Near-Earth asteroid may have broken off from the moon, study finds


Astronomers used the Large Binocular Telescope in southern Arizona to show that the asteroid Kamo'oalewa, seen in an artist's impression, may be a lost fragment of the moon. Image by Addy Graham/University of Arizona


Nov. 11 (UPI) -- A near-Earth asteroid named Kamo'oalewa, which orbits the sun but remains close to the Earth, may be a moon fragment, University of Arizona researchers said in a study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Researchers found that the asteroid's patter of reflected light, called a spectrum, matched lunar rocks from NASA's Apollo missions, indicating it broke off from the moon.

They initially doubted themselves because no other known asteroids have lunar origins, but after three years of looking for another plausible explanation, they found it was the most likely scenario, according to the study.

"We doubted ourselves to death," study co-author Vishnu Reddy, a university professor who started the project in 2016, said in a press release.

Study lead Ben Sharkey, a planetary sciences graduate student at Arizona, said that the team reached its finding this spring after their observations were delayed by the shutdown of the telescope last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We got much needed follow-up observations and went, 'Wow it is real,'" Sharkey said. "It's easier to explain with the moon than other ideas."

Study co-author, Renu Malhotra, a university professor who led the orbit analysis portion of the study, said Kamo'oalewa's orbit, which was similar to the Earth's, but with the slightest tilt, was not typical of near-Earth Asteroids, and was another clue to its lunar origins.

"It is very unlikely that a garden-variety near-Earth asteroid would spontaneously move into a quasi-satellite orbit like Kamo'oalewa's," Malhotra said in the release.

"It will not remain in this particular orbit for very long, only about 300 years in the future, and we estimate that it arrived in this orbit about 500 years ago," Malhotra said.

Researchers defined Kamo'oalewa as one of the Earth's "quasi-satellites," which "are faint and difficult to observe."

The research team used the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona for the study, which also included data from the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Flagstaff, Ariz.

The near-Earth asteroid, which is roughly the size of a Ferris wheel and gets as close as 9 million miles from the Earth, was discovered in 2016 by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System located at Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii.

The name Kamo'oalewa, found in a Hawaiian creation chant, alludes to an offspring that travels on its own.

Back in 2018, a study found that both the Earth and moon formed from the same giant collision.

The scientists in that study hypothesized that a pair of planet-size bodies collided to create a donut-shaped cloud of vaporized rock called a synestia.

As the rock vapors condensed into liquid form, the cloud shrunk and transformed into molten planet, but a glob of vaporized rock escaped during impact, resulting in the seed for what became the Earth's moon.

GM's Oshawa Assembly plant builds its first Chevy Silverado pickup

Jamie L. LaReau, Detroit Free Press
Wed, November 10, 2021, 

General Motors has started production of the Chevrolet Silverado pickup at the Oshawa Assembly plant in Ontario.

The first Silverado, a 2022 heavy-duty High Country trim in red, rolled off the assembly line around 11:45 a.m. Monday, but GM announced it publicly on Wednesday, said Monte Doran, GM spokesman.

It is a remarkable feat considering the plant was slated for closure in 2018 when GM said it would permanently close Oshawa and four other factories in North America in a cost-saving effort. The plants targeted for closure, Oshawa included, all built cars, and consumer tastes had shifted to pickups and SUVs.

The first pickup trucks coming down the assembly line at Oshawa Assembly in Ontario on November 10, 2021.

But in labor talks last year, Unifor — the union that represents GM auto workers in Canada — struck a deal with GM to build the automaker's overflow of pickup trucks.

Located about 40 miles east of Toronto near the Lake Ontario shoreline, Oshawa Assembly has undergone a $1.1 billion overhaul and is now building the full-size light-duty and heavy-duty pickups far ahead of schedule to help GM meet increased demand for that vehicle.

"The rapid retooling, hiring, and training needed to reach today’s start of production was an extraordinary accomplishment," Scott Bell, GM Canada president and managing director, said in a statement. "We continue our work with the federal and Ontario governments toward even larger transformative investments in Canada.”

The retooled facility includes a new body shop that covers 13 acres, 1,200 new robots, 10,300 feet of new conveyors and 310 miles of electric wiring. It contains 5,000 parts from 370 different suppliers, Doran said.

Oshawa will begin shipping trucks to dealers next month.

The plant will begin shipping trucks to dealers in December 2021. The first truck off the line will be auctioned to help GM and our Canadian dealers raise money for Sharon’s Kids, one of our favourite charities in Durham Region.

But GM Canada will raffle the first one, which will come with an exclusive VIN 001 wrap, to its dealers in Canada to benefit the Durham Children’s Aid Foundation (DCAF). For every $250 a dealer donates to DCAF, it earns an additional entry into the raffle, Doran said. Dealers can donate until Nov. 29 and GM Canada will announce the winner Dec. 8.

It's common practice for automakers to use the first car off a line to benefit charity.

Donating to DCAF honors former Oshawa employee Sharon Clark, who died last year after battling cancer. For years, Oshawa Assembly employees have donated holiday gifts for children, through “Sharon’s Kids.”

Since 2018, GM Canada and its employees have donated more than $500,000 to Sharon’s Kids, which is now part of DCAF, GM Canada said in a statement.

Oshawa Assembly will be the only GM factory to build both heavy duty and light duty pickups, exclusively building the Silverado.

"That said, Oshawa will add to GM’s North American manufacturing footprint, allowing the company to significantly increase production across both the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra lineups," Doran said.

GM Canada said it will create 1,800 jobs, mostly new hires, to support two shifts of production and support thousands of additional jobs for suppliers.

Mary Ann Kidd, an employee working on the line at Oshawa Assembly plant, assembles a truck door.

Unifor National President Jerry Dias said the return of vehicle assembly to the Oshawa plant is unprecedented and it is because of the "resiliency and dedication" of Unifor members.

The union fought GM's plan to close the plant with pickets, calling GM "Greedy Motors," a call for customers to boycott GM vehicles made in Mexico, and a media campaign against the automaker so negative that in 2019, GM threatened to sue Unifor over a union spot critical of GM that aired in Canada during the Super Bowl.

Unifor defied GM's threat and continued the ad campaign during the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards and other high-profile shows.

"Seeing the first of many trucks roll off the newly reopened Oshawa assembly line was a proud moment for everyone who fought shoulder-to-shoulder for these jobs," Dias said in a statement Wednesday. "The auto industry has and will continue to be the bedrock of Oshawa and Durham region’s economy.”

More: Documentary takes aim at GM's move to close Oshawa Assembly Plant

More: Here's how Canada's autoworker union won big with GM, Ford and FCA

Chevron, partners to fork out for carbon offsets for Gorgon LNG carbon capture shortfall


Dow Jones Industrial Average listed company Chevron (CVX)'s logo is seen in Los Angeles

Sonali Paul
Wed, November 10, 2021

MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Chevron Corp and its partners in the Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Western Australia have agreed to buy carbon credits likely to cost more than $180 million as a penalty for failing to meet a five-year target for carbon capture and storage (CCS).

The costs, which could amount to well over A$250 million ($184 million) based on Reuters calculations, will be shared with its Gorgon LNG partners - Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell, and Japan's Osaka Gas, Tokyo Gas and JERA.

The A$3.1 billion Gorgon CCS project, the world's largest commercial CCS project, is being penalised by the Western Australian government for injecting far less carbon dioxide than planned since the LNG plant started up five years ago.

Chevron said in a statement that it would invest A$40 million in "lower carbon projects" and would buy and surrender 5.23 million greenhouse gas offsets to fulfill the Gorgon project's obligations to the state government, ideally by mid-July 2022.

"The package we have announced ... ensures we meet the expectations of the regulator, the community and those we place on ourselves as a leading energy producer in Australia," Chevron Australia Managing Director Mark Hatfield said in a statement.

Based on the current price of carbon offsets on the voluntary Australian spot market, which last week hit a record high of A$37 a tonne, 5.23 million offsets would cost at least A$195 million.

Amid short supply of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), Chevron is unlikely to meet its obligation just with those offsets and said in a report to the government it would also use other internationally verified carbon units and offsets.

Gorgon CCS was designed to inject up to 4 million tonnes a year of CO2. Since starting injecting CO2 in August 2019, three years later than scheduled, it has injected a total of about 5.5 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent.

The project was delayed by three years due to a range of technical problems.

($1 = 1.3563 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Sonali Paul; additional reporting by Sameer Manekar in Bengaluru; Editing by Ramakrishnan M. and Kenneth Maxwell)

Earth Has a Second Moon—For Another 300 Years, At Least

Jeffrey Kluger
Thu, November 11, 2021, 

Full frame of the full moon at sunset with a sky with clouds.
The big guy has a little friend 

Credit - Getty Images; © Jose A. Bernat

It’s easy to be brand loyal to the moon. We’ve only got the one, after all, unlike Jupiter and Saturn, where you’d have dozens to choose from. Here, it’s luna or nada. Or not. The fact is, there’s another sorta, kinda moon in a sorta, kinda orbit around Earth that was discovered only in 2016. And according to a new study in Nature, we may at last know how it was formed.

The quasi-moon—named Kamo’oalewa, after a Hawaiian word that refers to a moving celestial object—is not much to speak of, measuring less than 50 m (164 ft) across. It circles the Earth in a repeating corkscrew-like trajectory that brings it no closer than 40 to 100 times the 384,000 km (239,000 mi.) distance of our more familiar moon. Its odd flight path is caused by the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun, which continually bend and torque the moonlet’s motions, preventing it from achieving a more conventional orbit.

“It’s primarily influenced just by the sun’s gravity, but this pattern shows up because it’s also—but not quite—on an Earth-like orbit. So it’s this sort of odd dance,” says graduate student Ben Sharkey of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, the lead author of the paper.

None of this means that Kamo’oalewa has to have especially exotic origins. The solar system is littered with asteroids, some of which are captured by the gravity of other planets and become more conventional—if fragmentary—moons. Others don’t orbit other planets in the common way but fall into line in front of them or behind them and pace them in their orbits around the sun, like the flocks of so-called Trojan asteroids that precede and trail Jupiter.
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Either way, Kamo’oalewa was bound to get attention because its composition posed a stubborn mystery. Asteroids tend to reflect brightly in certain infrared frequencies, but Kamo’oalewa just doesn’t. It’s dimmer somehow—clearly made of different stuff, which suggests a different origin.

To investigate the mystery, Sharkey, under the guidance of his PhD adviser, planetary scientist Vishnu Reddy, first turned to a NASA-run telescope in Hawaii routinely used for studying Earth-vicinity asteroids. But even through the usually reliable instrument, the infrared signature seemed too faint. Instead they switched to a University of Arizona-run monocular telescope that, as Sharkey says, could “squeeze every last ounce of photons out of that object.”

That produced better, clearer results, but still they were incomplete. The rock was made of common silicates like other asteroids, but they were common only in their general composition, not in their infrared signature, which remained stubbornly off.

At last, the answer suggested itself. If Kamo’oalewa was behaving like a sort of quasi-moon, perhaps it was an artifact of the actual moon. Earlier in Sharkey’s PhD program, one of his advisers published a paper on lunar samples brought back by the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. When Sharkey compared the data he was getting in his telescope with what the earlier geologists came up with in the rock lab, the results matched perfectly. The kind of space-weathering lunar silicates undergo when they’re still on the surface of the moon precisely accounted for the differences in the infrared reflectivity between common asteroids and Kamo’oalewa.

“Visually, what you’re seeing is weathered silicate,” says Sharkey. “The eons of exposure to space environment and the micrometeorite impacts, it’s almost like a fingerprint and it’s hard to miss.”

How Kamo’oalewa shook free of our lunar companion is no mystery. The moon’s been getting bombarded by space rocks for billions of years, resulting in all manner of lunar debris getting ejected into space (nearly 500 bits of which have made it to the surface of the Earth as meteorites). Kamo’oalewa is one such piece of lunar rubble that spiraled away from the moon. But rather than landing on Earth or simply tumbling off into the void, it found itself a quasi-satellite in its own right.

“We see thousands of craters on the moon, so some of this lunar ejecta has to be sticking around in space,” says Sharkey.

Kamo’oalewa won’t stick around all that long, as its current trajectory is not entirely stable. According to estimates from Sharkey and others, the object will remain an earthly companion for only about 300 more years—nothing at all on the cosmic clock—after which it will break free of its current gravitational chains and twirl off into the void. Originally a part of the moon, then a companion of Earth, it will spend the rest of its long life traveling on its own.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has spent nearly $1.8 million on political lobbying this year, more than Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin

Isobel Asher Hamilton

Wed, November 10, 2021

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (left) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Joe Raedle/Getty Images/Axel Springer

• Elon Musk's SpaceX has spent nearly $1.8 million on political lobbying this year, CNBC first reported.

• Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has spent just under $1.4 million, data from Open Secrets shows.

• Blue Origin has been locked in a legal challenge with NASA over a SpaceX contract.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has spent more on political lobbying this year than rival billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, data suggests.

As first reported by CNBC, SpaceX has spent just under $1.8 million so far this year and Blue Origin has spent just under $1.4 million, data from Open Secrets, a nonprofit that monitors political lobbying expenditure, shows.

Musk said in a September tweet he prefers to "stay out of politics." He has been known to give his personal opinion on politics, however, calling lockdown measures "fascist" and attacking Joe Biden over the president's supposedly "biased" stance on unions.

SpaceX spent $2.2 million on lobbying in 2020 while Blue Origin spent $1.9 million in the same year, per the Open Secrets data.

SpaceX this year spent $590,000 directly lobbying lawmakers, including the Executive Office of the President, CNBC reported. The company also spent more than $210,000 on campaign contributions to bipartisan congressional candidates in the first half of 2021, CNBC said.

While SpaceX has spent more on political lobbying than Blue Origin, per the Open Secrets data, Blue Origin has been notably active in the courts.

SpaceX was awarded a $2.9 billion contract by NASA in April to help take US astronauts back to the moon. Blue Origin filed a challenge with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in April but its case was rejected by the GAO in July.

Blue Origin also sued NASA in August but the US Court of Federal Claims ruled against Bezos' company on November 4.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday that NASA's target for getting astronauts to the moon by 2024 had been pushed back to 2025, and partially blamed Blue Origin's legal fights for the delay.

Rare 520-year-old coin found at site of first English settlement in Newfoundland

Thu, November 11, 2021

The rare silver coin is known as a Henry VII half groat or two-penny piece

Archaeologists in eastern Newfoundland have unearthed what could be the oldest English coin ever found in Canada.

The rare silver coin - around the size of a US nickel and just smaller than a 10p coin - was discovered at the historic site of Cupids Cove, the first English settlement in the nation.

Known as a Henry VII half groat or two-penny piece, it is believed to have been minted more than 520 years ago.

The coin is expected to go on display at the site in the 2022 tourist season.

"It is incredible to imagine that this coin was minted in England and was lost in Cupids over a hundred years later," said Steve Crocker, the provincial tourism, culture, arts and recreation minister, in a statement on Wednesday.

"It links the story of the early European exploration in the province and the start of English settlement."

A team of archaeologists studied the coin in consultation with a former curator of the Bank of Canada's Currency Museum and determined it had been minted in Canterbury sometime between 1493 and 1499.

Head archaeologist William Gilbert, who has led digs at the site since 1995, hailed the discovery as "a major find".

"Some artefacts are important for what they tell us about a site, while others are important because they spark the imagination. This coin is definitely one of the latter," Mr Gilbert said.

"One can't help but wonder at the journey it made, and how many hands it must have passed through."

In August 1610, a group of English settlers landed at what was then known as Cupers Cove, in Conception Bay, Newfoundland. They were led by a merchant from Bristol by the name of John Guy.

Within years, the colonists had built several structures there, including a fort, sawmill, gristmill and brew house.

In 2001, Mr Gilbert's team uncovered an Elizabethan coin at the same site, which was at the time considered to be the oldest English coin found in Canada.

The newly unearthed half groat is believed to be about 60 years older.

US Elementary school teacher draws praise with video breaking down his starting salary: ‘Teachers deserve better’

Dillon Thompson
Thu, November 11, 2021

An elementary school teacher in Ohio is sparking a widespread conversation about teachers’ salaries.

The viral moment began when Kyle Cohen, a fourth-grade teacher based in Cleveland, posted a TikTok sharing the total salary he made in his first year of work. The clip, in which Cohen revealed that he made $31,000 before taxes, immediately went viral and sparked a massive debate on the app.

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Many of the comments on Cohen’s video were supportive — with users arguing that teachers deserve much higher pay — but a few were critical. One comment, which pointed out that teachers “only” work for eight to nine months of the year, sparked a response from Cohen.

That clip went even more viral than the first. In it, Cohen broke down how many hours he works in a normal week — and how little he makes for each of those hours.

Cohen told In The Know that he posted the video to help “shed light on the current realities educators are facing.” He said he’d shared a similar clip on his YouTube channel (he posts similar content on Instagram as well) and decided to delve deeper into the concept — largely because of how these financial strains impact students.

“Students are experiencing more challenges than ever before as a result of the pandemic,” Cohen said. “If we don’t address these issues, it’s the students, our future leaders, who are going to face the consequences.”

In the TikTok, Cohen begins by explaining that he usually works about 50 hours a week, or roughly 200 hours each month. Then, he adds that he also puts in an “extra” 40 or so hours each month for lesson planning, parent-teacher conferences and other after-school events.

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Elementary school teacher draws praise with video breaking down his starting salary: ‘Teachers deserve better’ (yahoo.com)

“This week, for example, it’s 6 o’clock in the evening,” Cohen says from his classroom. “I have conferences that go until 8 o’clock. I also have conferences next week…”

Then, he crunches the numbers. He multiplies his 240 hours by the nine months he works each year, then divides that number into $31,000 — the salary he made in his first year. The result? Just $14 an hour.

In his video, Cohen was also quick to emphasize that he is “incredibly grateful” for his career and loves being a teacher. He also told In The Know that he knew what he was getting into — and he was never scared off by the job’s salary constraints.

“Teaching is always referred to as being an ‘underpaid job,'” he said. “Family and friends always made comments about the lack of salaries teachers get paid in this country. With that being said, I never allowed these comments to keep me from a field I knew I was meant to be in.”

Instead, Cohen just hopes his clips can start more conversations about how little most teachers make in a year.

“My hope in making these videos is to start some real conversations,” Cohen told In The Know. “Our teachers — and students — deserve the best, and it is the unfortunate reality that we are far from making this dream a reality.”

TikTok users were quick to come to Cohen’s support. His video is now full of praiseworthy comments as well as plenty of outrage.

“It should be $70K minimum for any teacher, regardless of grade level,” one user argued.

“Teachers deserve better,” another added.

“My God, this system needs to change,” another wrote.

The problem spans beyond just the U.S., though. In a recent study of teacher salaries worldwide, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that, in terms of pay, America actually rates higher than several other developed nations.

For example, the average starting salary for an American primary school teacher is close to $42,000, which was actually 10th among the 36 countries surveyed. The U.S. ranked above Canada, Sweden, Japan, Israel and more, while ranking behind nations like Germany, Spain and Denmark.

Japanese-Korean-Turkish language group traced to farmers in ancient China


Japanese-Korean-Turkish language group traced to farmers in ancient China

Wed, November 10, 2021,
By Will Dunham

(Reuters) - A study combining linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence has traced the origins of the family of languages including modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian and the people who speak them to millet farmers who inhabited a region in northeastern China about 9,000 years ago.

The findings detailed on Wednesday document a shared genetic ancestry for the hundreds of millions of people who speak what the researchers call Transeurasian languages across an area stretching more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km).

The findings illustrate how humankind's embrace of agriculture following the Ice Age powered the dispersal of some of the world's major language families. Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.

There are 98 Transeurasian languages. Among these are Korean and Japanese as well as: various Turkic languages including Turkish in parts of Europe, Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia; various Mongolic languages including Mongolian in Central and Northeast Asia; and various Tungusic languages in Manchuria and Siberia.

This language family's beginnings were traced to Neolithic millet farmers in the Liao River valley, an area encompassing parts of the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the region of Inner Mongolia. As these farmers moved across northeastern Asia, the descendant languages spread north and west into Siberia and the steppes and east into the Korean peninsula and over the sea to the Japanese archipelago over thousands of years.

The research underscored the complex beginnings for modern populations and cultures.

"Accepting that the roots of one's language, culture or people lie beyond the present national boundaries is a kind of surrender of identity, which some people are not yet prepared to make," said comparative linguist Martine Robbeets, leader of the Archaeolinguistic Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

"Powerful nations such as Japan, Korea and China are often pictured as representing one language, one culture and one genetic profile. But a truth that makes people with nationalist agendas uncomfortable is that all languages, cultures and humans, including those in Asia, are mixed," Robbeets added.

The researchers devised a dataset of vocabulary concepts for the 98 languages, identified a core of inherited words related to agriculture and fashioned a language family tree.

Archaeologist and study co-author Mark Hudson of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History said the researchers examined data from 255 archaeological sites in China, Japan, the Korean peninsula and the Russia Far East, assessing similarities in artifacts including pottery, stone tools and plant and animal remains. They also factored in the dates of 269 ancient crop remains from various sites.

The researchers determined that farmers in northeastern China eventually supplemented millet with rice and wheat, an agricultural package that was transmitted when these populations spread to the Korean peninsula by about 1300 BC and from there to Japan after about 1000 BC.

The researchers performed genomic analyses on ancient remains of 23 people and examined existing data on others who lived in North and East Asia as long as 9,500 years ago.

For example, a woman's remains found in Yokchido in South Korea had 95% ancestry from Japan's ancient Jomon people, indicating her recent ancestors had migrated over the sea.

"It is surprising to see that ancient Koreans reflect Jomon ancestry, which so far had only been detected in Japan," Robbeets said.

The origins of modern Chinese languages arose independently, though in a similar fashion with millet also involved. While the progenitors of the Transeurasian languages grew broomcorn millet in the Liao River valley, the originators of the Sino-Tibetan language family farmed foxtail millet at roughly the same time in China's Yellow River region, paving the way for a separate language dispersal, Robbeets said.

(Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)

WAGE THEFT

Japan train driver sues over 49 cents in docked wages

Wed, November 10, 2021

Japan's railways are famously punctual

A Japanese train driver is suing his employer after he was docked 56 yen ($0.49; £0.36) in wages for causing a brief delay to the country's famously punctual rail system.

Train company JR West fined the man after a work mix-up in June 2020 caused a one-minute delay to operations.

It argued that no labour had been performed during the stoppage.

The employee is seeking 2.2 million yen ($19,407; £14,347) in damages for mental anguish caused by the ordeal.

According to the Japanese news site, Soranews24, the unnamed man was scheduled to pilot an empty train to Okayama station in the south of the country, but arrived at the wrong platform while waiting to take over from the previous driver.

By the time he realised his mistake and had rushed to the correct platform, the transfer between the two drivers had been delayed by two minutes, leading to a one-minute delay in the train's departure and a one-minute delay in warehousing the train at the depot.

JR West initially docked the man 85 yen ($0.75; $0.55), but later agreed to reduce the fine to 56 yen after the driver took the case to the Okayama Labour Standards Inspection Office.

However, the employee refused to accept the reduction and has argued that the delay caused no actual disruption to the timetables or passengers as the train was empty during the incident.

But the company says it applied the "no work, no pay principle", as it would for an employee's late arrival or an unexplained absence.

The driver took his case to the Okayama District Court in March, where he is now seeking damages.

Japan's rail system is known for its reliability. In 2017 a rail company issued an apology after one of its trains left a station 20 seconds early.

And if a train delayed by more than five minutes, passengers are issued with a certificate they can use as an excuse for being late.

 

Iran wants guarantee US will not leave renewed nuclear deal

TEHRAN, Nov. 12 (MNA) – Iran's top negotiator and Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Ali Bagheri Kani said that Iran requires a commitment that the US will not again leave the nuclear deal (JCPOA).

Ali Bagheri Kani in an interview with Guardian said that talks in Vienna between Iran and other signatories had failed to reach an agreement on a means of verifying that US sanctions had both been lifted and had a practical impact on trade with Iran.

“We need verification, and this remains unresolved. It is one of the issues that remains not finalised. It is not enough for the ink to be put on the agreement,” he said. Bagheri Kani did not rule out an independent body being responsible for verification.

Defending Iran's demand that the US give a guarantee that it will comply with the agreement, Bagheri Kani said, “This is about an agreement, not a policy. If there is a peace agreement between two states, it has the effect of a treaty. This is international law. It is not intended that domestic laws of the US can prevail over an international agreement. That is against international law.”

He added he wanted European powers to give their own guarantees that they will trade with Iran, regardless of the US position, possibly by using a blocking statute nullifying the effect of US sanctions on European firms that trade with Iran.

Bagheri Kani rejected that Iran had been stalling on the talks’ resumption in an effort to develop its own nuclear program, saying it was natural for a new government to take time to prepare its negotiating position and to hold bilateral talks with the other parties.

He reiterated calls for all US sanctions linked to the nuclear deal to be lifted.  “We are just saying that in accordance with the JCPOA the sanctions should be lifted. We did a deal, and our view is that it should be implemented.”

Bagheri Kani also ruled out discussions on Iran’s missile and security program being included in the agreement. He said, "The JCPOA has a clear framework and other issues are not relevant. We are not going to negotiate on our defence capabilities or our security.”

Asked if he was requiring the Vienna talks to go back to the start, he said, “What is important is not from where we started, but what is important is that we achieve a deal that has practical results for the parties. Our main objective is to remove the illegal sanctions that they have imposed on the Iranian nation in breach of UN resolutions. Any sanctions in breach of the JCPOA imposed by President Obama and President Trump have to be lifted. That is the agreement set out the JCPOA.”

The 2015 deal, more formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, the UK, China, Russia, and France — plus Germany and the EU. Despite the International Atomic Energy Agency's acknowledgement of Iran's adherence to all of its obligations, the US government unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in May 2018.

The US government has imposed sanctions under various pretexts in line with its hostile goals against Iran and the advancement of its economic war against Iran.

Amid the indifference of the JCPOA parties toward continued US violations of the JCPOA, in December 2020, the Iranian Parliament passed the Law on "Strategic Action Plan to Counter Sanctions and Protect Rights of the People" that prompted the Iranian administration to restrict the IAEA’s inspections and accelerate the development of the country’s nuclear program beyond the limits set by the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement.

Iran has also increased the level of uranium enrichment beyond the level allowed under the JCPOA in accordance with the accord itself.

The current US administration has not yet fulfilled the promises Joe Biden made during his presidential elections campaigns to undo Trump's actions and return to the deal. In the meantime, Tehran has also stressed that the Biden administration's return to the agreement without lifting the sanctions is not important at all.

Meanwhile, Iran and the remaining signatories to the JCPOA known as the P4+1 with the indirect involvement of the United States have held six rounds of talks so far with no results. The Western powers made excessive demands during the talks and the talks were halted amid the change in the government in Iran till last Wednesday, the Iranian deputy foreign minister and the new top negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani announced that the Vienna talks will start on November 29 after a five-month halt.

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