By Pau Mosquera, Sol Amaya

(CNN) — Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado has left Oslo, her coordinator of international relations, Pedro Urruchurtu Noselli, wrote in a post on X.

“As confirmed by the prime minister of Norway, she is no longer in the city of Oslo,” Noselli’s post said. “She is doing well and during these days she is attending medical appointments with a specialist for her prompt and full recovery.”

CNN is trying to find out where Machado traveled to. Machado is recovering from a vertebra fracture she suffered during her secretive journey to leave Venezuela and travel to Norway to receive the Nobel last week.

Machado, one of the most critical voices against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, spent 11 months in hiding in Venezuela out of fear for her life and freedom.

But last week she left her refuge to begin a difficult and dangerous journey to Oslo. While she did not arrive at the Wednesday morning ceremony, where her daughter received the prize on her behalf, she did appear before the public the following day.

US special forces veteran Bryan Stern, founder of the Grey Bull Rescue Foundation, said his rescue team spirited the Nobel laureate out of Venezuela. Stern told CNN that the extraction lasted almost 16 hours and was carried out mostly at night and in rough waters.

After a journey by boat and a private jet, Machado arrived in Norway on December 10. There she met with her daughter and made her first public appearance in almost a year, greeting the crowd from the balcony of the Grand Hotel in Oslo.

“In general, this is the most difficult, most high-profile and most delicate operation we have performed,” said Stern, who added that he pleaded with Machado not to return to Venezuela.

Machado has previously said that her intention is to return to her country.

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By Michael Williams, CNN

(CNN) — Rep. Sarah McBride on Wednesday criticized congressional Republicans as being “obsessed with trans people” ahead of a vote on bills that would restrict youth access to gender identity care and penalize health workers who provide it.

“I actually think they think more about trans people than trans people think about trans people,” said McBride, who is the first out transgender member of Congress.

“They are consumed with this, and they are extreme on it,” the Delaware Democrat added.

Since President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, he has made restricting access to health care for trans people and diminishing their existence a priority.

The president has ordered trans people to be removed from the military, excised any mention of them from federal websites, removed them from hate crime surveys and worked to restrict their access to youth sports.

Despite the outsized attention placed on trans people by the administration, they only represent around 0.6% of the US population aged 13 and older, according to the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law that provides scientific research on gender identity and sexual orientation.

One of the new GOP bills, spearheaded by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, would amend current law to make it a felony for health care providers to offer forms of gender identity care to transgender youth, including hormone therapy and puberty blockers.

The bill would also open the door for criminal penalties to people who help facilitate that care for minors, including parents or guardians.

The bill is the culmination of a yearslong effort on the part of Greene, a Georgia Republican, to restrict youth access to such care. Trump, with whom Greene has recently fallen out, made anti-transgender policies a central platform of his successful presidential campaign.

Civil rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union described Greene’s bill as “the most extreme anti-trans legislation ever considered by Congress.”

A second bill, sponsored by GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, prohibits federal Medicaid funding for “gender transition procedures for minors.”

McBride said Wednesday that Republicans were “trying to politicize a misunderstood community and misunderstood care.”

“No one’s healthcare should be politicized,” she said

CNN’s Alison Main contributed to this report.

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By Andrew Freedman, CNN

NEW ORLEANS (CNN) — Stress balls were the swag item of choice at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s booth Wednesday morning, during the world’s largest gathering of climate scientists.

NCAR representatives came to this meeting — the convention of the American Geophysical Union — to talk about their research, which is crucial to the climate and weather community. Instead, they’ve ended up fielding questions about Trump administration plans to break up this Boulder-based center, which conducts research and maintains supercomputing facilities on behalf of the government and 129 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

The impending breakup of NCAR, first reported by USA Today and announced on X Tuesday night by OMB director Russ Vought, would be aimed at ending the center’s climate programs while maintaining its supercomputing facilities and weather-related programs.

In his post on X, Vought called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”

His announcement landed with a thud, even among some experts who have supported the Trump administration in the past.

Ryan Maue, who briefly served as a top official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Trump’s first term, denounced the move against NCAR on X, stating: “If you believe A.I. and numerical weather prediction are important for our economy and national security, then NCAR in Boulder probably is our best bet to compete globally.”

“(American) weather modeling has been neglected for 20 years, and moonshot focus is needed, not dismantling.”

Created in 1960, the lab feeds models, tools and insights into government agencies including NOAA and NASA. At a town hall meeting last week, NOAA’s administrator touted the need to form a closer partnership with NCAR in order to improve the agency’s weather modeling, according to an agency staff member who attended.

That work could be put in jeopardy by the center’s breakup.

The NCAR is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which is also in Boulder. As part of the administration’s plans, all the center’s existing facilities, including its I.M. Pei-designed headquarters in the Boulder foothills, would be shuttered and moved to other locations.

In his statement, Vought said “vital activities such as weather research” will move to these new locations. The White House did not respond to CNN’s request for further details about the plan, such as how officials aim to discern the difference between weather and climate programs when deciding which to continue.

At the AGU conference, researchers expressed suspicions that climate research is not the only reason NCAR has been targeted. “Something more is going on,” said Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

He noted it would be possible, for example, to shut down NCAR’s climate research programs without parceling its facilities to other locations, presumably in other states. The Trump administration has already sought to move major infrastructure out of Democrat-led Colorado, with the Space Force headquarters slated to move to Alabama.

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