It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
SAP, Carahsoft Probe Expanded to Work With Nearly 100 Agencies
Jake Bleiberg and Christina Kyriasoglou Wed, October 2, 2024 at 3:43 PM MDT 4 min read
(Bloomberg) -- US prosecutors are broadening a probe of potential price-fixing by German software maker SAP SE and tech reseller Carahsoft Technology Corp., seeking to examine the companies’ work with almost 100 government agencies, according to new court records that show the scope of the investigation is far greater than previously known.
The Justice Department sent Carahsoft a legal demand for documents and information on 94 civilian government agencies with which it has done business for SAP products, according to a document filed in Baltimore federal court Tuesday. In it, the company characterized the prosecutors’ demand as “dramatically expanding” a civil probe that was already examining whether the companies overcharged the military and some other parts of government on purchases of more than $2 billion worth of SAP technology since 2014.
The investigation’s expanded reach across the US government, which hasn’t been previously reported, signals the depth of legal risk it poses to a top technology vendor and to Germany’s most valuable company. Many investigations end without any formal accusations of wrongdoing.
An SAP spokesperson, Joellen Perry, said the company and its US-based unit, SAP National Security Services, Inc., each received document demands from the Justice Department in August 2022 and have been cooperating with the civil investigation. The demands were “broad and seek documents relating to bidding and pricing practices by SAP and its resellers (including Carahsoft), but the information SAP has produced to date has been more narrowly focused,” Perry said.
A lawyer for Carahsoft, William Lawler III, declined to comment. On Tuesday, Lawler asked a judge to seal the records describing the expanded scope of the civil investigation, saying it included “several unsupported substantive allegations about Carahsoft and its business partners.”
A Justice Department spokesperson also declined to comment.
In June 2022, the Justice Department demanded information from Carahsoft about whether the company and SAP overcharged the US government by making false statements to the Department of Defense, according to court records. Investigators later asked Carahsoft to hand over records related to the Department of Agriculture, Department of Labor, Office of Personnel Management and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Lawler wrote in the Tuesday court filing. The company declined because doing so would cause it to miss a deadline to produce the other records, he said.
Japan’s New Economy Minister Seeks to Maximize Nuclear Restarts
Shoko Oda and Yoshiaki Nohara Tue, October 1, 2024
(Bloomberg) -- Japan’s new economy minister said the country will need to maximize the use of existing nuclear power plants as artificial intelligence and data centers are expected to boost electricity demand.
It’s “natural” for Japan to pursue both atomic and renewable energy in order to meet the growing needs without increasing carbon emissions, said Yoji Muto, who was appointed to the role on Tuesday. The new administration will eye restarting as many reactors as possible so long as they are safe, he said Wednesday.
Muto’s comments point to a continuation of former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s work that shifted Japan back toward nuclear energy as a major power source, with many reactors still offline in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. His successor, Shigeru Ishiba, had said during his campaign that Japan should reduce its dependence on the energy source but later said that he would support the restart of existing plants.
Ishiba’s comments led to a decline in utility shares earlier this week, as investors speculated that the new government would negatively impact the push to embrace nuclear. That move is part of a global revival as countries turn to fission for stable and emissions-free electricity to meet demand.
Muto also said that Japan will need to protect its atomic industry by developing next-generation reactors. The nation is in the process of revising its strategic energy plan that will dictate the power mix, which is currently 70% fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal, beyond 2030.
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
Mississippi lawmakers, energy experts agree more nuclear power is in state's future. See why
Grant McLaughlin, Mississippi Clarion Ledger Wed, October 2, 2024
Energy sector experts and representatives from some of Mississippi's largest energy providers want to increase nuclear energy production in and around the state, and they aren't the only ones.
During a meeting with the Mississippi Senate Energy Committee Tuesday at the State Capitol, representatives from Entergy and the Tennessee Valley Authority spoke with lawmakers about the importance and utility of new nuclear power technology to meet demands from various industries in and out of Mississippi such as steel manufacturing and data centers.
Lawmakers also wanted to know what they can do now to entice developments of small nuclear reactor plants, which are essentially more compact reactors that can produce more power.
"Obviously, nuclear is the future," Senate Energy Committee Chairman Joel Carter, R-Gulfport, said. "I thinkMississippi has decided to say, 'Hey, y'all watch this,' and now we'll see what happens."
Experts from Nuscale Power said more modern energy production sites can have as many as 12 small reactors to a plant and produce more than 1,000 megawatts of power while only using a portion of the land a traditional nuclear power plant would need.
From a cost-to-build perspective, these types of nuclear power plant would take about three years to build at a significantly reduced overall price tag, Nuscale Power Executive Vice President of Business Development Clayton Scott said.
"Mississippi is a great state to build something, and so we think we're open minded to working with you guys to figure out what (projects) make sense," Scott said.
As for what the state can do now to attract these projects, Scott and others said tax incentives, supportive state policy and investment, Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved build sites, land with access to rivers, waterways, rail and highways are essential.
Scott said his company is actively looking at 12 sites throughout the United States.
Currently, there are 93 nuclear power plants in the United States and one, the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station, which is owned by Entergy, is located near Port Gibson. The plant has an operation license ending in 2044 and an option to extend it to 2066.
According to the United States Department of Energy, nuclear energy is the second largest form of clean energy production. Nuclear power also does not produce carbon emissions, uses less land as compared to other plants such as coal or gas plants and leaves little waste product.
The power itself is created traditionally by fission, a process for splitting atoms. The heat from that atomic reaction is then used to create steam, which then spins a turbine that creates electricity.
Jim Smiley, of Entergy, told lawmakers the company doesn't want to pioneer new nuclear technology in the state, but it already has a federally approved nuclear plant site in addition to Grand Gulf Nuclear Station, and would greenlight a plant project if it doesn't cost its customers more on their monthly bills and is a benefit to the region.
"We firmly believe that nuclear is our future and new nuclear specifically is in our future," Smiley said. "It's not really a matter of if, it's a matter of when and how do we get there."
TVA representative Dan Pratt also showed a chart showing that as of 2023, nuclear power accounted for 42% of its grid, which encompasses Northeast Mississippi. Pratt said the future of nuclear power should not be ignored as TVA looks to significantly decrease its carbon footprint by 2050.
"We do believe that ultimately to get to 2050 and truly be able to get to extreme decarbonization, nuclear has got to be part of that," Pratt said. "That's got to be part of the national energy strategy, and TVA is part of that, obviously, as an advocate and an operator of nuclear power."
The TVA operates three nuclear power plants already, with one in Alabama and two in Tennessee. Grant McLaughlin covers state government for the Clarion Ledger. He can be reached at gmclaughlin@gannett.com
Corrosion exceeds estimates at Michigan nuclear plant US wants to restart, regulator says
Timothy Gardner Wed, October 2, 2024
By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Holtec, the company wanting to reopen the Palisades nuclear reactor in Michigan, found corrosion cracking in steam generators "far exceeded" estimates, the U.S. nuclear power regulator said in a document published on Wednesday.
President Joe Biden's administration this week finalized a $1.52 billion conditional loan guarantee to the Palisades plant. It is part of an effort to support nuclear energy, which generates virtually emissions-free power, to curb climate change and to help satisfy rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and digital currency.
Palisades, which shut under a different owner in 2022, is seeking to be the first modern U.S. nuclear power plant to reopen after being fully shut.
A summary of an early September call between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Holtec published on Wednesday said indications of stress corrosion cracking in tubes in both of Palisade's steam generators "far exceeded estimates based on previous operating history." It found 1,163 steam generator tubes had indications of the stress cracking. There are more than 16,000 tubes in the units.
Steam generators are sensitive components that require meticulous maintenance and are among the most expensive units at a nuclear power station.
Holtec wants to return the plant to operation late next year. Patrick O'Brien, a company spokesperson, said the results of the inspections "were not entirely unpredicted" as the standard system "layup process", or procedure for maintaining the units, was not followed when the plant went into shutdown.
But he said the return of Palisades is still on schedule and that Holtec wants to fix, and not replace, the steam generators, which he said would last for 30 years after repairs.
"We expect the repair strategy will be to 'unplug' approximately 300 tubes per steam generator that were plugged at original installation, and then address the tubes found during the inspections by plugging approximately 20% of the tubes that cannot be repaired easily and repairing the remaining 80% with sleeving, which is a common and proven repair strategy," O'Brien said.
Holtec still needs permits from the NRC. "Holtec must ensure the generators will meet NRC requirements if the agency authorizes returning Palisades to operational status," an NRC spokesperson said.
The NRC said last month that preliminary results from inspections "identified a large number of steam generator tubes with indications that require further analysis and/or repair."
Steam generator issues can pose problems for nuclear power plants. Parts of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California were shut in 2012 after steam generators that had a design flaw leaked. Problems with new generators led to the closure of the plant in 2013.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Andrea Ricci and David Gregorio)
First nuclear plant recommissioned in US history as part of $2.8bn funding
The Biden-Harris Administration, through the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Agriculture (USDA), has announced more than $2.8bn in funding to support clean power in the Midwest.
As part of the plan, the DOE has closed a loan guarantee of up to $1.52bn to finance the restoration and resumption of a 800MW nuclear generating station in Michigan.
This marks the first recommissioning of a retired nuclear power plant in US history.
The Palisades Nuclear Plant, which ceased operations in May 2022, will be brought back online and upgraded to produce clean baseload power until at least 2051, subject to US Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing approvals.
The plant’s restart is expected to protect 600 union jobs at the plant and 1,100 in the community and provide access to reliable power for 800,000 homes in the Midwest, covering Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois.
Palisades is also anticipated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 4.47 million tonnes (mt) per year for a total of 111mt during the projected 25 years of operations.
The project is managed by energy company Holtec International and Wolverine Power Cooperative, a not-for-profit energy provider to rural communities in Michigan. The organisations signed long-term power purchase agreements in 2023.
The USDA has also allocated more than $1.3bn for Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy to reduce the cost of electricity passed on to the community from the Palisades plant and other clean energy sources.
According to the White House, the Palisades plant is located in a disadvantaged community where residents face higher energy costs than 97% of communities in the country.
US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M Granholm commented: “Nuclear power is America’s largest source of carbon-free of electricity, supporting hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs across the country, and will play a critical role in tackling the climate crisis and protecting public health and the environment from its impacts.”
The US aims for a carbon-free power sector by 2035. Nuclear power has been spotlighted as a solution for providing uninterrupted carbon-free power amid rising electricity demand.
"First nuclear plant recommissioned in US history as part of $2.8bn funding " was originally created and published by Power Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. Energy Department finalizes loan for Michigan nuclear plant revival
Zack Budryk Mon, September 30, 2024
The Energy Department on Monday announced it has finalized a $1.5 billion loan to restart a shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant.
The loan guarantee will restart the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant in Covert Township, which shut down in 2022 after five decades of operation. The reboot will mark the first for a nuclear reactor after the removal of its fuel.
The Biden administration is also awarding $1.3 billion through the Department of Agriculture’s Empowering Rural America program to two rural electric cooperatives, which will discount electricity passed on to their members through emissions-free sources, such as the Holtec plant.
The administration projected the restarted Palisades plant, which still must go through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing approval process, will provide power until at least 2051 once brought back online. The administration estimated it will create or keep up to 600 local jobs, and the company has signed an agreement with 15 trade unions, according to the department.
“Nuclear power is America’s largest source of carbon-free of electricity, supporting hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs across the country and will play a critical role in tackling the climate crisis and protecting public health and the environment from its impacts,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, a former Michigan governor, in a statement. “Under President Biden and Vice President Harris’ leadership, DOE and our partners across the federal government are working around the clock to ensure this vital source of clean electricity—and the vibrant workforce it supports— continues to power our nation for generations to come.”
Nuclear power largely fell out of favor during the Cold War amid anxieties about the potential for accidents, but policymakers in recent years have revisited it as a renewable and emissions-free power source. The announcement comes shortly after the news that the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, the site of a partial meltdown in 1979, will reopen to power Microsoft data centers.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. DOE, USDA announce over $2.8B for Palisades nuclear plant restart
Two regional electric cooperatives, Hoosier Energy and Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative, will receive about $1.3 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to partially offset power purchases from the reopened facility, the administration said.
Holtec remains on track to restart Palisades in October 2025, company spokesperson Patrick O’Brien told Utility Dive earlier this month. It would be the first U.S. n Dive Insight:
DOE in March announced a conditional loan guarantee of up to $1.52 billion for the Palisades restart. Monday’s announcement solidifies DOE’s commitment and, along with the USDA’s awards, represents crucial financing for Holtec’s effort.
The federal funding announcements for Palisades come less than two weeks after Constellation Energy said it would spend $1.6 billion to restart the idled 835-MW reactor at Three Mile Island unit 1 in 2028.
Constellation’s TMI-1 restart is supported by a 20-year PPA with Microsoft, which will use the electricity to run data centers in PJM Interconnection territory. Constellation declined to discuss the terms of the PPA, but the company’s investor presentation on the restart suggests it places a substantial premium on power generated by TMI-1, Studsvik Scandpower Chief Commercial Officer Keith Drudy told Utility Dive last month.
Morgan Stanley analysts estimate Constellation will sell power to Microsoft for $98/MWh compared to market power prices of around $50/MWh. Constellation also expects the unit’s output will receive a roughly $30/MWh clean energy tax credit.
The USDA awards to Hoosier Energy and Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative “will help reduce wholesale power costs, provide community benefits and keep electricity reliable and affordable” for the cooperatives’ residential and commercial members, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Xochitl Torres Small said in a press briefing.
Under their respective PPAs, Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative will procure 435 MW and Hoosier Energy 369 MW of Palisades’ generation, USDA said earlier this month.
Hoosier Energy will also use a portion of its award to procure 250 MW of renewable energy annually, USDA said.
The USDA award to Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative will help it reach its goal of procuring 100% carbon-free power by 2030, 10 years ahead of Michigan’s 2040 target, Torres Small said. The Palisades PPA is “a key component” of that plan, along with some 400 MW of solar capacity under development across Michigan, the cooperative said in March.
The USDA awards represent about one-quarter of the value of the cooperatives’ PPAs, a senior administration official said in the press briefing.
The DOE loan will fund inspection, testing, restoration, rebuilding and replacement of existing equipment at Palisades, another senior administration official said in the briefing. LPO has received nuclear-related loan requests worth more than $65 billion, the senior administration official added.
“To dominate the industries of the future, we need to supply abundant, affordable, clean power,” National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said in the briefing. “Palisades represents that potential.
PITIFUL
Biden to keep target of accepting 125,000 refugees next year, memo says
Reuters Mon, September 30, 2024 U.S. President Biden provides an update on the Hurricane Helene response and recovery efforts, at the White House
(Reuters) - President Joe Biden will keep the administration's target of accepting 125,000 refugees next year, according to a memo delivered to the U.S. State Department on Monday.
The Biden administration is on pace to bring in 100,000 people through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in fiscal year 2024, which ends on Sept. 30, according to an internal report to U.S. lawmakers, Reuters has reported.
If successful, that would be the highest level in three decades.
"The admission of up to 125,000 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest," Biden wrote in the memo.
Immigration is a top voter concern in the run-up to the Nov. 5 elections that will pit Kamala Harris, a Democrat and Biden's vice president, against Republican Donald Trump. Trump greatly curtailed refugee admissions during his 2017-2021 presidency and has pledged a wide-ranging immigration crackdown if re-elected.
The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program typically is available to people outside of their home countries who face persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Applicants must be outside the U.S. to qualify for the status.
Biden first aimed for 125,000 refugee admissions in fiscal year 2022, an ambitious target that has remained elusive even after years of stepping up refugee processing.
(Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Chris Reese and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
US 'Welcome Corps' helps resettle LGBTQ+ refugees fleeing crackdowns against gay people
MICHAEL CASEY and TERRY CHEA Updated Wed, October 2, 2024
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Cabrel Ngounou's life in Cameroon quickly unraveled after neighbors caught the teenager with his boyfriend.
A crowd surrounded his boyfriend's house and beat him. Ngounou's family learned of the relationship and kicked him out. So Ngounou fled — alone and with little money — on a dangerous, four-year journey through at least five countries. He was sold by traffickers and held captive as a sex slave in Libya, harassed in Tunisia and tried unsuccessfully to take a boat to Europe.
"The worst thing was that they caught us. So it was not easy for my family," Ngounou said. “My sisters told me I need to get out of the house because my place is not there. So that’s what really pushed me to leave my country.”
Ngounou's troubles drew attention after he joined a protest outside the U.N. refugee agency's Tunisia office. Eventually, he arrived in the United States, landing in San Francisco in March.
Ngounou joined a growing number of LGBTQ+ people accepted into the Welcome Corps, which launched last year and pairs groups of Americans with newly arrived refugees. So far, the resettlement program has connected 3,500 sponsors with 1,800 refugees, and many more want to help: 100,000 people have applied to become sponsors.
President Joe Biden has sought to rebuild the refugee programs Donald Trump largely dismantled as president, working to streamline the process of screening and placing people in America. New refugee resettlement sites have opened across the country, and on Tuesday, the Biden Administration announced that it resettled 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2024, the largest number in more than three decades.
In contrast, Trump has pledged to bar refugees from Gaza, reinstate his Muslim ban and impose “ideological screening” for all immigrants if he regains the presidency. He and running mate JD Vance are laying groundwork for their goal of deporting millions of illegal immigrants by amplifying false claims, such as the accusation that Haitians given temporary protected status to remain in the U.S. legally are eating pets in Ohio.
Under Biden, meanwhile, two human rights officials in the State Department were tasked last year with identifying refugees who face persecution either due to their sexual orientation or human rights advocacy.
“LGBTQ refugees are forced to flee their homes due to persecution and violence, not unlike other people,” said Jeremy Haldeman, deputy executive director of the Community Sponsorship Hub, which implements the Welcome Corps on behalf of the State Department. But they are particularly vulnerable because they're coming from places "where their identities are criminalized and they are at risk of imprisonment or even death.”
More than 60 countries have passed anti-LGBTQ laws and thousands of people have fled the Middle East and Africa seeking asylum in Europe. In April, Uganda’s constitutional court on Wednesday upheld an anti-gay law that allows the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”
“There are just a lot of people who are really at risk and are not safe in their country, and they’re usually not safe in the neighboring or regional countries either,” Kathryn Hampton, senior adviser for U.S. Strategy at Rainbow Railroad, which helps LGBTQI+ people facing persecution.
The demand far outstrips capacity: Of more than 15,000 requests for help in 2023, the nonprofit helped resettle 23 refugees through the Welcome Corps program in cities as large as Houston and towns as small as Arlington, Vermont. It has a goal of resettling 50 this year.
"So, we have a lot of urgency as an organization to find and create new pathways that LGBTQI+ people can access to find safety,” Hampton said.
Another refugee in the program, Julieth Luna Garcia, is a transgender woman from El Salvador who settled in Chicago.
Speaking through a translator, the 31-year-old Garcia said she suffered abuse from her family because of her trans identity and couldn't legally access gender-affirming care until she arrived in the United States.
"I lived with constant fear, even more so at night. I didn’t like to go out. I was really scared that somebody would find me alone and do something,” Garcia said. Since arriving in February, Garcia has found a place to live and a job as a home health aide and hopes to study to become a lawyer. "Here, I’m not scared to say who I am. I’m not scared to tell anyone," she said.
Maybe the biggest change was starting hormone treatments, she said: “To see yourself in the mirror and see these changes, I can’t really explain it, but it’s really big. It’s an emotional and exciting thing and something I thought I would never experience.”
Welcome Corps sponsors are expected to help refugees adjust for at least three months after they arrive. Garcia said the five volunteers helped her “adapt to a new life with a little less difficulty,” by accessing benefits, getting a work permit and enrolling in English classes.
Ngounou recalled how his sponsors, a team of seven that included a lesbian couple, Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, hosted him and connected him with LGBTQ resources and a work training program. They also served as his tour guides to gay life, taking him to the historically gay Castro district, where Ngounou got his first glimpse of the huge rainbow Pride flag and stopped to read every plaque honoring famous gay people.
“Cabrel was just very, very moved by that. Just kind of started crying. We all did,” Raeff recalled.
“I know that feeling like when we were young, when you’d go into a gay bar and you’d feel like this sense of kind of freedom, like this community,” she said. “That was the only place where you could go and actually be open. And that ... this is this community of people and we all have this in common.”
Now the 19-year-old Ngounou works in a coffee shop and takes college courses, with the goal of becoming a social worker. He hopes the boyfriend he met in Tunisia can visit him in San Francisco — and he still finds it hard to believe that they can share their love openly.
“Here I’m really me ... I feel free,” he said with a laugh. "I feel free to have my boyfriend and walk with him in the street. I feel free, you know, to enjoy myself with him wherever we want to enjoy ourselves. But in Tunisia or anywhere else, in Cameroon, you have to hide such things.”
APTOPIX US LGBTQ Refugees Julieth Luna Garcia, a transgender woman from El Salvador, looks into a compact mirror at Horner Park in Chicago, Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
___
This story has been corrected. Ngounou was sold by traffickers and held captive as a sex slave in Libya, not sexually assaulted in prison.
___
Casey reported from Boston.
WWIII
Vietnam protests Chinese force's attack on fishermen in contested waters
Wed, October 2, 2024
HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam on Wednesday protested to China over what it said was an attack on a Vietnamese fishing boat three days ago in contested South China Sea waters that injured several fishermen.
The Vietnamese foreign ministry said in a statement that Chinese law enforcers beat the Vietnamese fishermen and took away their fishing equipment when their boat was operating near Hoang Sa, Vietnam's name for the Paracel Islands.
The Chinese-controlled islands, also claimed by Vietnam, are in the South China Sea, a busy global maritime waterway, almost all of which is claimed by China.
"Vietnam is extremely concerned, indignant and resolutely protests the brutal treatment by Chinese law enforcement forces of Vietnamese fishermen and fishing boats operating in the Hoang Sa archipelago of Vietnam," foreign ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang said in a statement.
The ministry delivered a strong protest to the Chinese embassy in Hanoi demanding that China respect Vietnam's sovereignty, investigate the incident and desist from further such actions, Hang said.
Vietnamese state media reported this week that around 40 people from two foreign vessels had beaten the fishermen with iron pipes, injuring 10.
China's foreign ministry said on Tuesday that the Vietnamese boats had been fishing illegally in Paracel waters without the permission of the Beijing government, and that Chinese authorities had taken measures to stop them.
"The on-site operations were professional and restrained, and no injuries were found," it said in response to a Reuters request for comment, without specifically referring to the attack.
(Reporting by Khanh Vu; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Vietnamese Fishing Crew Attacked and Severely Beaten in Paracel Islands
A Vietnamese fishing boat was attacked by unnamed aggressors in the Paracel Islands, according to state-owned media, and all 10 crewmembers aboard were injured.
The Vietnamese border guard station in the village of Binh Chau reported that a fishing vessel was "obstructed and attacked" while operating in a Vietnamese-claimed area of the Paracel Islands. China has occupied the archipelago since a brief naval battle with U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces in 1974, but Vietnam has never abandoned its sovereignty claim.
The fishing vessel - named only with a numeral, QNg 95739 TS - departed port on September 13, bound for the Paracels (known as the Hoang Sa archipelago to the Vietnamese).
According to state outlet TPO, the crew were approached by two foreign vessels, which destroyed their fishing gear and beat the crew severely. On returning to port in Quang Ngai province, four were taken immediately to a hospital for treatment for a range of injuries.
Captain Nguyen Thanh Bien, 40, said that the 95739 was approached by a vessel with the pennant number 301 visible on the hull at about 0600 hours on September 29. At 1000, the vessel closed in from astern and lowered away two launches. A second ship, numbered 101, followed suit and lowered another.
"About 40 people climbed onto the ship, each holding an iron rod, and then attacked," said Bien. "At this time, I tried to run towards the bow of the ship, however, two people held me and attacked me so hard that I lost consciousness. About one hour later I woke up."
Fisherman Huynh Tien Cong, 47, told TPO that the two foreign vessels approached from astern and boarded the 95739. They used iron pipes or bars to beat the fishermen severely. "We didn't dare to resist, we just lay there and endured the beating," said Cong, who sustained two broken legs.
Crewmember Nguyen Thuong, 34, told the outlet that the attackers departed at about 1300 hours, and that they took the boat's cargo of fish, its equipment and its fishing gear - everything of value except for a GPS unit. The boarding party's interpreter told the injured crewmembers to go back to Vietnam.
Phung Ba Vuong, party chairman for the village of Binh Chau, told media that local agencies are working to verify the claim. According to TPO, many other boats from Quang Ngai province have encountered the same violent treatment at the hands of unnamed attackers in the Paracel Islands.
Xi vows ‘reunification’ with Taiwan on eve of Communist China’s 75th birthday
Nectar Gan, CNN Tue, October 1, 2024
Chinese leader Xi Jinping reiterated his pledge to achieve “reunification” with Taiwan on the eve of Communist China’s 75th birthday, as Beijing flexed its military might in the run-up to the national holiday.
At a state banquet celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic on Monday, Xi used his address to underscore his resolve to achieve the “complete reunification of the motherland.”
“It’s an irreversible trend, a cause of righteousness and the common aspiration of the people. No one can stop the march of history,” he told the thousands in attendance at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
China’s ruling Communist Party claims Taiwan as its own, despite having never controlled it, and has vowed to “reunify” with the self-governing democracy, by force if necessary.
But many people on the island view themselves as distinctly Taiwanese and have no desire to be part of Communist China.
The two sides have been ruled by separate governments since 1949, after the end of the Chinese civil war. The communists took power in Beijing and founded the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, while the defeated nationalists fled to Taiwan, moving the seat of the Republic of China from the mainland to Taipei.
Successive Chinese leaders have vowed to one day take control of Taiwan, but Xi, China’s most assertive leader in decades, has ramped up rhetoric and aggression against the democratic island – fueling tension across the strait and raising concerns for a military confrontation.
“Taiwan is China’s sacred territory. Blood is thicker than water, and people on both sides of the strait are connected by blood,” Xi told the banquet attended by more than 3,000 people, including officials, retired party leaders and foreign dignitaries.
He also called for deeper economic and cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and promotion of “spiritual harmony of compatriots on both sides.”
“(We must) resolutely oppose ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities,” Xi said.
Beijing has labeled Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te a “dangerous separatist,” and tensions have ratcheted up since Lai’s inauguration in May, during which he called on China to cease its intimidation of Taiwan.
Taiwan officials say Beijing has intensified military activities around the island in recent months, includingdrills in Maythat the Chinese military said were designed to test its ability to “seize power” over the island.
On Sunday, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it was on alert after detecting “multiple waves” of missile firing deep in inland China.
The missiles were fired by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Rocket Force in the inland regions of Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang, the ministry said in a statement, adding that Taiwan’s air defense forces have “maintained a high level of vigilance and strengthened their alert.”
It comes just days after China fired an intercontinental ballistic missileinto the Pacific Oceanfor the first time in 44 years, in a rare public test that analysts said was meant to send a message to the United States and its allies amid heightened regional tensions.
The issue of Taiwan has become a major point of contention between China and the US, which maintains close but informal relations with Taipei and is bound by law to supply the island with weapons to defend itself.
On Sunday, US President Joe Biden approved an additional $567 million in military support for Taiwan in the largest aid package America has granted the island. The funding will cover defense articles as well as “military education and training,” the White House said in astatement.
Israel bars UN secretary-general from entering country
Reuters Updated Wed, October 2, 2024 FILE PHOTO: World leaders take part in the 79th annual U.N. General Assembly high-level debate
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's foreign minister said on Wednesday that he was barring U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres from entering the country because he had not "unequivocally" condemned Iran's missile attack on Israel.
Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday amid an escalation in fighting between Israel and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Many were intercepted in flight but some penetrated missile defences.
Guterres on Tuesday issued a brief statement after the missile attack condemning "the broadening of the Middle East conflict, with escalation after escalation." Earlier on Tuesday, Israel had sent troops into southern Lebanon.
Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz said Guterres' failure to call out Iran made him persona non grata in Israel.
"Anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran's heinous attack on Israel, as nearly all the countries of the world have done, does not deserve to set foot on Israeli soil," Katz said.
"Israel will continue to defend its citizens and uphold its national dignity, with or without Antonio Guterres."
Asked about the move at a press briefing, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said: "Steps like these are not productive to (Israel) improving its standing in the world."
"The U.N. does incredibly important work in Gaza. It does incredibly important work in the region. And the U.N., when it's acting at its best, can play an important role for security and stability," Miller added.
U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric described the announcement as political and "just one more attack, so to speak, on U.N. staff that we've seen from the government of Israel." He said the U.N. traditionally does not recognise the concept of persona non grata as applying to U.N. staff.
During a Security Council meeting on Wednesday Guterres said: "As I did in relation to the Iranian attack in April - and as should have been obvious yesterday in the context of the condemnation I expressed - I again strongly condemn yesterday’s massive missile attack by Iran on Israel."
(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch and Michelle Nichols; additional reporting by Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Peter Graff, Angus MacSwan and Jonathan Oatis)
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Australian court upholds ruling against ANZ in $2.5 billion share issue case
Business in Sydney’s CBD and general views of Sydney · Reuters
Updated Wed, October 2, 2024 By Byron Kaye
(Reuters) -An Australian court on Wednesday upheld a ruling that found ANZ violated disclosure rules in a A$2.5 billion ($1.7 billion) share placement nearly a decade earlier, dismissing the lender's appeal and wrapping up a long legal saga.
The three-judge appeals panel of the Federal Court also upheld a A$900,000 fine imposed on the bank and ordered the country's No. 3 lender to pay the costs borne by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in defending the appeal.
Last year, the Federal Court found ANZ had broken rules and unfairly impacted investors' decision-making by failing to disclose that between $754 million and $791 million worth of the shares had not been sold as planned and would be placed with underwriters.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) first filed criminal charges against the bank and its underwriters in 2018 alleging cartel behaviour before withdrawing the case four years later.
ASIC's civil case against ANZ was put on hold until the ACCC case ended. It ended with the finding against the bank last September.
ANZ's appeal "overcomplicates the statutory regime and does not withstand close analysis", one of the three Federal court judges said in the ruling on Wednesday.
ASIC Chair Joe Longo said in a statement that the regulator would "always defend the integrity of Australia's markets".
"This is an important case that confirms how critical continuous disclosure is to maintain market integrity," he said.
ANZ said in a statement that it would review the judgement.
($1 = 1.4480 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Additional reporting by Archishma Iyer in Bengaluru; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
Amazon’s RTO charge is just layoffs in disguise, experts say
Fortune · (David Ryder/Bloomberg—Getty Images)
Sasha Rogelberg Updated Wed, October 2, 2024 at 8:35 AM MDT 3 min read
Amazon’s return-to-office policy announced last month, mandating employees work in person five days a week starting in 2025, already has workers irritated. Some have even begun “rage-applying” to new positions, wanting to stick it to the tech company. The trouble for them is that could be exactly the response Amazon was hoping for.
The tech mammoth’s strict RTO push might just be a sneaky means of laying off workers, some future-of-work experts say. Amazon likely already knows the new policy will nudge dissatisfied workers out, meaning the company will no longer have to go through the tough process of formal layoffs. As a tradeoff, the RTO crusade could come at the expense of the company’s own talent and tech advancements.
"Amazon presumably took the view they would rather control costs by cutting head count and take the hit of technology and innovation," Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom told Business Insider.
The company may be content with making the sacrifice of some brain drain. The RTO crackdown came in tandem with CEO Andy Jassy calling for a reduction in managers and a bump in the ratio of workers to managers by 15% by the end of 2025’s first quarter. Amazon said its RTO shift is an effort to strengthen company culture and that the company has no plans to reduce its headcount.
Brian Elliott, future-of-work advisor and author of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives, agreed with Bloom. He told Fortune Amazon will “undoubtedly” see employee attrition as a result of the mandate because it continues to be widely unpopular among most U.S. workers.
“The vast majority of people want something that is in the middle: They want a couple days a week together that are meaningful with their teams,” he said. “And, by the way, those people the flexibility is taken away from are much more likely to jump ship.”
A study from human resources consulting firm Robert Half conducted last month revealed 39% of office workers in Australia would quit if their company slashed flexible working. Amazon employees are already bolstering that statistic. Anonymous job review site Blind, which surveyed 2,585 verified Amazon workers a day after Jassy’s RTO announcement, found that 73% of employees considered quitting their jobs as a result of the mandate. Amazon’s high risk strategy
These “backdoor layoffs,” as Bloom refers to them, have already made a splash in other workplaces. According to research by BambooHR published in May surveying over 1,500 U.S. managers, about a quarter of executives said they hoped employees would voluntarily leave the company after the implementation of an RTO mandate. When AT&T mandated its 60,000 workers across nine of its 350 offices work in person again, some employees interpreted the push as a way to eliminate workers unable or uninterested in relocating to their offices. CEO John Stankey estimated that 15% of the affected workforce, about 9,000 employees, would face the choice of relocating or leaving the company altogether.
“It’s a layoff wolf in return-to-office sheep’s clothing,” an anonymous AT&T employee told Bloomberg.
The sneaky layoff strategy hasn’t always worked out for employers. Almost half of employers that implemented RTO policies saw a greater than anticipated level of employee attrition, according to a 2023 report from Unispace. Almost 30% reported recruitment difficulties.
Amazon will face this same risk, Elliott argued. Other tech companies may keep their flexible work policies as a means to poach Amazon’s talent, and Amazon may struggle to hire new faces, he said. This talent pool shrinks even more for women, who may need flexibility for child care, and managers, who can leverage experience to find a cushier job elsewhere.
“You lose a set of people in your organization,” Elliott said. “You lose high performance.”
Webb telescope reveals surprising details of Pluto's moon Charon
Will Dunham Tue, October 1, 2024 FILE PHOTO: Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is seen in a high-resolution, enhanced color view captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope are giving scientists a fuller understanding about the composition and evolution of Pluto's moon Charon, the largest moon orbiting any of our solar system's dwarf planets.
Webb for the first time detected carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide - both frozen as solids - on the surface of Charon, a spherical body about 750 miles (1,200 km) in diameter, researchers said on Tuesday. Those are added to the water ice, ammonia-bearing compounds and organic materials previously documented on Charon's surface.
Charon, discovered in 1978, has the distinction of being the solar system's largest moon relative in size to the planet it orbits. It is about half the diameter and an eighth the mass of Pluto, a dwarf planet that resides in a frigid region of the outer Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, beyond the most distant planet Neptune.
The distance between Charon and Pluto is about 12,200 miles (19,640 km), compared to the 238,855 miles (384,400 km) on average separating Earth from its moon.
Most of Charon's surface is gray, with reddish-brown regions around its poles composed of organic materials.
The Webb observations build on data obtained when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Charon during its visit to the Pluto system in 2015. The new study tapped into the ability of Webb, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data the following year, to observe across a greater range of wavelengths than previously available.
The presence of hydrogen peroxide speaks to the irradiation processes Charon has experienced over time, the researchers said, while the carbon dioxide is probably an original component dating to this moon's formation about 4.5 billion years ago.
The hydrogen peroxide, the researchers said, formed as the water ice on Charon's surface was chemically altered by the perpetual onslaught of ultraviolet radiation from the sun as well as energetic particles from the solar wind and from galactic cosmic rays that traverse the universe.
The researchers said the carbon dioxide observed by Webb was probably buried underneath the surface and exposed by impacts on Charon. The carbon dioxide, they said, is likely to have been part of the primordial material from which both Charon and Pluto originally formed.
Scientists had been surprised that carbon dioxide was not previously spotted.
"The detection of carbon dioxide was a satisfying confirmation of our expectations," said Silvia Protopapa, assistant director of the department of space studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, co-investigator of the New Horizons mission and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
"The detection of hydrogen peroxide on Charon was unexpected. I honestly did not anticipate finding evidence of it on the surface," Protopapa added.
The new observations of Charon help tell a broader story about the celestial bodies populating our solar system.
"Every small body in the outer solar system is a unique piece of a larger puzzle that scientists are trying to put together," Protopapa said.
The researchers used a Webb instrument called the Near-Infrared Spectrograph to make four observations in 2022 and 2023, getting full coverage of Charon's northern hemisphere.
"These new Webb observations add carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide to the known inventory of (Charon's) surface components. Both of these provide insights into ongoing processes of irradiation and impact-driven resurfacing," said study co-author Ian Wong, staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
(Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
Grounded Astronauts Angry They Were Forced to Give Up Their Seats for Stranded Starliner Crew
Victor Tangermann Wed, October 2, 2024
Grounded
NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson were intending to get a lift to the International Space Station on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft over the weekend.
But thanks to Boeing's disastrous crewed test flight of its issues-laden Starliner spacecraft, the two women had to stay behind to make space for their stranded colleagues, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
"I think it was hard not to watch that rocket lift off without thinking, 'That's my rocket and that's my crew,'" Cardman said during NASA's live broadcast of Saturday's Crew-9 launch, as quoted by Space.com. "It makes me feel very connected to this mission." Hate to Watch You Leave
Two out of the four seats on board the Crew Dragon were occupied by NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who will be returning alongside Wilmore and Williams early next year.
Hague has been on two trips to the ISS, while Gorbunov is on his first flight to space. Cardman has yet to visit the ISS, while Wilson flew to space onboard three Space Shuttle missions between 2006 and 2010.
It must've been a bittersweet moment, watching the two leave without Cardman or Wilson on board. After all, an opportunity to launch into space is exceedingly rare.
"We, of course, want to be together," Wilson said during the broadcast. "We have built friendship and camaraderie … but I'm very excited for them, looking forward to hearing their stories from space."
To balance out the weight, Cardman and Wilson's bodies were simulated using pieces of ballast inside the Crew Dragon capsule.
Cardman applauded NASA for prioritizing the "safety of the crew," and added that Williams and Wilmore were "well-prepared" professionals.
In late August, NASA made the decision to bump the two women from the flight. Instead, they had to watch their colleagues get ready over many weeks, an unfortunate reality brought about by Boeing's plagued Starliner.
"Zena and Stephanie will continue to assist their crewmates ahead of launch," NASA chief astronaut Joe Acaba said in a statement at the time. "They exemplify what it means to be a professional astronaut."
NASA switches off instrument on Voyager 2 spacecraft to save power
ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN Wed, October 2, 2024 at 9:18 AM MDT·1 min read 60
FILE - This photo provided by NASA shows the "Sounds of Earth" record being mounted on the Voyager 2 spacecraft in the Safe-1 Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Aug. 4, 1977. (AP Photo/NASA, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — To save power, NASA has switched off another scientific instrument on its long-running Voyager 2 spacecraft.
The space agency said Tuesday that Voyager 2's plasma science instrument — designed to measure the flow of charged atoms — was powered down in late September so the spacecraft can keep exploring for as long as possible, expected into the 2030s.
NASA turned off a suite of instruments on Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1 after they explored the gas giant planets in the 1980s. Both are currently in interstellar space, or the space between stars. The plasma instrument on Voyager 1 stopped working long ago and was finally shut down in 2007.
Four remaining instruments on Voyager 2 will continue collecting information about magnetic fields and particles. Its goal is to study the swaths of space beyond the sun's protective bubble.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune. It's currently more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) from Earth. Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
NASA astronaut snaps footage of glorious comet flying through space
Mashable Tue, October 1, 2024 The International Space Station viewed from a SpaceX Dragon craft.
An icy visitor is flying through the inner solar system.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, also called Comet C/2023 A3, has grown brighter as it's approached the sun, allowing astronauts aboard the International Space Station to capture vivid footage of this ancient ball of ice, rock, and dust. NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick recently posted a view of the comet rising beyond Earth as the station zipped through its orbit at some 17,500 mph.
"Comet rises above the horizon just before orbital sunrise amongst aurora and swirling satellites," the space agency's flight engineer posted online. The comet makes its appearance at the bottom of the view at about 12 seconds into the short clip.
In this view from Sept. 29, the comet is some 75 million miles from Earth, and 38 million miles from the sun (Earth is 93 million miles from our star). As comets approach the sun, they heat up and eject dust and gas into space, leaving long wakes of millions-of-miles-long material, as you can see below. Comet C/2023 A3 just made its closest approach to the sun on Sept. 27, and is now en route to the profoundly frigid realms of the deep solar system.
Comets have a lot of material to burn, as they're typically miles long to tens of miles long. "When frozen, they are the size of a small town," NASA explained. One particular comet, discovered in 2021, is a whopping 85 miles wide.
Although Dominick captured the comet with a camera, he did note that it's visible to the naked eye from the space station, too. And down on Earth, it might be visible to skygazers. The "best show," as the comet zooms between Earth and the sun, is likely to happen in mid-October.
But if this comet eludes you, or you can't escape to dark enough skies, enjoy the view from space.
This artist’s concept illustrates how tightly the three stars in the system called TIC 290061484 orbit each other. If they were placed at the center of our solar system, all the stars’ orbits would be contained a space smaller than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. The sizes of the triplet stars and the Sun are also to scale.
Professional and amateur astronomers teamed up with artificial intelligence to find an unmatched stellar trio called TIC 290061484, thanks to cosmic “strobe lights” captured by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
The system contains a set of twin stars orbiting each other every 1.8 days, and a third star that circles the pair in just 25 days. The discovery smashes the record for shortest outer orbital period for this type of system, set in 1956, which had a third star orbiting an inner pair in 33 days.
“Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures of its stars,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “And we can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve.”
A paper, led by Kostov, describing the results was published in The Astrophysical Journal Oct. 2.
Flickers in starlight helped reveal the tight trio, which is located in the constellation Cygnus. The system happens to be almost flat from our perspective. This means the stars each cross right in front of, or eclipse, each other as they orbit. When that happens, the nearer star blocks some of the farther star’s light.
Using machine learning, scientists filtered through enormous sets of starlight data from TESS to identify patterns of dimming that reveal eclipses. Then, a small team of citizen scientists filtered further, relying on years of experience and informal training to find particularly interesting cases.
These amateur astronomers, who are co-authors on the new study, met as participants in an online citizen science project called Planet Hunters, which was active from 2010 to 2013. The volunteers later teamed up with professional astronomers to create a new collaboration called the Visual Survey Group, which has been active for over a decade.
“We’re mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects,” said Saul Rappaport, an emeritus professor of physics at MIT in Cambridge. Rappaport co-authored the paper and has helped lead the Visual Survey Group for more than a decade. “It’s exciting to identify a system like this because they’re rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.” Many more likely speckle our galaxy, waiting to be discovered.
Partly because the stars in the newfound system orbit in nearly the same plane, scientists say it’s likely very stable despite their tight configuration (the trio’s orbits fit within a smaller area than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun). Each star’s gravity doesn’t perturb the others too much, like they could if their orbits were tilted in different directions.
But while their orbits will likely remain stable for millions of years, “no one lives here,” Rappaport said. “We think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have disrupted planets from forming very closely around any of the stars.” The exception could be a distant planet orbiting the three stars as if they were one.
As the inner stars age, they will expand and ultimately merge, triggering a supernova explosion in around 20 to 40 million years.
In the meantime, astronomers are hunting for triple stars with even shorter orbits. That’s hard to do with current technology, but a new tool is on the way.
Images from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be much more detailed than TESS’s. The same area of the sky covered by a single TESS pixel will fit more than 36,000 Roman pixels. And while TESS took a wide, shallow look at the entire sky, Roman will pierce deep into the heart of our galaxy where stars crowd together, providing a core sample rather than skimming the whole surface.
“We don’t know much about a lot of the stars in the center of the galaxy except for the brightest ones,” said Brian Powell, a co-author and data scientist at Goddard. “Roman’s high-resolution view will help us measure light from stars that usually blur together, providing the best look yet at the nature of star systems in our galaxy.”
And since Roman will monitor light from hundreds of millions of stars as part of one of its main surveys, it will help astronomers find more triple star systems in which all the stars eclipse each other.
“We’re curious why we haven’t found star systems like these with even shorter outer orbital periods,” said Powell. “Roman should help us find them and bring us closer to figuring out what their limits might be.”
Roman could also find eclipsing stars bound together in even larger groups — half a dozen, or perhaps even more all orbiting each other like bees buzzing around a hive.
“Before scientists discovered triply eclipsing triple star systems, we didn’t expect them to be out there,” said co-author Tamás Borkovits, a senior research fellow at the Baja Observatory of The University of Szeged in Hungary. “But once we found them, we thought, well why not? Roman, too, may reveal never-before-seen categories of systems and objects that will surprise astronomers.”
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission managed by NASA Goddard and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.
NASA’s citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public and do not require U.S. citizenship. Through these collaborations, volunteers (known as citizen scientists) have helped make thousands of important scientific discoveries. To get involved with a project, visit NASA’s Citizen Science page.
Scientists discover planet orbiting closest single star to our Sun
ESO
image:
This artist’s impression shows Barnard b, a sub-Earth-mass planet that was discovered orbiting Barnard’s star. Its signal was detected with the ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), and astronomers were able to confirm it with data from other instruments. An earlier promising detection in 2018 around the same star could not be confirmed by these data. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus but is too hot to support liquid water, a year lasts just over three Earth days.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to our Sun. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus, a year lasts just over three Earth days. The team’s observations also hint at the existence of three more exoplanet candidates, in various orbits around the star.
Located just six light-years away, Barnard’s star is the second-closest stellar system — after Alpha Centauri’s three-star group — and the closest individual star to us. Owing to its proximity, it is a primary target in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. Despite a promising detection back in 2018, no planet orbiting Barnard's star had been confirmed until now.
The discovery of this new exoplanet — announced in a paper published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics — is the result of observations made over the last five years with ESO’s VLT, located at Paranal Observatory in Chile. “Even if it took a long time, we were always confident that we could find something,” says Jonay González Hernández, a researcher at the Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias in Spain, and lead author of the paper. The team were looking for signals from possible exoplanets within the habitable or temperate zone of Barnard’s star — the range where liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. Red dwarfs like Barnard’s star are often targeted by astronomers since low-mass rocky planets are easier to detect there than around larger Sun-like stars. [1]
Barnard b [2], as the newly discovered exoplanet is called, is twenty times closer to Barnard’s star than Mercury is to the Sun. It orbits its star in 3.15 Earth days and has a surface temperature around 125 °C. “Barnard b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few known with a mass less than that of Earth. But the planet is too close to the host star, closer than the habitable zone,” explains González Hernández. “Even if the star is about 2500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot there to maintain liquid water on the surface.”
For their observations, the team used ESPRESSO, a highly precise instrument designed to measure the wobble of a star caused by the gravitational pull of one or more orbiting planets. The results obtained from these observations were confirmed by data from other instruments also specialised in exoplanet hunting: HARPS at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, HARPS-N and CARMENES. The new data do not, however, support the existence of the exoplanet reported in 2018.
In addition to the confirmed planet, the international team also found hints of three more exoplanet candidates orbiting the same star. These candidates, however, will require additional observations with ESPRESSO to be confirmed. “We now need to continue observing this star to confirm the other candidate signals,” says Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, a researcher also at the Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias and co-author of the study. “But the discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets.”
ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction, is set to transform the field of exoplanet research. The ELT’s ANDES instrument will allow researchers to detect more of these small, rocky planets in the temperate zone around nearby stars, beyond the reach of current telescopes, and enable them to study the composition of their atmospheres.
Notes
[1] Astronomers target cool stars, like red dwarfs, because their temperate zone is much closer to the star than that of hotter stars, like the Sun. This means that the planets orbiting within their temperate zone have shorter orbital periods, allowing astronomers to monitor them over several days or weeks, rather than years. In addition, red dwarfs are much less massive than the Sun, so they are more easily disturbed by the gravitational pull of the planets around them and thus they wobble more strongly.
[2] It’s common practice in science to name exoplanets by the name of their host star with a lowercase letter added to it, ‘b’ indicating the first known planet, ’c’ the next one, and so on. The name Barnard b was therefore also given to a previously suspected planet candidate around Barnard's star, which scientists were unable to confirm.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) enables scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe for the benefit of all. We design, build and operate world-class observatories on the ground — which astronomers use to tackle exciting questions and spread the fascination of astronomy — and promote international collaboration for astronomy. Established as an intergovernmental organisation in 1962, today ESO is supported by 16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO’s headquarters and its visitor centre and planetarium, the ESO Supernova, are located close to Munich in Germany, while the Chilean Atacama Desert, a marvellous place with unique conditions to observe the sky, hosts our telescopes. ESO operates three observing sites: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its Very Large Telescope Interferometer, as well as survey telescopes such as VISTA. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. Together with international partners, ESO operates ALMA on Chajnantor, a facility that observes the skies in the millimetre and submillimetre range. At Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, we are building “the world’s biggest eye on the sky” — ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. From our offices in Santiago, Chile we support our operations in the country and engage with Chilean partners and society.
This handout image taken by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows rippled patterns on the surface of rocks caused by the waves of a shallow lake billions of years ago - Copyright AFP Zein Al RIFAI
For first time, researchers witnessed formation of nanosized water bubbles in real time and at the molecular-scale. Here, the scientists observed hydrogen and oxygen atoms merge to form tiny, nano-sized bubbles of water. This demonstrated how palladium, a rare metallic element, can rapidly generate water from hydrogen and oxygen. The element catalyzes the gaseous reaction to generate water.
Since the early 1900s, researchers have known that palladium can act as a catalyst to rapidly generate water. But how, exactly, this reaction occurs has remained a mystery. Viewing the process with atomic precision was simply impossible, at least until nine months ago.
The researchers from Northwestern University witnessed this process at the nanoscale for the first time with an electron microscope. By viewing the process with extreme precision, they discovered how to optimize it to generate water at a faster rate.
The new process could be used to generate water on-demand in extreme environments, including on other planets. This is useful since the reaction does not require extreme conditions; hence, the researchers say it could be harnessed as a practical solution for rapidly generating water in arid environments.
For the experiment, the scientists developed an ultra-thin glassy membrane that holds gas molecules within honeycomb-shaped nanoreactors, so they can be viewed within high-vacuum transmission electron microscopes.
Here the researchers can examine samples in atmospheric pressure gas at a resolution of just 0.102 nanometers, compared to a 0.236-nanometer resolutionusing other state-of-the-art tools. The technique also enabled, for the first time, concurrent spectral and reciprocal information analysis.
The researchers think their observation might be the smallest bubble ever formed that has been viewed directly. A process called electron energy loss spectroscopy, to analyze the bubbles.
“By directly visualizing nanoscale water generation, we were able to identify the optimal conditions for rapid water generation under ambient conditions,” states Northwestern’s Vinayak Dravid, senior author of the study. “These findings have significant implications for practical applications, such as enabling rapid water generation in deep space environments using gases and metal catalysts, without requiring extreme reaction conditions.”
Dravid adds: “Think of Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, in the movie ‘The Martian.’ He burned rocket fuel to extract hydrogen and then added oxygen from his oxygenator. Our process is analogous, except we bypass the need for fire and other extreme conditions. We simply mixed palladium and gases together.”
The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study is titled “Unraveling the adsorption-limited hydrogen oxidation reaction at palladium surface via in situ electron microscopy”.
