UNION VICTORIES ARE A VICTORY FOR THE WORKING CLASS

Hyundai joins Honda and Toyota in raising wages after auto union wins gains in deals with Detroit 3

TOM KRISHER
Mon, November 13, 2023 

FILE - The Hyundai company logo is displayed  in Littleton, Colo. Hyundai has joined Honda and Toyota in raising factory worker wages after the United Auto Workers union reached new contract agreements with Detroit automakers. Hyundai said Monday, Nov. 13, 2023 that it will raise factory worker pay 25% by 2028. 

(AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File) 

South Korean automaker Hyundai has joined Honda and Toyota in raising factory worker wages after the United Auto Workers union reached new contract agreements with Detroit automakers.

Hyundai said Monday it will raise factory worker pay 25% by 2028, matching the general wage increase won by the UAW during that period. Toyota raised factory pay 9% to 10% starting in January, while Honda said it will increase wages 11% during the same period.

Experts say the increases at least in part are aimed at thwarting UAW President Shawn Fain's strategy of trying to organize U.S. auto plants run by foreign automakers and Tesla in order to increase the union's bargaining power. Fain said terrified auto executives at nonunion plants are raising wages, and he called Toyota's pay increase the UAW bump.

“UAW, that stands for ‘You Are Welcome,’” he said.

About 146,000 UAW members are voting on new contracts with General Motors, Ford and Jeep maker Stellantis that give them 25% general wage increases over the next four years and eight months. When cost of living wages are factored in, workers will get about 33% raises, with the top assembly line employee making about $42 per hour.

Hyundai to hike US hourly wages 25% by 2028 after UAW deal

David Shepardson
Mon, November 13, 2023 

2022 World Car Awards at the New York International Auto Show, in New York City
In this article

(Reuters) -Hyundai Motor said on Monday it will hike wages for nonunion production workers at its Alabama factory by 25% by 2028, weeks after the United Auto Workers won new contracts with the Detroit Three automakers.

The Korean automaker joins Toyota Motor and Honda Motor in raising U.S. factory wages after the UAW won a new contract with General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler parent Stellantis that will result wage increases of 25% through 2028. The Detroit Three wage hikes amount to 33% when expected cost-of-living adjustments are factored in.

Hyundai said that with a new raise coming in January, the 4,000 hourly workers at its Alabama factory will have received a wage increase of 14% over the last 12 months. Hyundai Motor Group also plans higher wages at its electric-vehicle factory in the U.S. state of Georgia that will open in 2025.

Hyundai said that wages are being raised so that the company can "remain competitive and ... recruit and retain top talent." Hyundai builds the Santa Fe, Tucson, Santa Cruz and Genesis GV70 vehicles in Montgomery, Alabama.

On Friday, Honda said it would give U.S. production workers an 11% pay hike starting in January and cut the time for factory workers to reach the top wage tier to three years from six, in line with a key concession won by UAW in its recent negotiations.

Honda and other nonunion automakers in the U.S. have come under pressure to improve pay and benefits following the record contracts achieved by the UAW in late October, roughly six weeks after thousands of its members went on strike.

When U.S. President Joe Biden visited Illinois last week, he said he backed the UAW's efforts to unionize Tesla and Toyota, adding that all U.S. auto workers deserve a deal similar to the UAW's recent agreements with the Detroit Three.

Honda's pay hike was announced after Toyota said it was raising the wages of its nonunion U.S. factory workers.

UAW workers are now in the process of voting on whether to ratify those contracts.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Priyamvada C in BengaluruEditing by Matthew Lewis)

France’s poorest island is parched because of drought and underinvestment

GREGOIRE MEROT

Updated Sun, November 12, 2023 

A woman carries a bucket of water on her head in the district of M'tsamoudou, near Bandrele, on the French Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte, Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023. Water taps flow just one day out of three because of a drawn-out drought compounded by years of water mismanagement. (AP Photo/Gregoire Merot)

MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) — Drop by disappearing drop, water is an ever more precious resource on Mayotte, the poorest place in the European Union. Taps flow just one day out of three in this French territory off Africa’s eastern coast, because of a drawn-out drought compounded by years of underinvestment and water mismanagement.

Diseases like cholera and typhoid are on the rebound, and the French army recently intervened to distribute water and quell tensions over supplies. The crisis is a wakeup call to the French government about the challenges and cost of managing human-caused climate change across France’s far-flung territories.

Racha Mousdikoudine, a 38-year-old mother of two living in Labatoir, washes dishes with bottled water, when she can get it. When the water taps run, she says, "I have to choose between taking a shower or preserving my water supply.''

“This shortage will be global in a few years. This is an opportunity for all French people to stand in solidarity with us. To be with us, to find solutions and make visible the situation happening in Mayotte," she said. "Because this can happen in all French departments."

She is helping coordinate a protest movement called “Mayotte is Thirsty” that is demanding accountability for alleged embezzling, leaks and lack of investment in sustainable water supplies. At one recent protest, residents sang, shouted and banged empty plastic bottles as they marched into the Mayotte water management company.

The government is pinning its hopes on the upcoming rainy season, though residents say it won't be enough to fix the deep-seated water problems. On a crisis visit last week, France's minister for overseas territories thanked the people of Mayotte for "accepting the unacceptable."

The water taps determine the rhythm of life in Mayotte, an island territory of about 350,000 people northwest of Madagascar.

Once every three days, water flows between 4 p.m. and 10 a.m. Families rush to prepare food, wash dishes, clean their homes and anything else involving water. Those living in Mayotte’s poorer neighborhoods without plumbing line up at public taps with paint buckets, plastic jerrycans, reused bottles — anything to collect water.

Then for 48 hours, they’re dry again.

“It is important to keep talking with the authorities, but we are not going to sit idly by,” said Mousdikoudine. “If we stay at home, politicians will still say that the population is resilient, that we can manage this situation. But we cannot do it, lives are at stake, our physical and mental health, as well as our children’s lives."

The most disadvantaged communities are hit the hardest by the water crisis in Mayotte, where the population is majority Black and many are struggling migrants from neighboring Comoros facing a new government crackdown.

Previously, water was among Mayotte’s rare riches. The mountainous and forested district of Combani, in central Mayotte, is full of springs and interspersed with rivers. The reservoirs of Combani, and Dzoumogne further north, provide 80% of the water distributed on the island.

Now the bare banks of the reservoir at Combani are cracked by the sun. Its capacity is 1.75 million cubic meters, but it now stands only 10% full. The Dzoumogne reservoir is at 6.5% capacity.

Mayotte is in its sixth year of drought, and just had its driest year since 1997, according to the national weather service. Scientists say human-induced climate change has made drought more frequent and extreme in some parts of the world.

But even without drought, Mayotte's water system wasn’t capable of fulfilling local needs.

Overseas Affairs Minister Philippe Vigier said during a visit last week that 850 leaks have been spotted since September. Residents regularly film facilities of water network management company Smae, a subsidiary of big French utility Vinci, spewing water into the void and share them online.

And only one new water borehole, delivering a few hundred cubic meters per day, has been put into service so far as part of an ambitious “Marshall Plan” for water announced in September.

The local water union blames the water rationing on lack of production capacity, not lack of water.

The central government is promising emergency work on drilling for new springs, the renovation of a desalination plant, and extending state distribution of bottled water to all residents and not just the most vulnerable.

Residents worry it won’t come fast enough, and have heard such promises before. The desalination plant has already faced years of delays, missed deadlines and allegations of pocketed subsidies.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In the neighboring Comoros, with a similar volcanic terrain and wet and dry seasons, the U.N. Development Program has a $60 million water management project aimed at better capturing rainwater and tracking usage.

While Comoros is one of the world’s poorest countries, France is one of the world’s richest and shouldn’t need U.N. aid. But Mayotte’s water crisis underlines inequalities and often awkward relationships between the central government in Paris and former colonies that remain part of France.

On Mayotte, richer residents invest in personal water tanks at a cost of 1,600 euros ($1,700) for each installation, to ensure water flows continuously.

But most of the Mayotte population lives below the French poverty line and must heed the local government’s repeated messages that “every drop counts.” With 50% living on less than 160 euros ($170) per month, according to state statistics agency Insee, 5.50-euro ($5.90) packs of bottled water imported from mainland France are not an option for most.

Instead, they drink brackish water or nothing. Hunger, too, is worsening, as drought cuts into crop production.

Local medics cite a rise in acute gastroenteritis — 20 patients in intensive care recorded for this reason in one month — as well as typhoid and cholera.

But Ben Issa Ousseni, president of the departmental council of Mayotte, told local broadcaster Mayotte 1ère that he believes “the crisis is still ahead of us."

He does not rule out the possibility of a total disruption of supply in homes.

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Cyril Castelliti contributed to this report from around Mayotte.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Kremlin says report on Zelenskiy's alleged ignorance of Nord Stream attack is 'alarming'

Reuters
Mon, November 13, 2023 

FILE PHOTO: Gas bubbles from the Nord Stream 2 leak reaching surface of the Baltic sea in the area shows disturbance of well over one kilometre diameter near Bornholm

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Monday that a Washington Post report that a Ukrainian military officer coordinated the attack on Russia's Nord Stream pipelines was especially alarming given the newspaper also said Ukraine's president had not known about it.

No one has taken responsibility for the September 2022 blasts, which occurred off the Danish island of Bornholm and ruptured three out of four lines of the system that delivers Russian gas to Europe.

The Washington Post reported that Roman Chervinsky, a senior Ukrainian military officer with deep ties to Ukraine's intelligence services, was the coordinator of the attack and cited unidentified people familiar with the operation as saying President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was kept out of the loop.

Chervinsky took orders from senior Ukrainian officials who ultimately reported to Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zaluzhnyi, the Post said.

A spokesperson for Ukraine's military told Reuters on Sunday he had "no information" about the report.

"Traces of Ukraine in this sabotage, this terrorist act, are increasingly appearing in reports, investigations and media reports," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"It says that President Zelenskiy may not have been aware of such actions by his subordinates from the security agencies. This is a very alarming signal not only for us, but also for the countries of the collective West," Peskov said.

"If the Kyiv regime is no longer in control of the situation in its own country, then this is alarming and should also be taken into account."

A sharp pressure drop on the pipelines under the Baltic Sea was registered on Sept. 26 and seismologists detected explosions, triggering a wave of speculation about who sabotaged the multibillion-dollar project that carried Russian gas to Germany.

Some U.S. and European officials initially suggested, without evidence, that Russia had blown up its own pipelines, an assertion dismissed as idiotic by President Vladimir Putin.

Russia has repeatedly said, without providing evidence, that the West was behind the Nord Stream blasts - particularly the United States and Britain, which both deny involvement.

The New York Times and The Washington Post have reported that Ukraine - which has repeatedly denied involvement, was behind the attack.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has reported that U.S. navy divers destroyed the pipelines, a report dismissed by Washington.

In a blog post, entitled "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline", Hersh said the plan was hatched in 2021 at the highest levels in the United States. The White House said the blog was "utterly false and complete fiction."

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; writing by Vladimir Soldatkin and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

International students have returned to US colleges, fueled by a surge from India

COLLIN BINKLEY
Sun, November 12, 2023 




 photo students and passers-by carry book bags as they walk past an entrance to Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, in Boston. A new study from the State Department and the Institute of International Education finds that international students in the U.S. grew by 12% in the 2022-23 academic year, the largest jump in more than 40 years. More than 1 million students came from abroad, the most since the 2019-20 school year. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — International students attended U.S. universities in surging numbers last year, rebounding from a pandemic slump with the help of a 35% jump in students coming from India, according to a study released Monday.

Overall, the number of international students in the U.S. grew by 12% in the 2022-23 academic year, the largest single-year increase in more than 40 years, according to findings from the State Department and the nonprofit Institute of International Education. More than 1 million students came from abroad, the most since the 2019-20 school year.

“This reinforces that the U.S. remains the destination of choice for international students wishing to study abroad, as it has been for more than a century,” said Allan E. Goodman, CEO of the Institute of International Education.

American colleges enrolled nearly 269,000 students from India, more than ever and second only to China. Most came for graduate programs, often in science, technology and business.

“The U.S. maintains a strong relationship with India on education, which I think is getting even stronger and even more connected,” said Marianne Craven, the State Department's acting deputy assistant secretary for academic exchange.

China still accounted for the most foreign students in the U.S. with 290,000, but its numbers decreased for a third consecutive year.

It reflects a gradual shift. After years of booming demand from China, interest has ebbed amid chilly international relations and increased competition from universities in the United Kingdom and Canada. Officials behind the new study also blame prolonged travel restrictions in Asia during the pandemic.

At the same time, U.S. universities have focused on recruiting in India, hoping to tap a growing population that the United Nations predicted would overtake China as the world's largest this year. Students from India now outnumber those from China in 24 U.S. states, including Illinois, Texas and Michigan, which rank among the top destinations for international students.

For the second consecutive year, America's graduate programs were the main attraction for international students, the study finds. Graduate enrollment grew by 21%, while undergraduate numbers ticked up 1%. It reverses a trend from the previous decade, which saw undergraduates come in larger numbers.

Much of last year's growth is credited to math and computer science programs, which attracted more students than any other subject and saw a 20% boost in enrollment over the previous year. Engineering and business followed behind. Taken together, those three fields account for more than half of all international students in the United States.

The surge nearly brings international numbers back to their pre-pandemic highs, with a peak of almost 1.1 million students in 2018. Enrollment fell precipitously over the following two years as COVID-19 stifled academic exchange.

The rebound appears to be continuing, with an 8% increase in international enrollment this fall, according to a smaller survey meant to give a snapshot of recent trends.

Overall, international students made up just 5.6% of all college students in the 2022-23 year, but they play an outsize role in U.S. higher education. University leaders say they're important for global exchange, and they're also important for revenue — international students are usually charged higher tuition rates, effectively subsidizing college for U.S. students.

Behind China and India, nations sending the most students to the U.S. were South Korea, Canada, Vietnam, Taiwan and Nigeria. Last school year saw a record number of students come from Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, India, Italy, Nepal, Pakistan and Spain.

While more students come from abroad, many colleges are struggling to attract students at home. Total enrollment across all colleges has stayed in a slump in the wake of pandemic decreases, and freshman enrollment decreased by 3.6% in fall 2023, according to a separate study by the National Student Clearinghouse.

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

Astronomers request retitling of galaxies named after ‘violent colonialist’ explorer Magellan

Genevieve Holl-Allen
Sun, November 12, 2023 

The dwarf galaxies are in the Milky Way and can be visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere - VW Pics/Universal Images Group Editorial

A group of astronomers has called for galaxies named after the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan to be renamed because of his “violent colonialist legacy”.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way that can be visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere.

They are claimed to have been discovered by Magellan and his crew during their first circumnavigation of the world between 1519 and 1522.

However, a group of astronomers in the United States has asked the International Astronomical Union, the body in charge of naming astronomical objects, for the Magellanic Clouds to be renamed.

Mia de los Reyes, an assistant professor of astronomy at Amherst College, Massachusetts, wrote in the American Physical Society journal that “the beauty of these starry objects is clouded by their names”.

Prof De los Reyes described Magellan as “a coloniser, a slaver and a murderer” and added: “Now I and a coalition of astronomers are calling for the scientific community to rename these galaxies, as well as other astronomical objects, institutions, and facilities that bear his name.”

She criticised Magellan as “no astronomer” and said that he was not the first to document the galaxies, but that indigenous peoples had “names and legends for these systems that predate Magellan by thousands of years”.


Magellan was described by one astronomer as 'a coloniser, a slaver and a murderer' - Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group Editorial

Prof de los Reyes also called for the twin Magellan Telescopes to be renamed.

They currently reside in Chile, which she described as “a country with a history of violent Spanish conquest”.

“Indeed, Magellan’s ‘discovery’ of the Strait of Magellan allowed Spanish conquistadors to explore Chile’s coast and led to genocidal campaigns against the native Mapuche people,” she said.

“I and many other astronomers believe that astronomical objects and facilities should not be named after Magellan, or after anyone else with a violent colonialist legacy.”

Bob Blackman, the Conservative MP for Harrow East, described the calls to rename the galaxies as “absolute nonsense”.

He said: “We can all look back on various different people’s involvement in the slave trade, but the reality is that if you’re going to start renaming everything that involved everyone from the slave trade you won’t have many left.”

In 2020, Nasa said that it was “examining” its use of unofficial terminology for the use of some cosmic objects “as part of its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion”.

At the time, the American space body said that it would no longer refer to planetary nebula NGC 2392 as the “Eskimo Nebula” nor to a pair of spiral galaxies in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster as “Siamese Twins Galaxy”.

Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate, said at the time: “Our goal is that all names are aligned with our values of diversity and inclusion, and we’ll proactively work with the scientific community to help ensure that.

“Science is for everyone, and every facet of our work needs to reflect that value.”

Tiny galaxies that had their stars stolen could be a 'missing link' in cosmic evolution

Robert Lea
Sun, November 12, 2023 

A diagram showing the transformation from a normal dwarf galaxy to an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy.

Astronomers have spotted the eroding remains of 100 dwarf galaxies that have been violently stripped of their outer layer of stars by larger galaxies. These disrupted galaxies represent the "missing link" in the evolution of a puzzling type of galaxy called ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs).

The discovery shows that UCDs — which are among the densest collections of stars in the universe — are the fossilized remains of normal dwarf galaxies that have been destroyed in violent gravitational encounters with other galaxies.

Astronomers first discovered UCDs more than two decades ago. The ultra-dense galaxies posed a mystery for astronomers because they are smaller and more compact than ordinary dwarf galaxies but larger than the star clusters they most closely resemble. Scientists theorized that UCDs were the remains of destroyed dwarf galaxies, but they lacked an intermediate galaxy to help confirm the transition.

So astronomers at the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawai'i began searching for these cosmic missing links around the Virgo Cluster — a group of around 2,000 galaxies located around 65 million light-years from Earth. The telescope spotted dozens of dwarf galaxies that seem to be undergoing this transformation.

"Our results provide the most complete picture of the origin of this mysterious class of galaxy that was discovered nearly 25 years ago," Eric Peng, a NOIRLab astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, said in a statement. "Here we show that 106 small galaxies in the Virgo cluster have sizes between normal dwarf galaxies and UCDs, revealing a continuum that fills the 'size gap' between star clusters and galaxies."

Related: Astronomers just caught the tiniest cannibal galaxy in the universe

Peng is a co-author of a paper detailing the discovery of these missing link galaxies published Wednesday, Nov. 8, in the journal Nature.

The recently identified galaxies seem to be in the early stages of UCD formation. All are located close to massive galaxies. This suggests that the gravitational influence of the nearby massive galaxies has stripped these smaller cosmic objects of their stars and gas.

The astronomers also saw objects within the Virgo Cluster with stretched and diffuse envelopes of gas and stars, as if they are currently being dragged away. Other objects seem to show different phases of this UCDtransition.

An image of NGC 3628 

"Once we analyzed the Gemini observations and eliminated all the background contamination, we could see that these transition galaxies existed almost exclusively near the largest galaxies," lead author Laixiang Wang, a scientist at Peking University, said in the statement. "We immediately knew that environmental transformation had to be important."

When arranged into a time sequence, the team got a picture of what appears to be the story of these star-robbed galaxies. "It's exciting that we can finally see this transformation in action," Peng concluded."It tells us that many of these UCDs are visible fossil remnants of ancient dwarf galaxies in galaxy clusters, and our results suggest that there are likely many more low-mass remnants to be found."

Martian rocks keep hitting Earth, but something doesn’t add up

Joshua Hawkins
Sun, November 12, 2023 


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For thousands of years, Martian rocks have bombarded Earth, sent flying through space after being ejected from their homeworld by violent impacts or volcanic processes. But as we collect these tiny samples, scientists have started to learn something interesting: the age of these Martian rocks doesn’t line up with what we know about Mars’ age as a whole. They’re a lot younger.

Mars is really old. Scientists believe the planet finished forming around 4.56 billion years ago, roughly 90 million years before our own planet. Further, evidence suggests that most of the Martian surface is old. So, why are chunks of Martian rock showing such a young age?


mars

The answer, they say, most likely lies in the constant bombardment of the Martian surface by meteorites and asteroids. With roughly 200 bombardments that create 4-meter craters each year, the Martian surface is constantly spewing more rock into space, some of which finds its way to Earth. The reason the Martian rock’s age doesn’t seem to add up is because the younger rock is replacing the older rock as it gets ejected from the planet.

This means that the younger rock from under the surface, which is still being replenished by volcanic activity, is eventually exposed to the surface and thus becomes the ejecta that meteorites send flying into space. This, a group of scientists explain in a paper published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, could help us understand why the Martian rocks found on Earth appear so young.

Understanding how Mars is changing – both inside and out – is important as NASA and others prepare for the first manned missions to Mars. Further, scientists are constantly looking for new ways to understand how the planets within our solar system formed, and how that can teach us more about the universe’s evolution as a whole.

The sun is blinding us to thousands of potentially lethal asteroids. Can scientists spot them before it's too late?

Brandon Specktor
Sun, November 12, 202

Illustration of an asteroid coming through the atmosphere towards a city.

On the morning of Feb. 15, 2013, a meteor the size of a semitrailer shot out from the direction of the rising sun and exploded in a fireball over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. Briefly glowing brighter than the sun itself, the meteor exploded with 30 times more energy than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, exploding some 14 miles (22 kilometers) above the ground. The blast shattered windows on more than 7,000 buildings, temporarily blinded pedestrians, inflicted instantaneous ultraviolet burns and otherwise injured more than 1,600 people. Fortunately, no known deaths resulted.

The Chelyabinsk meteor is thought to be the biggest natural space object to enter Earth's atmosphere in more than 100 years. Yet no observatory on Earth saw it coming. Arriving from the direction of the sun, the rock remained hidden in our biggest blind spot, until it was too late.

Events like these are, fortunately, uncommon. Rocks the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor — roughly 66 feet (20 meters) wide — breach Earth's atmosphere once every 50 to 100 years, according to an estimate from the European Space Agency (ESA). Larger asteroids strike even less frequently. To date, astronomers have mapped the orbits of more than 33,000 near-Earth asteroids and found that none pose a risk of hitting our planet for at least the next century.


But you can't calculate the risk of an asteroid you can't see — and there are untold thousands of them, including some large enough to destroy cities and potentially trigger mass-extinction events, moving on unknowable trajectories around our star, experts told Live Science. It's a harsh reality that has astronomers both concerned about the possible consequences and motivated to find as many of our solar system's hidden asteroids as possible. Once we know about them, deadly asteroids can either be monitored and deflected if needed, or if all else fails, populations can be warned to relocate to avoid mass casualties.

"The most problematic object is the one you don't know about," Amy Mainzer, a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona and principal investigator for two NASA asteroid-hunting missions, told Live Science. "If we can know what's out there, then we can have a much better estimate of the true risk."

Related: NASA's most wanted: The 5 most dangerous asteroids in the solar system

Killers from the sun

The animation depicts a mapping of the positions of known near-Earth objects (NEOs) at points in time over the past 20 years, and finishes with a map of all known asteroids as of January 2018.

At any moment, the sun hides countless asteroids from view. This includes a constantly rotating cast of Apollo asteroids — near-Earth objects that spend most of their time far beyond the orbit of Earth but occasionally cross our planet's path to swoop closer to the sun — as well as the mysterious class of asteroids called the Atens, which orbit almost entirely interior to Earth, ever on the planet's dayside.

"Aten asteroids are the most dangerous, because they cross Earth's orbit just barely at their most distant point," Scott Sheppard, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told Live Science. "You would never see one coming, to some degree, because they're never in the darkness of the night sky."

As with all asteroids, the majority of these hidden space rocks are likely small enough to burn up completely in Earth's atmosphere upon contact. But it's estimated that there are also many undiscovered asteroids measuring more than 460 feet (140 m) in diameter — large enough to survive the plunge through the atmosphere and cause catastrophic local damage upon impact, Mainzer said. Asteroids with this destructive potential are sometimes dubbed "city killers."

"We think we've found roughly 40% of those asteroids in the 140-meter neighborhood," Mainzer said. According to NASA estimates, that leaves about 14,000 left to be found.


Asteroid size infographic.

There may also be far, far bigger objects awaiting us in the sun's glare. Though exceptionally rare, a handful of "planet killer" asteroids — which measure more than 3,280 feet (1 km) in diameter and are capable of kicking up enough dust to trigger a global extinction event — may lurk in the sun's glare, Sheppard said.

In 2022, Sheppard and his colleagues discovered one such planet killer obscured by the sun, which they described in a paper in The Astronomical Journal. The researchers were hunting for asteroids near Venus, borrowing time from several large telescopes to scan the horizon for five to 10 minutes each night at twilight, when they discovered 2022 AP7 — a mile-wide (1.5 km) behemoth with a quirky five-year orbit that makes the giant space rock almost permanently invisible to telescopes.

"When it's in the night sky, it's at its furthest point from the sun, and it's very faint," Sheppard said. "The only time it's somewhat bright is when it's interior to Earth, near the sun."

Currently, 2022 AP7 crosses Earth's orbit only when our planet and the asteroid are on opposite sides of the sun, making it harmless. However, that gap will slowly narrow over thousands of years, bringing the two objects closer and closer to a potentially catastrophic collision. And it's likely not the only one.

"Through our survey to this date, we find that there's definitely several more kilometer-size Aten asteroids out there to be found," Sheppard added.

Related: Could scientists stop a 'planet killer' asteroid from hitting Earth?

A blinding puzzle

Three near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) hiding in the glare of the Sun.

Surveying asteroids near the sun poses a unique challenge for astronomers. Most space-based telescopes gaze toward the planet's nightside, to avoid both solar glare and radiation damage. Ground-based telescopes, meanwhile, face even greater restrictions.

"Not only is the glare of the sun a problem, but the timing is a big problem as well," Sheppard said. "The sun has to set to a certain position below the horizon before they even let you open the telescope, and the sky has to be just dark enough where you can take images and not saturate."

Once the sun reaches this fleeting position, ground-based telescopes have less than 30 minutes to survey the area near the edge of the sun before it dips below the horizon and disappears from view entirely, Sheppard added.

During this brief window, ground-based telescopes have the added challenge of peering straight through Earth's atmosphere, which appears thickest near the horizon and causes light from distant objects to flicker and diffuse. Gases in the atmosphere also absorb many wavelengths of infrared light — the thermal radiation that astronomers use to detect some of the faintest, coolest objects in the universe.

It's hardly an ideal scenario for spotting small, dark, fast-moving chunks of rubble.

"That's why you need to go to space," Luca Conversi, manager of ESA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Centre, told Live Science.

Salvation in space

Diagram showing Salvation from space in orbit with the Earth, moon and sun. An asteroid belt is shown.

Orbiting hundreds of miles over Earth and far beyond, space telescopes are free from the distorting effects of the planet's atmosphere. This unlocks a powerful tool in their arsenals: infrared imaging, or the ability to detect heat coming off of space objects, rather than just the reflected sunlight that makes objects detectable by visible-light telescopes.

"Only a small portion of an asteroid's surface is illuminated by the sun, even in space," Conversi said. "So instead of looking at sunlight reflected from the surface, [infrared telescopes] look at the thermal emission of the asteroid itself, so we're able to find it."

This means that even asteroids that are visually dark, like the recently visited asteroid Bennu, shine "like glowing coals" when seen in infrared, Mainzer said.

Currently, there's only one infrared space telescope that's actively looking for near-Earth asteroids — the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE. Launched in 2009 as simply WISE, the telescope was designed to detect objects far from Earth. But in 2013, after the Chelyabinsk incident, WISE was roused from a two-year hibernation as NEOWISE, with new software and a new mission to detect potentially troublesome near-Earth asteroids.

But NEOWISE was never able to look toward the sun — and its mission is expected to end for good by July 2024, Mainzer said. That will leave new asteroid detection solely in the hands of ground-based surveys until the next generation of space-based telescopes can launch later this decade.

"Go look up."

NEO Surveyor in an infrared starfield filled with asteroids.

Two planned spacecraft should help to significantly demystify the dangers of the solar blind zone: NASA's NEO Surveyor, currently planned to launch in 2027, and ESA's NEOMIR, which is still in its early planning phase and will launch no sooner than 2030, Conversi said.

Both spacecraft will be equipped with infrared detectors and tall solar shades that will allow them to look for asteroids very near to the sun's glare, and both will orbit at the first Lagrange point (L1) between Earth and the sun, where the gravitational pull of the two objects is balanced. NEO Surveyor will complete a full scan of the sky every two weeks, splitting its focus evenly between the dawn and dusk sides of the sun, said Mainzer, the principal investigator for both NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor. The telescope is expected to primarily uncover near-Earth objects ranging from 50 to 100 m (164 to 328 feet) wide.

NEOMIR, meanwhile, would complement NEO Surveyor by scanning a ring-shaped area around the sun every six hours or so, Conversi said. Between the two spacecraft, even asteroids as small as the Chelyabinsk meteor should be spotted somewhere in their orbits long before impact, the researchers said.

"According to our predictions, NEOMIR would have seen the Chelyabinsk meteor about one week before impact," Conversi said. "More than enough time to alert the population and take some measures."

In the case of a small, Chelyabinsk-size meteor that explodes before reaching the ground, those measures could include alerting people in the impact zone to shelter and stay away from windows. Larger objects would hopefully be detected long before their date of impact, allowing people to evacuate the area if necessary. "Planet killers" require years of planning to safely deflect, but are also the easiest to spot far in advance.

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But with both NEO Surveyor and NEOMIR years away from seeing the light of day, astronomers will continue to rely on the best ground-based methods available to parse the mysteries of the sun. Even with these spacecraft operational, a small percentage of near-sun asteroids will likely remain undetectable, Conversi said. Fortunately, the risks of a deadly impact remain low, and will hopefully only lower as astronomers gather more and better information.

"Go look up," Mainz

Migrant family journeys back to Venezuela, more leaving Chicago as winter looms: ‘The American Dream doesn’t exist anymore’

Laura Rodríguez Presa, Chicago Tribune
Sun, November 12, 2023

Over the past five months since arriving in Chicago, Andrea Carolina Sevilla’s parents have been unable to enroll her in school even though the reason they left everything behind in their native Venezuela was for her to have access to better education.

In Venezuela, she said, she was lucky she could even attend school. Many other teenagers start working at an early age to help out their families, who often face extreme poverty.

But she did not have the same luck in the city that she once dreamed of visiting. The family went from sleeping on the floor of a police station, to a crowded shelter, to a house on the Far South Side, and then back to the floor of the police station after her stepfather Michael Castejon, 39, couldn’t afford the rent. He could not find a job that paid enough without a work permit, he said.


On Nov. 3, they set out to go back to Texas. And from there, they would go to Venezuela, the country they fled to seek asylum in the United States. They’re among the countless number of migrants who have chosen to leave Chicago in recent weeks in their search for a better life. They’re looking for warmer weather, more resources or to reunite with friends and family in other places.

One family of five left for Detroit because another migrant told them there was work there. One man went back to Texas, where he will join his cousins after trying his luck in Chicago. In the past month, at least 40 people, including Sevilla’s family, have left Chicago from the 1st District station on the Near South Side with the help of Catholic Charities of Chicago.

“The American Dream doesn’t exist anymore,” said Castejon as he laid on a blanket on the bare floor of the station the afternoon before they left. “There’s nothing here for us,” he added.

Migrants said they’re realizing the city is at a breaking point. Not only is there no more space in shelters, they also acknowledge that some residents in Chicago oppose the opening of more shelters for them. Castejon said that despite the dangerous trek to get here — often begging for money and sleeping in the streets to cross several borders — the journey had not been worth it.

His attempts to settle in the city failed. He said he never felt comfortable in a shelter, and that the hot meals, stipends and good jobs he’d heard about from other migrants never materialized. The father didn’t consider that once in the country, the family wouldn’t be granted asylum immediately and or even get a work permit while they wait.

It could have been misinformation, he said. Or that the benefits that those who arrived in the city before him, are no longer available because of the amount of people now here. But even after hearing that the temporary protected status (TPS) program was expanded and the process to get job permits could be accelerated, he decided he was exhausted and chose not to wait.

“We didn’t know things would be this hard,” he said. “I thought the process was faster.”

More than 2,000 people have gotten monetary aid from the state through Catholic Charities to relocate to other states with family and friends, according to Katie Bredemann, a spokesperson with Catholic Charities of Chicago. The program has been part of their effort to help ease the humanitarian crisis in Chicago and offer the migrants an opportunity to reunite with families or reach the city they intended to go to before being sent to Chicago.

“The state of Illinois determines who is eligible for relocation to other states, then Catholic Charities assists in helping to help make the travel arrangements,” Bredemann said in an email.

But while some migrants are choosing to leave, many more still arrive every week. In what could be considered a revolving door for taxpayers, for example, Catholic Charities of Chicago is using Illinois taxpayer money to transport the migrants who want to return to Texas or to other states while simultaneously the Catholic Charities of San Antonio and the city of Denver are using federal taxpayer money to send new migrants to Chicago.

As of Friday, there were 20, 700 migrants who have arrived in Chicago since August 2022 when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending migrants to sanctuary cities such as Chicago, in part to protest federal immigration policies.

Castejon said Chicago wasn’t what they expected when they arrived in June. But the father was determined to succeed, he said.

The family was first taken to the 1st District police station where they stayed for a couple weeks before getting transferred to Wright College with hundreds of other asylum-seekers. The family lived there for about a month before moving into a house with another migrant who was renting an apartment through a city voucher program that offers up to $15,000 for up to six months of rental assistance.

But when rental assistance vanished, neither could afford rent, so they were once again homeless, the father said.

They eventually met someone who offered to rent them an apartment for $750. They managed to afford it because Castejon had found a job in construction, where he was getting paid in cash. But the work was heavy and the pay was not enough, he said, so he left.

Unable to pay rent, the family returned to the 1st District station, where they waited about two weeks before packing their belongings, mostly collected through donations, and headed back to Venezuela.

As the patriarch, he said he felt powerless not being able to provide for his wife and daughter, he said.

“How many more months of living in the streets will it take? No, no more. It’s better that I leave. At least I have my mother back home,” he said angrily.

He said the family decided to seek asylum in the United States because of the extreme poverty in which they were living in Venezuela’s authoritarian regime. But the trip was not worth it, he said.

“We just want to be home,” he said. “If we’re going to be sleeping in the streets here, we’d rather be sleeping in the streets over there.”

The first few colder days influenced the family’s decision to contact staff at Catholic Charities, pressing for plane tickets that would put them closer to a border town to find a way back home. When they got the news that they had been approved and had their tickets in hand, Castejon felt relieved, he said.

The feeling of disappointment and impotency that Castejon felt is shared by many of the migrants, said Brayan Lozano, head of the volunteer group of the Police Station Response Team at the 1st District station.

As an asylum-seeker himself, Lozano understands firsthand the experience the migrants go through: the environment they’ve escaped from their native countries and their expectations for the United States, which may have been influenced by social media and word-of-mouth from the first group of migrants who arrived in Chicago. There may have been more resources when they first came in August 2022, he said.

Even though many, including Castejon’s family, are leaving, others still hope to eventually find shelter in hotel rooms, get access to public services and cash assistance or live out the American Dream.

A proposed ballot question asking Chicagoans whether the city should keep its designation as a sanctuary city has roiled the City Council in recent weeks and immigrant- and Black-led groups gathered Thursday morning across the street from City Hall to urge “solidarity, not division” in responding to the migrant crisis.

“Like many people, we’re just here for a better life. I’m grateful to God and I’m just following a dream to be able to offer more to my family,” said Ana, a Venezuelan teacher who came to Chicago in September because she could not afford to live on the pay she was making at home.

The teacher spoke in Spanish through a translator.

“I am here to continue to advocate for Chicago to be a sanctuary city, for there to be resources for everyone, for us immigrants, to continue to receive the help that we deserve, because everyone deserves a sun to shine on them,” she said.

Lozano said there are several migrants who transitioned from sheltering in suburban hotel rooms into apartments with the help of the city and state resettlement program, received assistance to file their asylum cases, found jobs working under the table, like many people who live in the country without authorization do, and are settling in the city.

But the resources have been exhausted for more recent arrivals and the resettlement program has been trumped by the number of migrants who are arriving.

Lozano said that there is a lot of misinformation flowing within the asylum-seeking community about what is actually happening in Chicago.

As snow and rain have come with the colder temperatures, the reality for migrants stuck sleeping outside of police stations has grown dire. Mattresses are wet, the smell inside tents is sticky, humid and pungent. They eat standing up, rubbing their hands together to keep warm.

“The word of the situation in Chicago is beginning to spread,” Lozano said.

Jose Nauh, 22, decided to give Texas another shot and returned earlier this month after sleeping in a police station in Chicago for more than two weeks.

He came to Chicago even though he has family in Houston because the ticket was free, he said, and he wanted to see what the buzz was all about.

Like Castrejon, he heard there was shelter, food and other public benefits. “That’s not true,” he said.

He grabbed a pink backpack, waved goodbye to Lozano, and rushed into a white car that took him to O’Hare International Airport to board a plane back south.

That same day Diana Vera, her three children and daughter-in law boarded a bus to Detroit, hoping that a cousin would take them in once they arrived.

“We heard that there are a lot of jobs over there even if you don’t have a permit,” the mother said as she brushed her hair while sitting on a blanket on the floor of the police station that had been their home for nearly a month.

Vera also was discouraged from staying after hearing from migrants at city shelters that the conditions are overwhelmed with people, the food is cold and there are no real beds.

“It sounds worse than sleeping at the police station,” she said.

Chicago Tribune’s Nell Salzman and A.D. Quig contributed.

We Are Spartacus

BY JOHN PILGER

 NOVEMBER 13, 2023

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Photograph Source: Globetrotter19 – CC BY-SA 3.0

Spartacus was a 1960 Hollywood film based on a book written secretly by the blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, and adapted by the screenplay writer Dalton Trumbo, one of the ‘Hollywood 10’ who were banned for their ‘un-American’ politics. It is a parable of resistance and heroism that speaks unreservedly to our own times.

Both writers were Communists and victims of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities which, during the Cold War, destroyed the careers and often the lives of those principled and courageous enough to stand up to a homegrown fascism in America.

‘This is a sharp time, now, a precise time …’ wrote Arthur Miller in The Crucible, ‘We live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.’

There is one ‘precise’ provocateur now; it is clear to see for those who want to see it and foretell its actions. It is a gang of states led by the United States whose stated objective is ‘full spectrum dominance’. Russia is still the hated one, Red China the feared one. From Washington and London, the virulence has no limit. Israel, the colonial anachronism and unleashed attack dog, is armed to the teeth and granted historical impunity so that ‘we’ the West ensure the blood and tears never dry in Palestine. British MPs who dare call for a ceasefire in Gaza are banished, the iron door of two-party politics closed to them by a Labour leader who would withhold water and food from the children of Palestine.

In McCarthy’s time, there were bolt holes of truth. Mavericks welcomed then are heretics now; an underground of journalism exists (such as this site) in a landscape of mendacious conformity. Dissenting journalists have been defenestrated from the ‘mainstream’ (as the great editor David Bowman wrote); the media’s task is to invert the truth and support the illusions of democracy, including a ‘free press’.

Social Democracy has shrunk to the width of a cigarette paper that separates the principal policies of major parties. Their one subscription is to a capitalist cult, neoliberalism, and an imposed poverty described by a UN special rapporteur as ‘the immiseration of a significant part of the British population.’

War today is an unmoving shadow; ‘forever’ imperial wars are designated normal. Iraq, the model, is destroyed at a cost of a million lives and three million dispossessed. The destroyer, Blair, is personally enriched and fawned over at his party’s conference as an electoral winner. Blair and his moral counter, Julian Assange, live 14 miles apart, one in a Regency mansion, the other in a cell awaiting extradition to hell.

According to a Brown University study, since 9/11, almost six million men, women and children have been killed by America and its acolytes in the ‘Global War on Terror’. A monument is to be built in Washington in ‘celebration’ of this mass murder; its committee is chaired by the former president, George W Bush, Blair’s mentor. Afghanistan, where it started, was finally laid to waste when President Biden shop-lifted its national bank reserves

There have been many Afghanistans. The forensic William Blum devoted himself to making sense of a state terrorism that seldom spoke its name and so requires repetition:

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. It has attempted to murder countless leaders.

Perhaps I hear some of you saying: that is enough. As the Final Solution of Gaza is broadcast live to millions, the small faces of its victims etched in bombed rubble, framed between TV commercials for cars and pizza, yes, that is surely enough. How profane is that word ‘enough’?

Afghanistan was where the West sent young men weighed down with the ritual of ‘warriors’ to kill people and enjoy it. We know some of them enjoyed it from the evidence of Australian SAS sociopaths, including a photograph of them drinking from an Afghan man’s prosthetic.

Not one sociopath has been charged for this and crimes such as kicking a man over a cliff, gunning down children point-blank, slitting throats: none of it ‘in battle’. David McBride, a former Australian military lawyer who served twice in Afghanistan,  was a ‘true believer’ in the system as moral and honourable,  He also has an abiding belief in truth, and loyalty. He can define them as few can. On 13 November he is in court in Canberra as an alleged criminal.

‘An Australian whistleblower,’ reports Kieran Pender, a senior lawyer at the Australian Human Rights Law Centre, ‘ [will face] trial for blowing the whistle on horrendous wrongdoing. It is profoundly unjust that the first person on trial for war crimes in Afghanistan is the whistle blower and not an alleged war criminal.’

McBride can receive a sentence of up to 100 years for revealing the cover-up of the great crime of Afghanistan. He tried to exercise his legal right as a whistleblower under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which the current Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, says ‘delivers on our promise to strengthen protections for public sector whistleblowers’. Yet it is Dreyfus, a Labor minister, who signed off on the McBride trial following a punitive wait of four years and eight months since his arrest at Sydney airport: a wait that shredded his health and family.

Those who know David and know of the hideous injustice done to him fill his street in Bondi near the beach in Sydney to wave their encouragement to this good and decent man. To them, and me, he is a hero.

McBride was affronted by what he found in the files he was ordered to inspect. Here was evidence of crimes and their cover-up. He passed hundreds of secret documents to the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Sydney Morning Herald. Police raided the ABC’s offices in Sydney while reporters and producers watched, shocked, as their computers were confiscated by the Federal Police.

Attorney-General Dreyfus, self-declared liberal reformer and friend of whistleblowers, has the singular power to stop the McBride trial. A Freedom of Information search of his actions in this direction suggests an indifference to whether or not an innocent man rots.

You can’t run a fully-fledged democracy and a colonial war; one aspires to decency, the other is a form of fascism, regardless of its pretensions. Mark the killing fields of Gaza, bombed to dust by apartheid Israel. It is no coincidence that in rich, yet impoverished Britain an ‘inquiry’ is currently being held into the gunning down by British SAS soldiers of 80 Afghans, all civilians, including a couple in bed.

The grotesque injustice meted out to David McBride is minted from the injustice consuming his compatriot, Julian Assange. Both are friends of mine. Whenever I see them, I am optimistic. ‘You cheer me,’ I tell Julian as he raises a defiant fist at the end of our visiting period. ‘You make me feel proud,’ I tell David at our favourite coffee shop in Sydney. Their bravery has allowed many of us, who might despair, to understand the real meaning of a resistance we all share if we want to prevent the conquest of us, our conscience, our self respect, if we prefer freedom and decency to compliance and collusion. In this, we are all Spartacus.

Spartacus was the rebellious leader of Rome’s slaves in 71-73 BC. There is a thrilling moment in the Kirk Douglas movie Spartacus when the Romans call on Spartacus’s men to identify their leader and so be pardoned. Instead hundreds of his comrades stand and raise their fists in solidarity and shout, ‘I am Spartacus!’ The rebellion is under way.

Julian and David are Spartacus. The Palestinians are Spartacus. People who fill the streets with flags and principle and solidarity are Spartacus. We are all Spartacus if we want to be.

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/rip-kirk-douglas-102-yrs-old-how-kirk.html