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By Adam Cancryn, Brenda Goodman, Jennifer Hansler, Deidre McPhillips, CNN

(CNN) — The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is dispatching staffers to meet the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship in the Canary Islands, with plans to escort its American passengers back to the US aboard a charter flight, four sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Another CDC team has been dispatched to meet the passengers in Nebraska, one source said. Passengers are expected to be placed into quarantine there as part of an effort to ensure that the virus does not have a chance to spread, two sources said. Nebraska is home to the National Quarantine Unit, a federally funded quarantine facility, as well as the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.

“Nebraska Medicine and UNMC remain in close coordination with national partners regarding the evolving situation with the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship,” Nebraska Medicine said in a statement. “We cannot discuss specific communications at this time, but, our specialized teams, including the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit and National Quarantine Unit, are staffed and ready, if needed, to safely provide care while protecting our staff and the community.”

The US State Department is arranging the repatriation flight in coordination with the CDC, US Department of Health and Human Services and government of Spain, a State Department spokesperson confirmed. One source said the charter is a specialized aircraft with a biocontainment unit, similar to those used during Covid-19 evacuations.

The department is “in direct communication with Americans on board and are prepared to provide consular assistance as soon as the ship arrives in Tenerife, Spain,” the State Department spokesperson said.

The Trump administration was expected to publicly detail its plan as early as Friday, one of the people familiar with the matter said, though they cautioned the timing remained fluid.

There are an estimated 17 Americans on board the cruise ship, according to its operator, Oceanwide Expeditions.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

President Donald Trump on Thursday indicated that the administration would soon release more information on its work to contain the disease, telling reporters that it is “very much, we hope, under control.”

“It was the ship, and I think we’re going to make a full report about it tomorrow,” he said.

Five states — Arizona, California Georgia, Texas and Virginia — are already monitoring seven passengers who previously disembarked from the ship. Health officials told CNN that none are experiencing symptoms. New Jersey also said it is monitoring two people who were potentially exposed to a person infected with hantavirus after departing MV Hondius. They are not experiencing hantavirus symptoms.

Eight hantavirus cases — all among passengers on the MV Hondius — have already been identified. Among them, three people have died.

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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — Scientists have named a newly identified species of wasp after David Attenborough to honor the legendary naturalist and broadcaster’s 100th birthday.

The wasp, called Attenboroughnculus tau, had been sitting in the collection of London’s Natural History Museum since 1983 after its discovery in southern Chile’s Valdivia province.

It’s not unusual for specimens to spend a long time in museum archives before being properly analyzed or classified, according to Gavin Broad, principal curator of insects at London’s Natural History Museum. Broad led a study on the species that was published Thursday in the Journal of Natural History.

“Taxonomic discovery is sometimes really quick — you find something and you describe it right away,” he said. “But sometimes it’s quite slow, and you just work methodically through the collections that other people have accumulated over the years.”

Augustijn De Ketelaere, a volunteer and study coauthor, spotted Attenboroughnculus tau during a survey of the museum’s ichneumon wasps — a large and geographically widespread group of parasitic wasps that contains about 25,000 identified species, with an estimated 75,000 more yet to be named.

A detailed examination of the 43-year-old specimen revealed that it was not just a previously unknown species but also a previously unidentified genus — a higher level taxonomic rank that refers to a group of related species.

“We looked at it, and we had a good look at all its relatives,” Broad said, “and we realized it’s got a combination of characters that meant it wouldn’t fit anywhere. So, we had to describe a new genus to accommodate this lovely little species.”

The wasp is 3.5 millimeters (0.13 of an inch) long, with a slender, curved abdomen, and belongs to a small subfamily of wasps native to Chile, Argentina, Australia and New Guinea.

“It’s a really weird distribution, because these are relics of a time when a supercontinent called Gondwana still existed,” said Broad, referring to a landmass that was made up of what are now South America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica, and started breaking up about 180 million years ago.

“These little wasps have clung on to what used to be Gondwana, and they’ve probably gone extinct in the rest of the world.”

An inspiration for many

Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus devised the system for naming species, called binomial nomenclature, in the 1750s. It uses two Latin or latinized words: the first identifying the genus and the second the species. In the case of Attenboroughnculus tau, the tribute to the naturalist’s name is in the genus, while the species name tau refers to the markings on the insect’s abdomen, which resemble a T or the Greek letter tau.

Taxonomy is important not only as the foundation of biology, but also because a species can’t be protected against the threat of extinction if it isn’t named. An ongoing shortage of taxonomists exists, with an extensive backlog of species waiting to be named.

However, naming a species is not particularly complicated.

“There’s not a lot of rules — taxonomy is quite open like that,” Broad said. “There’s a lot of guidelines, like don’t name things after really awful people or after yourself, because it just looks bad.

“Naming a genus after somebody is quite special, because a genus is mo

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (KEYT) – This morning the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office will be holding a press conference in Arroyo Grande to provide the public with updates regarding the Kristin Smart case.

Sheriff Parkinson will be holding the conference in the 500 block of East Branch Street, outside of the home of Susan Flores, the mother of the man convicted of murdering Smart back in 1996.

Investigators began searching Flores' home on Wednesday, and could be seen probing the Earth, testing the soil, and taking measurements using plastic tubing.

Up until now, the sheriff's department has not shared any details into the search, but it will the topic of discussion at today's 9:00am conference.

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By Amarachi Orie, CNN

London (CNN) — The depiction of an enslaved Black child known as “Jersey” by celebrated 18th-century portrait painter Joshua Reynolds has long puzzled art historians, raising questions about the boy’s identity and life — and whether or not he was even real.

Now, researchers in London say they finally have some answers — after scouring British government archives, original letters, ship captains’ logs and documents relating to crew members, according to the UK’s National Trust. The conservation charity carried out the research in collaboration with London’s National Gallery and the Royal Museums Greenwich.

In the painting, completed around 1748, the smartly-dressed boy — wearing a navy-blue coat, red waistcoat, an embroidered white turban and pearl earrings — is gazing up at young Royal Navy lieutenant, Paul Henry Ourry, who later became a captain.

Artists in the 18th century would often include a person of color, who would sometimes be imaginary, in their portraits of wealthy white sitters to embellish the painting and highlight the high status of the main subject, according to the researchers.

So, “as tropes, we can’t always be sure that the person of color, the Black sitter, is a real person,” Zoe Shearman, a property curator at the National Trust’s Saltram estate in the southwestern English city of Plymouth, told CNN on Friday. “So it’s really important to just begin this process of trying to evidence that, to forefront those stories.”

Within the archives, the researchers discovered various details relating to the boy’s name, including that “Jersey” was his surname and even a nickname that might have replaced a former name, the National Trust said in a statement Friday.

His full name is recorded as “Boston Jersey” in a crew record book, historical geographer Mark Brayshay, an emeritus professor at the UK’s University of Plymouth and a volunteer researcher at Saltram, said in the statement.

The boy might have been named Jersey because Ourry was born in St Helier — the capital of Jersey, one of the Channel Islands — after his Huguenot family fled persecution in France, according to the National Trust. The boy could have been named Boston because, before being in England, he lived in Boston, Massachusetts, although the reason for this first name is not certain.

Boston Jersey was, however, baptized under a different name, “George Walker,” as a teenager on July 30, 1752, and probably at a chapel in Westminster, London, the trust said.

The baptism certificate reads, “A Certain Black Boy Called Boston Jersey Baptised by the name of George Walker aged fifteen,” suggesting that the boy was around age 11 in the portrait.

In the early 1700s, it was routine to ship boys of African descent under 10 years of age to Britain to serve as domestic servants in affluent households.

George Walker was a name that “maybe perhaps he chose for himself, or it was a name that he had used earlier on,” Shearman said.

Naval career

Evidence for the boy being “a real person with a life story” is uncovered in records relating to his naval career, according to Shearman, who said Jersey traveled for more than five years with Lieutenant Ourry o