Laverne Cox Reveals She & Friend Were Targets of Transphobic Attack

MON, 30 NOVEMBER 2020

Laverne Cox is luckily okay after being targeted in a transphobic attack.

The 48-year-old Orange is the New Black actress took to her Instagram to reveal that she and a friend were targeted in an “aggressive” transphobic attack while walking in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

Laverne explained that she and her friend were walking when a man came up to the friend and “aggressively” asked what time it was before asking, “Guy or girl?”.

The friend told the man to “f–k off,” which then triggered the man to start hitting her friend.

“The guy is like hitting my friend, and then my friend is going toward him and I’m like ‘Holy s–t,” Laverne said. “I pull out my phone and I call to dial 911, and all of a sudden it’s over and the guy is gone.”

Luckily Laverne and her friend weren’t physically injured.

While reflecting on the incident, Laverne said that she believes the man wanted her to answer his question instead of her friend.

“The guy really wanted me to answer so that he could spook whether I’m trans or not,” Laverne said. “I don’t know why, I don’t know why it matters. At the end of the day, it’s like who cares? I’m in a hoodie and yoga pants, I’m completely covered up, I’ve got my mask on. Who cares if I’m trans? How does this affect your life?”

She added: “This dude was looking for trouble…because I happened to be a trans person in public. None of this is new, but it’s still just kind of like…why do you need to be aggressive?”

“I started blaming myself. We were walking in the park. We weren’t doing anything,” Laverne shared. It’s important to remind myself and remind you that when these things happen, it’s not your fault…that there are people not cool with you existing in the world.”

Laverne also opened up about harsh reality about transphobia.

“It’s not safe in the world,” she said. “I don’t like to think about that a lot, but it is the truth and it is not safe if you’re a trans person.”

Laverne also shared a message with fans to be “aware of your surroundings” and know that “it’s not your fault” if an incident like hers happens to them.

“It’s not your fault that there are people not cool with you existing in the world,” Laverne said. “We have a right to walk in the park.”

White Island tragedy: New Zealand watchdog lays 13 charges
CGTN

White Island is a popular tourist spot in New Zealand. /CFP

New Zealand's workplace watchdog has laid charges over the White Island volcanic eruption last year when 22 people died and dozens more suffered horrific burns, local media reported Monday.

Related story: White Island's volcano eruption: Death toll hits 16, two still missing

There were 47 people, mainly Australian tourists, on the island – also known as Whakaari – on December 9, 2019 when a column of burning ash and steam blasted from the country's most active volcano.

The regulator WorkSafe has been investigating why tour groups were taken onto an active volcano three weeks after its eruption alert level had been raised.

State-owned Television New Zealand (TVNZ) said the investigation has resulted in 13 charges against 10 parties and three individuals, which were expected to go to court on December 15.

It said all names involved were being withheld and the parties, which are likely to be companies or corporate entities, each faced fines of up to NZ$1.5 million ($1.1 million), with individuals facing maximum fines of NZ$300,000.

A separate inquiry by the coroner's office is ongoing and will examine whether criminal charges such as manslaughter should be laid.

WorkSafe could not confirm the TVNZ report but said an announcement would be made later Monday.

(With input from AFP)

Covid 19 coronavirus: 'Tragic error' caused pandemic to decimate Italian city of Bergamo
29 Nov, 2020

A member of the Italian Red Cross walks through an alley in the old town in Bergamo during his home visit to Covid-19 positive patients in April. Photo / Getty Images news.com.au

By: Ally Foster

When the first wave of coronavirus infections swept through Europe, one city in northern Italy became a chilling example of the virus' deadly power, with the rest of the continent watching in horror as hospitals were overrun and morgues overflowed with victims.

The city of Bergamo and its surrounding province was decimated by the Covid-19 pandemic, with one wrong decision allowing the virus to spread silently through the region until it was too late to bring it under control.

At the start of the year when the only coronavirus cases Italy had recorded were linked to overseas travellers, the advice, taken from recommendations by the World Health Organisation, was to only test for the virus if a patient had a link to China.

Nurses attend to a Covid-19 patient at the Pope John XXIII Hospital on April 7, 2020 in Bergamo, Italy. Photo / Getty Images

So, when people started to arrive in emergency rooms across Bergamo with a cough and fever they were determined to have the flu and sent home to rest.

When more patients without any connection to China began to get increasingly ill, medical professionals were struggling to understand the cause.

Dr Monica Avogadri, 55-year-old anaesthesiologist at Pesenti Fenaroli Hospital, was stumped when an 83-year-old man that had been sent home with flu symptoms was rushed back to hospital unable to breathe.

Neither the man nor his wife had any connection to China.

''China?" was the wife's response, Dr Avogadri told the New York Times.

"She didn't even know where it was."

Without an apparent link to China Dr Avogadri wasn't able to conduct a Covid-19 test.

Just days later, on February 20, another doctor in the nearby town of Codogno broke Italy's testing protocol and discovered the first known case of local transmission in the country.

By this point multiple other infections were already circulated undetected in the community, which would soon turn into an explosion of cases and lead to thousands of deaths.

A Civil Protection member rests a flower on the coffin of a Bergamo coronavirus victim in the hangar where 18 coffins wait to be transported to Florence. Photo / Getty Images

After hearing about the case Dr Avogadri, who by this point was also ill, called the hospital and asked for the 83-year-old patient be tested for Covid-19.

A test on the man and his hospital roommate came back positive.

"It was at that moment I understood we were screwed," the hospital's director Dr Giuseppe Marzulli told the New York Times.

"We had looked for who had been in China, and this was the tragic error."

In the weeks following, cases soared in the Bergamo province, with hospitals becoming overrun and the virus claiming so many victims that army trucks were forced to come in an take coffins to other regions.

About 3000 people are reported to have died from coronavirus, however the real number is believed to be significantly higher.

An antibody survey conducted in May revealed about 38.5 per cent of Bergamo's population had been infected by Covid-19, meaning the region had some of the highest infection levels in the world.

"Assuming that the 38.5 per cent cumulative prevalence found in the present study applies to the general population of the Bergamo province – 1.1 million inhabitants – one should infer an actual number of 420,000 SARS-CoV-2 infections," a paper based on the survey results read.

"This is much higher than those reported in the official data, which report 16,000 cases as of 25th September 2020. Within the limitation of this approach, our esteem suggests that 96 per cent of infections went undetected by the healthcare system."

With Europe now experiencing a deadly second wave of infections, Bergamo is now fairing a lot better than other parts of Italy.

Experts are speculating whether the area's high initial infection rate could be providing residents some form of herd immunity this time around.

"We are very far from achieving herd immunity. But in areas that experienced a high frequency of infections, there are probably enough antibodies to limit the circulation of the virus," Giuseppe Remuzzi, an infectious disease expert who oversaw the antibody survey told The Wall Street Journal.


On Saturday Europe crossed a grim barrier, registering more than 400,000 Covid-19 deaths.

Britain, where police arrested over 60 people during a protest in London against virus restrictions, accounted for 57,551 fatalities, followed by Italy with 53,677, France with 51,914 and Spain with 44,668.

Despite cases surging across the continent, some countries are choosing to reopen stores ahead of Christmas, with France and Poland among the countries lifting restrictions.

Belgium will allow shops to reopen from December 1, but keep the current semi-lockdown in place possibly until mid-January. The move mirrors similar easing in Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Ireland has also announced a staggered easing of restrictions to allow some businesses to reopen and for families to gather ahead of Christmas.

Institutionally racist': New Zealand's security agencies were Islamophobic and ignored right-wing threat, says Muslim group
29 Nov, 2020 

Abdur Razzaq Khan, of the Federation of Islamic Associations, presenting its report into the Christchurch terror attacks. Photo / Mark Mitchell


By: Amelia Wade
Political reporter, NZ Herald@AmeliaJWade

New Zealand's security agencies were "institutionally racist and Islamophobic" and ignored the rising threat of right-wing extremism because it was instead focused on Muslim terrorism, a Kiwi Islamic organisation says.

The Federation of the Islamic Associations of New Zealand (FIANZ) today publicly released its submission to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the March 15 terror attacks.

It investigated how the New Zealand Intelligence Community [NZIC] didn't foresee the threat of right-wing extremism despite rising attacks overseas and the Muslim community here feeling increasingly unsafe.

"We asked for help. We knew we were vulnerable to such an attack. We did not know who, when, what, where or how. But we knew," the report said.

A team of researchers pored over a decade of media reports, speeches in Parliament, public addresses, online forums among other sources to establish how the threat had been ignored.

It concluded security organisations were institutionally racist, Islamophobic, incorrect and misled the public.

"We are not trying to generate any hate, we are just trying to give the facts as we see them. The problem is much deeper than that," said Abdur Razzaq Khan, who chaired the federation's submission to the Royal Commission.

The federation said Muslim communities were left "defenceless" because of "systemic failures" of diversity at the security organisations which failed to properly engage with Muslim communities.

The report pointed to numerous examples of the director-general of security Rebecca Kitteridge wrongly framed terrorism as a "Muslim issue" rather than seeing the community as potential victims.

"We are not trying to generate any hate, we are just trying to give the facts as we see them," said Abdur Razzaq Khan as he released the Federation of Islamic Associations' Royal Commission submission. 

Photo / Mark Mitchell

Their submission included a speech from Kitteridge in 2016 at Victoria University where she said New Zealanders "can walk the streets free from fear" of events like Paris, Brussels, Ottawa, London and Sydney which were all perpetrated by Islamic radicals.

She did not mention the events of Oslo, Quebec, Pittsburg or Macerata which were orchestrated by right-wing extremists.

It was not until mid-2018 that agencies began assessing the threat of right-wing extremists, the report said.


But Khan said they did not blame any individual for the "failings", or say that the NZIC was staffed by white supremacists or individuals with anti-Muslim bias.

"This is not the fault of any individual - this is the culture of Islamophobia."

The NZSIS was extremely capable and if they had focused on finding right-wing extremism, they would have found the Christchurch terrorist.

"This rat would have easily been identified if they were looking - but they weren't looking.

"They are very good, they searched out those Muslims who were searching out objectionable material and they prosecuted."

The federation also found the Christchurch mosque attacks terrorist would never have been able to obtain a firearm if proper procedures were followed because two of his referees did not meet police criteria.


In order to avoid a terror attack happening again, the federation recommended criminalising hate crimes, denying right-wing extremism, establishing a Ministry of Super Diversity, improving how media portray Muslims, and better training for the police and security agencies.

The New Zealand Intelligence Community said it could not respond to specific claims until the Royal Commission's report was released on December 8. The 800-page report has been presented to the Government.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she wanted the public to see the report before "launching into the discussion" on whether New Zealand's security agencies had failed.

Zimbabwean witchdoctor's daughter cannot stay in New Zealand, tribunal rules

A historical image of a witchdoctor in Bulawayo in the then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Photo / Getty Images

By: Melissa Nightingale
NZ Herald reporter based in Wellington

nov 29/2020

The daughter of a Zimbabwean witchdoctor has been declined refugee status in New Zealand despite her fears that she'll be forced to take his place in the tribe if she returns home.

The woman said if she returned to Zimbabwe her late father's tribe could use sorcery against her to force her to become the next witchdoctor.

She would then have to undergo female genital mutilation and be made to carry it out on other young girls in the tribe as part of her duties.

But the New Zealand Immigration and Protection Tribunal has rejected her bid to stay in Aotearoa, saying there was no evidence witchcraft could be used against her if she went back to her home village.


The details were laid out in a recently-released tribunal decision.

The witchdoctor's child

The woman's mother fell pregnant at 17 to the witchdoctor of another tribe - members of the VaRemba culture - who lived about 250km away.

When her parents found out about the pregnancy, they took her to the man's tribe and demanded he take care of her, as custom dictated.

But the mother was unhappy there, as he and his family were abusive to her and she was made to do chores for the man's witchcraft practice - including slaughtering animals and accompanying young children to circumcision ceremonies.

She saw young girls with serious post-circumcision infections and other young girls being forced into marriage at a young age, the tribunal decision said.

She eventually fled back to her home village and remained there, giving birth to her child in 1992.

In February 2016, the mother heard the witchdoctor had died, and decided she and her daughter should attend the funeral.

"Villagers who were gathered for the funerary events were surprised and confused to see them, until one woman recognised [the mother] and introduced them to everyone.

"The gathering seemed happy to see them and there was ululating and singing."

The pair spent the night at the village, and were told the next morning that the spirit of the woman's father was now "upon her". They did not think much of the comments and departed a short time later.

That same month, the daughter, then in her 20s, married a trader she had met in the capital city of Harare. By May, the pair and their son had travelled to New Zealand on false South African passports, and sought refugee or protected person status.

The woman gave birth to another son in August that year, while detained in community accommodation.

Their initial appeals for refugee status pointed to political troubles for the husband, and were dismissed as not credible.

Her husband's application has now been severed from the rest of the family's and focuses on other factors such as debt he owes back in Zimbabwe.

Tribe: She must be the next witchdoctor

The trouble began in 2017 when members of the tribe approached the woman's mother at her home and told her that as the witchdoctor's eldest child, the woman must return home and take his place.

They said many people had died since his death, and that a spirit had possessed one of their members and announced the woman must be the village's next witchdoctor.

The mother gave evidence to the tribunal by video link and telephone, saying the tribe members had visited her multiple times demanding her daughter return to the village, and at one point had become aggressive and broken her fence.

She had not reported the incident to police because she knew police would not involve themselves in matters related to witchcraft.

The daughter fears returning home as she believes the tribe will forcibly bring her back to the village and use sorcery to make her become the next witch doctor.

"She would be forced to abandon her Christian faith, would suffer [female genital mutilation] and would have to practise it on other women and girls. She would have to take a vow of celibacy and undergo humiliating and invasive ceremonial rituals. Her children would be forced to be circumcised," the decision said.


She has applied for refugee or protected person status for herself and her two sons on these grounds.

The decision

The tribunal found there was "simply no scientific principle underlying any claim of the efficacy or power of sorcery".

"Absent any testable, verifiable and falsifiable, and independent evidence of witchcraft powers which would otherwise seem to defy the laws of physics and/or chemistry, the tribunal is satisfied that claims of harm arising from acts of witchcraft do not suffice for the purposes of establishing the well-foundedness element of the refugee inquiry."

It had not been established that the tribe would be able to use sorcery to force the woman to take up the mantle of witchdoctor, the decision said.

"She may be subjectively fearful that they can do so but the objective reality is that they cannot."

There was also no evidence of any real risk she would suffer serious harm or that she would be physically forced into the role, the decision said.


The appeals for refugee and protected person status were dismissed.

Brazil's Bolsonaro alleges fraud in US presidential election

Sun, 29 November 2020

Brazil Elections 

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro talks with the media outside a polling station, after voting during the run-off municipal elections in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, Nov. 29, 2020. Bolsonaro, who sometimes has embraced the label "Trump of the Tropics," said Sunday he'll wait a little longer before recognizing the U.S. election victory of Joe Biden, while also echoing President Donald Trump's allegations of irregularities in the U.S. vote.

(AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — who sometimes has embraced the label “Trump of the Tropics” — said Sunday he’ll wait a little longer before recognizing the U.S. election victory of Joe Biden.

Speaking to reporters while casting a ballot in municipal races, he also echoed President Donald Trump's allegations of irregularities in the U.S. vote.

“I have my sources of information that there really was a lot of fraud there,” he said. “Nobody talks about that. If it was enough to define (victory) for one or the other, I don't know.”

Asked if he would recognize Biden's victory, he said, “I am holding back a little more.”

He also expressed doubts about Brazil's current electronic voting system, which he has suggested is vulnerable to fraud. He has urged the country to go back to a paper ballot system for the 2022 presidential election.

The conservative Brazilian leader has appealed to the same sort of right-wing populist base in Brazil that Trump has courted in the United States, and has welcomed comparisons to the U.S. president.

Like Trump, he has embraced unproven treatements for COVID-19 and has campaigned to ease restrictions meant to combat it, arguing the economic loss is more damaging than the illness itself.

Russia seeking to build its own space station


TEHRAN, Nov. 29 (MNA) – Russia's rocket and space corporation Energia on Thursday announced that it is working on the development of a new multifunctional space station.

Russia's own orbital station will consist of three to seven modules unmanned or with a crew of two to four people, said Vladimir Solovyov, first deputy general designer of Energia for flight operation and testing of rocket and space systems, Xinhua Net reported.

At a conference of the Russian Academy of Sciences on space, Solovyov raised concern about the longevity of the International Space Station (ISS) as certain components have been damaged and could not be replaced.

Solovyov, who is also the flight director of the ISS Russian segment, said the station may stop operation by 2025 and the cost of maintaining it may amount to 10-15 billion rubles (132-198 million U.S. dollars).

Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos said Thursday that it plans to discuss the operational lifespan of the ISS with NASA early next year.

The ISS lifespan is highly dependent on the technical condition of the modules and certain political aspects that are planned to be addressed, Roscosmos said in a press release.

The corporation is currently awaiting proposals from Energia on the creation of a new national space station, which will first be considered at the Roscosmos Scientific and Technical Council and then reported to the government, it said.

Officials raid home of Diego Maradona’s doctor, probe death as manslaughter case


By Jorge Fitz-Gibbon
November 29, 2020 

Diego Maradona (right) and Leopoldo LuqueDiego Maradona press office/AFP

MORE ON:

Argentine investigators raided the home of Diego Maradona’s doctor on Sunday as they probe a possible case of involuntary manslaughter in the soccer legend’s death.

The blitz comes after Maradona’s lawyer last week called for a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of the 60-year-old former soccer phenom, who died Wednesday after suffering a heart attack, the Mirror reported Sunday.

Investigators converged on the home of the doctor, Leopoldo Luque, 33, around 8:40 a.m. Sunday and are expected to question him as they probe possible medical negligence in Maradona’s death, the outlet said.

“As Luque was Maradona’s personal physician the decision was taken to search his house and surgery (office) to look for documents that could determine whether, during Maradona’s treatment at home, there were any irregularities,” a law enforcement source told Argentina’s La Nacion.

The soccer star’s lawyer, Matias Moria, raised questions about his death Thursday.

“The ambulance took more than half an hour to arrive, which was criminal idiocy,” he said, according to the Independent Online.

On Saturday, Maradona’s daughters — Dalma, Giannina, and Jana — spoke to investigators and also raised questions about Luque’s potential involvement in their father’s death, the Mirror reported.

Maradona’s family was already incensed after a funeral worker last week released a selfie alongside the icon’s body.

Funeral worker Claudio Fernandez was fired over the incident.

Maradona is considered one of the sport’s all-time greats, scoring 34 goals in 91 international appearances, including four World Cups.

AUSTRALIA

Sydney records hottest November night as heatwave sweeps city


November 29, 2020
By Agence France-Presse

  

A fiery sunset over the Members' Stand during the one-day cricket match between India and Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground in the sweltering city -- via AFP

Sydney recorded its hottest November night as Australia’s largest city suffered through a weekend heatwave that saw daytime temperatures peak above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

The overnight temperature did not drop below 25.3 degrees Celsius Saturday into Sunday in central Sydney, according to the meteorology bureau, making it the hottest November night since records began.

The temperature had already hit a scorching 30 degrees Celsius by 4:30 am Sunday, before reaching above 40 degrees for the second consecutive day.

“New South Wales is in the midst of a severe heatwave with very warm conditions already being experienced yesterday, and today being a repeat of some of those conditions,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s Agata Imielska.

Daytime records for November fell elsewhere in Australia’s southeast, with the outback towns of Griffith and Mildura reaching 43.2 and 45.7 degrees Celsius respectively on Saturday.

The heatwave saw bans on lighting fires imposed across large swathes of New South Wales (NSW) state, which was badly hit by catastrophic bushfires during the last southern hemisphere summer.

A number of blazes broke out Sunday, including one on Sydney’s western outskirts that the NSW Fire and Rescue Service said damaged a property.

More than 60 bushfires were still burning across the state, but most had been brought under control by firefighters as a southerly wind change led to a rapid drop in temperatures.

It was the first burst of significant bushfire activity since the devastating 2019-2020 fires, which burned an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom and left 33 people dead as tens of thousands fled their homes.

The fire season also killed or displaced nearly three billion animals and cost the economy an estimated US$7 billion.

The latest heatwave comes just two weeks after government scientists warned the fossil-fuel reliant country should brace for worse to come, predicting climate change will continue to exacerbate bushfires, droughts and cyclones in Australia.

Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeatedly played down the link between climate change and the bushfires, and has committed to keeping Australia as one of the world’s leading fossil fuel exporters.

But Australians are increasingly concerned about climate change, with a recent poll by Sydney’s Lowy Institute showing almost 90 percent believing it is a critical or important threat.

Scientific drama continues over life on Venus

November 29,  2020 Nicole Karlis, Salon - Commentary

A radar mosaic image of Venus. (NASA.gov)

In September, news about the possibility of floating, cloud-based life on Venus caused a storm in the science world as tumultuous as the sulfur clouds that rain acid down on the second planet from the Sun.

A paper published in Nature Astronomy by a group of international astronomers explained how they detected phosphine (PH₃), a gaseous molecule composed of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms, in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Researchers saw phosphine’s signal in spectrograms from two radio telescopes they used to capture the data, and estimated there were 20 parts per billion of the compound in Venus’ clouds.

This discovery, the astronomers stated, was believed to be a “promising” sign of life, as phosphine on Earth is created in the gaseous emanations of anaerobic life. Could it be that, high above among the mountains, craters, thousands of volcanoes and thick atmosphere, little microbes flitted about the Venusian sky?

“If no known chemical process can explain PH₃ within the upper atmosphere of Venus, then it must be produced by a process not previously considered plausible for Venusian conditions,” the authors of the paper stated. “This could be unknown photochemistry or geochemistry, or possibly life.”

On Earth, phosphine is produced as a waste byproduct of simple anaerobic bacteria, and they are a notorious signature of the uncommon gas. The researchers struggled to figure out any other way that the gas could be produced on Venus, geologically or in the atmosphere somehow, but came up empty.

But quickly after astronomers published the initial paper, more research papers followed questioning the observation of phosphine—both its presence and the abundance of the compound. In one critique of the original study, researchers suggest that the signs of phosphine were coming from another common gas in Venus’ clouds, sulfur dioxide, which has a similar spectrogram. Another critique focused on how difficult it is to extract a phosphine signal out of the data that the initial group of researchers used, according to Nature. Subsequently, the same team of astronomers of the initial paper re-examined their data and cited a processing error and recalculated its estimate to 5 parts per billion. In other words, if there’s phosphine there likely isn’t as much of it. Their results were published in a preprint posted on 17 November to arXiv.

So, does that mean that life on Venus has been ruled out?

“If phosphine indeed exists at the claimed abundance of ~5 ppb [parts per billion], then this abundance is still orders of magnitude larger than what one can get out of plausible volcanic activity on the planet based on what we know from Earth,” Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Salon over email. “But although we know that phosphine originates from life on Earth, we do not fully understand the detailed path by which it is produced (namely which microbes make it and how).”

Loeb said there is still a lot of research that needs to be done in order to land on a definitive answer to whether or not there’s life on Venus or not— like going to Venus and collecting some microbes in a probe, say.

“We will not be convinced that life exists on Venus until microbes are found by scooping the Venusian clouds,” Loeb said. “The claimed detection of phosphine plays the important role of motivating a mission that will go there.”

Notably, Loeb added that the over-reported estimate of phosphine wasn’t a “mistake.”

“I would not call it a mistake but an overestimate, for now, until proven wrong by better data,” Loeb said.

As luck would have it, NASA’s DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) mission is one contender to study the upper atmosphere of Venus. According to Forbes, NASA is due to make a decision next year on whether or not the mission will move forward. If phosphine is indeed abundantly present in Venus’ atmosphere, this mission would be able to detect it.

“DAVINCI+ will measure the compositional and dynamic context for interesting gases such as phosphine—and likely others not yet discovered,” Dr. James Garvin, Chief Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the principal investigator of DAVINCI+, told Forbes. “We do not have enough information to rule out more exotic processes potentially responsible for unanticipated phosphorous gases such as phosphine; DAVINCI+’s proposed measurements could directly provide essential chemical context.”

NASA hasn’t paid much attention to Venus since the 1990s, when the Magellan mission mapped out the planet’s surface. But as Loeb told Salon, the “claimed detection” of phosphine “plays the important role of motivating a mission that will go there.”

In other words, the planet Venus could be undergoing its own kind of renaissance in the planetary science world.

When asked if there’s more potential interest in missions to Venus, Loeb said “definitely.” He added that the original report inspired members of his own research group to write two more papers on the subject.

Therese Encrenaz, an astrophysicist at LESIA, Paris Observator, told Salon via email that she is convinced that “there are still many open questions regarding the photochemistry and meteorology of its atmosphere.”

“Venus has been forgotten for too long, relative to the space exploration of Mars,” Encrenaz said. “There is no need for phosphine to be interested in Venus! I am very happy to see potential space missions on Venus being in the competition for future selections, at ESA [European Space Agency] and NASA; I hope at least one of them will get selected.”

As Noam Izenberg, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and deputy chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group, previously told Salon, even if there ends up not being phosphine or life on Venus, the search alone “highlights how much we don’t know about Venus, and that fundamental new discoveries […] await us next door.”