South Korea says Myanmar arms ban in place after U.N. concern
Wed, August 9, 2023
By Hyonhee Shin
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea said on Wednesday its ban on the sale of arms to Myanmar remained in place even though it had invited an envoy appointed by its military rulers to an event promoting the sale of weapons.
Thomas Andrews, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, had expressed "extreme concern" that the Myanmar ambassador, Thant Sin, attended the event hosted by South Korea's foreign ministry in May, saying it had legitimised the junta and raised doubts about South Korea's ban.
Myanmar has been in crisis since the military ousted an elected government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, with most Western governments isolating the generals and cutting off arms sales but others, including Russia and China, maintaining close relations.
"Our government has been still strictly implementing countermeasures against Myanmar since they were announced shortly after the outbreak of the crisis, including a ban on exports of military supplies, and there is no change in this position," the South Korean ministry said in a statement.
Andrews had said in a letter to South Korea's diplomatic mission in Geneva that the envoy's "participation in the event legitimises an illegal and brutal military junta".
The invitation to Thant Sin also "raises doubts" about South Korea's ban on arms exports to Myanmar and could imply its intention to permit the sale, despite the junta's responsibility for attacks on civilians, Andrews said.
South Korea's Geneva-based diplomatic mission said last month the invitation was sent to all countries in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations in line with "established practice" and was "absolutely unrelated" to its policy towards Myanmar's military.
Close U.S. ally South Korea had not conducted any arms transactions with Myanmar since 2019 but operates major development projects there.
Andrews, following a visit to South Korea in November, urged it to take even stronger action to deny the Myanmar junta legitimacy and help reverse the crisis.
(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; editing by Robert Birsel)
Wednesday, August 09, 2023
Shanghai homebuyers warn of mortgage boycott as property crisis spreads to mainland China's financial and commercial hub
South China Morning Post
Tue, August 8, 2023
Dozens of homebuyers in Shanghai have threatened to stop repaying mortgages as they protest against a developer's delay in handing over flats, evoking memories of a nationwide boycott about a year ago that spread to more than a hundred cities as builders were behind schedule due to tight funding and strict Covid-19 curbs.
These warnings reflect the continued stress in China's property market as the government attempts to rebalance the sector, exposing developers to completion risk and marking the first mortgage boycott threat in the mainland's financial and commercial hub where residential units have long been viewed as safe investment amid a property boom.
These boycott warnings come at a time when property sales are sinking and could further pressure the liquidity starved sector. Property sales declined 33 per cent year on year in July, extending a 17 per cent fall in June.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
The One - Rivera Shanghai, a project located on Puyi Road, Pudong, stalled construction due to a liquidity crunch it has faced since early 2022, which forced the company to miss delivery deadlines stipulated in the home purchase contracts.
A view of unfinished residential project The One - Rivera Shanghai on Puyi Road, Pudong. Photo: Zhang Shidong alt=A view of unfinished residential project The One - Rivera Shanghai on Puyi Road, Pudong. Photo: Zhang Shidong>
According to two buyers who asked not to be identified, about 100 people whose flats were not delivered on the due date have written to the developer and relevant housing and financial authorities complaining about the lapse and have warned they would stop making mortgage payments from September if construction did not resume by end-August.
"We, ordinary families, cannot withstand the losses incurred by the unfinished project," the homebuyers said in the letter that was obtained by the Post. "We made the decision [not to repay the mortgage] unless government authorities step in to ensure a resumption of construction."
The developer, Shanghai Dongying Real Estate, could not be reached for comment.
The project comprises about 300 flats in two buildings. Homes in the first building were expected to be delivered to buyers by March 12, 2022 and the delivery date for the second lot was December 10, 2022.
"The protests left local authorities red-faced because a [potential] mortgage boycott would point towards the city's unsuccessful policies governing the significant real estate market," said Bob Fu, a senior manager with property agency Baonuo in Shanghai. "It remains to be seen whether the ripple effect will spread to other projects in the city."
The One - Rivera Shanghai, located in the area within the city's Inner Ring Elevated Road, offers flats at about 110,000 yuan (US$15,293) per square metre to buyers, with prices of each unit ranging from 15 million yuan to over 30 million yuan.
Flats built in areas within the inner ring road are popular with local homebuyers partly because of the government's price cap on new homes. Those new flats are often priced at a 10 to 20 per cent discount to those pre-owned units in the neighbourhood.
Buyers sign housing contracts, or sales of partially built homes, with developers, and start repaying mortgages before homes are delivered when construction is complete.
China's ailing real estate sector, along with related industries such as home appliances and construction materials, accounts for about a quarter of the country's economy.
Beijing's austerity measures to reduce developers' leverage ratios in 2020 resulted in a wave of bond and loan defaults involving developers from China Evergrande Group to Kaisa Group Holdings.
About 50 mainland developers have defaulted on some US$100 billion worth of offshore bonds over the past two years, according to a JPMorgan report in December, with 39 seeking restructuring plans with creditors for US$117 billion in stressed debt.
In August 2022, buyers of more than 320 residential projects in 100 cities collectively refused to make mortgage repayments on unfinished projects, according to real-time updates on "WeNeedHome" on GitHub, Microsoft's collaborative code-sharing platform.
Luxury homes in Shanghai have come under pressure amid worries about China's faltering economy, with some sellers cutting prices by up to 20 per cent to attract buyers, according to property agencies and consultancies.
Last November, Beijing rolled out a 16-point rescue plan for the property market, under which the banking regulators injected trillions of yuan into the property sector.
In July this year, Ni Hong, Minister of Housing and Urban-rural Development, said loosening measures, including lower mortgage financing rates and reduced down payment ratios, would be implemented to spur a market recovery while China's statistics bureau spokesman Fu Linghui said it was only a temporary setback as the industry clean-up had created turbulence. A resolution is around the corner, which could be a harbinger of long-term stability for the industry, he added.
"We have to think about the contingent impact if confidence collapses. That's the worst case," said analysts at Goldman Sachs in a note last year, highlighting that the cost for the government to eliminate completion risk was around 600 billion yuan.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
South China Morning Post
Tue, August 8, 2023
Dozens of homebuyers in Shanghai have threatened to stop repaying mortgages as they protest against a developer's delay in handing over flats, evoking memories of a nationwide boycott about a year ago that spread to more than a hundred cities as builders were behind schedule due to tight funding and strict Covid-19 curbs.
These warnings reflect the continued stress in China's property market as the government attempts to rebalance the sector, exposing developers to completion risk and marking the first mortgage boycott threat in the mainland's financial and commercial hub where residential units have long been viewed as safe investment amid a property boom.
These boycott warnings come at a time when property sales are sinking and could further pressure the liquidity starved sector. Property sales declined 33 per cent year on year in July, extending a 17 per cent fall in June.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
The One - Rivera Shanghai, a project located on Puyi Road, Pudong, stalled construction due to a liquidity crunch it has faced since early 2022, which forced the company to miss delivery deadlines stipulated in the home purchase contracts.
A view of unfinished residential project The One - Rivera Shanghai on Puyi Road, Pudong. Photo: Zhang Shidong alt=A view of unfinished residential project The One - Rivera Shanghai on Puyi Road, Pudong. Photo: Zhang Shidong>
According to two buyers who asked not to be identified, about 100 people whose flats were not delivered on the due date have written to the developer and relevant housing and financial authorities complaining about the lapse and have warned they would stop making mortgage payments from September if construction did not resume by end-August.
"We, ordinary families, cannot withstand the losses incurred by the unfinished project," the homebuyers said in the letter that was obtained by the Post. "We made the decision [not to repay the mortgage] unless government authorities step in to ensure a resumption of construction."
The developer, Shanghai Dongying Real Estate, could not be reached for comment.
The project comprises about 300 flats in two buildings. Homes in the first building were expected to be delivered to buyers by March 12, 2022 and the delivery date for the second lot was December 10, 2022.
"The protests left local authorities red-faced because a [potential] mortgage boycott would point towards the city's unsuccessful policies governing the significant real estate market," said Bob Fu, a senior manager with property agency Baonuo in Shanghai. "It remains to be seen whether the ripple effect will spread to other projects in the city."
The One - Rivera Shanghai, located in the area within the city's Inner Ring Elevated Road, offers flats at about 110,000 yuan (US$15,293) per square metre to buyers, with prices of each unit ranging from 15 million yuan to over 30 million yuan.
Flats built in areas within the inner ring road are popular with local homebuyers partly because of the government's price cap on new homes. Those new flats are often priced at a 10 to 20 per cent discount to those pre-owned units in the neighbourhood.
Buyers sign housing contracts, or sales of partially built homes, with developers, and start repaying mortgages before homes are delivered when construction is complete.
China's ailing real estate sector, along with related industries such as home appliances and construction materials, accounts for about a quarter of the country's economy.
Beijing's austerity measures to reduce developers' leverage ratios in 2020 resulted in a wave of bond and loan defaults involving developers from China Evergrande Group to Kaisa Group Holdings.
About 50 mainland developers have defaulted on some US$100 billion worth of offshore bonds over the past two years, according to a JPMorgan report in December, with 39 seeking restructuring plans with creditors for US$117 billion in stressed debt.
In August 2022, buyers of more than 320 residential projects in 100 cities collectively refused to make mortgage repayments on unfinished projects, according to real-time updates on "WeNeedHome" on GitHub, Microsoft's collaborative code-sharing platform.
Luxury homes in Shanghai have come under pressure amid worries about China's faltering economy, with some sellers cutting prices by up to 20 per cent to attract buyers, according to property agencies and consultancies.
Last November, Beijing rolled out a 16-point rescue plan for the property market, under which the banking regulators injected trillions of yuan into the property sector.
In July this year, Ni Hong, Minister of Housing and Urban-rural Development, said loosening measures, including lower mortgage financing rates and reduced down payment ratios, would be implemented to spur a market recovery while China's statistics bureau spokesman Fu Linghui said it was only a temporary setback as the industry clean-up had created turbulence. A resolution is around the corner, which could be a harbinger of long-term stability for the industry, he added.
"We have to think about the contingent impact if confidence collapses. That's the worst case," said analysts at Goldman Sachs in a note last year, highlighting that the cost for the government to eliminate completion risk was around 600 billion yuan.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
China's property sector is in dire straits as yet another developer reportedly runs into trouble
Joseph Wilkins
Tue, August 8, 2023
A man walks outside a property agency featuring posters of the
Joseph Wilkins
Tue, August 8, 2023
A man walks outside a property agency featuring posters of the
latest high-rise apartment buildings in Hong Kong
Tyrone Siu/Reuters
The Chinese property sector has been under the gun for years.
Enormous losses, heavy debt burdens, and low demand all plague the industry, and firms keep failing.
Country Garden is the latest to wobble, as Bloomberg reports investors say they haven't received bond repayments
China's property sector continues to unravel as another developer falls behind on its debt payments, according to Bloomberg.
Country Garden Holdings – once China's largest developer by sales – failed to make coupon payments due Monday, investors who hold the firm's notes told Bloomberg.
The missed payments amount to $10.5 million of interest on a dollar bond maturing in 2026 and $12 million on another note maturing in 2030, per the report.
Country Garden is one of the few remaining private developers still standing after a years-long downturn in the country's property sector. Last month, Shimao Group defaulted on its debt, announcing losses of $6.8 billion.
While Evergrande, China's largest developer, reported a whopping $81 billion two-year loss in July – a figure almost triple the GDP of Iceland. The firm's collapse back in 2021 reverberated through global markets when it failed to repay its debt pile – and in the two years that followed, this has had dire consequences for the nation's property market.
Country Garden's woes arrive in spite of the Chinese government's pledge to rescue the embattled industry. Last week Chinese real estate stocks won a reprieve as Beijing pledged bond financing support to some of the country's largest companies – and in attendance at the meeting were executives from the firm itself.
But the long-awaited commitment by the central bank to stimulate the slumping sector may arrive too late, at least for Country Garden. The two bonds include a 30-day grace period before the missed coupon payments are classed as in default, according to bond prospectuses seen by Bloomberg.
China's property sector accounts for about a fifth of the country's overall economy. Its headwinds include heavy debt burdens, sluggish demand for new property, and potential homebuyers prioritizing saving instead. This helped to stunt second-quarter GDP growth, which came in at 6.3%, well below forecasts of up to 7.1%.
The Chinese property sector has been under the gun for years.
Enormous losses, heavy debt burdens, and low demand all plague the industry, and firms keep failing.
Country Garden is the latest to wobble, as Bloomberg reports investors say they haven't received bond repayments
China's property sector continues to unravel as another developer falls behind on its debt payments, according to Bloomberg.
Country Garden Holdings – once China's largest developer by sales – failed to make coupon payments due Monday, investors who hold the firm's notes told Bloomberg.
The missed payments amount to $10.5 million of interest on a dollar bond maturing in 2026 and $12 million on another note maturing in 2030, per the report.
Country Garden is one of the few remaining private developers still standing after a years-long downturn in the country's property sector. Last month, Shimao Group defaulted on its debt, announcing losses of $6.8 billion.
While Evergrande, China's largest developer, reported a whopping $81 billion two-year loss in July – a figure almost triple the GDP of Iceland. The firm's collapse back in 2021 reverberated through global markets when it failed to repay its debt pile – and in the two years that followed, this has had dire consequences for the nation's property market.
Country Garden's woes arrive in spite of the Chinese government's pledge to rescue the embattled industry. Last week Chinese real estate stocks won a reprieve as Beijing pledged bond financing support to some of the country's largest companies – and in attendance at the meeting were executives from the firm itself.
But the long-awaited commitment by the central bank to stimulate the slumping sector may arrive too late, at least for Country Garden. The two bonds include a 30-day grace period before the missed coupon payments are classed as in default, according to bond prospectuses seen by Bloomberg.
China's property sector accounts for about a fifth of the country's overall economy. Its headwinds include heavy debt burdens, sluggish demand for new property, and potential homebuyers prioritizing saving instead. This helped to stunt second-quarter GDP growth, which came in at 6.3%, well below forecasts of up to 7.1%.
New Zealand is partnering with BlackRock in aim to reach 100% renewable electricity
WE DON'T CALL IT ESG SAYS BLACKROCK
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, right, makes an announcement on a plan to make New Zealand 100% renewable energy dependent, in Auckland, Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. New Zealand's government said it will partner with U.S. investment giant BlackRock in an aim to become one of the first nations in the world to have its electricity grid run entirely from renewable energy.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, right, makes an announcement on a plan to make New Zealand 100% renewable energy dependent, in Auckland, Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. New Zealand's government said it will partner with U.S. investment giant BlackRock in an aim to become one of the first nations in the world to have its electricity grid run entirely from renewable energy.
(Jason Oxenham/New Zealand Herald via AP)
NICK PERRY
Updated Mon, August 7, 2023
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand's government said Tuesday it will partner with U.S. investment giant BlackRock in its aim to become one of the first nations in the world to have its electricity grid run entirely from renewable energy.
The government said it was helping BlackRock launch a $1.2 billion fund to ramp up investments in wind and solar generation, as well as battery storage and green hydrogen. Some of the investment is expected to come from government-owned companies.
New Zealand's electricity grid already runs off about 82% renewable energy after it damned rivers decades ago to produce hydroelectric power. The government said it aims to reach 100% renewable generation by the end of this decade.
The announcement comes two months out from an election, with the government hoping to burnish its green credentials. Critics point out the nation’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have barely budged since the government symbolically declared a climate emergency in 2020.
“This is a gamechanger for the clean-tech sector, and an example of the pragmatic and practical steps the government's taking to accelerate climate action while actually growing our economy and creating jobs,” Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told reporters in Auckland.
Hipkins said the fund would allow New Zealand companies to produce intellectual property that could be commercialized across the world.
“Partnering with, and supporting, industry to solve the climate crisis is a no-brainer,” Hipkins said.
BlackRock released few details about the planned 2 billion New Zealand dollar ($1.22 billion) fund, but did say it would initially target institutional investors. It was the first time BlackRock had launched an initiative of its kind, said Andrew Landman, the head of BlackRock in Australia and New Zealand.
“The level of innovation is far greater in this country than we see elsewhere in clean tech,” Landman told reporters. “We are seeing enormous visionary capabilities out of those investee companies.”
BlackRock said making the grid completely green would require a total investment of about US$26 billion.
BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink said on social media that “the world is looking for models of cooperation between the private and public sectors to ensure an orderly, just and fair energy transition.”
David Seymour, the leader of New Zealand's libertarian ACT Party, said the plan would push up power prices for little environmental gain.
“New Zealanders don’t want to be subject to a ‘world first’ climate change experiment that will mean the government micromanages their lives," Seymour said in a statement.
___
This story has been updated to correct the attribution of the quote in the 9th graf to Andrew Landman.
NICK PERRY
Updated Mon, August 7, 2023
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand's government said Tuesday it will partner with U.S. investment giant BlackRock in its aim to become one of the first nations in the world to have its electricity grid run entirely from renewable energy.
The government said it was helping BlackRock launch a $1.2 billion fund to ramp up investments in wind and solar generation, as well as battery storage and green hydrogen. Some of the investment is expected to come from government-owned companies.
New Zealand's electricity grid already runs off about 82% renewable energy after it damned rivers decades ago to produce hydroelectric power. The government said it aims to reach 100% renewable generation by the end of this decade.
The announcement comes two months out from an election, with the government hoping to burnish its green credentials. Critics point out the nation’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have barely budged since the government symbolically declared a climate emergency in 2020.
“This is a gamechanger for the clean-tech sector, and an example of the pragmatic and practical steps the government's taking to accelerate climate action while actually growing our economy and creating jobs,” Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told reporters in Auckland.
Hipkins said the fund would allow New Zealand companies to produce intellectual property that could be commercialized across the world.
“Partnering with, and supporting, industry to solve the climate crisis is a no-brainer,” Hipkins said.
BlackRock released few details about the planned 2 billion New Zealand dollar ($1.22 billion) fund, but did say it would initially target institutional investors. It was the first time BlackRock had launched an initiative of its kind, said Andrew Landman, the head of BlackRock in Australia and New Zealand.
“The level of innovation is far greater in this country than we see elsewhere in clean tech,” Landman told reporters. “We are seeing enormous visionary capabilities out of those investee companies.”
BlackRock said making the grid completely green would require a total investment of about US$26 billion.
BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink said on social media that “the world is looking for models of cooperation between the private and public sectors to ensure an orderly, just and fair energy transition.”
David Seymour, the leader of New Zealand's libertarian ACT Party, said the plan would push up power prices for little environmental gain.
“New Zealanders don’t want to be subject to a ‘world first’ climate change experiment that will mean the government micromanages their lives," Seymour said in a statement.
___
This story has been updated to correct the attribution of the quote in the 9th graf to Andrew Landman.
Romanian care homes scandal spotlights abuse described as 'inhumane and degrading'
In this image released on July 27, 2023 by the Center of Legal Resources Romania, improvised beds are set up in the basement of a care home in the village of Bardesti in the central Romanian Mures County. The Centre for Legal Resources, or CLR, which conducted an unannounced inspection of the home, found alarming levels of neglect and abuse, saying that, on top of 23 residents inside the main building, seven more were found living in appalling conditions in a dingy basement beneath. Four of the residents who had severe disabilities, they said, were "lying on mattresses soiled with feces, urine, and blood." (Center of Legal Resources via AP)
STEPHEN McGRATH and VADIM GHIRDA
Updated Wed, August 9, 2023
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — After receiving distressed text messages from a young man worried about the conditions his friend was living in at a social care home in central Romania, Georgiana Pascu arranged an impromptu visit to inspect the facility.
“In the beginning, we were quite sure there is nothing there,” said Pascu, program manager at the Center for Legal Resources, a rights group. She said that a day earlier, state authorities had carried out an inspection of the care home for older and disabled people, and no issues had been flagged.
But what she and her colleagues uncovered at the care home in the village of Bardesti, she said, was “outrageous … inhuman.”
“There was a very young woman who looked malnourished, she didn’t move, she didn’t speak at all — she was lying on the basement floor,” she told The Associated Press. “There was another young woman, she was crying and asking for water.”
The nongovernmental organization discovered six residents in late July living in the Little House of Min’s cluttered, dingy basement surrounded by construction materials in addition to 23 people living on the floors above. Four residents with severe disabilities were lying on mattresses “soiled with feces, urine, and blood, with flies on them,” they said, who “couldn’t defend themselves and couldn't ask for help.”
The team of three from the Center for Legal Resources immediately called the emergency services, and police and ambulance crews arrived, but even they called for backup, Pascu said. Hours later, a resident directed Pascu to what she describes as a small “secluded room … with just a bed inside” where two residents lived with “no artificial or natural light.”
The NGO’s findings triggered a judicial investigation and follow similar discoveries in other private institutions. So far, two Cabinet members were forced to resign over what Romanian media have dubbed the “horror homes” scandal.
The discovery is just the latest in a string of disturbing revelations that have made front-page news in the local media, spotlighting the impact corruption can have on the socially vulnerable in Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007.
One of the main conditions of Romania’s accession to the EU was that it crack down on endemic corruption, but it remains one of the bloc’s most corrupt members, according to Transparency International.
In early July, police raids at three separate care homes in Ilfov County near Bucharest also uncovered widespread abuse and neglect of older and disabled people. Images emerged of residents tied to beds in filthy rooms, some exhibiting signs of physical abuse and appearing rake-thin.
In those cases, Romania’s anti-organized crime agency, DIICOT, said that two organized criminal gangs accused of human trafficking and other charges were formed in 2020 to “exploit people with disabilities or in vulnerable situations.” Prosecutors said residents were subjected to unpaid labor via acts of coercion as well as physical violence, and weren't given enough food.
Prosecutors launched a criminal investigation and said there are more than 20 suspects in the case.
DIICOT detained three people after the findings at the Little House of Min, which it alleges formed a criminal gang in 2020 “to commit the crime of human trafficking,” and that residents were subjected to “inhumane and degrading treatment” through acts of physical and mental aggression.
Residents were being exploited under the guise of an association that withheld their state benefits payments or sums sent to them by friends and relatives, prosecutors said. Instead of the money going toward the residents’ care, it was mainly used “for the benefit of the members of the group.”
Two local officials were fired over the findings and the authorities shuttered the home.
The AP contacted the young man who had raised concerns to Pascu about the Little House of Min, but he wasn’t authorized to talk because he’s considered a victim in the legal case.
Doru Constantin, a spokesperson from Mures County social services, confirmed to the AP that the Little House of Min was checked by inspectors a day before the NGO’s discovery, but said they didn’t find anything “because they didn't have access to the basement of the building.”
“I can’t believe even now something like this could happen in our county,” he added.
President Klaus Iohannis has called the revelations a “national disgrace” and said measures must be taken to “cut evil from the roots.”
One of the Ilfov care home bosses, DIICOT alleges, was squandering residents’ money on prostitutes, drugs and parties. He is also being investigated for abuse of office by the National Anti-Corruption Directorate, which is also investigating two social inspectors for corruption who carried out favorable checks on his home in May.
Family Minister Gabriel Firea, who is reported to have close ties to that care home boss, was forced to resign amid the sprawling scandal, as was Labor Minister Marius Budai. They both denied knowledge of care homes’ woes.
Alin Mituta, a Romanian legislator at the European Parliament, asked the European Commission in July if it planned to investigate Romania’s abusive care homes issue, which he said directly violated the bloc’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. The responsible Romanian authorities, Mituta said, “were made aware of these issues … but no action was taken.”
European Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper said in a statement sent to the AP on Wednesday that the Commission is “deeply concerned by this case as there is no place for mistreatment of vulnerable people in the EU,” adding it can't comment on ongoing investigations.
The recent revelations have also brought back memories of when Romania’s communist-era orphanages gained international exposure after communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu was executed in 1989. In the early 1990s, images were broadcast around the world of thousands of children abandoned in orphanages where they existed in squalid conditions.
Bianca Albu, a Romanian investigative journalist who first reported on the Ilfov care homes six months ago along with her colleague Ovidiu Vanghele, said their report didn’t initially yield “any attention from the local or national authorities.” She fears that “these problems are happening all over” Romania.
“It’s like a disease,” she said.
Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu expressed gratitude last week to the NGOs that “exposed abuses in the welfare system."
“It is obvious that the Romanian state needs help,” he said. “We need to close this chapter of abuse.”
___
Stephen McGrath reported from Sighisoara.
In this image released on July 27, 2023 by the Center of Legal Resources Romania, improvised beds are set up in the basement of a care home in the village of Bardesti in the central Romanian Mures County. The Centre for Legal Resources, or CLR, which conducted an unannounced inspection of the home, found alarming levels of neglect and abuse, saying that, on top of 23 residents inside the main building, seven more were found living in appalling conditions in a dingy basement beneath. Four of the residents who had severe disabilities, they said, were "lying on mattresses soiled with feces, urine, and blood." (Center of Legal Resources via AP)
STEPHEN McGRATH and VADIM GHIRDA
Updated Wed, August 9, 2023
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — After receiving distressed text messages from a young man worried about the conditions his friend was living in at a social care home in central Romania, Georgiana Pascu arranged an impromptu visit to inspect the facility.
“In the beginning, we were quite sure there is nothing there,” said Pascu, program manager at the Center for Legal Resources, a rights group. She said that a day earlier, state authorities had carried out an inspection of the care home for older and disabled people, and no issues had been flagged.
But what she and her colleagues uncovered at the care home in the village of Bardesti, she said, was “outrageous … inhuman.”
“There was a very young woman who looked malnourished, she didn’t move, she didn’t speak at all — she was lying on the basement floor,” she told The Associated Press. “There was another young woman, she was crying and asking for water.”
The nongovernmental organization discovered six residents in late July living in the Little House of Min’s cluttered, dingy basement surrounded by construction materials in addition to 23 people living on the floors above. Four residents with severe disabilities were lying on mattresses “soiled with feces, urine, and blood, with flies on them,” they said, who “couldn’t defend themselves and couldn't ask for help.”
The team of three from the Center for Legal Resources immediately called the emergency services, and police and ambulance crews arrived, but even they called for backup, Pascu said. Hours later, a resident directed Pascu to what she describes as a small “secluded room … with just a bed inside” where two residents lived with “no artificial or natural light.”
The NGO’s findings triggered a judicial investigation and follow similar discoveries in other private institutions. So far, two Cabinet members were forced to resign over what Romanian media have dubbed the “horror homes” scandal.
The discovery is just the latest in a string of disturbing revelations that have made front-page news in the local media, spotlighting the impact corruption can have on the socially vulnerable in Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007.
One of the main conditions of Romania’s accession to the EU was that it crack down on endemic corruption, but it remains one of the bloc’s most corrupt members, according to Transparency International.
In early July, police raids at three separate care homes in Ilfov County near Bucharest also uncovered widespread abuse and neglect of older and disabled people. Images emerged of residents tied to beds in filthy rooms, some exhibiting signs of physical abuse and appearing rake-thin.
In those cases, Romania’s anti-organized crime agency, DIICOT, said that two organized criminal gangs accused of human trafficking and other charges were formed in 2020 to “exploit people with disabilities or in vulnerable situations.” Prosecutors said residents were subjected to unpaid labor via acts of coercion as well as physical violence, and weren't given enough food.
Prosecutors launched a criminal investigation and said there are more than 20 suspects in the case.
DIICOT detained three people after the findings at the Little House of Min, which it alleges formed a criminal gang in 2020 “to commit the crime of human trafficking,” and that residents were subjected to “inhumane and degrading treatment” through acts of physical and mental aggression.
Residents were being exploited under the guise of an association that withheld their state benefits payments or sums sent to them by friends and relatives, prosecutors said. Instead of the money going toward the residents’ care, it was mainly used “for the benefit of the members of the group.”
Two local officials were fired over the findings and the authorities shuttered the home.
The AP contacted the young man who had raised concerns to Pascu about the Little House of Min, but he wasn’t authorized to talk because he’s considered a victim in the legal case.
Doru Constantin, a spokesperson from Mures County social services, confirmed to the AP that the Little House of Min was checked by inspectors a day before the NGO’s discovery, but said they didn’t find anything “because they didn't have access to the basement of the building.”
“I can’t believe even now something like this could happen in our county,” he added.
President Klaus Iohannis has called the revelations a “national disgrace” and said measures must be taken to “cut evil from the roots.”
One of the Ilfov care home bosses, DIICOT alleges, was squandering residents’ money on prostitutes, drugs and parties. He is also being investigated for abuse of office by the National Anti-Corruption Directorate, which is also investigating two social inspectors for corruption who carried out favorable checks on his home in May.
Family Minister Gabriel Firea, who is reported to have close ties to that care home boss, was forced to resign amid the sprawling scandal, as was Labor Minister Marius Budai. They both denied knowledge of care homes’ woes.
Alin Mituta, a Romanian legislator at the European Parliament, asked the European Commission in July if it planned to investigate Romania’s abusive care homes issue, which he said directly violated the bloc’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. The responsible Romanian authorities, Mituta said, “were made aware of these issues … but no action was taken.”
European Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper said in a statement sent to the AP on Wednesday that the Commission is “deeply concerned by this case as there is no place for mistreatment of vulnerable people in the EU,” adding it can't comment on ongoing investigations.
The recent revelations have also brought back memories of when Romania’s communist-era orphanages gained international exposure after communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu was executed in 1989. In the early 1990s, images were broadcast around the world of thousands of children abandoned in orphanages where they existed in squalid conditions.
Bianca Albu, a Romanian investigative journalist who first reported on the Ilfov care homes six months ago along with her colleague Ovidiu Vanghele, said their report didn’t initially yield “any attention from the local or national authorities.” She fears that “these problems are happening all over” Romania.
“It’s like a disease,” she said.
Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu expressed gratitude last week to the NGOs that “exposed abuses in the welfare system."
“It is obvious that the Romanian state needs help,” he said. “We need to close this chapter of abuse.”
___
Stephen McGrath reported from Sighisoara.
Looking back toward cosmic dawn − astronomers confirm the faintest galaxy ever seen
Guido Roberts-Borsani, Postdoctoral Researcher in Astrophysics, University of California, Los Angeles
Tue, August 8, 2023
The early universe was filled with a fog made up of hydrogen atoms until the first stars and galaxies burned it away. NASA/JPL-Caltech, CC BY
The intense ultraviolet light from the first generations of stars and galaxies is thought to have burned through the hydrogen fog, transforming the universe into what we see today. While previous generations of telescopes lacked the ability to study those early cosmic objects, astronomers are now using the James Webb Space Telescope’s superior technology to study the stars and galaxies that formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
I’m an astronomer who studies the farthest galaxies in the universe using the world’s foremost ground- and space-based telescopes. Using new observations from the Webb telescope and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, my team confirmed the existence of the faintest galaxy currently known in the early universe. The galaxy, called JD1, is seen as it was when the universe was only 480 million years old, or 4% of its present age.
A brief history of the early universe
The first billion years of the universe’s life were a crucial period in its evolution. In the first moments after the Big Bang, matter and light were bound to each other in a hot, dense “soup” of fundamental particles.
However, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded extremely rapidly. This expansion eventually allowed the universe to cool enough for light and matter to separate out of their “soup” and – some 380,000 years later – form hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms appeared as an intergalactic fog, and with no light from stars and galaxies, the universe was dark. This period is known as the cosmic dark ages.
The arrival of the first generations of stars and galaxies several hundred million years after the Big Bang bathed the universe in extremely hot UV light, which burned – or ionized – the hydrogen fog. This process yielded the transparent, complex and beautiful universe we see today.
Astronomers like me call the first billion years of the universe – when this hydrogen fog was burning away – the epoch of reionization. To fully understand this time period, we study when the first stars and galaxies formed, what their main properties were and whether they were able to produce enough UV light to burn through all the hydrogen.
The search for faint galaxies in the early universe
The first step toward understanding the epoch of reionization is finding and confirming the distances to galaxies that astronomers think might be responsible for this process. Since light travels at a finite speed, it takes time to arrive to our telescopes, so astronomers see objects as they were in the past.
For example, light from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, takes about 27,000 years to reach us on Earth, so we see it as it was 27,000 years in the past. That means that if we want to see back to the very first instants after the Big Bang (the universe is 13.8 billion years old), we have to look for objects at extreme distances.
Because galaxies residing in this time period are so far away, they appear extremely faint and small to our telescopes and emit most of their light in the infrared. This means astronomers need powerful infrared telescopes like Webb to find them. Prior to Webb, virtually all of the distant galaxies found by astronomers were exceptionally bright and large, simply because our telescopes weren’t sensitive enough to see the fainter, smaller galaxies.
However, it’s the latter population that are far more numerous, representative and likely to be the main drivers to the reionization process, not the bright ones. So, these faint galaxies are the ones astronomers need to study in greater detail. It’s like trying to understand the evolution of humans by studying entire populations rather than a few very tall people. By allowing us to see faint galaxies, Webb is opening a new window into studying the early universe.
A typical early galaxy
JD1 is one such “typical” faint galaxy. It was discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope as a suspect distant galaxy. But Hubble didn’t have the capabilities or sensitivity to confirm its distance – it could make only an educated guess.
Small and faint nearby galaxies can sometimes be mistaken as distant ones, so astronomers need to be sure of their distances before we can make claims about their properties. Distant galaxies therefore remain “candidates” until they are confirmed. The Webb telescope finally has the capabilities to confirm these, and JD1 was one of the first major confirmations by Webb of an extremely distant galaxy candidate found by Hubble. This confirmation ranks it as the faintest galaxy yet seen in the early universe.
To confirm JD1, an international team of astronomers and I used Webb’s near-infrared spectrograph, NIRSpec, to obtain an infrared spectrum of the galaxy. The spectrum allowed us to pinpoint the distance from Earth and determine its age, the number of young stars it formed and the amount of dust and heavy elements that it produced.
A sky full of galaxies and a few stars. JD1, pictured in a zoomed-in box, is the faintest galaxy yet found in the early universe. Guido Roberts-Borsani/UCLA; original images: NASA, ESA, CSA, Swinburne University of Technology, University of Pittsburgh, STScI
Gravitational lensing, nature’s magnifying glass
Even for Webb, JD1 would be impossible to see without a helping hand from nature. JD1 is located behind a large cluster of nearby galaxies, called Abell 2744, whose combined gravitational strength bends and amplifies the light from JD1. This effect, known as gravitational lensing, makes JD1 appear larger and 13 times brighter than it ordinarily would.
Without gravitational lensing, astronomers would not have seen JD1, even with Webb. The combination of JD1’s gravitational magnification and new images from another one of Webb’s near-infrared instruments, NIRCam, made it possible for our team to study the galaxy’s structure in unprecedented detail and resolution.
Not only does this mean we as astronomers can study the inner regions of early galaxies, it also means we can start determining whether such early galaxies were small, compact and isolated sources, or if they were merging and interacting with nearby galaxies. By studying these galaxies, we are tracing back to the building blocks that shaped the universe and gave rise to our cosmic home.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
It was written by: Guido Roberts-Borsani, University of California, Los Angeles.
Read more:
A subtle symphony of ripples in spacetime – astronomers use dead stars to measure gravitational waves produced by ancient black holes
How the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a surprisingly bright, complex and element-filled early universe – podcast
This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program JWST-ERS-1324, and the authors acknowledge financial support from NASA through grant JWST-ERS-1324.
Guido Roberts-Borsani, Postdoctoral Researcher in Astrophysics, University of California, Los Angeles
Tue, August 8, 2023
THE CONVERSATION
A phenomenon called gravitational lensing can help astronomers observe faint, hard-to-see galaxies. NASA/STScI
The universe we live in is a transparent one, where light from stars and galaxies shines bright against a clear, dark backdrop. But this wasn’t always the case – in its early years, the universe was filled with a fog of hydrogen atoms that obscured light from the earliest stars and galaxies.
A phenomenon called gravitational lensing can help astronomers observe faint, hard-to-see galaxies. NASA/STScI
The universe we live in is a transparent one, where light from stars and galaxies shines bright against a clear, dark backdrop. But this wasn’t always the case – in its early years, the universe was filled with a fog of hydrogen atoms that obscured light from the earliest stars and galaxies.
The early universe was filled with a fog made up of hydrogen atoms until the first stars and galaxies burned it away. NASA/JPL-Caltech, CC BY
The intense ultraviolet light from the first generations of stars and galaxies is thought to have burned through the hydrogen fog, transforming the universe into what we see today. While previous generations of telescopes lacked the ability to study those early cosmic objects, astronomers are now using the James Webb Space Telescope’s superior technology to study the stars and galaxies that formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
I’m an astronomer who studies the farthest galaxies in the universe using the world’s foremost ground- and space-based telescopes. Using new observations from the Webb telescope and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, my team confirmed the existence of the faintest galaxy currently known in the early universe. The galaxy, called JD1, is seen as it was when the universe was only 480 million years old, or 4% of its present age.
A brief history of the early universe
The first billion years of the universe’s life were a crucial period in its evolution. In the first moments after the Big Bang, matter and light were bound to each other in a hot, dense “soup” of fundamental particles.
However, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded extremely rapidly. This expansion eventually allowed the universe to cool enough for light and matter to separate out of their “soup” and – some 380,000 years later – form hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms appeared as an intergalactic fog, and with no light from stars and galaxies, the universe was dark. This period is known as the cosmic dark ages.
The arrival of the first generations of stars and galaxies several hundred million years after the Big Bang bathed the universe in extremely hot UV light, which burned – or ionized – the hydrogen fog. This process yielded the transparent, complex and beautiful universe we see today.
Astronomers like me call the first billion years of the universe – when this hydrogen fog was burning away – the epoch of reionization. To fully understand this time period, we study when the first stars and galaxies formed, what their main properties were and whether they were able to produce enough UV light to burn through all the hydrogen.
The search for faint galaxies in the early universe
The first step toward understanding the epoch of reionization is finding and confirming the distances to galaxies that astronomers think might be responsible for this process. Since light travels at a finite speed, it takes time to arrive to our telescopes, so astronomers see objects as they were in the past.
For example, light from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, takes about 27,000 years to reach us on Earth, so we see it as it was 27,000 years in the past. That means that if we want to see back to the very first instants after the Big Bang (the universe is 13.8 billion years old), we have to look for objects at extreme distances.
Because galaxies residing in this time period are so far away, they appear extremely faint and small to our telescopes and emit most of their light in the infrared. This means astronomers need powerful infrared telescopes like Webb to find them. Prior to Webb, virtually all of the distant galaxies found by astronomers were exceptionally bright and large, simply because our telescopes weren’t sensitive enough to see the fainter, smaller galaxies.
However, it’s the latter population that are far more numerous, representative and likely to be the main drivers to the reionization process, not the bright ones. So, these faint galaxies are the ones astronomers need to study in greater detail. It’s like trying to understand the evolution of humans by studying entire populations rather than a few very tall people. By allowing us to see faint galaxies, Webb is opening a new window into studying the early universe.
A typical early galaxy
JD1 is one such “typical” faint galaxy. It was discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope as a suspect distant galaxy. But Hubble didn’t have the capabilities or sensitivity to confirm its distance – it could make only an educated guess.
Small and faint nearby galaxies can sometimes be mistaken as distant ones, so astronomers need to be sure of their distances before we can make claims about their properties. Distant galaxies therefore remain “candidates” until they are confirmed. The Webb telescope finally has the capabilities to confirm these, and JD1 was one of the first major confirmations by Webb of an extremely distant galaxy candidate found by Hubble. This confirmation ranks it as the faintest galaxy yet seen in the early universe.
To confirm JD1, an international team of astronomers and I used Webb’s near-infrared spectrograph, NIRSpec, to obtain an infrared spectrum of the galaxy. The spectrum allowed us to pinpoint the distance from Earth and determine its age, the number of young stars it formed and the amount of dust and heavy elements that it produced.
A sky full of galaxies and a few stars. JD1, pictured in a zoomed-in box, is the faintest galaxy yet found in the early universe. Guido Roberts-Borsani/UCLA; original images: NASA, ESA, CSA, Swinburne University of Technology, University of Pittsburgh, STScI
Gravitational lensing, nature’s magnifying glass
Even for Webb, JD1 would be impossible to see without a helping hand from nature. JD1 is located behind a large cluster of nearby galaxies, called Abell 2744, whose combined gravitational strength bends and amplifies the light from JD1. This effect, known as gravitational lensing, makes JD1 appear larger and 13 times brighter than it ordinarily would.
Without gravitational lensing, astronomers would not have seen JD1, even with Webb. The combination of JD1’s gravitational magnification and new images from another one of Webb’s near-infrared instruments, NIRCam, made it possible for our team to study the galaxy’s structure in unprecedented detail and resolution.
Not only does this mean we as astronomers can study the inner regions of early galaxies, it also means we can start determining whether such early galaxies were small, compact and isolated sources, or if they were merging and interacting with nearby galaxies. By studying these galaxies, we are tracing back to the building blocks that shaped the universe and gave rise to our cosmic home.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
It was written by: Guido Roberts-Borsani, University of California, Los Angeles.
Read more:
A subtle symphony of ripples in spacetime – astronomers use dead stars to measure gravitational waves produced by ancient black holes
How the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a surprisingly bright, complex and element-filled early universe – podcast
This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program JWST-ERS-1324, and the authors acknowledge financial support from NASA through grant JWST-ERS-1324.
Orion's Heat Shield Remains 'Biggest Open Issue' Ahead of NASA's Artemis 2 Mission
Passant Rabie
Tue, August 8, 2023
The Artemis 2 Orion crew module in development.
NASA is working to resolve a lingering issue with the Orion capsule’s heat shield, which is designed to protect the astronauts on board the spacecraft during its return to Earth as part of the Artemis 2 mission.
On Tuesday, NASA shared an update on its progress towards the launch of the crewed lunar mission in November 2024. As the space agency prepares to send a crew of four astronauts to the Moon and back aboard Orion, NASA is running a series of tests on the spacecraft’s heat shield after it unexpectedly took a little bit more damage than it was supposed to during the Artemis 1 mission.
“We’re continuing to work on the heat shield, we’ll probably look for final disposition to that early next year,” Jim Free, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during a press conference. The space agency is running a series of tests on the heat shield to determine the root cause of its unanticipated level of wear and tear, according to Free. Once NASA figures out what might have caused the issue with the heat shield, the space agency will begin to come up with ways to resolve it ahead of the November 2024 launch of Artemis 2.
The Artemis 2 crew pose with the Orion spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Every time you’d see me come in, you take a step back because I’m coming about heat shield,” NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis 2 mission, told Free during the press conference. “This crew, we’re not going to launch until we know we’re ready, until our team knows that the vehicle is ready and we will keep the pressure on.”
So far, NASA officials don’t seem to think Orion’s heat shield woes would delay the mission and are leaving that as a last resort. “Obviously, we’re going to make the right decision to keep them safe,” Free said. “If that decision is we have to do something drastic, then we’ll do that but right now we’re on a path to get to the root cause and then we’ll make the final detention from that.”
An uncrewed Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on December 11, 2022, following a 26-day trip to the Moon and back as part of the Artemis 1 mission. The mission was a success but follow-up inspections of the capsule revealed an unexpected performance from its heat shield.
“Some of the charred material ablated away differently than what our computer models, and what our ground testing, predicted,” Howard Hu, the Orion program manager for NASA, told reporters in March. “More of this charred material was liberated during reentry than we had expected.”
During Orion’s reentry through Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft traveled at speeds reaching 24,600 miles per hour (39,590 kilometers per hour) and its heat shield endured temperatures above 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. While it was expected that some charring would occur, the Artemis team did not anticipate that little pieces of the shield’s ablative material would come off.
“I think it’s definitely the biggest open issue out of [Artemis 1],” Free said.
Want to know more about humanity’s next giant leap in space? Check out our full coverage of NASA’s Artemis Moon program, the new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, the recently concluded Artemis 1 mission around the Moon, the four-person Artemis 2 crew, NASA and Axiom’s Artemis Moon suit, and the upcoming lunar Gateway space station. And for more spaceflight in your life, follow us on Twitter and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.
Gizmodo
Passant Rabie
Tue, August 8, 2023
The Artemis 2 Orion crew module in development.
NASA is working to resolve a lingering issue with the Orion capsule’s heat shield, which is designed to protect the astronauts on board the spacecraft during its return to Earth as part of the Artemis 2 mission.
On Tuesday, NASA shared an update on its progress towards the launch of the crewed lunar mission in November 2024. As the space agency prepares to send a crew of four astronauts to the Moon and back aboard Orion, NASA is running a series of tests on the spacecraft’s heat shield after it unexpectedly took a little bit more damage than it was supposed to during the Artemis 1 mission.
“We’re continuing to work on the heat shield, we’ll probably look for final disposition to that early next year,” Jim Free, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during a press conference. The space agency is running a series of tests on the heat shield to determine the root cause of its unanticipated level of wear and tear, according to Free. Once NASA figures out what might have caused the issue with the heat shield, the space agency will begin to come up with ways to resolve it ahead of the November 2024 launch of Artemis 2.
The Artemis 2 crew pose with the Orion spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Every time you’d see me come in, you take a step back because I’m coming about heat shield,” NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis 2 mission, told Free during the press conference. “This crew, we’re not going to launch until we know we’re ready, until our team knows that the vehicle is ready and we will keep the pressure on.”
So far, NASA officials don’t seem to think Orion’s heat shield woes would delay the mission and are leaving that as a last resort. “Obviously, we’re going to make the right decision to keep them safe,” Free said. “If that decision is we have to do something drastic, then we’ll do that but right now we’re on a path to get to the root cause and then we’ll make the final detention from that.”
An uncrewed Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on December 11, 2022, following a 26-day trip to the Moon and back as part of the Artemis 1 mission. The mission was a success but follow-up inspections of the capsule revealed an unexpected performance from its heat shield.
“Some of the charred material ablated away differently than what our computer models, and what our ground testing, predicted,” Howard Hu, the Orion program manager for NASA, told reporters in March. “More of this charred material was liberated during reentry than we had expected.”
During Orion’s reentry through Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft traveled at speeds reaching 24,600 miles per hour (39,590 kilometers per hour) and its heat shield endured temperatures above 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. While it was expected that some charring would occur, the Artemis team did not anticipate that little pieces of the shield’s ablative material would come off.
“I think it’s definitely the biggest open issue out of [Artemis 1],” Free said.
Want to know more about humanity’s next giant leap in space? Check out our full coverage of NASA’s Artemis Moon program, the new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, the recently concluded Artemis 1 mission around the Moon, the four-person Artemis 2 crew, NASA and Axiom’s Artemis Moon suit, and the upcoming lunar Gateway space station. And for more spaceflight in your life, follow us on Twitter and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.
Gizmodo
U$A
An illicit, Chinese-owned lab fueled conspiracy theories. But officials say it posed no danger
California Biolab official sign informs the public of the closure of a warehouse that housed a now-shuttered medical lab owned by Chinese business people and that officials say was operating illegally in Reedley, Calif., on July 31, 2023. (Eric Paul Zamora/The Fresno Bee via AP)
OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ
Wed, August 9, 2023 a
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Jesalyn Harper, the only full-time code enforcement officer for the small, agricultural city of Reedley in California's Central Valley, was responding to a complaint about vehicles parked in the loading dock of a cold-storage warehouse when she noticed a foul smell and saw a garden hose snaking into the old building.
A woman in a lab coat answered her knock, and behind her were two others in plastic gloves and blue surgical masks, packing pregnancy tests for shipping. Harper said they spoke broken English and told her they were from China. Walking through the lab, she found dozens of refrigerators and ultralow-temperature freezers hooked to illegal wiring; vials of blood and jars of urine in shelves and plastic containers; and about 1,000 white lab mice being kept in crowded, soiled containers.
The women said the owner lived in China, provided a phone number and email address and asked her to leave. Alarmed by what she saw, Harper, whose work mostly entails ensuring people have permits for yard sales and are keeping their lawns mowed, contacted Fresno County health officials and then the FBI.
The discovery last December launched investigations by federal, state and local authorities who found no criminal activity at the medical lab owned by Prestige Biotech Inc., a company registered in Las Vegas, and no evidence of a threat to public health or national security. Nonetheless, it was just the beginning of a case that this summer fueled fears, rumors and conspiracy theories online about China purportedly trying to engineer biological weapons in rural America.
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During a March inspection of the lab in Reedley, a city of about 25,000 people some 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco, officials did find infectious agents in the refrigerators including E. coli, coronavirus, malaria, hepatitis B and C, dengue, chlamydia, human herpes, rubella and HIV.
But the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there was no sign that the lab was illegally in possession of the materials or had select agents or toxins that could be used as bioweapons.
“CDC has taken no further action in this matter,” the agency said in an email to The Associated Press, referring further questions to county and state officials.
After company representatives stopped communicating with city and county officials, they got a court order to shut down the operation, euthanized the mice and cleaned the biological materials. Officials thought that would be the end of it.
Then on July 25, the Mid Valley Times, a local online news outlet, published a story about the lab that quoted court documents saying a representative of Prestige Biotech, which makes pregnancy and coronavirus tests sold online, told officials in March that the mice had been genetically modified to catch and carry the virus that causes COVID-19.
That was likely a miscommunication by Prestige Biotech representative Wang Zhaolin, whose English is not perfect, Harper said.
“She stated that the mice were bred, and then she hesitated and said they were modified to carry COVID,” Harper said Zhaolin told her and other officials. After the lab was shut down, she added, Wang stopped cooperating with them.
Wang’s comment prompted Reedley authorities to hire Nina Hahn, an attending veterinarian at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to examine the mice. Hahn found they had not been injected with any infectious agent and were simply used to grow COVID-19 antibody cells to make testing kits. She also determined they were not subjected to experimentation, Harper said.
But that hasn't stopped the furor, however.
After the Mid Valley Times article, national media outlets published stories saying the lab had bioengineered mice to carry COVID-19. A Fresno city official questioned the lab’s proximity to Lemoore Naval Air Station, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) away in neighboring Kings County. In a war with China, the official said, fighter jets would deploy from the base.
Last week House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican who represents a Congressional district neighboring Reedley’s, said during a visit to a nearby town that he plans to raise concerns over the “very disturbing” case with colleagues on the Select Committee on China and follow up with the FBI.
“My concern is to get to the bottom of what happened here but to also look at where this is happening in other parts of this country as well,” McCarthy said.
Lok Siu, a professor of Asian American and Asian diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the fears being fanned online reflect anti-Chinese sentiments that have existed in the United States for centuries and were heightened during the pandemic.
“Ultimately all Chinese people are connected to the Chinese state. They’re not given the ability to act as responsible or irresponsible individuals and they are seen as agents, and the only reason for that is because ethnic Chinese people are seen as not loyal and always foreign,” Siu said.
In Reedley, where the laboratory failed to officially register, officials took a dim view of the operation.
“They were bad actors. They never came to the city and they moved in in the middle of the night. Those are pretty big elements that tell us they did not want us to know they were here,” said Nicole Zieba, Reedley’s city manager.
The California Department of Public Health said in a statement that all clinical laboratories must get state and federal licenses to operate, and it is still investigating whether Prestige Biotech has a state license. Federal officials said they found no illegalities.
Several Prestige Biotech representatives including attorney Michael Lin in Las Vegas did not respond to emailed requests for comment sent by AP.
There were also questions from some about why the federal investigation was not made public until the Mid Valley Times reported on it.
Zieba said that early on, state and federal officials advised the city to not share information with the public about the lab, which had been operating illegally in the city since October 22, because the investigation was still ongoing.
And after California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control checked the air and water and found no threat, she decided to heed that advice.
“It was fairly quickly apparent to us that there was nothing airborne, nothing in the water, nothing in the sewer system, so our public was safe,” Zieba said. “Had there been any hazard to their safety, we would have immediately notified the public.”
Reedley officials said what has been most concerning about the discovery was finding out there is no single government entity overseeing private medical laboratories.
“What’s frustrating is that we’re focusing on these myths, bioengineered weapons and stuff like that, rather than the real issue, the lack of regulation of these private labs,” Harper said.
An illicit, Chinese-owned lab fueled conspiracy theories. But officials say it posed no danger
California Biolab official sign informs the public of the closure of a warehouse that housed a now-shuttered medical lab owned by Chinese business people and that officials say was operating illegally in Reedley, Calif., on July 31, 2023. (Eric Paul Zamora/The Fresno Bee via AP)
OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ
Wed, August 9, 2023 a
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Jesalyn Harper, the only full-time code enforcement officer for the small, agricultural city of Reedley in California's Central Valley, was responding to a complaint about vehicles parked in the loading dock of a cold-storage warehouse when she noticed a foul smell and saw a garden hose snaking into the old building.
A woman in a lab coat answered her knock, and behind her were two others in plastic gloves and blue surgical masks, packing pregnancy tests for shipping. Harper said they spoke broken English and told her they were from China. Walking through the lab, she found dozens of refrigerators and ultralow-temperature freezers hooked to illegal wiring; vials of blood and jars of urine in shelves and plastic containers; and about 1,000 white lab mice being kept in crowded, soiled containers.
The women said the owner lived in China, provided a phone number and email address and asked her to leave. Alarmed by what she saw, Harper, whose work mostly entails ensuring people have permits for yard sales and are keeping their lawns mowed, contacted Fresno County health officials and then the FBI.
The discovery last December launched investigations by federal, state and local authorities who found no criminal activity at the medical lab owned by Prestige Biotech Inc., a company registered in Las Vegas, and no evidence of a threat to public health or national security. Nonetheless, it was just the beginning of a case that this summer fueled fears, rumors and conspiracy theories online about China purportedly trying to engineer biological weapons in rural America.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
During a March inspection of the lab in Reedley, a city of about 25,000 people some 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco, officials did find infectious agents in the refrigerators including E. coli, coronavirus, malaria, hepatitis B and C, dengue, chlamydia, human herpes, rubella and HIV.
But the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there was no sign that the lab was illegally in possession of the materials or had select agents or toxins that could be used as bioweapons.
“CDC has taken no further action in this matter,” the agency said in an email to The Associated Press, referring further questions to county and state officials.
After company representatives stopped communicating with city and county officials, they got a court order to shut down the operation, euthanized the mice and cleaned the biological materials. Officials thought that would be the end of it.
Then on July 25, the Mid Valley Times, a local online news outlet, published a story about the lab that quoted court documents saying a representative of Prestige Biotech, which makes pregnancy and coronavirus tests sold online, told officials in March that the mice had been genetically modified to catch and carry the virus that causes COVID-19.
That was likely a miscommunication by Prestige Biotech representative Wang Zhaolin, whose English is not perfect, Harper said.
“She stated that the mice were bred, and then she hesitated and said they were modified to carry COVID,” Harper said Zhaolin told her and other officials. After the lab was shut down, she added, Wang stopped cooperating with them.
Wang’s comment prompted Reedley authorities to hire Nina Hahn, an attending veterinarian at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to examine the mice. Hahn found they had not been injected with any infectious agent and were simply used to grow COVID-19 antibody cells to make testing kits. She also determined they were not subjected to experimentation, Harper said.
But that hasn't stopped the furor, however.
After the Mid Valley Times article, national media outlets published stories saying the lab had bioengineered mice to carry COVID-19. A Fresno city official questioned the lab’s proximity to Lemoore Naval Air Station, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) away in neighboring Kings County. In a war with China, the official said, fighter jets would deploy from the base.
Last week House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican who represents a Congressional district neighboring Reedley’s, said during a visit to a nearby town that he plans to raise concerns over the “very disturbing” case with colleagues on the Select Committee on China and follow up with the FBI.
“My concern is to get to the bottom of what happened here but to also look at where this is happening in other parts of this country as well,” McCarthy said.
Lok Siu, a professor of Asian American and Asian diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the fears being fanned online reflect anti-Chinese sentiments that have existed in the United States for centuries and were heightened during the pandemic.
“Ultimately all Chinese people are connected to the Chinese state. They’re not given the ability to act as responsible or irresponsible individuals and they are seen as agents, and the only reason for that is because ethnic Chinese people are seen as not loyal and always foreign,” Siu said.
In Reedley, where the laboratory failed to officially register, officials took a dim view of the operation.
“They were bad actors. They never came to the city and they moved in in the middle of the night. Those are pretty big elements that tell us they did not want us to know they were here,” said Nicole Zieba, Reedley’s city manager.
The California Department of Public Health said in a statement that all clinical laboratories must get state and federal licenses to operate, and it is still investigating whether Prestige Biotech has a state license. Federal officials said they found no illegalities.
Several Prestige Biotech representatives including attorney Michael Lin in Las Vegas did not respond to emailed requests for comment sent by AP.
There were also questions from some about why the federal investigation was not made public until the Mid Valley Times reported on it.
Zieba said that early on, state and federal officials advised the city to not share information with the public about the lab, which had been operating illegally in the city since October 22, because the investigation was still ongoing.
And after California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control checked the air and water and found no threat, she decided to heed that advice.
“It was fairly quickly apparent to us that there was nothing airborne, nothing in the water, nothing in the sewer system, so our public was safe,” Zieba said. “Had there been any hazard to their safety, we would have immediately notified the public.”
Reedley officials said what has been most concerning about the discovery was finding out there is no single government entity overseeing private medical laboratories.
“What’s frustrating is that we’re focusing on these myths, bioengineered weapons and stuff like that, rather than the real issue, the lack of regulation of these private labs,” Harper said.
China ranks 1st in world in scientific research output, most-cited papers: report
Michelle De Pacina
Wed, August 9, 2023
China has produced around a quarter of all scientific papers published worldwide, a recent report revealed.
About the report: According to an annual report released on Tuesday by Japan's education ministry, China ranked first for the second year in a row in published scientific papers — producing around 24.6% of the world's total — and published nearly 30% of the top 10% and 1% most-cited papers. The East Asian nation has had the most-cited papers since 2018 and has been in the top 1% since 2019.
The report is based on data from analytics company Clarivate. According to Nikkei Asia, scientific research capabilities “determine future market shares in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge fields, and may have a direct impact on national security as well.”
China versus the U.S.: According to the report, 61% of citations of Chinese papers were by Chinese researchers, while only 29% of citations of U.S. papers were by American researchers.
More from NextShark: Chinese sexologist creates 'male virtue' program that teaches men how to become better fathers
The report noted that China only accounts for about 20% of the papers published in renowned scientific journals Nature and Science, which is far behind America's roughly 70% share in both journals.
Japan falls behind: As for neighboring country Japan, the East Asian nation’s ranking fell from 12th place to 13th place, falling behind Iran. This is reportedly due in part to Japan’s slow growth in doctoral degree holders.
Michelle De Pacina
Wed, August 9, 2023
China has produced around a quarter of all scientific papers published worldwide, a recent report revealed.
About the report: According to an annual report released on Tuesday by Japan's education ministry, China ranked first for the second year in a row in published scientific papers — producing around 24.6% of the world's total — and published nearly 30% of the top 10% and 1% most-cited papers. The East Asian nation has had the most-cited papers since 2018 and has been in the top 1% since 2019.
The report is based on data from analytics company Clarivate. According to Nikkei Asia, scientific research capabilities “determine future market shares in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge fields, and may have a direct impact on national security as well.”
China versus the U.S.: According to the report, 61% of citations of Chinese papers were by Chinese researchers, while only 29% of citations of U.S. papers were by American researchers.
More from NextShark: Chinese sexologist creates 'male virtue' program that teaches men how to become better fathers
The report noted that China only accounts for about 20% of the papers published in renowned scientific journals Nature and Science, which is far behind America's roughly 70% share in both journals.
Japan falls behind: As for neighboring country Japan, the East Asian nation’s ranking fell from 12th place to 13th place, falling behind Iran. This is reportedly due in part to Japan’s slow growth in doctoral degree holders.
Boston man files lawsuit seeking to bankrupt white supremacist group he says assaulted him
Members group bearing insignias of the white supremacist Patriot Front shove Charles Murrell with metal shields during a march through Boston on Saturday, July 2, 2022, in Boston. The Black musician who says members of the white nationalist hate group punched, kicked and beat him with metal shields during a march through Boston last year sued the organization on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
MARK PRATT
Updated Tue, August 8, 2023
BOSTON (AP) — A Black teacher and musician who says members of a white nationalist hate group punched, kicked and beat him with metal shields during a march through Boston last year sued the organization on Tuesday.
Charles Murrell III, of Boston, was in the area of the Boston Public Library to play his saxophone on July 2, 2022, when he was surrounded by members of the Patriot Front and assaulted in a “coordinated, brutal, and racially motivated attack,” according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston.
No one has been charged in connection with the attack on Murrell, 36, and the investigation remains open, according to a spokesperson for the Suffolk district attorney’s office.
Murrell was taken by ambulance to the hospital for treatment of lacerations, some of which required stitches, the suit says.
“As a result of this beating, Mr. Murrell sustained physical injuries to his face, head, and hand, all of which required medical attention. Mr. Murrell also continues to suffer significant emotional distress to this day as a result of the incident,” the suit says. “Among other harms, those physical and emotional injuries have adversely affected Mr. Murrell’s ability to earn a living as a musician.”
He has “been plagued by severe anxiety, mental anguish, invasive thoughts, and emotional distress, including, but not limited to, persistent concern for his physical safety and loss of sleep,” and “routinely has nightmares and flashbacks,” according to the suit.
The defendants are Patriot Front, its founder Thomas Rousseau and multiple John Does.
Attorney Jason Lee Van Dyke, who has represented Patriot Front members in prior cases, is still trying to determine whether he is eligible to represent the group in this case, but said Tuesday “Charles Murrell is not telling the truth.”
“I happen to have seen the raw video footage and it was clear that Charles Murrell was the aggressor and no one with Patriot Front did anything unlawful.” he said. “His assertion that he was beaten is factually incorrect.”
Murrell, who has a background teaching special education, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Monday that the lawsuit is about holding Patriot Front accountable, helping his own healing process and preventing anything similar from happening to children of color, like those he teaches.
“Because I am a teacher, because I come from special education, I am filing this suit so that even if one of them has a safer sidewalk to walk on, the work that I am doing will have been very much worth it,” Murrell said.
The march in Boston by about 100 members of the Texas-based Patriot Front was one of its so-called flash demonstrations that it holds around the country. In addition to shields, the group carried a banner that said “Reclaim America” as they marched along the Freedom Trail and past some of the city's most famous landmarks.
They were largely dressed alike in khaki pants, dark shirts, hats, sunglasses and face coverings.
Murrell said he had never heard of the group before the confrontation, but believes he was targeted because of the tone of their voices and the slurs they used when he encountered them.
Patriot Front trains members to commit acts of violence, according to the suit.
“What happened to Mr. Murrell was no accident,” the suit says. “For years, Patriot Front ... has publicly and privately advocated for the use of violence against those who disagree with its express goal of creating an entirely ‘white’ United States.”
The goal of the lawsuit is not just justice and accountability, said Licha Nyiendo, the chief legal officer at Human Rights First, which is backing Murrell in the lawsuit, but to bankrupt Patriot Front.
“Our goal is to decimate this extremist group,” she said, “and bring a national spotlight to the dangers of their extremist ideology.”
It's a similar tactic used against multiple white supremacist groups involved at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which resulted in a $26 million verdict.
“That bankrupted and marginalized the leading hate groups that were involved in Charlottesville and really pulled back the curtain, through the discovery process, on how these groups operate,” said Amy Spitalnick, the senior adviser on extremism for Human Rights First.
The suit, which alleges among other things civil rights violations, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages.
Founded after the “Unite the Right” rally, Patriot Front’s manifesto calls for the formation of a white ethnostate in the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website.
It’s members post flyers and stickers, put banners on buildings or overpasses and even perform acts of public service, designed to maximize propaganda value, the SPLC said.
Also active online, the Patriot Front is one of the nation's most visible white supremacist groups “whose members maintain that their ancestors conquered America and bequeathed it to them, and no one else,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Five members of the group were sentenced to several days in jail for conspiring to riot at a Pride event in Idaho last year. A jury found them guilty of the riot charge after after they were accused of planning to riot at the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, LGBTQ+ Pride event.
A total of 31 Patriot Front members, including one identified as its founder, were arrested June 11, 2022, after someone reported seeing people loading into a U-Haul van like “a little army” at a hotel parking lot in Coeur d’Alene, police said at the time. Police said they found riot gear, a smoke grenade, shin guards and shields in the van.
Members group bearing insignias of the white supremacist Patriot Front shove Charles Murrell with metal shields during a march through Boston on Saturday, July 2, 2022, in Boston. The Black musician who says members of the white nationalist hate group punched, kicked and beat him with metal shields during a march through Boston last year sued the organization on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
MARK PRATT
Updated Tue, August 8, 2023
BOSTON (AP) — A Black teacher and musician who says members of a white nationalist hate group punched, kicked and beat him with metal shields during a march through Boston last year sued the organization on Tuesday.
Charles Murrell III, of Boston, was in the area of the Boston Public Library to play his saxophone on July 2, 2022, when he was surrounded by members of the Patriot Front and assaulted in a “coordinated, brutal, and racially motivated attack,” according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston.
No one has been charged in connection with the attack on Murrell, 36, and the investigation remains open, according to a spokesperson for the Suffolk district attorney’s office.
Murrell was taken by ambulance to the hospital for treatment of lacerations, some of which required stitches, the suit says.
“As a result of this beating, Mr. Murrell sustained physical injuries to his face, head, and hand, all of which required medical attention. Mr. Murrell also continues to suffer significant emotional distress to this day as a result of the incident,” the suit says. “Among other harms, those physical and emotional injuries have adversely affected Mr. Murrell’s ability to earn a living as a musician.”
He has “been plagued by severe anxiety, mental anguish, invasive thoughts, and emotional distress, including, but not limited to, persistent concern for his physical safety and loss of sleep,” and “routinely has nightmares and flashbacks,” according to the suit.
The defendants are Patriot Front, its founder Thomas Rousseau and multiple John Does.
Attorney Jason Lee Van Dyke, who has represented Patriot Front members in prior cases, is still trying to determine whether he is eligible to represent the group in this case, but said Tuesday “Charles Murrell is not telling the truth.”
“I happen to have seen the raw video footage and it was clear that Charles Murrell was the aggressor and no one with Patriot Front did anything unlawful.” he said. “His assertion that he was beaten is factually incorrect.”
Murrell, who has a background teaching special education, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Monday that the lawsuit is about holding Patriot Front accountable, helping his own healing process and preventing anything similar from happening to children of color, like those he teaches.
“Because I am a teacher, because I come from special education, I am filing this suit so that even if one of them has a safer sidewalk to walk on, the work that I am doing will have been very much worth it,” Murrell said.
The march in Boston by about 100 members of the Texas-based Patriot Front was one of its so-called flash demonstrations that it holds around the country. In addition to shields, the group carried a banner that said “Reclaim America” as they marched along the Freedom Trail and past some of the city's most famous landmarks.
They were largely dressed alike in khaki pants, dark shirts, hats, sunglasses and face coverings.
Murrell said he had never heard of the group before the confrontation, but believes he was targeted because of the tone of their voices and the slurs they used when he encountered them.
Patriot Front trains members to commit acts of violence, according to the suit.
“What happened to Mr. Murrell was no accident,” the suit says. “For years, Patriot Front ... has publicly and privately advocated for the use of violence against those who disagree with its express goal of creating an entirely ‘white’ United States.”
The goal of the lawsuit is not just justice and accountability, said Licha Nyiendo, the chief legal officer at Human Rights First, which is backing Murrell in the lawsuit, but to bankrupt Patriot Front.
“Our goal is to decimate this extremist group,” she said, “and bring a national spotlight to the dangers of their extremist ideology.”
It's a similar tactic used against multiple white supremacist groups involved at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which resulted in a $26 million verdict.
“That bankrupted and marginalized the leading hate groups that were involved in Charlottesville and really pulled back the curtain, through the discovery process, on how these groups operate,” said Amy Spitalnick, the senior adviser on extremism for Human Rights First.
The suit, which alleges among other things civil rights violations, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages.
Founded after the “Unite the Right” rally, Patriot Front’s manifesto calls for the formation of a white ethnostate in the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website.
It’s members post flyers and stickers, put banners on buildings or overpasses and even perform acts of public service, designed to maximize propaganda value, the SPLC said.
Also active online, the Patriot Front is one of the nation's most visible white supremacist groups “whose members maintain that their ancestors conquered America and bequeathed it to them, and no one else,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Five members of the group were sentenced to several days in jail for conspiring to riot at a Pride event in Idaho last year. A jury found them guilty of the riot charge after after they were accused of planning to riot at the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, LGBTQ+ Pride event.
A total of 31 Patriot Front members, including one identified as its founder, were arrested June 11, 2022, after someone reported seeing people loading into a U-Haul van like “a little army” at a hotel parking lot in Coeur d’Alene, police said at the time. Police said they found riot gear, a smoke grenade, shin guards and shields in the van.
The temperature the human body cannot survive
Daniel Lawler
Wed, August 9, 2023
Scientists warn that extreme 'wet bulb temperature' events are becoming more common with human-caused climate change (Frederic J. BROWN)
Scientists have identified the maximum mix of heat and humidity a human body can survive.
Even a healthy young person will die after enduring six hours of 35-degree Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) warmth when coupled with 100 percent humidity, but new research shows that threshold could be significantly lower.
At this point sweat -- the body's main tool for bringing down its core temperature -- no longer evaporates off the skin, eventually leading to heatstroke, organ failure and death.
This critical limit, which occurs at 35 degrees of what is known "wet bulb temperature", has only been breached around a dozen times, mostly in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, Colin Raymond of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
None of those instances lasted more than two hours, meaning there have never been any "mass mortality events" linked to this limit of human survival, said Raymond, who led a major study on the subject.
But extreme heat does not need to be anywhere near that level to kill people, and everyone has a different threshold depending on their age, health and other social and economic factors, experts say.
For example, more than 61,000 people are estimated to have died due to the heat last summer in Europe, where there is rarely enough humidity to create dangerous wet bulb temperatures.
But as global temperatures rise -- last month was confirmed on Tuesday as the hottest in recorded history -- scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will also become more common.
The frequency of such events has at least doubled over the last 40 years, Raymond said, calling the increase a serious hazard of human-caused climate change.
Raymond's research projected that wet bulb temperatures will "regularly exceed" 35C at several points around the world in the coming decades if the world warms 2.5C degrees above preindustrial levels.
- 'Really, really dangerous' -
Though now mostly calculated using heat and humidity readings, wet bulb temperature was originally measured by putting a wet cloth over a thermometer and exposing it to the air.
This allowed it to measure how quickly the water evaporated off the cloth, representing sweat off of skin.
The theorised human survival limit of 35C wet bulb temperature represents 35C of dry heat as well as 100 percent humidity -- or 46C at 50 percent humidity.
To test this limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the United States measured the core temperatures of young, healthy people inside a heat chamber.
They found that participants reached their "critical environmental limit" -- when their body could not stop their core temperature from continuing to rise -- at 30.6C wet bulb temperature, well below the previously theorised 35C.
The team estimated that it would take between five to seven hours before such conditions would reach "really, really dangerous core temperatures," Daniel Vecellio, who worked on the research, told AFP.
- The most vulnerable -
Joy Monteiro, a researcher in India who last month published a study in Nature looking at wet bulb temperatures in South Asia, said that most deadly heatwaves in the region were well below the 35C wet bulb threshold.
Any such limits on human endurance are "wildly different for different people," he told AFP.
"We don't live in a vacuum -- especially children," said Ayesha Kadir, a paediatrician in the UK and health advisor at Save the Children.
Small children are less able to regulate their body temperature, putting them at greater risk, she said.
Older people, who have fewer sweat glands, are the most vulnerable. Nearly 90 percent of the heat-related deaths in Europe last summer were among people aged over 65.
People who have to work outside in soaring temperatures are also more at risk.
Whether or not people can occasionally cool their bodies down -- for example in air conditioned spaces -- is also a major factor.
Monteiro pointed out that people without access to toilets often drink less water, leading to dehydration.
"Like a lot of impacts of climate change, it is the people who are least able to insulate themselves from these extremes who will be suffering the most," Raymond said.
His research has shown that El Nino weather phenomena have pushed up wet bulb temperatures in the past. The first El Nino event in four years is expected to peak towards the end of this year.
Wet bulb temperatures are also closely linked to ocean surface temperatures, Raymond said.
The world's oceans hit an all-time high temperature last month, beating the previous 2016 record, according to the European Union's climate observatory.
Daniel Lawler
Wed, August 9, 2023
Scientists warn that extreme 'wet bulb temperature' events are becoming more common with human-caused climate change (Frederic J. BROWN)
Scientists have identified the maximum mix of heat and humidity a human body can survive.
Even a healthy young person will die after enduring six hours of 35-degree Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) warmth when coupled with 100 percent humidity, but new research shows that threshold could be significantly lower.
At this point sweat -- the body's main tool for bringing down its core temperature -- no longer evaporates off the skin, eventually leading to heatstroke, organ failure and death.
This critical limit, which occurs at 35 degrees of what is known "wet bulb temperature", has only been breached around a dozen times, mostly in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, Colin Raymond of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
None of those instances lasted more than two hours, meaning there have never been any "mass mortality events" linked to this limit of human survival, said Raymond, who led a major study on the subject.
But extreme heat does not need to be anywhere near that level to kill people, and everyone has a different threshold depending on their age, health and other social and economic factors, experts say.
For example, more than 61,000 people are estimated to have died due to the heat last summer in Europe, where there is rarely enough humidity to create dangerous wet bulb temperatures.
But as global temperatures rise -- last month was confirmed on Tuesday as the hottest in recorded history -- scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will also become more common.
The frequency of such events has at least doubled over the last 40 years, Raymond said, calling the increase a serious hazard of human-caused climate change.
Raymond's research projected that wet bulb temperatures will "regularly exceed" 35C at several points around the world in the coming decades if the world warms 2.5C degrees above preindustrial levels.
- 'Really, really dangerous' -
Though now mostly calculated using heat and humidity readings, wet bulb temperature was originally measured by putting a wet cloth over a thermometer and exposing it to the air.
This allowed it to measure how quickly the water evaporated off the cloth, representing sweat off of skin.
The theorised human survival limit of 35C wet bulb temperature represents 35C of dry heat as well as 100 percent humidity -- or 46C at 50 percent humidity.
To test this limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the United States measured the core temperatures of young, healthy people inside a heat chamber.
They found that participants reached their "critical environmental limit" -- when their body could not stop their core temperature from continuing to rise -- at 30.6C wet bulb temperature, well below the previously theorised 35C.
The team estimated that it would take between five to seven hours before such conditions would reach "really, really dangerous core temperatures," Daniel Vecellio, who worked on the research, told AFP.
- The most vulnerable -
Joy Monteiro, a researcher in India who last month published a study in Nature looking at wet bulb temperatures in South Asia, said that most deadly heatwaves in the region were well below the 35C wet bulb threshold.
Any such limits on human endurance are "wildly different for different people," he told AFP.
"We don't live in a vacuum -- especially children," said Ayesha Kadir, a paediatrician in the UK and health advisor at Save the Children.
Small children are less able to regulate their body temperature, putting them at greater risk, she said.
Older people, who have fewer sweat glands, are the most vulnerable. Nearly 90 percent of the heat-related deaths in Europe last summer were among people aged over 65.
People who have to work outside in soaring temperatures are also more at risk.
Whether or not people can occasionally cool their bodies down -- for example in air conditioned spaces -- is also a major factor.
Monteiro pointed out that people without access to toilets often drink less water, leading to dehydration.
"Like a lot of impacts of climate change, it is the people who are least able to insulate themselves from these extremes who will be suffering the most," Raymond said.
His research has shown that El Nino weather phenomena have pushed up wet bulb temperatures in the past. The first El Nino event in four years is expected to peak towards the end of this year.
Wet bulb temperatures are also closely linked to ocean surface temperatures, Raymond said.
The world's oceans hit an all-time high temperature last month, beating the previous 2016 record, according to the European Union's climate observatory.
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