By Sophie Tanno, CNN

(CNN) — Five of the seven villagers trapped for a week in a flooded cave in Laos have been found alive, rescuers said on Wednesday.

They were located by specialist cave divers and for now remain stuck in an underground cavern, as rescuers continue to search for the two remaining people.

A dangerous operation to rescue the villagers was launched amid deteriorating conditions. They are believed to be trapped on “an elevated ledge inside the cave that benefits from continuous airflow,” state-run Lao News Agency reported Tuesday.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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By Deidre McPhillips, CNN

(CNN) — The FIFA World Cup is now just a few weeks away, but Dr. Rebecca Katz has been worrying about the public health threats it poses for years.

“With any mass gathering event, there are certain disease conditions that people worry about,” said Katz, who leads Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “There’s always something happening.”

There’s a well-established playbook for planning how to protect the public’s health during mass gatherings like the World Cup, experts say. But broader circumstances surrounding this year’s tournament, which is expected to bring millions of visitors to North America, are poised to test that playbook.

Right now, an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda is posing an acute global health concern. The World Health Organization has declared it to be a “public health emergency of international concern” — only the ninth such declaration since the criteria were established in 2005. And it’s happening while US and international health resources are also being directed toward responding to a rare hantavirus outbreak.

Although those rare and serious diseases are concerning, experts say that most public health preparation for the World Cup has been focused on familiar issues – but ramped up to match the scale of the event.

“We’re expecting the unexpected, but there’s this idea of ‘let’s make sure we’re also really expecting the expected,’ ” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, health director for the Fulton County (Georgia) Board of Health, which is home to the World Cup host city of Atlanta. “The common things are going to become even more common.”

Respiratory diseases are a particular concern during mass gatherings, and measles has quickly risen to the top of that list as all three World Cup host countries – the US, Mexico and Canada – face a recent surge in cases.

Other infectious diseases such as sexually transmitted infections also pose challenges, especially during celebratory times. And arboviruses — a group of viruses that spread to people through bites from infected insects, such as dengue from mosquitoes – were an early obsession for Katz and her World Cup concerns.

“We have the vectors for dengue, for chikungunya, for all of these disease challenges in the US, but what we haven’t had was enough people with those diseases to sustain the transmission,” she said. The World Cup, though, would bring in millions of people who could potentially make that chain of transmission more substantial, Katz said.

Local public health leaders have also noted concerns about high temperatures, air quality, drug overdoses, food safety and more.

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and former senior adviser to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said heat-related illness is “probably the most reliable risk” beyond infectious diseases.

“Crowds plus sun plus summer temperatures plus physical exertion plus alcohol is a combination that sends people to emergency rooms every year,” she wrote in her public health newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist.

Public health is always working to provide an “invisible shield” around communities, said Dr. Monika Roy, deputy health officer and director of the infectious disease and response branch with the County of Santa Clara (California) Public Health.

“We do this every day. It is the bread and butter, so we feel prepared, but having the resources to do so is very important,” she said at a briefing this month.

This year’s edition features the largest World Cup competition ever — with 48 participating teams, up from 32 — and it’s the first time games will be spread across three countries.

This unique scale makes the core elements of a public health response – clear communication, rapid surveillance and efficient coordina

Por CNN en Español

Irán amenaza con tomar represalias tras ataques de EE.UU. Con el ébola en mente, México se prepara para el reto sanitario del Mundial. Las declaraciones de Michael Phelps sobre salud mental. Esto es lo que debes saber para comenzar el día. Primero, la verdad.

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Mientras Donald Trump salía del hospital el martes después de su examen físico, dijo de camino de regreso a la Casa Blanca que todo había salido “PERFECTAMENTE”. Pero es probable que eso haga poco para acallar las preguntas sobre su salud. Incluso el propio presidente ha comenzado a hacer un reconocimiento tácito de su propia mortalidad.

• Trump culmina su mes de venganza republicana, y otras conclusiones de la segunda vuelta electoral en Texas. Análisis

El Cuerpo de la Guardia Revolucionaria Islámica de Irán afirma tener un derecho “legítimo” a responder ante cualquier “violación” del alto el fuego, después de que las Fuerzas Armadas de EE.UU. ejecutaran “ataques de autodefensa” contra sitios de lanzamiento de misiles y embarcaciones iraníes en las inmediaciones del estrecho de Ormuz. Sigue aquí las actualizaciones de la información minuto a minuto.

• Es posible que Trump no tenga una buena salida de la guerra con Irán. Análisis
• Cuando Irán desafía el cese del fuego, el Gobierno de Trump se encoge de hombros. Análisis
• Iraníes vuelven a conectarse a internet con escepticismo y desafío tras meses de apagón

Como intérprete judicial en el sistema migratorio de Texas, el trabajo de Meenu Batra era asegurarse de que los migrantes entendieran los procedimientos del tribunal de inmigración: lo bueno y lo malo. En marzo, Batra conoció el otro lado del sistema migratorio cuando fue detenida por el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional (DHS, por sus siglas en inglés), tras décadas viviendo y trabajando en Estados Unidos.

• La Corte Suprema desestima la demanda de Florida sobre los conductores de camiones extranjeros
• La Corte Suprema falla a favor de Trump en una demanda sobre libertad de expresión presentada por jueces de inmigración

El Gobierno de Gustavo Petro llega a su recta final entre una alta polarización, promesas de reformas incumplidas y crecientes crisis en salud, seguridad y economía. Aunque conserva respaldo popular y exhibe avances sociales y ambientales, persisten las críticas por la falta de gobernabilidad, la violencia y las promesas sin cumplir.

A pocas semanas de que México reciba a millones de aficionados

By Maureen O’Hare, CNN

Istanbul, Turkey (CNN) — If you dreamed of holding one of history’s most seismic New Year parties, one capable of ripping through six centuries of time and uniting the chronology of a whole country at the stroke of midnight, you’d choose a ballroom like this.

When the Champagne popped in this room on December 31, 1925, Turkey officially abolished the Rumi calendar, which was pinned to the year 1341, and instantly woke up in the Western Gregorian year of 1926. It was a literal 585-year chronological leap, executed overnight.

To pull off such a feat, you need a worthy venue. The Grand Pera Ballroom in the Pera Palace Hotel exactly fits the bill: a gleaming line of crystal chandeliers suspended from Belle Époque-style gold-leaf ceiling medallions, gilded cornices, floral moldings, ivory woodwork and floor-to-ceiling curtains with enough sumptuous fabric to make a dozen ballgowns.

Built in 1892 to host passengers arriving in Istanbul on the Orient Express long-distance train service, the hotel was a place of pioneering luxury. It was the first establishment in Istanbul to provide electricity and hot water outside of the Ottoman palaces, and it was home to the second electric elevator in Europe (the first being in the Eiffel Tower.)

By the time it hosted Turkey’s first-ever Western New Year’s Eve party to ring in that gigantic chronological jump, the hotel was, in a city famously described as the meeting point between east and west, the global crossroads within a global crossroads.

While the six-story Neoclassical landmark on a hillside in the lively Beyoğlu district, overlooking the natural harbor of the Golden Horn has seen its clientele change over the years, its original sumptuous design by architect Alexander Vallaury has been well preserved by its two renovations in 2010 and 2014.

In Beyoğlu, the narrow streets are jammed with cars and yellow taxis, revelers spill out onto the hillside steps from busy bars, and vintage red trams move through the throng of pedestrians day and night on nearby İstiklal Avenue.

However, past the uniformed doormen and through the Pera Palace’s revolving door lies an opulent Art Nouveau time capsule with Ottoman accents. The marble walls and columns impress with grandeur, but the red velvet furnishings and soft light from the chandeliers are soft and welcoming. The guests, mostly older Americans and Europeans, flit between the patisserie, the lounge and the Orient Bar.

Greta Garbo and Jackie O

The hotel’s history is inextricably bound to the birth of the modern Turkish nation under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, also known as Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks.” It’s also welcomed 20^th-century icons from cinema, literature and politics.

“This is the elevator that our founding father Mustafa Kemal has used, Agatha Christie has used, Alfred Hitchcock has used,” says Ezgi Pek, the hotel’s marketing coordinator, as the surprisingly spacious dark-wood elevator trundles up through the building’s six floors. A red velvet banquette lines the rear, so that VIPs of yore need not endure one minute without seated luxury.

The roll call of celebrated guests is long. There are pink-curtained rooms dedicated to Greta Garbo and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and suites in honor of dancer-spy Mata Hari and writers Ernest Hemingway and Pierre Loti. The cinematic Hitchcock suite has silver curtains and bedding while Christie’s Room 411 has a replica of her typewriter. The English mystery writer is rumored to have written her 1934 novel “Murder on the Orient Express” during a stay here, but the hotel had already been at the center of plenty of real-life drama.

The early 20th century was a time of unprecedented turmoil across the continents of Europe and Asia. In the 40 or so short years since the hotel’s official ope

By David Goldman, CNN

(CNN) — The clock is ticking for President Donald Trump to get a deal done with Iran.

Or maybe it’s the other way around: Iran could be dealing with a ticking time bomb – in its own oil wells! With just days to go before they’re destroyed.

That’s according to Trump, who can’t seem to stop talking about exploding oil.

• April 23, Oval Office: “If they don’t get their oil moving, their whole oil infrastructure is going to explode. You know what that means? Because they have no place to store it and because they have no place to store it, if they have to stop it … something happens underground that essentially renders it in very poor shape and you never recover fully.”
• April 26, Fox News: “When you have, you know, lines of vast amounts of oil pouring through your system, if for any reason that line is closed because you can’t continue to put it into containers or ships, which has happened to them (they have no ships because of the blockade), what happens is that line explodes from within, both mechanically and in the earth.”
• May 4, Hugh Hewitt Show: “You know, their oil, when you turn off the oil, underground, and the mechanical too, but underground has a tendency in like almost 100% of the cases, to literally explode and just destroy everything around it. And you can never get that oil again.”

What in the world is he talking about?

There’s a kernel of truth in what Trump is saying, although it wouldn’t happen the way he’s describing it – and certainly not in the short timeframe he laid out.

Iran’s oil isn’t about to go boom (on its own, anyway). But the war has created a challenging physics problem for the entire Middle Eastern oil industry.

Well, well, well

Shortly after Iran effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz to foreign tankers, local energy producers ran out of places to store the oil and gas that was piling up. Many neighboring Middle Eastern wells had to be shut off (the industry actually uses the term: “shut in”).

Iran had to shut in its own wells this month after the United States started blockading the strait.

Shut-ins are not like flipping off a light switch. They represent a complex engineering challenge that involves serious physics and meticulous planning over the course of days or even weeks.

When oil wells are shut in, the pressure underground can become imbalanced, deforming the underlying structure. Those changes can damage reservoirs, which can create similar problems for nearby wells, too. Water can seep in, reducing the well’s potential output.

Equipment can be damaged under extended downtime, too. Pumps and lift systems can easily become corroded. Sand and debris can settle into equipment. Concrete casing and tubing – used to seal and extract oil – can lose integrity, causing leaks and potential hazardous gas releases.

And, yes, in rare cases, explosions.

But serious damage – let alone an explosion – isn’t likely, oil industry analysts agree. Wells have been shut in for extended periods before, including in Iran.

During the early days of the pandemic, when basically no one was traveling anywhere, the world ran out of room to store fuel that no one wanted, and oil was literally selling for negative dollars. Producers, including Iran, shut in their wells without any significant or lasting damage.

Some Middle Eastern suppliers have also temporarily shut in their wells when OPEC production caps kicked in.

The oil industry, even in a country as economically battered as Iran, is well equipped to handle it.

“The US blockade of Iran’s oil exports will not cause catastrophic, or even very serious, damage to its upstream oil