Health officials in Illinois and North Dakota say their states’ measles outbreaks are over, pointing to a continuing slowdown of measles spread in the U.S. during vaccine-preventable disease’s worst year since 1991.

Wednesday’s national case count stood at 1,309 — 21 new cases in a week, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, the U.S. passed the total count for 2019, when the country almost lost its status of having eliminated measles.

A vast majority of this year’s cases are from Texas, where a major outbreak raged through the late winter and spring. Other states with active outbreaks — which the CDC defines as three or more related cases — include Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah.

There have been three deaths in the U.S. this year, and all were unvaccinated: two elementary school-aged children in West Texas and an adult in New Mexico.

North America has three other large outbreaks. The longest, in Ontario, Canada, has resulted in 2,244 cases from mid-October through July 8. The province logged its first death June 5 in a baby who got congenital measles but also had other preexisting conditions.

Another outbreak in Alberta, Canada, has sickened 1,323 as of Tuesday. And the Mexican state of Chihuahua had 3,129 measles cases and eight deaths as of Tuesday, according to data from the state health ministry.

Measles is caused by a highly contagious virus that’s airborne and spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs. It is preventable through vaccines and has been considered eliminated from the U.S. since 2000.

Former NYC top cop sues mayor, city

New York City’s former interim police commissioner is suing Mayor Eric Adams and his top deputies, accusing them of operating the NYPD as a “criminal enterprise.”

In a federal racketeering lawsuit filed Wednesday, the ex-commissioner, Thomas Donlon, alleges Adams and his inner circle showered unqualified loyalists with promotions, buried allegations of misconduct and gratuitously punished whistleblowers.

It is the latest in a series of recent lawsuits by former NYPD leaders describing a department ruled by graft and cronyism, with swift repercussions for those who questioned the mayor’s allies.

In a statement, City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak Altus called the allegations “baseless,” blasting Donlon as a “disgruntled former employee who — when given the opportunity to lead the greatest police department in the world — proved himself to be ineffective.”

Donlon, a longtime FBI official, was appointed last fall by Adams to stabilize a department shaken by federal investigations and high-profile resignations.

Pro-Russian cybercrime network thwarted

A coordinated international operation has hit the infrastructure of a pro-Russian cybercrime network linked to a string of denial of service attacks targeting Ukraine and its allies, the European Union’s police agency Europol announced Wednesday.

Codenamed Eastwood, the operation targeted the so-called NoName057(16) group, which was identified last month by Dutch authorities as being behind a series of denial-of-service attacks on several municipalities and organizations linked to a NATO summit in the Netherlands.

Europol said that the cybercrime network was also involved in attacks in Sweden, Germany and Switzerland.

The police agency said the international operation “led to the disruption of an attack-infrastructure consisting of over one hundred computer systems worldwide, while a major part of the group’s central server infrastructure was taken offline.”

Tropical storm forming off Florida panhandle

The tropical weather system moving across the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday was showing a greater chance of becoming a tropical depression as it moves toward the northern Gulf Coast, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The weather system has a 40% chance of becoming a tropical depression as it moves west toward southeastern Louisiana on Thursday, the federal agency said. The tropical weather will affect Alabama and Mississippi as well.

Regardless of whether the system worsens, heavy downpours could cause flooding, officials warned.

Alaska quake triggers initial tsunami warning

Communities along a 700-mile stretch of Alaska’s southern coast ordered residents to higher ground after a powerful offshore earthquake Wednesday, but officials quickly downgraded and then canceled a tsunami warning for the region. There were no reports of significant damage.

The earthquake, with a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, struck at 12:37 p.m. local time south of Sand Point, a community of about 600 people on Popof Island, in the Aleutian chain, according to the Alaska Earthquake Center.

“We have seen other earthquakes in the area that have not generated significant tsunami waves, but we’re treating it seriously and going through our procedures, making sure communities are notified so they can activate their evacuation procedures,” said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesperson for Alaska’s emergency management division.

The quake was felt as far away as Anchorage, almost 600 miles to the northeast.

The National Weather Service said that there was no tsunami threat for other U.S. and Canadian Pacific coasts in North America.

Gunmen kill 20 in Nigeria attacks

At least 20 people have been killed in a gun attack on a village in central Nigeria, local authorities said Wednesday.

The attack took place in the early hours of Tuesday, state assembly member Dewan Gabriel said in a statement.

Sati Shuwa, a local elected official in charge of the area, said the assailants, armed with guns and machetes, were undeterred by the presence of security personnel as they burned down houses during the raid.

No one claimed responsibility for the killings, but such attacks are common in Nigeria’s northern region where herders and farmers often clash over limited access to land and water.

Last month, gunmen killed at least 150 people.

Prince Harry takes up Diana’s land mine cause

Prince Harry followed in his late mother’s footsteps on Wednesday by wearing a flak jacket and walking down a path in an active land mine field in Angola to raise awareness for a charity’s work clearing explosives from old war zones.

The Duke of Sussex is in the southern African country with the Halo Trust organization, the same group Princess Diana worked with when she went to Angola in January 1997, seven months before she was killed in a car crash in Paris.

Diana’s advocacy and the images of her walking through a minefield helped mobilize support for a land mine ban treaty that was ratified later that year.

Harry walked through a land mine field near a village in Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola, according to Halo Trust. It’s not the first time he has retraced his mother’s steps after traveling to Angola for a similar awareness campaign in 2019.

The land mines across Angola were left behind from its 27-year civil war from 1975 to 2002. The Halo Trust says at least 60,000 people have been killed or injured by land mines since 2008.

— From news services