Robert Caros fifth volume on Lyndon Johnson, one of the book worlds most long-awaited publications, is unlikely to be delayed by the death of his longtime editor, publishing luminary Robert Gottlieb.

Mr. Caro is continuing his work on Volume 5 with limited interruption, Caro spokesperson Paul Bogaards said Thursday, a day after Gottliebs death at 92.

No release date has been set for whats supposed to be the final book in The Years of Lyndon Johnson series, the first of which was published in 1982. Late last year, Caro told The Associated Press he had no sense when the fifth volume would be done, saying then that he still hoped to visit Vietnam and spend time in a village subjected to U.S. attacks during the Vietnam War.

Caro had worked with Gottlieb also the editor of such celebrated authors as Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Nora Ephron for more than a half-century. Their collaboration began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker, continuing with the first four Johnson biographies, and a brief volume on Caros writing process, Working.

Their unique collaboration was the basis for an acclaimed documentary, Turn Every Page, directed by Gottliebs daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, and released last year.

As Caro told the AP ahead of the documentarys release, he and Gottlieb did not have the kind of ongoing communication many writers and editors have. Caro did not consult with Gottlieb while writing his books or show him early drafts, waiting instead to turn in a completed manuscript. They saw so little of each other in social gatherings that Lizzie Gottlieb would say that she only got to know Caro through making the film, which does depict the pair editing Working.

The two Bobs argued fiercely over The Power Broker when hundreds of thousands of words were cut from what still ended up as a 1,200-page book but had since enjoyed a much warmer and more seamless working relationship.

From the day 52 years ago that we first looked at my pages together, Bob understood what I was trying to do and made it possible for me to take the time, and do the work, I needed to do, Caro said in a statement Wednesday adding that he looked upon Gottlieb as a great friend.

The Johnson books, which have brought Caro a Pulitzer and a National Book Award among other honors, have become an obsession with history fans. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf receives more queries from fans about the fifth volume, expected to cover the last nine years of Johnsons life, than about any other book.

Caro is a famously thorough researcher and expansive narrator whose books usually exceed 600 pages and can take up to a decade or more to finish. His most recent Johnson book, The Passage of Power, was released in 2012.

You cant speed up the research, Caro told the AP last year, saying the scope of the final volume was huge.

Bogaards declined comment on who might edit the final book, which the 87-year-old Caro had acknowledged was shadowed by his and Gottliebs ages. Caro has said he sometimes receives mail from fans, urging him to finish Volume 5 and reminding him, Do you know how old you are?

Bob and I dont sit around and talk about it, Caro told the AP last year. We know how the clock ticks.

The homicide rate for older U.S. teenagers rose to its highest point in nearly 25 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the suicide rate for adults in their early 20s was the worst in more than 50 years, government researchers said Thursday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report examined the homicide and suicide rates among 10- to 24-year-olds from 2001 to 2021.

The increase is alarming and reflects a mental health crisis among young people and a need for a number of policy changes, said Dr. Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher who studies U.S. death trends and wasnt involved in the CDC report.

Experts cited several possible reasons for the increases, including higher rates of depression, limited availability of mental health services and the number of guns in U.S. homes.

Guns were used in 54% of suicides and 93% of homicides among the age group in 2021, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

Picture a teenager sitting in their bedroom feeling desperate and making a decision, impulsively, to take their own life, Woolf said. If they have access to a gun, its game over.

Suicide and homicide were the second and third leading causes of death for 10- to 24-year-olds, after a category of accidental deaths that includes motor vehicle crashes, falls, drownings and overdoses. Other researchers have grouped the data by the method of death, and concluded that guns are now the biggest killer of U.S. children.

Earlier this year, Woolf and other researchers looking at CDC data noted dramatic increases in child and adolescent death rates overall at the beginning of the pandemic, and found suicide and homicide were important factors.

The report also found:

Suicide and homicide death rates remained far higher for older teenagers and young adults than they were for 10- to 14-year-olds.

In 2021, there were about 2,900 suicides in youths ages 10 to 19, and 4,200 in 20- to 24-year-olds. About 3,000 homicide deaths were reported in the younger group, and nearly 3,900 in the adults in their early 20s.

The homicide death rate jumped from 8.9 deaths per 100,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2019 to 12.3 in 2020. It rose to 12.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021, the highest since 1997, according to CDC data.

Homicide deaths became more common than suicide deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds, while suicide was more common in the younger and older age groups.

While large increases were seen in homicide rates for young Black and Hispanic people in the U.S., there were not significant increases for their white counterparts, other CDC data shows.

Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the homicide death rate jumped 34% from 2019 to 2020 from 13.4 per 100,000 population to 18 per 100,000. It held stable in 2021, but the suicide rate rose enough in 2021 to 19.4 per 100,000 to surpass the homicide rate.

Suicide death rates in children and teens were rising before COVID-19, but they jumped up at the beginning of the pandemic. Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said the reasons may be hard to pinpoint, but that isolation during COVID-19 lockdowns could be a factor.

There is a misperception that if you talk to young people about depression, theyll get depressed. A dont-ask, dont-tell policy for depression is not effective, Trivedi said. The earlier we can identify the ones who need help, the better chance well have at saving lives.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued draft regulations setting ambitious greenhouse gas emission limits from power plants. If EPAs proposed rule goes into effect, it will accelerate the need for nuclear energy since it is the only carbon-free source that can fill this void. As the demand for uranium increases in the U.S., it must diversify its global supply chains. We do not want to find ourselves in the position we are currently in with the nickel, copper, lithium, and cobalt needed for electric vehicles.

Ten years ago, electric cars were a small fraction of the automobiles manufactured and driven in the U.S., and accessing the materials needed to build them was not a widely discussed concern. Since then, we have seen the White House announce a commitment to having 50% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030 and make historic investments to make it a reality.

It is a lofty, exciting goal, but the U.S. will have to rely on its strained relationship with China to achieve these goals. China refines 68% of nickel worldwide, along with 40% of copper, 59% of lithium, and 73% of cobalt. More than half of the worlds cobalt reserves are located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where child labor practices are the norm. China owns the majority of these minesand is the eighth-largest producer of uranium in its own right.

If Western countries want to avoid this dire predicament with nuclear energy, they need to start shoring up the uranium supply chain now. Currently, more than 71% of uranium production comes from state-owned or quasi-controlled companies, and Ukraine is a prime example of how shaky dependence on buying from countries like Russia can be. The countrys nuclear reactors ran on Russian uranium and produced 55% of the countrys electricity before the invasion. Ukraine is now sourcing its supply from Kazakhstan, which has a complicated geo-political situation, so this may only be a temporary fix as opposed to a long-term solution or something allied nations targeting net zero and the energy utilities powering them should emulate.

In the United States, 20% of electricity is nuclear-powered, with most of its imported enriched uranium coming from Russia and a majority of its uranium ore from Kazakhstan. This is not a recipe for energy security and independence and cannot easily be changed. For example, U.S. elected officials banned Russian oil and other energy imports in 2022 in response to the Ukraine invasion but did not include uranium. Canadas sanctions with Russia also do not prohibit importing or exporting uranium from Russia.

The first step to achieving energy independence is to move towards buying fuel from companies that only mine uranium in nations with shared values, beginning with Canada. While companies cannot change where uranium is found, they can commit to keeping the resource in nations that are allied for energy security and targeting net zero when it is discovered there. That means selling only to the U.S., Canada, or other like-minded allied countries.

NexGen Energy is committed to being such a company. Our mineral exploration operations will be based exclusively in Canada, the third largest producer of uranium, and other nations that are allied for energy security and targeting net zero. As importantly, we are committed to selling our uranium only to those same allies leading the energy transition to ensure we do not directly or indirectly fund nations that dont demonstrate peaceful respect for other countries.

The governments and utilities that work with us will benefit from our Saskatchewan-based Rook I project, the largest undeveloped deposit in the world, which will deliver enough uranium to power up to 46 million U.S. homes for years to come and save the equivalent emissions of taking 70 million vehicles off the road. As we prepare to bring our high-grade uranium to market, we will institute a checklist of standards for partners and those involved in our supply chain to ensure high levels of security, safety, and labor standards are met.

Not only is this the right thing to do, its also smart business, as it minimizes the geopolitical risks for our customers, end-users, and investors, making us a supplier of choice.

Nuclear power is the lynchpin of the clean energy transition, but the U.S., Canada, and their allies need stable supply chains. For that to happen, more companies must make this type of commitment to meet the needs of their governments and allies. We look forward to partnering with customers and policymakers to make this the industry standard of the future.

Leigh R. Curyer is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of NexGen Energy Ltd. (NXE).

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

More must-read commentary published by Fortune:

Glenda Jackson, a two-time Academy Award-winning performer who had a second career in politics as a British lawmaker before an acclaimed late-life return to stage and screen, has died at age 87.

Jacksons agent Lionel Larner said she died Thursday at her home in London after a short illness. He said she had recently completed filming The Great Escaper, in which she co-starred with 90-year-old Michael Caine.

Born into a working-class family 1936 in Birkhenhead, northwest England, Jackson trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company where she starred in the cutting-edge drama Marat/Sade directed by Peter Brook and became one of the biggest British stars of the 1960s and 70s, winning two Academy Awards, for Women in Love in 1971 and A Touch of Class in 1974.

On television, she took home two Emmy Awards in 1972 for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth R., and secured a place in British pop-culture history by playing Cleopatra in a classic sketch on The Morecambe & Wise Show in 1971. All men are fools, she proclaimed in what became a famous one-liner, and what makes them so is seeing beauty like what I have got.

In her 50s Jackson went into politics, winning election to Parliament in 1992. She spent 23 years as a Labour Party lawmaker, serving as a minister for transport in Prime Minister Tony Blairs first government in 1997.

She came to be at odds with Blair over the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She said Blairs decision to enter the U.S.-led war without United Nations authorization left her deeply, deeply ashamed.

The victims will be as they always are, women, children, the elderly, she told The Associated Press before the invasion.

Jacksons blunt manner and outspokenness continued throughout her political career, and may have helped keep her from high government office. After former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, she eschewed politeness about the dead to rail in Parliament against the heinous social, economic and spiritual damage wreaked upon this country by the late leader.

Jackson returned to acting after leaving Parliament in 2015 and had some of her most acclaimed roles, including the title character in Shakespeares King Lear. It opened at Londons Old Vic in 2016 and later played on Broadway.

She had her first film role in a quarter-century in the 2019 movie Elizabeth is Missing. Jackson won a BAFTA award, Britains equivalent of an Oscar, for her performance as a woman with Alzheimers trying to solve a mystery.

Director Oliver Parker, who recently worked with Jackson on upcoming movie The Great Escaper, said the team was shocked and deeply saddened at her death.

She had such fierce intelligence, such passion, and fearlessness, Parker said. It is hard to believe that it was less than a month ago that we screened the finished film for her and Michael (Caine) she was as feisty and vibrant as ever and we will treasure the memory of that emotional and happy day.

Caine said it was as wonderful an experience this time as it was 50 years ago, when the two last worked together.

Glenda was one of our greatest movie actresses, he said. I shall miss her.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said Jackson leaves a space in our cultural and political life that can never be filled.

She played many roles with great distinction, passion and commitment, he said. From award-winning actor to campaigner and activist to Labour MP and government minister, Glenda Jackson was always fighting for human rights and social justice.

Tulip Siddiq, Jacksons successor as Labour lawmaker for the London seat of Hampstead and Kilburn, said she was devastated to hear that my predecessor Glenda Jackson has died.

A formidable politician, an amazing actress and a very supportive mentor to me. Hampstead and Kilburn will miss you Glenda, Siddiq wrote on Twitter.

Jackson is survived by her son, Dan Hodges.

As a Black student who was raised by a single mother, Makia Green believes she benefited from a program that gave preference to students of color from economically disadvantaged backgrounds when she was admitted over a decade ago to the University of Rochester.

As a borrower who still owes just over $20,000 on her undergraduate student loans, she has been counting on President Joe Bidens promised debt relief to wipe nearly all of that away.

Now, both affirmative action and the student loan cancellation plan policies that disproportionately help Black students could soon be dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court. To Green and many other people of color, the efforts to roll them back reflect a larger backlash to racial progress in higher education.

I feel like working people have been through enough I have been through enough, said Green, a community organizer. From a pandemic, an uprising, a recession, the cost of living price going up. I deserved some relief.

The rulings could also have political consequences among a generation of young voters of color who took Biden at his word when he promised to cancel debt, said Wisdom Cole, director of NAACPs youth and college program.

Year after year, we have elected officials, we have advocates, we have different politicos coming to our communities making promises. But now its time to deliver on those promises, he said.

The presidents plan forgives up to $10,000 in federal student debt for borrowers, and doubles the debt relief to $20,000 for borrowers who also received Pell Grants. About half of the average debt held by Black and Hispanic borrowers would be wiped out, according to the White House. Six Republican-led states filed a legal challenge questioning whether the president, a Democrat, has authority to forgive the debt.

In the affirmative action cases, the court is considering the use of race-conscious admissions policies that many selective colleges have used for decades to help build diversity on their campuses. The cases were brought by a conservative activist who argues the Constitution forbids the use of race in college admissions.

The high court is expected to rule in each of the cases by the end of June.

Both cases focus on policies that address historic racial disparities in access to higher education, as Black borrowers tend to take on disproportionately more debt to afford college, said Dominique Baker, an education policy professor at Southern Methodist University.

Backlash to racial progress tends to follow periods of social change and advancement, Baker said. In a study published in 2019, Baker and her co-authors found states were more likely to adopt bans on affirmative action when white enrollment at public flagship universities dropped.

These are policy tools that have an explicit aim around reducing the power of white supremacy, Baker said. The two court challenges, she said, can be seen as linked backlash to two attempts towards racial justice.

Green, who grew up in a low-income household in Harlem, New York, graduated from Rochester with about $40,000 in federal loan debt. Some of that was erased under a public service forgiveness program when she completed two terms with Americorps, and she whittled it down further with monthly installments until the government paused repayment due to the pandemic.

Green said she sees both court cases as connected to conservative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Critics say opposition to such programs is rooted in questions of fairness and in white grievances over the advancement of nonwhite people.

This is white supremacy at work, Green said. This is a long tactic of conservative, white supremacist-leaning groups to use education and limit Black peoples access to education, as a way to further control and oppress us.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many colleges developed affirmative action plans to address the fact that many predominantly white schools struggled to attract people from historically disadvantaged and underrepresented communities. Policies were also created to promote greater inclusion of women.

Since the late 1970s, the Supreme Court has three times upheld affirmative action in college admissions on grounds that institutions have a compelling interest to address past discrimination that shut nonwhite students out of higher learning. Justices have also agreed with arguments that more diverse student bodies promoted cross-racial understanding.

But with the Supreme Court skewing more ideologically conservative, some former students and advocates worry how a ruling against affirmative action might affect diversity on campuses.

Tarina Ahuja, a rising senior at Harvard College, said being part of a diverse student body has been a crucial part of her undergraduate experience. She recalled classes where students discussed their lived experiences on topics such as police violence, colonialism and labor movements discussions that would have fallen flat without a diverse range of student perspectives.

The decision is going to very likely be something that is scary to a lot of us, she said.

In anticipation of a possible ruling against race-conscious admissions, some colleges are considering adding more essays to get a better picture of an applicants background. Others are planning to boost recruiting in racially diverse areas. But in states that have already banned affirmative action, similar efforts at selective colleges have largely failed to maintain diversity gains.

Jonathan Loc, a graduate student at Harvard who helped organize teach-ins in support of affirmative action, said that for students of color, its impossible to speak about their lives without mentioning race, whether through hardships faced or simply their pride in their cultural heritage.

I grew up as the son of refugees in a low-income community and a single parent family burdened with the model minority myth, he said. But I think that that kind of narrative also helps me to be an Asian American focused on racial justice, focused on making sure that everyone who has a unique story related to their racial background or any background has that story heard.

If the court rules against affirmative action, it will be important for colleges to find ways to show they see the students as more than a number on paper, said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

We need the schools to say, Look, the court says we cant consider race, but we still see you, said Hewitt, whose organization defended affirmative action before the Supreme Court in October.

Kristin McGuire, the executive director of Young Invincibles, said that she could not overlook the decisions looming over the upcoming Juneteenth holiday, which marks the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. For two years after abolition, Black Americans were kept as laborers and denied the freedom to begin building generational wealth, McGuire said.

If both of these are struck down, it will send a very clear signal that our court system does not support the most vulnerable populations, especially those who helped build this country, McGuire said.

___

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

President Joe Biden is hosting executives from Live Nation, Airbnb and other companies at the White House on Thursday to highlight his administrations push to end so-called junk fees that surprise consumers.

Biden prioritized the effort to combat surprise or undisclosed fees in his State of the Union address and has called for legislation, regulation and private sector action to end them. Biden, at Thursdays event, was set to announce actions by companies that have eliminated or plan to eliminate those surprise fees.

The consumer advocacy push is part of the Democratic presidents pitch to voters ahead of his 2024 reelection bid that government can help improve their lives in big and small ways.

At the White House, Live Nation, which is based in Beverly Hills, California, is announcing that it will provide customers with upfront all-in pricing meaning the actual purchase price including service charges and any other fees for its owned venues by September and that Ticketmaster will give consumers the option to view all-in pricing up front for other venues on the live-entertainment tickets platform. SeatGeek, based in New York, will also unveil features to make it easier to browse for tickets with the true cost displayed.

Airbnb, based in San Francisco, rolled out its all-in pricing tool in December, after Biden first called on companies to stop hiding fees.

President Biden has been working to lower costs for hardworking families by bringing down inflation, capping insulin prices for seniors, and eliminating hidden junk fees, National Economic Council director Lael Brainard said in a statement. More companies are heeding the Presidents call so that Americans know what theyre paying for up front and can save money as a result.

A group of music companies is suing Twitter for over $250 million, claiming the platform has ignored many copyright violation notices. The coalition is composed of 17 music publishers, including such big names as Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Corp., and Big Machine Music. One problem for Elon Musk in defending the lawsuit is that hes said he considers copyright a plague on humanity.

The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) is representing the coalition in the suit, which claims that the publishers sent copyright violations notices for 1,700 songs, on which the social network took no action. The coalition is seeking fines of up to $150,000 per violation.

Twitter has engaged in, knowingly facilitated, and profited from copyright infringement, at the expense of music creators, to whom Twitter pays nothing, the plaintiffs allege.

NMPA CEO David Israelite wrote an emailed statement to Fortune expounding on the case: Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service. Twitter knows full well that music is leaked, launched, and streamed by billions of people every day on its platform.

Heres how things got so bad that a quarter-billion-dollar lawsuit was the only recourse.

Elons music dealings (or lack thereof)

Twitter is the only major social media platform without a music licensing deal, meaning that it does not compensate music rights holders when its users post copyrighted music. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok all have licensing deals that require them to pay annual fees to host all audio content without risk of legal reprisal. 

Licenses can cost upwards of $100 million annually, which is likely why Twitter had previously avoided obtaining one.

In the fall of 2021, Twitter started negotiating such a deal with Sony, Universal, and Warner, The New York Times reported. When Musk first announced that he would buy Twitter the following April, Israelite tweeted at the billionaire, imploring him to amend the platforms music policy. Last month, Israelite tweeted a similar message to new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, mentioning that she comes from NBCUniversal, a company that created intellectual property and values copyrights. 

Please fix the Twitter policy of not paying songwriters for their contribution to the platform, Israelite wrote in the April 2022 tweet. All other major social media companies have already done the same. 

But after Elon Musk purchased the social network in the fall of 2022, the existing negotiations stalled and failed to finalize. The Times reported that the acquisition halted the deal because multiple people involved in the talks were laid off, and because Musks slashing of hundreds of millions in expenditures caused internal chaos and left no budget for any deal to materialize. 

After Musk became CEO, posting of pirated content and copyrighted music proliferated on Twitter, with some people posting full-length films on the platform, including Hackers and The Fast and the Furious. 

Musk has publicly expressed his disdain for copyright law in the past. 

Current copyright law in general goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator, he tweeted in a thread in May 2022. Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity. The plaintiffs quoted the tweet in their suit.

Twitter responded to Fortunes request for comment with the poop emoji.

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