Climate Change News: Central Banks Urged To Divest Coal Investments


By Marcy Kreiter @marcykreiter
02/05/20 AT 2:01 PM

The region is home to several ageing coal-fired power plants Photo: AFP / DIMITAR DILKOFF

KEY POINTS
The New Economics Foundation estimates central banks have a minimum $12 billion exposure to the coal industry

Central banks will need to be careful in how they divest their coal-related investments to avoid triggering "transition risk"

As of July, more than 6,700 coal-fired power plants were in operation worldwide

The London think tank New Economics Foundation recommended in a report issued Wednesday the world’s leading central banks divest themselves of coal-related investments to avoid holding stranded assets as governments work on reining in climate change.

The foundation also urged the adoption of rules that would discourage financing of polluting industries by both banks and credit rating agencies.

Frank van Lerven, a foundation economist and author of the report, said the central banks will have to be careful in how they rid themselves of brown assets so they don’t “trigger transition risk.”

“Central banks have to be careful and manage this process gradually,” he told Bloomberg.

The foundation estimates central banks in the euro area, Britain, the U.S., Japan, China and Switzerland have more than $12 billion coal investments, both stocks and bonds.

“Central banks across the world have exposures to coal through their collateral frameworks as well as the assets they hold,” the report said. “The balance sheets of major central banks today stand at more than $20 trillion. At least $627 billion of that total is allocated to equities and corporate bonds. Assuming that just 2% of this sum is linked to coal-exposed assets, central bank coal exposures would amount to more than $12 billion. Removing this exposure is critical and urgent.”

Lerven noted the U.S., Japan and China have a large number of cial-fired power plants “and that’s probably reflected in their central banks’ balance sheets.” China currently accounts for half of both coal consumption and production.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has said she is committed to finding ways to tackle change while the Bank of England has taken steps “to stress test the financial sector for stranding fossil fuel assets in general and coal assets in particular,” the report says.

Projections indicate the use of coal in energy production will fall by two-thirds by 2030 and to nearly zero by 2050. Currently 80% of coal-fired plants in the European Union are unprofitable, necessitating their rapid phase-out. Despite this, coal use has doubled since 2000 worldwide, with more than 500 new plants being built or planned. More than 6,700 plants were operating worldwide as of July, Global Energy Monitor reported.

Pension Funds Around The World Moving To Abandon Investments In Fossil Fuels


By Palash Ghosh @Gooch700
10/03/2020





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KEY POINTS
The New Jersey bill mandates total divestment from coal companies within two years

New Jersey Treasury Department, which administers the pension fund, opposes the divestment bill

The oil and gas sector now only accounts for about 2.5% of the market cap of the S&P 500 index

The State of New Jersey may soon order its state pension fund to divest from fossil fuels, following a long list of other state, municipal and national pension funds that have already done so.

In a recent op-ed published in the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper, Richard J. Codey (a former governor of New Jersey) and Tom Sanzillo (director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis) wrote that it is high time for the Garden State to pull out of fossil fuel investments -- for both environmental and financial reasons.

New Jersey State Senators Bob Smith and Linda Greenstein, both Democrats, have sponsored the Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill -- Senate Bill S330 -- which calls for the state pension fund to withdraw from fossil fuels.

Specifically, the bill would prohibit state pension funds from investing in any of the top 200 companies “that hold the largest carbon content fossil fuel reserves.”

The bill also mandates total divestment from coal companies within two years, and withdrawal from all other fossil fuel companies by Jan. 1, 2022.

However, the New Jersey Treasury Department, which administers the pension fund, opposes the bill, suggesting, among other things, that jettisoning energy investments would lower annual returns.

But the editorial disputed that assertion.

“The proposed legislation provides the right financial solution,” Codey and Sanzillo wrote. “Oil and gas companies once led the world economy and contributed mightily to pension fund returns. Today, however, and for the last 10 years, the oil and gas sector has performed dead last in the world stock market.”

Indeed, the oil and gas sector now only accounts for about 2.5% of the market cap of the S&P 500 index – an index many pension funds invest in -- down from 28% in the 1980s.

“[Energy] industry profits have tanked and the outlook is negative -- and this was true before the pandemic,” Codey and Sanzillo noted. “By contrast, fossil-free portfolios have performed as well, and even better, than those with oil and gas stocks.”

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Over the past 10 years, they indicated, the energy sector in the S&P 500 has delivered an annualized return of minus-3.5%, versus a 12.2% annualized gain from the composite S&P 500 index.

“The New Jersey pension funds already suffer under the weight of historically poor performance,” Codey and Sanzillo added. “They were recently cited as among the least well-positioned funds to weather [another] pandemic-like financial shock.”

As a result, Codey and Sanzillo urged the New Jersey Legislature to address the state’s “climate crisis” and the “failing financial performance” of fossil fuel investments by supporting divestment.

Many other pension funds have already said they will reduce or eliminate their investments in fossil fuels.

In March of this year, the £700 million ($900 million) Parliamentary Pension Fund of the British government – which manages the pensions of the Members of Parliament -- cut its exposure to fossil fuel companies, including BP (BP) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS-A). The fund has since increased investments in renewable energy companies.

In January 2018, New York City unveiled a plan to divest fossil fuel companies from its $189 billion in pension funds within five years. New York City’s five pension funds had about $5 billion in fossil fuel investments at that time.

Earlier in 2020, Forsta AP-fonden, one of the Swedish government’s largest pension funds, pledged to cease investments in fossil fuels.

The fund’s chairman, Urban Hansson Brusewitz, said divesting from fossil fuels amounted to “an efficient way for the fund to manage the financial risk associated with a transition in line with the Paris [climate change] agreement.”

THIRD WORLD USA
Bank Deposits Surged In Poorer Neighborhoods During Pandemic, But Branch Closures Accelerated

By Palash Ghosh @Gooch700
10/04/20 


KEY POINTS
Bank branches in low-income neighborhoods saw deposits surge by 19.5% year-over-year through June 30

The average deposit growth for all branches amounted to 16%.

In Northeast Ohio deposits surged by 29% year-over-year through June 30

U.S. bank branches in low-income neighborhoods delivered the highest year-over-year deposit growth during the second quarter, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., or FDIC.

Among almost 4,000 bank branches in low-income neighborhoods, deposits surged by 19.5% year-over-year through June 30, besting the 16.9% deposit growth for branches in upper-income neighborhoods.

The average deposit growth for all branches amounted to 16%. That 16% growth spurt greatly exceeded previous years’ data – for the second quarter of 2019, all banks saw year-over-year deposit growth of 3.4%.

S&P Global Market Intelligence noted that deposits in low-income enclaves were likely augmented by “expanded unemployment benefits and government stimulus checks.”

Ironically, in conjunction, many national banks have been closing branches in low-income areas – partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic – meaning that banks that remained open in poor areas also received “abnormally high overdraft and service charges.”

S&P noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has more “severely affected” low-income workers, who are less likely to be able to work from home. But government stimulus and expanded unemployment benefits have also “provided a more significant boost for these workers.”

For example, banks in Northeast Ohio – which is dominated by Cleveland, one of the poorest cities in the nation, with a poverty rate of 36.2% – saw deposits surge by 29% year-over-year through June 30. For Ohio as a whole, bank deposits rose by 23%.

"A lot of borrowers that took cash for defensive purposes – have been keeping cash in the bank that otherwise might have gone to other purposes," Charlie Crowley, a managing director with asset manager Boenning & Scattergood, told Crain’s. "There were some people who took [Paycheck Protection Program] money and drew on unused lines of credit with the rainy-day mentality."

Similarly in Chattanooga, Tennessee – a city with a 20.7% poverty rate – deposits in the city’s 27 commercial banks jumped by 12% year-over-year through June 30 – to a record high of more than $12.1 billion. In Tennessee as a whole, bank deposits soared by almost 20.5%.

"This has been a very unusual year and some of this [deposit] growth is probably just a temporary thing due to the unprecedented stimulus measures from the government and the cautious attitude toward spending and many activities until we get a vaccine for this virus," Collin Barrett, president of the Tennessee Bankers Association, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press. "These numbers are somewhat artificially inflated this year and they will go back down.

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In fact, a recent study by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research revealed that workers in the bottom one-third of the earnings pie received nearly half (49%) of emergency COVID-19 benefits from the government.

“Because lawmakers targeted the median worker when increasing unemployment benefits by $600 per week, low-income workers were likely to receive more in unemployment than they would have earned on the job,” S&P stated.

However, another study by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggested that low-income people were more likely to spend their COVID-19 relief funds – meaning the recent spike in their bank deposit growth might be temporary.

Further, the deposit growth data must be examined through other complicating factors.

“Deposit growth data as a proxy for local economic conditions is somewhat limited by banks' approach to their branches,” S&P observed. “Banks often move deposits by the billions from one branch to another, necessitating the use of median figures instead of aggregate numbers. And the consolidation of branches could complicate growth figures as banks move deposits from closed branches to nearby ones that are still operating.”

Indeed, banks have been shutting down branches in low-income areas at a swift rate.

Since 2013, U.S. banks have closed 11.3% of their branches in low-income areas, but only 7.9% in upper-income neighborhoods.

U.S. Bancorp (USB) closed 56 branches for the year ended June 30, accounting for 7.1% of its branch network in low- and moderate-income areas. Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) had 45 closures, or 2.8% of its branch network in low- to moderate-income areas.

In contrast, Woodforest Financial Group Inc., parent of Woodforest National Bank, opened 23 new branches in low- and moderate-income areas with over the 12 months ended June 30.

Woodforest National Bank, S&P indicated, is among the nation's “most aggressive banks” when it comes to service charges.

For the last 12 months ended June 30, Woodforest was the only bank with less than $10 billion in assets to rank among the top 20 banks by service charges. Such charges accounted for nearly one-third (31.9%) of the bank's operating revenue – versus industrywide median of only 1.6%.

Biden Bounds Ahead In Polls Post-Debate

A new poll showed Biden with a 14-point lead over Trump.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/new-yahoo-news-you-gov-poll-biden-expands-lead-to-8-points-as-voters-blame-trump-for-covid-19-carelessness-and-chaotic-debate-163144698.html


Anew poll shows that former Vice President Joe Biden won support after last week’s debate. The survey shows him 14 points ahead of President Donald J. Trump, but the responses were recorded before Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis was made public.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released Sunday, included 800 registered voters. When asked who they’d vote for if they voted tomorrow, more than half said Biden and Senator Kamala Harris. They took 53% of respondents while Trump and Vice President Mike Pence only pulled in 39%.

Of the 53% supporting Biden, 51% said there was “no chance at all” that the 45th president would ever get their vote. Of Trump’s 39% overall, 36% said they would never change their mind.

Meanwhile, 6% were still unsure after the debate.

Pollsters asked for opinions on a number of hot topics, including who would be better for a number of tasks, with Biden winning all of them. Participants were asked who’d be better at appointing Supreme Court judges (Biden 46%, Trump 37%) and who has “the right temperament to be president” (Biden 58%, Trump 26%).

It’s worth noting that this poll was taken before Trump’s positive COVID-19 diagnosis was made public. When respondents were asked on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 which candidate would be better at dealing with coronavirus, 52% said Biden while Trump only had 35%. It’s unclear if public opinion will change after the President’s hospitalization.

Pence ordered borders closed after CDC experts refused

By JASON DEAREN and GARANCE BURK

1 of 4
Vice President Mike Pence arrives at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Ga., Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020. (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Vice President Mike Pence in March directed the nation’s top disease control agency to use its emergency powers to effectively seal the U.S. borders, overruling the agency’s scientists who said there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus, according to two former health officials. The action has so far caused nearly 150,000 children and adults to be expelled from the country.

The top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor who oversees these types of orders had refused to comply with a Trump administration directive saying there was no valid public health reason to issue it, according to three people with direct knowledge of the doctor’s refusal.

So Pence intervened in early March. The vice president, who had taken over the Trump administration’s response to the growing pandemic, called Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director, and told him to use the agency’s special legal authority in a pandemic anyway.

Also on the phone call were Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. Redfield immediately ordered his senior staff to get it done, according to a former CDC official who was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The CDC’s order covered the U.S. borders with both Mexico and Canada, but has mostly affected the thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants arriving at the southern border. Public health experts had urged the administration to focus on a national mask mandate, enforce social distancing and increase the number of contact tracers to track down people exposed to the virus.

But Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Donald Trump who has been a vocal opponent of immigration, pushed for the expulsion order.

“That was a Stephen Miller special. He was all over that,” said Olivia Troye, a former top aide to Pence, who coordinated the White House coronavirus task force. She recently resigned in protest, saying the administration had placed politics above public health. “There was a lot of pressure on DHS and CDC to push this forward.”

Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act gives federal health officials unique powers during a pandemic to take extraordinary measures to limit transmission of an infectious disease. One of those is the ability to stop the flow of immigration from countries with high numbers of confirmed cases, a legal authority the CDC does not normally have.

Public health experts say the administration’s pattern of dismissing science-based decision making in favor of political goals has endangered many, including President Donald Trump himself, who on Friday confirmed he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus.

“The decision to halt asylum processes ‘to protect the public health’ is not based on evidence or science,” wrote Dr. Anthony So, an international public health expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in a letter to Redfield in April. “This order directly endangers tens of thousands of lives and threatens to amplify dangerous anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia.”

Since the order went into effect on March 20, nearly 150,000 people — including at least 8,800 unaccompanied children who are normally afforded special legal protections under a court settlement and federal law — have been sent back to their countries of origin without typical due process. Many have been returned to dangerous and violent conditions in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Pence’s spokeswoman Katie Miller, who is Stephen Miller’s wife, called the account of the phone call “false.”

“Vice President Pence never directed the CDC on this issue,” she said in an email.

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project described the order as “a complete bypass of the entire asylum system and (the) system protecting unaccompanied children.”

“That is what the Trump administration has been trying to do for four years and they finally saw a window,” he added.

Miller started his campaign for the order by button-holing the coronavirus task force staff to try to get the issue on its agenda, according to Troye. The task force did not take the issue up immediately, said Troye. The administration had already passed a nonessential travel ban, which public health experts had largely supported. The CDC spurned Miller’s idea, too. In early March the agency’s Division of Migration and Quarantine, led by Dr. Martin Cetron, refused to support the order because there was not a strong public health basis for such a drastic move, according to three people with knowledge of his decision.

White House officials were undeterred. They turned to lawyers at CDC’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In a call with CDC’s senior leadership, attorneys for both agencies urged CDC to use its public health authority to turn people back at the borders. Border officials said they wanted to protect their agents, and American lives.

By mid-March, CDC’s scientists still refused to comply. That’s when Pence and Wolf called with the message to get it done and quickly.

An HHS lawyer then wrote the order and submitted it to Redfield, who reviewed it and signed it. Redfield declined to comment through a CDC spokesperson, because the order is currently in litigation.

“They forced us,” said a former health official involved in the process. “It is either do it or get fired,”

Trump described the order as originating at CDC, when it had not. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has decided to exercise its authority ... to give Customs and Border Protection the tools it needs to prevent the transmission of the virus coming through both the northern and the southern border,” Trump told a March 20 at coronavirus task force press briefing.

“So we’re treating the borders equally — the northern border and the southern border,” he said. “A lot of people say that they’re not treated equally. Well, they are.”

In recent months, Trump has highlighted the decision to shut down the border as an argument for his reelection in November.

And the Title 42 order has been renewed multiple times since it first passed as a month-long temporary measure. Mark Morgan, the acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said in August that the expulsions were necessary to protect his agents, and that 10 CBP employees had died after contracting COVID-19.

“It’s a great — it’s a great feeling to have closed up the border,” Trump said that same month after being updated on border wall construction in Yuma, Arizona. “Now people come in, if they come in, through merit, if they come in legally. But they don’t come in like they used to.”

Before March, Central American children who crossed into the U.S. alone were generally sent to facilities overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS shelters are required to be state licensed, have beds and provide schooling. Most children are eventually placed with family or friends who serve as sponsors while they await their day in court.

Under the Title 42 order this year, the administration instead detained some migrant children in hotels, sometimes for weeks, before expelling them to their home countries.

After witnessing a gang member murder a young man and being threatened, one 16-year-old decided to leave Honduras over the summer and arrived at the border near El Paso on July 4, where he was taken into government custody, detained in a hotel and told he would be deported, his father said. He was allowed to stay after the ACLU filed a suit challenging the Title 42 expulsions and in August was reunited with his father in Texas, where he is now attending school online.

“He was really worried they wouldn’t let him reunite with me, and they didn’t let him see anyone, so he was just waiting for them to send him back to Honduras,” his father, Carlos Emilio Barrera, told AP. “He’s doing better now because he’s taking classes in school and he’s hoping he will have the opportunity to one day get asylum, but he still sometimes has dreams that he’s back inside locked up.”

The administration’s move not to grant migrant children their normal due process is currently being challenged in court.

“I don’t know how you could look another CDC scientist in the eye after doing this,” Dr. Josh Sharfstein, a former FDA deputy commissioner and a Johns Hopkins professor, said of Redfield. “It’s undermining the purpose of having an agency that uses evidence to protect public health.

“It’s a profound dereliction of duty for a CDC director.”

___

A previous version of this story gave an incorrect spelling for the first name of Pence aide Marc Short.

Burke reported from San Francisco.

___

To contact AP’s investigative team, email investigative@ap.org

History on screen: East Germany through its filmmakers’ eyes
By DAVID RISING

1 of 12

In this Wednesday, June 17, 2020 photo Gunnar Dedio, German film producer and managing director of PROGRESS Film GmbH poses for a photo between rolls of film in the archive of PROGRESS Film, in Leipzig, Germany. A new project is underway to digitize thousands of East German newsreels, documentaries and feature films 30 years after Germany’s reunification. The movies that are being scanned, transcribed and posted online provide a look inside a country that no longer exists but was a critical part of the Cold War. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)


BERLIN (AP) — As John F. Kennedy peered over the Berlin Wall into communist East Germany in 1963, red curtains blocked the U.S. president’s view through the Brandenburg Gate and a banner perched in front of it accused the United States of breaking an international agreement “to prevent the rebirth of German militarism.”

A western newsreel documented the crowds cheering Kennedy on the western side as well as the East German stunt, the narrator noting that Kennedy didn’t get a good look at the gate, because “the Iron Curtain was supplemented by a giant cloth one, as the Communists made sure he saw their propaganda.”

That might have been the final word on the visit, were it not for a new project, 30 years after Germany’s reunification, to digitize thousands of East German newsreels. The movies being scanned, transcribed and posted online provide a perspective from inside a country that no longer exists but was a critical part of the Cold War.

The East German Augenzeuge, or Eyewitness, newsreel on the Kennedy visit trumpeted the prank as a triumph, scoffing that the American president got an “unexpected surprise instead of the great view into the East German capital promised by his Secret Service” and allegedly had to cut his visit from “20 minutes to five.”

“History and who we are is a narrative, so it’s very important to compare the different narratives,” said Gunnar Dedio, a film producer and media entrepreneur who last year bought Progress, the company holding the license rights to the East German film collection.

“It’s not only the propaganda side of it, but also the whole societal side, where we can understand much better the differences in the Germany of today — why people who were socialized in East or West are still quite different often in their thinking, because their backgrounds, their history, was quite different.”

Dedio charges license fees to documentary producers, museums and others wanting to use the films, but they’re currently available to view online for free.

The cellar of his Leipzig operation is stacked floor-to-ceiling with canisters of 35mm film reels, each labeled, catalogued and waiting to be scanned, a process that is expected to take another two to three years. In all there are more than 12,000 films, including some 2,000 newsreels — one made every week the German Democratic Republic, or DDR by its German initials, existed.

The online offerings include digitized films from other archives, like western newsreels and a series of home movies featuring Adolf Hitler’s girlfriend, and later wife, Eva Braun, enjoying holidays with family, friends, pets and the Nazi dictator himself as German armies marched through Europe.

Though some of the better-known movies have been available on DVD for a long time, having the entire collection available is a goldmine for researchers, said Stefan Wolle, the head of research for Berlin’s DDR Museum, who is not affiliated with the project.

“For me, and for us, these films are terribly important and valuable, partially as historical documents, which tell a lot about the time from the perspective of the time — the ideology, the cultural policies. And they’re also artistically valuable,” he said.

Germany was divided into four occupation zones after World War II, the Soviet-influenced East Germany and West Germany’s American, British and French sectors.

In the Soviet sector, authorities in 1946 founded DEFA, a monopoly film production company that used the famous Babelsberg studio outside Berlin and its personnel to start making movies meant to reeducate the German people after years of Nazi rule.

DEFA soon broadened its productions to highlight wider themes of communism, like the emancipation of women and the redistribution of wealth, in feature films, documentaries and newsreels.

In 1950, the year after East Germany was established as a country, the authorities formed another company, Progress, as a state monopoly to distribute DEFA films and to import foreign productions.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, DEFA’s studios were sold and its film collection was given to a state-run foundation. Progress went through a couple of hands before being acquired by Dedio’s company in 2019.

DEFA teams shot around the world from the Eastern perspective, exploring the inequities of South Africa under apartheid while it was still largely tolerated by Western nations, focusing on the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests in the U.S., and looking at the 1967 six-day war between Israel and its neighbors as an act of “imperialist aggression” by Tel Aviv in collusion with “the U.S.A and other NATO countries.”

The films feature leaders like Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Indira Gandhi, Yasser Arafat, Ho Chi Minh and Salvador Allende, as well as prominent individuals such as American civil rights activist Angela Davis and actors and entertainers like Marlene Dietrich, Jane Fonda, and Louis Armstrong.

“It’s a picture to show that ’Our system is right and that the Western democracies are very far from being good societies, and some of it is, of course, propaganda,” Dedio said. “But some of it seen with eyes from today is very, very interesting and revealing. It shows what wasn’t captured on the western side of the Iron Curtain.”

As anti-government sentiment grew in East Germany during the 1980s, directors were emboldened to slip messages about topics that were verboten to talk about overtly past the strict state censors, such as by filming buildings in disrepair in the background of scenes to document the country’s crumbling infrastructure.

“Most of the time, they find these very small ways to express what they really think, in metaphors, in symbolic ways, in very intelligent ways, where it was difficult for the censorship to intervene. But for the majority of people, it was clear how it was meant,” said Dedio, who was born in the East German city of Rostock in 1969 and grew up watching DEFA films.

A documentary on the underground music scene made just before the fall of the Berlin Wall features a beach concert of the East Berlin punk band Feeling B, several of whose members later found fame as part of the post-reunification band Rammstein.

A group of youths, their pants cuffed and boots laced high as they dance wildly in the sand, wouldn’t have looked out of place in a New York. London or Toronto mosh pit in the 1980s, a reminder that beyond the official rhetoric, most residents on the east side of the Iron Curtain were just ordinary people living their lives.

“You see a lot of real life in pictures out of the East which you can’t find in the official propaganda,” Dedio said.

New space toilet reaches the final frontier


By Chelsea Gohd - Space.com 

A robotic Cygnus spacecraft successfully blasted off from Virginia late Friday (Oct. 2) carrying nearly 4 tons of gear, including a new space toilet, to the International Space Station.

A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket lit up the night sky alongside a nearly full moon at 9:16 p.m. EDT (0116 GMT on Oct. 3) as it launched the Cygnus NG-14 mission to the space station from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.

The craft is hauling 7,624 lbs. (3,458 kilograms) of cargo that includes scientific equipment, an experimental space toilet, food, hardware and other supplies for the Expedition 63/64 astronauts living and working on the space station.

The launch came after a series of delays due to weather this week and less than 24 hours after a launch abort late Thursday (Oct. 1) due to a ground support equipment issue.

Along with crew supplies and hardware, the launch today sent a number of exciting scientific investigations and equipment to the space station. One of the most anticipated items onboard is a new space toilet, formally known as the Universal Waste Management System. The astronauts on the space station will test the $23 million commode for future use on station and by future crews on missions to the moon.

The Cygnus is carrying a number of other investigations as well. For example, the radish-growing experiment Plant Habitat-02 aims to expand our knowledge of growing plants and food in space. With this experiment, researchers will test how the plants grow with different light and soil conditions. This "could help optimize growth of the plants in space as well as provide an assessment of their nutrition and taste," according to a NASA statement.

Another experiment will help scientists develop more effective and safer cancer treatments. While Testing cancer drugs in microgravity could help reveal treatments that "make good candidates for safer, more effective, and affordable medicines to treat leukemia and other cancers," NASA wrote in the same statement.

Another experiment will use a customized 360-degree camera that launched to the station in December 2018 to create an immersive virtual reality experience that will allow people to experience what life is really like inside the space station and even "outside" on spacewalks. And a different investigation will examine a unique process that could help astronauts on the space station to produce water and energy by converting the urea in human urine into ammonia.

Additionally, Estée Lauder will be launching not an experiment, but a skincare serum to the space station. There, astronauts will photograph the commercial product in the space station's cupola window. This endeavor is part of NASA's efforts to engage more with commercial activity in low Earth orbit. 

Launch delays and details

Tonight's launch was previously scheduled to take place Tuesday evening (Sept. 29), but the liftoff was delayed "due to poor weather conditions anticipated Tuesday and Wednesday," NASA wrote. An attempted launch on Thursday was aborted two minutes and 40 seconds before liftoff due to the ground support equipment glitch. Northrop Grumman engineers were able to identify and address the issue in time for tonight's successful launch.

The Cygnus is built by Virginia-based company Northrop Grumman, which, like SpaceX, holds a space station resupply contract with NASA. Northrop Grumman named this Cygnus spacecraft the S.S. Kalpana Chawla, paying homage to astronaut Kalpana Chawla who, along with six other astronauts, died in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle tragedy. Chawla also flew on Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator. She was the first woman of Indian origin to ever go to space.

NG-14 is the 14th launch for Cygnus and the spacecraft's 13th mission to the space station.

"As the 14th flight to the ISS, the Cygnus has been a workhorse for us in bringing cargo and removing cargo from the ISS ... it's brought up tens and tens of tons of metric tons of cargo. And it's key [in bringing] a lot of the research, crew supplies, critical spares that we need on ISS in order to continue operations," Dorth said. 

Docking with the space station

The Cygnus spacecraft will arrive at the space station on Sunday (Oct. 4). There, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, the expedition 63 commander, will grapple the craft with the station's robotic arm. Flight engineer and Roscosmos cosmonaut Ivan Vagner will act as a backup.

After capturing Cygnus, with help from mission control in Houston, the station's robotic arm will rotate and install the craft on the space station's unity module, where it will remain until mid-December before departing to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Long-term jobless caught in a squeeze that imperils recovery

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER and ALEXANDRA OLSON

FILE - In this Sept. 2, 2020, file photo, a shopper walks by one of several vacant retail spaces among the outlet shops in Freeport, Maine. The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.9% in September, but hiring is slowing and many Americans have given up looking for work, the government said Friday, Oct. 2, in the final jobs report before the voters decide whether to give President Donald Trump another term. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)


WASHINGTON (AP) — This spring, Magdalena Valiente was expecting her best year as a Florida-based concert promoter. Now, she wonders if the career she built over three decades is over.

Back in March, Valiente had been busy planning three tours and 42 live events, including concerts for the Panamanian reggaeton star Sech and the Miami Latin pop band Bacilos. Earning well into six figures during good years, Valiente was hoping to help her youngest son, a high school junior, pay his way through college.

But with live events canceled, things have turned bleak. She is relying on unemployment benefits and Medicaid and has applied for food stamps. She has lost hope that the crisis will end soon.

“I worked up from the very bottom when I started in this business in my twenties,” said Valiente, a single mother in Fort Lauderdale. “There weren’t many other women, and it was hard. It’s not easy to let it go.”

Millions of Americans in the industries hit hardest by the viral pandemic face a similar plight. Their unemployment has stretched from weeks into months, and it’s become painfully unclear when, if ever, their jobs will come back. In the entertainment field where Valiente worked and in other sectors that absorbed heavy job losses — from restaurants and hotels to energy, higher education and advertising — employment remains far below pre-pandemic levels.

These trends have raised the specter of a period of widespread long-term unemployment that could turn the viral recession into a more painful, extended downturn. People who have been jobless for six months or longer — one definition of long-term unemployment — typically suffer an erosion of skills and professional networks that makes it harder to find a new job. Many will need training or education to find work with a new company or in a new occupation, which can delay their re-entry into the job market.

On Friday, the government reported that employers added 661,000 jobs in September, normally a healthy gain. Yet it marked the third straight monthly slowdown in hiring. The nation has regained barely half the 22 million jobs that were lost to the pandemic and the widespread business shutdowns it caused in March and April.

In a worrisome trend, a rising proportion of job losses appear to be permanently gone. When the virus erupted in March and paralyzed the economy, nearly 90% of layoffs were considered temporary, and a quick rebound seemed possible. No longer. In September, the number of Americans classified as permanently laid off rose 12% to 3.8 million. And the number of long-term unemployed rose by 781,000 — the largest increase on record — to 2.4 million.

“We have a real chance of there being massive long-term unemployment,” said Till Von Wachter, an economics professor at UCLA.

The nation now has 7% fewer jobs than in February. Yet the damage is far deeper in some sectors. The performing arts and spectator sports category, which includes Valiente’s industry, has lost 47% of its jobs. It hasn’t added any net jobs since the coronavirus struck.

Hotels are down 35%, restaurants and bars 19%, transportation 18%. Advertising, one of the first expenses that companies cut in a downturn, is down 9%.

Higher education has lost 9% of its jobs. Many classes have been delayed or moved online, reducing the need for janitors, cafeteria workers and other administrators. Normally during recessions, the education sector adds jobs to accommodate people returning to school to seek marketable skills or education. Not this time.

Ashley Broshious took years to develop skills that now seem much less in demand. A manager and sommelier at a Charleston restaurant, Broshious is one of just six certified advanced sommeliers in South Carolina. Still, she was laid off in March. And when the restaurant owner reopened one of his two establishments, she wasn’t rehired.

Now, Broshious receives about $326 a week in unemployment benefits. That’s not nearly enough to pay the $2,400 monthly rent on her home, as well as student loans, car insurance and credit card debt from a trip to Hawaii she took while still working.

“When you spend your entire life building this career,” Broshious said, “it’s hard to start over.”

Some economists note hopefully that this recovery has progressed faster than many analysts expected and may keep doing so. Matthew Notowidigdo, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School, and three colleagues predicted in a research paper that the rapid recall of temporary workers will lower unemployment to 4.6% a year from now. That would suggest a much faster recovery than the previous recession.

Three-quarters of the temporarily laid off aren’t bothering to look for work, Notowidigdo said, based on an analysis of government data, apparently because they’re confident of being recalled. And while the number of job openings has declined by about 17% compared with a year earlier, according to Glassdoor, it remains far higher than during the Great Recession.

In July, the most recent month for which government data is available, there were 2.5 unemployed workers, on average, for each job opening. That’s much better than the six unemployed per job opening during the depths of the Great Recession.

“There are still a lot of people finding jobs fairly rapidly,” Notowidigdo said.

Still, more than one-third of workers who have been laid off or furloughed now regard their job loss as permanent, according to a survey by Morning Consult. That’s up from just 15% in April.

Some economists, like Sophia Koropeckyj of Moody’s Analytics, see rising cause for concern. Koropeckyj estimates that 5 million people will struggle to find work even after the virus has been controlled. Jobs likely won’t return to pre-pandemic levels until late in 2023, she said in a research note.

Even among some people who have managed to land new jobs, the pandemic recession has upended their financial lives.

Angela Grimley worked her way up through several Marriott Hotels in Philadelphia to become an event manager, only to have the recession kick her back down the ladder. After months of unemployment, Grimley, 38, found a part-time job answering customers’ calls and emails for the Pennsylvania General Store, which sells food and souvenirs found only in Pennsylvania.

She loves the work. And she feels fortunate that her boyfriend, whom she lives with, is still working. But before the pandemic Grimley had received a new job offer as a conference and event manager at a marketing company involved in healthy parenting products. The job would have paid much more and provided health and retirement benefits, which her part-time job doesn’t. But the offer vanished in the pandemic.

The damage to her finances “keeps me up at night,” Grimley said. Having had to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, she’s discovered that some of her doctors won’t accept her new insurance.

For Valiente, no concerts are scheduled until August 2021. Yet she’s no longer confident that the public will be ready even then for packed concerts of thousands of people.

At 52, she said, it’s hard to contemplate a career change.

“By the end of the year, if things look worse, I’ll have to come up with a plan B, but I don’t know what that will be in the music business,” Valiente said. “I don’t want to go into debt because I’m not young, and I don’t have another 30 years of working.”

___

Olson reported from New York.

Seismic search for oil in Atlantic Ocean looks dead for now

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Seismic exploration for oil and gas off the south Atlantic coast is unlikely to proceed this year because permits expire Nov. 30, federal officials and company representatives told a federal judge Thursday.

The testing shoots blasts of air, using the vibrations to map where oil and gas might be present below the ocean floor. Environmentalists sued in federal court in Charleston seeking to block the exploration because the work has been shown to harm marine animals like the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

President Donald Trump recently banned oil drilling off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, reversing previous support. But lawyers for the U.S. Department of Commerce and five interested companies had still sought to proceed with testing.

The Post and Courier of Charleston reports that the government said in a Thursday hearing there’s no way to extend the permits after they expire on Nov. 30, meaning they will be moot before the case can go to trial.

Industry groups said it was impossible to get boats in the water before that date.

U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel has not issued an order ending the litigation, but “as a practical matter, the case is over,” said Catherine Wannamaker, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“We’re excited about this,” she said. “It’s been a long battle for us and it’s a big victory for our waters and right whales,” she said.

A spokeswoman for industry group International Association of Geophysical Contractors declined to comment on the case, as did a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Services, which issued the permits at the center of the litigation.

There is nothing stopping the exploration companies from re-applying for permits to search in the new year.

Two types of permits are required to conduct the work. The permits at the center of the case were called Incidental Harassment Authorizations, or basically, permission to disturb sea life during seismic work.

“Since these companies can apply again, we need a more permanent, long-term ban on offshore drilling and seismic testing at the federal level,” said Alan Hancock of the Coastal Conservation League.

cal Survey May Have Found Secret Chambers In King Tut’s Tomb

David Bressan Contributor
Science
I deal with the rocky road to our modern understanding of earth


View of the bust of one of history's great beauties, Queen Nefertiti of Egypt, hosted today Berlin's ... [+] DDP/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The Valley of the Kings is a valley in Egypt where, for a period of nearly 500 years from the 16th to 11th century BCE, rock-cut tombs were excavated for the pharaohs and powerful nobles of the New Kingdom. In 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter was searching here for the tomb of Tutankhamen, a relatively minor pharaoh who ruled over Egypt from 1332 to 1323 BCE. On November 4, 1922, a boy accidentally stumbled on a stone that turned out to be the top of a flight of steps cut into the bedrock. One month later, Carter entered the pharaoh's tomb.

Asked if he could see anything in the darkness of the burial chamber, to which Carter responded "yes, wonderful things."

Tutankhamon died unexpectedly aged just 19, and archaeologists long suspected that the tomb wasn't built primarily for him, but was a collective tomb used by his family.

In 2015, egyptologist Nicholas Reeves noted on high-resolution images of the tomb's interior some straight lines and cracks in the painted walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, which he suggested could indicate the presence of hidden doorways to hidden chambers beyond. He speculated that the tomb could host the mortal - and lost - remains of Queen Nefertiti, among the wives of Tutankhamun's father, and celebrated for her beauty as shown by the famous 3,300-year-old bust.

Using Ground Penetrating Radar (or GPR), Japanese researcher Hirokatsu Watanable found two anomalies in the bedrock behind the tomb walls, interpreted as cavities filled with metallic and organic objects. However, a similar survey done by American geophysicist Dean Goodman in March 2016 didn't confirm the previous anomalies. Goodman excluded the presence of any anomalies or cavities in the solid bedrock.

In 2018, a third survey, this time by an Italian research team, found no evidence of marked discontinuities due to the passage from natural rock to artificial blocking walls in the tomb, concluding that there are no hidden chambers immediately adjacent to the tomb of Tutankhamun. However, the study couldn't exclude larger chambers or passages in the broader area around the tomb.

The most recent survey, done in 2019, mapped not only the inner burial chamber, but also a wider area around the tomb. The team combined three different geophysical survey methods to get a three-dimensional map of the bedrock. Magnetometry and electrical resistivity imaging measure the bedrock's magnetic and electric properties, with voids appearing as missing data, and GPR sends electric signals into the underground, reflected by pockets of air or disturbed soil layers.

Surprisingly enough, the team noted a quite large anomaly in the data, believed to be a corridor-like space almost 6 feet high and 30 feet long running parallel to the tomb's entrance gallery. However, electromagnetic interference by a ventilation system installed in the tomb prevents to follow the alleged corridor into the mountain using geophysical suvey methods. The breath and sweat of almost 1,000 people a day visiting the tomb caused mold to grow on the walls. To prevent any further damage in January 2019 a modern ventilation system was installed.

Results of the 2019 geophysical surveys showing the large cavity of the tomb KV 62 (Tutankhamun’s ... [+] PORCELLI ET AL. 2020

Only an archaeological dig could give us certainty at this point. Leading Egyptian archaeologists remain skeptical of the claims. Already in the past, they noted, geophysical surveys showed voids where none were found during later archaeological excavations. Natural occurring discontinuities in the bedrock, like joints or mineral veins, can result in "ghost signals" resembling artificial structures.

Many egyptologists also exclude that Nefertiti, married to the pharao Echnaton, is buried here. Echnaton tried to replace the divine pantheon worshipped by ancient Egyptians with one single Sun-God, openly opposing the powerful priesthood ruling the ancient city of Thebes. Thebes, controlling the access to the Valley of the Kings during the New Kingdom, would not allow a burial of a relative of the heretic pharao there, so the experts. If Nefertiti's tomb still exists, it may be hidden somewhere far away from Thebes and the Valley of the Kings.