An ancient forest near the South Pole, experts fear a domestic violence crisis, movie studios making new releases available digitally.

These, and more, are the newsworthy stories from this past week.

Science and Environment

• Buried sediment extracted from the seafloor off West Antarctica contains ancient pollen, fossilized roots and other chemical evidence of a diverse forest that flourished millions of years ago, less than a thousand kilometers from the South Pole.
  
  – Science News Magazine

• The EPA sent a letter to government and private sector partners informing that the agency is not planning to enforce environmental standards on power plants and factories, who won’t be penalized for breaking the rules during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  
  – ZME Science

• Researchers have come up with a new method that can create 1,000 components for face shields per day with a single 3D printer. The printing technique called “high-area rapid printing” (HARP) uses a printer that stands 13 feet (4 meters) in height, which can print half a yard in one hour (0.45 meters/hour).
  
  Face shields are needed by many healthcare workers to protect themselves when treating patients so as to avoid a potential infection.
  
  – ZME Science

Health and Society

• In a hopeful sign for other Western countries, authorities in Italy said the epidemic there is slowing appreciably after three weeks of lockdown—but officials and experts said it will take until after Easter to cut new infections enough to loosen the lockdown.
  
  – The Wall Street Journal

• Experts are convinced we’re on the precipice of a crisis of domestic violence fueled by the anxiety, stay-at-home rules and economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
  
  Survivors are more isolated, their abusive partners are under more stress, and the options for escape have become more limited amid the outbreak.
  
  The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached by calling 800-799-7233, by texting LOVEIS to 22522 or by going to thehotline.org.
  
  – Axios

Business and Economics

• Some movie studios, like Universal Pictures, have said that they will for the first time roll out movies to digital audiences at the same time that they make them available in theaters due to the crisis.
  
  – Axios

Government and Politics

• President Trump said he was extending the administration’s social-distancing guidelines for another 30 days through the end of April, after saying for days that he was hoping to open up the country in the coming weeks.
  
  Mr. Trump said the peak of the death rate was expected to hit in two weeks.
  
  – The Wall Street Journal

• A Justice Department watchdog examining a sampling of FBI applications to monitor Americans suspected of links to foreign intelligence or terrorism found errors in 100% of the more than two dozen files he looked at.|
  
  – The Wall Street Journal

• Federal judges for now blocked Texas and Ohio from curbing most abortions, after the states recently cited the need to preserve medical equipment for the fight against the coronavirus as a reason to halt the procedure.
  
  – The Wall Street Journal

• Russian President Vladimir Putin sent soldiers and nine plane loads of medical supplies to Italy when aid from Europe and the U.S. was scarce earlier this month.
  
  – The Wall Street Journal