, Gov. Phil Murphy called his fellow Democrat a “steadfast champion for the people of New Jersey.”

“With his signature bowtie, big heart, and tenacious spirit, Donald embodied the very best of public service,” Murphy said in a statement. “As a former union worker and toll collector, he deeply understood the struggles our working families face, and he fought valiantly to serve their needs, every single day.”

Payne had previously served as president of Newark City Council in New Jersey’s largest city, and on the Essex County Board of Commissioners.

Payne’s office had said his heart attack was connected to complications from diabetes. Payne’s father, Donald Milford Payne, held the congressional seat before him. When the elder Payne died in 2012, the younger ran successfully in a special election to succeed him.

He had won reelection six times since. The district covers parts of Newark and its heavily populated suburbs.

A New Jersey colleague, Democratic U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, called Payne a “truly great public servant” who liked to call him “Uncle Frank” and had fought to raise awareness for diabetes and colorectal cancer prevention and to replace lead pipes in Newark.

Payne’s survivors include his wife, Beatrice, and their three children, Murphy said.

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge Wednesday sentenced a longtime U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent to four years in prison for leaking DEA intelligence to defense lawyers in a $100,000 bribery scheme that prosecutors said jeopardized drug cases and the lives of confidential informants.

John Costanzo Jr. was found guilty last year of bribery and honest-services wire fraud, joining a growing list of DEA agents convicted of federal crimes. Another former DEA supervisor, Manny Recio, is scheduled to be sentenced next month in the same case.

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Oetken, in handing down his sentence, noted that the 49-year-old Costanzo was “especially culpable” as a supervisor because he “knew what he was doing was wrong.”

Costanzo, addressing the judge before sentencing, expressed regret for his actions. “This is my cross to bear,” he said. “I will try to find a silver lining in all of this.”

Prosecutors urged the judge to sentence Costanzo to at least seven years behind bars, saying he abused the tradecraft he mastered as a narcotics investigator steeped in the world of money laundering. He worked in supervisory roles in Miami and later at DEA headquarters outside Washington, D.C.

“Costanzo acted purely out of greed,” prosecutors wrote in court papers. “He used his network, connections and skills to hold himself above the law and make money for leaking law enforcement secrets, undermining everything he purported to stand for.”

Much of the case turned on text messages and wiretapped phone calls between Costanzo and Recio, who remained close after Recio retired from DEA in 2018 and began working as a private investigator for Miami defense lawyers.

Prosecutors allege that attorneys David Macey and Luis Guerra bankrolled the bribery scheme and used the leaked information to approach new clients facing federal drug charges. Macey and Guerra have not been charged but prosecutors in January asked the court for permission to access normally privileged communications between Recio and the attorneys as part of what they described as an “ongoing” investigation.

The DEA did not respond to a request for comment. Costanzo’s sentencing came less than two weeks after a federal jury in Buffalo, New York, convicted another veteran DEA agent of obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents in a sprawling corruption case.

Over the course of a year, Recio repeatedly asked Costanzo to query names in a confidential DEA database to keep abreast of federal investigations that would interest his new employers. The two also discussed the timing of high-profile arrests and the exact date in 2019 when prosecutors planned to bring charges against businessman Alex Saab, a top criminal target in Venezuela and suspected bag man for the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro.

In exchange, prosecutors said, Recio secretly funneled bribes to Costanzo, including plane tickets and a $50,000 down payment on a condo in suburban Coral Gables.

The conspiracy relied on middlemen, including Costanzo’s father, himself a retired and decorated DEA agent who prosecutors said lied to the FBI. Prosecutors said Costanzo and Recio also used sham invoices and a company listing its address as a UPS store to disguise the bribe payments while deleting hundreds of messages and calls to a burner phone.

In requesting a sentence of probation, Costanzo obtained letters of support from several former colleagues, including three current DEA agents and supervisors who described him as a dedicated public servant, generous friend and expert in illicit finance.

Costanzo’s attorney said his client’s only ambition was to follow in the footsteps of his father, John Costanzo Sr., a retired DEA agent who served for years in Italy and who is now battling pancreatic cancer.

“Not being present for his hero’s waning days and final months would break John forever,” defense lawyer Marc Mukasey argued in a pre-sentencing memo. “That is a punishment he does not deserve.”

Prosecutors, however, painted a less charitable view of the father-son relationship, pointing to the elder Costanzo’s role as a conduit for a $50,000 bribe payment that was used to purchase a Miami townhouse.

“Let this be a message to all public officials who are tempted to profit illegally from their service — there will be serious consequences,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said.

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Mustian reported from Natchitoches, Louisiana, Goodman from Miami.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukraine for the first time has begun using long-range ballistic missiles provided secretly by the United States, bombing a Russian military airfield in Crimea last week and Russian forces in another occupied area overnight, American officials said Wednesday.

Long sought by Ukrainian leaders, the new missiles give Ukraine nearly double the striking distance — up to 300 kilometers (190 miles) — that it had with the mid-range version of the weapon that it received from the U.S. last October. One of the officials said the U.S. is providing more of these missiles in a new military aid package signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

Biden approved delivery of the long-range Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, in February, and then in March the U.S. included a “significant” number of them in a $300 million aid package announced, one official said.

The two U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the delivery before it became public, would not provide the exact number of missiles given last month or in the latest aid package, which totals about $1 billion.

Ukraine has been forced to ration its weapons and is facing increasing Russian attacks. Ukraine had been begging for the long-range system because the missiles provide a critical ability to strike Russian targets that are farther away, allowing Ukrainian forces to stay safely out of range.

Information about the delivery was kept so quiet that lawmakers and others in recent days have been demanding that the U.S. send the weapons — not knowing they were already in Ukraine.

For months, the U.S. resisted sending Ukraine the long-range missiles out of concern that Kyiv could use them to hit deep into Russian territory, enraging Moscow and escalating the conflict. That was a key reason the administration sent the mid-range version, with a range of about 160 kilometers (roughly 100 miles), in October instead.

Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that the White House and military planners looked carefully at the risks of providing long-range fires to Ukraine and determined that the time was right to provide them now.

He told The Associated Press in an interview that long-range weapons will help Ukraine take out Russian logistics nodes and troop concentrations that are not on the front lines. Grady declined to identify what specific weapons were being provided but said they will be “very disruptive if used properly, and I’m confident they will be.”

Like many of the other sophisticated weapons systems provided to Ukraine, the administration weighed whether their use would risk further escalating the conflict. The administration is continuing to make clear that the weapons cannot be used to hit targets inside Russia. At the State Department, spokesman Vedant Patel said Wednesday that Biden directed his national security team to send the ATACMS specifying that they be used inside Ukrainian sovereign territory.

“I think the time is right, and the boss (Biden) made the decision the time is right to provide these based on where the fight is right now,” Grady said Wednesday. “I think it was a very well considered decision, and we really wrung it out — but again, any time you introduce a new system, any change — into a battlefield, you have to think through the escalatory nature of it.”

Ukrainian officials haven’t publicly acknowledged the receipt or use of long-range ATACMS. But in thanking Congress for passing the new aid bill Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted on the social platform X that “Ukraine’s long-range capabilities, artillery and air defense are extremely important tools for the quick restoration of a just peace.”

One of the U.S. officials said the Biden administration warned Russia last year that if Moscow acquired and used long-range ballistic missiles in Ukraine, Washington would provide the same capability to Kyiv.

Russia got some of those weapons from North Korea and has used them on the battlefield in Ukraine, said the official, prompting the Biden administration to greenlight the new long-range missiles.

The U.S. had refused to confirm that the long-range missiles were given to Ukraine until they were actually used on the battlefield and Kyiv leaders approved the public release. One official said the weapons were used early last week to strike the airfield in Dzhankoi, a city in Crimea, a peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. They were used again overnight east of the occupied city of Berdyansk.

Videos on social media last week showed the explosions at the military airfield, but officials at the time would not confirm it was the ATACMS.

Ukraine’s first use of the weapon came as political gridlock in Congress had delayed approval of a $95 billion foreign aid package for months, including funding for Ukraine, Israel and other allies. Facing acute shortages of artillery and air defense systems, Ukraine has been rationing its munitions as U.S. funding was delayed.

With the war now in its third year, Russia used the delay in U.S. weapons deliveries and its own edge in firepower and personnel to step up attacks across eastern Ukraine. It has increasingly used satellite-guided gliding bombs — dropped from planes from a safe distance — to pummel Ukrainian forces beset by a shortage of troops and ammunition.

The mid-range missiles provided last year, and some of the long-range ones sent more recently, carry cluster munitions that open in the air when fired, releasing hundreds of bomblets rather than a single warhead. Others sent recently have a single warhead.

One critical factor in the March decision to send the weapons was the U.S. Army’s ability to begin replacing the older ATACMS. The Army is now buying the Precision Strike Missile, so is more comfortable taking ATACMS off the shelves to provide to Ukraine, the official said.

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Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer contributed to this report.

(Reuters) – A U.S. Senate committee said on Wednesday it had launched an investigation into the prices of Novo Nordisk’s diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy in the United States.

Senator Bernie Sanders, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, sent a letter to Novo’s CEO seeking more information on U.S. prices for the two drugs, which are higher than the prices in other countries.

The committee also asked Novo if it will substantially reduce both the list price and the net price of both the drugs, and why the company was charging a higher price for the weight loss drug Wegovy than Ozempic, which contains the same compound.

“Novo Nordisk remains committed to working with policymakers to advance solutions to support access and affordability for all patients, and we reiterated this commitment in our conversation with Chairman Sanders,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.

Ozempic, approved for diabetes patients, and Wegovy belong to a class of drugs called GLP-1 agonists that reduces food cravings and causes the stomach to empty more slowly.

(Reporting by Christy Santhosh and Pratik Jain in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council is set to vote Wednesday on a resolution sponsored by the United States and Japan calling on all nations to prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race in outer space. It is likely to be vetoed by Russia.

The resolution calls on all countries not to develop or deploy weapons of mass destruction, like nuclear arms, in space.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a council meeting on March 18 where she announced the resolution that “any placement of nuclear weapons into orbit around the Earth would be unprecedented, dangerous and unacceptable.”

Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyansky, retorted that Moscow’s initial impression was that the resolution is “yet another propaganda stunt by Washington” and is “very politicized” and “divorced from reality.”

The announcement of the resolution followed White House confirmation in February that Russia has obtained a “troubling” anti-satellite weapon capability, although such a weapon is not operational yet.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared later that Moscow has no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space, claiming that the country has only developed space capabilities similar to those of the United States.

The draft resolution says “the prevention of an arms race in outer space would avert a grave danger for international peace and security.”

It urges all countries carrying out activities in exploring and using outer space to comply with international law and the U.N. Charter.

The draft “affirms” that countries that ratified the 1967 Outer Space Treaty must comply with their obligations not to put in orbit around the Earth “any objects” with weapons of mass destruction, or install them “on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space.”

The treaty, ratified by some 114 countries including the United States and Russia, prohibits the deployment of “nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction” in orbit or the stationing of “weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

The draft resolution emphasizes “the necessity of further measures, including political commitments and legally binding instruments, with appropriate and effective provisions for verification, to prevent an arms race in outer space in all its aspects.”

It reiterates that the U.N. Conference on Disarmament, based in Geneva, has the primary responsibility to negotiate agreements on preventing an arms race in outer space.

The 65-nation body has achieved few results and has largely devolved into a venue for countries to voice criticism of others’ weapons programs or defend their own. The draft resolution urges the conference “to adopt and implement a balanced and comprehensive program of work.”

At the March council meeting where the U.S.-Japan initiative was launched, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “geopolitical tensions and mistrust have escalated the risk of nuclear warfare to its highest point in decades.”

He said the movie “Oppenheimer” about Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the U.S. project during World War II that developed the atomic bomb, “brought the harsh reality of nuclear doomsday to vivid life for millions around the world.”

“Humanity cannot survive a sequel to Oppenheimer,” the U.N. chief said.