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China’s Space Ambitions Are Fueling Competition and Collaboration

2022-10-31T15:00:00.001+05:30

China’s Space Ambitions Are Fueling Competition and Collaboration

At 3:37 a.m. ET on Monday, China launched the last key component of its space station, the latest step in the country’s efforts to become a leading space power.

The Mengtian (“dreaming of the heavens”) lab module, onboard a carrier rocket, blasted off the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the island of Hainan. It is expected to dock at the Tiangong (“heavenly palace”) Space Station within several hours.

Designed to carry out microgravity and low-earth orbit experiments, Mengtian will be China’s second addition to Tiangong this year, following the July deployment of Wentian (“quest for the heavens”), a laboratory module equipped for biological research.
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Completing the key structures of Tiangong is, in itself, a feat, considering its first core module was sent to low-earth orbit only in April last year. Tiangong makes China only the third country in the world apart from the U.S. and Russia to send up astronauts and build a space station.

China still has many other extraterrestrial ambitions in the pipeline. Within the next decade, it plans to build a base at the moon’s southern tip and from there deploy a telescope with 300 times the field of view of the Hubble. It also intends to collect samples from Mars, among other aims. Some of these developments are scheduled to take place earlier than similar deadlines set by NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA).

It’s this steady progress of the Chinese space program that worries U.S. politicians and senior military officials. Some believe the U.S. is falling behind in the new “space race”—echoing rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War—with the moon as the finish line once again. The U.S., in a rush to build its own lunar base, is already attempting to test rockets for roundtrip moonflights.

Tiangong will not compete with the 16-module International Space Station (ISS), China says, having at most six modules based on earlier plans. But with the ISS retiring after 2030, unless private U.S. companies like SpaceX and Tesla replace it with their own stations, the Tiangong will be the only space station orbiting Earth. The Tiangong may have even forced the U.S.’s decision last year to delay the decommissioning of the ISS, which was originally scheduled for 2024, says Quentin Parker of the University of Hong Kong’s Laboratory for Space Research.

“Competition is good,” Parker tells TIME. “It helps you train, helps you improve performance, brings down costs and gets new developments more rapidly.”

China-U.S. competition in space

As competition grows, China and the U.S. are accusing each other of militarizing outer space. The Chinese space program’s opaque ties to the People’s Liberation Army fuels Washington’s concerns over using civilian facilities for surveillance and intelligence, even though NASA has a history of working with U.S. defense agencies. Citing security issues, the U.S. in 2011 passed a law barring China from joining the ISS and requiring FBI approval for any space information exchange with the country. Most recently, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson accused China of planning to colonize the moon, stealing tech and using the Tiangong to study how to destroy other satellites, a claim China has vehemently denied.

Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut who was in the ISS from 2004 to 2005, laments how the U.S. refuses to collaborate with China in space, when Russia, its space rival since the Cold War and a perennial security threat to Washington, can still shuttle astronauts to the ISS.

“You can’t tell me the Russians aren’t trying to spy on the U.S. and vice versa,” he tells TIME. “But we’ve had a very successful collaboration on the International Space Station because nothing we do with the ISS has any military value.” Russia, however, plans to defect from the ISS consortium by 2024.

In its January white paper, China emphasized “peaceful collaboration” with international partners in space science and governance. Still, some worry that working with China would abet its military. A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies report argues that Beijing can use data collected from ground stations in South America—a key part of China’s space infrastructure—for surveillance. On the other hand, the ESA and China have been exchanging data collected from European and Chinese satellites to advance earth science research since 2004. Karl Bergquist, ESA Administrator for the International Relations Department, says the agency does not see why “it should not work” with China as the data exchanged is not for military use but for science.

“The more data our scientists have that they can work on, the better it will be for us all,” Bergquist tells TIME.

Read More: China’s New Space Station Has a Big Role to Play—Scientifically and Diplomatically

For its part, China doesn’t want to close its space station doors—Tiangong is open to all U.N. member states. The ESA has even planned for its astronauts to board the Tiangong, though this has been stalled pending further discussion with Beijing. One of the station’s designers told state media that Tiangong is “inclusive” and designed to be adaptable for non-Chinese astronauts. And at least 1,000 scientific experiments will be conducted in the station, Nature reports, mostly involving Chinese researchers but also including projects led by researchers from 17 other countries and regions like Kenya, Russia, Mexico, Japan and Peru, some of which are struggling to support their own space initiatives.

While the U.S. is decades of operational experience ahead of the Chinese space program, China’s willingness to partner with other countries may be cementing its place as a space power today. Since 2016, China has made 46 space cooperation agreements with 19 different countries and regions.

“I don’t believe [China] wants to be confrontational,” Parker tells TIME. “I think they want people to like them; I think they want to be trusted.”

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TIME
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How Global Leaders Are Reacting to the News of Lula’s Election Victory in Brazil

2022-10-31T11:00:00.001+05:30

How Global Leaders Are Reacting to the News of Lula’s Election Victory in Brazil

Leaders around the world have congratulated Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won by a whisker in the South American country’s runoff polls Sunday.

Lula—as the 77-year-old former president and veteran leftist is known—edged out far-right populist incumbent Jair Bolsonaro after garnering 50.9% of the votes compared to Bolsonaro’s 49.1%. His victory marks an impressive political comeback since leaving office in 2010 and being jailed in 2017 after what he claims was a politically motivated probe into public corruption. Brazil’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction last year, allowing him to run in this year’s election.
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“They tried to bury me alive and I’m here,” Lula said in a speech Sunday night. He said he wants to focus on uniting the 215 million Brazilian people across toxic political divisions. “There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people—a great nation.”

As news of the result reverberated around the globe, political leaders commended the Brazilian president-elect and affirmed the power of democracy.

U.S. President Joe Biden congratulated Lula for his victory in Brazil’s “free, fair and credible elections,” saying in a White House statement that he looked forward to cooperation between the two countries.

On Twitter, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also extended his congratulations to the Brazilian people “for exercising their right to vote and reaffirming the strength of their democracy.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he hopes to work with Lula to advance shared interests, including protecting the environment. Bolsonaro’s time as president saw devastating relaxations in ecological safeguards, and Lula has promised a policy overhaul geared towards preserving the Amazon rainforest and ushering in a green economy for Brazil.

Across the Atlantic, French President Emmanuel Macron said Lula’s win “opens a new page” in Brazil’s history. “Together we will join forces to address the many common challenges and renew the bond of friendship between our two countries,” he tweeted.

Josep Borell Fontelles, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, commended the “peaceful and well-organized election.” Fontelles said he hopes to advance EU-Brazil relations under Lula.

Closer to home, Argentina President Alberto Fernandez celebrated “a new era” for Latin America’s history with Lula’s win. “A time of hope and future that begins today,” Fernandez tweeted. “Here you have a partner to work with and dream big about the good life of our peoples.”

Chilean leftist president Gabriel Boric, who was elected last year, tweeted simply: “Lula. Joy!”

Another Latin American leftist, Colombia’s recently-elected President Gustavo Petro, also kept his post-election message short: “Viva Lula.”

Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro tweeted “a big hug” to Lula, adding, “Long live the peoples determined to be free, sovereign and independent! Today in Brazil democracy triumphed.”

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador tweeted: “Lula won. The people of Brazil are blessed. There will be equality and humanity.”

Ganó Lula, bendito pueblo de Brasil. Habrá igualdad y humanismo. pic.twitter.com/2nCg5yo5UD

— Andrés Manuel (@lopezobrador_) October 30, 2022

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wished Lula success in advancing collaboration between the two nations, adding that his win will “encourage democrats everywhere” and “give new hope for the Amazonian and global environment.”

Lula’s inauguration is scheduled for January 1.

Bolsonaro, 67, a former army captain, has previously made baseless claims of widespread election fraud, raising fears that he will not accept the results. He has so far remained silent over Lula’s win.

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How Lula Won the Most Crucial Election in Brazil for Decades

2022-10-31T07:00:00.001+05:30

How Lula Won the Most Crucial Election in Brazil for Decades

It’s the comeback of the century. At national elections on Sunday, Brazilian voters delivered a narrow victory for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a beloved but controversial leftist former president. With more than 99% of votes counted, the former union leader took 50.86% against 49.14% for Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent.

The result should mark an end to a bruising and deeply polarizing election year. Instead, it plunges this country of 200 million people into a tense wait to see how Bolsonaro will respond. The president, a former army captain, has spent the past year indicating that he would not accept a loss at these elections. His campaign and his supporters have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that Brazil’s electronic voting system is vulnerable to fraud—in a widely-remarked echo of former U.S. president Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the run-up to the 2020 election. The narrow margin of victory for Lula has intensified long-held fears that Bolsonaro’s supporters will stage their own version of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
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But if authorities manage to see off an institutional crisis, Lula—as the president-elect is universally known—will return to Brasilía’s Planalto Palace in January, after a tumultuous four years of Bolsonaro’s government.

Who is Lula?

Lula has been a household name in Brazil for around three decades. After serving as the head of a steel-workers union in São Paulo in the 1970s, Lula helped to establish the leftist Worker’s Party, and won his first presidential election in 2002. His two terms in office were boom times for Brazil: a surge in the value of Brazilian commodities and rising exports to China powered rapid economic growth. The windfall helped to fund a major expansion of social programs, including Bolsa Família—which provided direct cash transfers to low-income families in exchange for ensuring children’s attendance in school—cementing Lula’s popularity with poorer Brazilians. He left office in 2010 with an 83% approval rating.

Lula’s reputation later took a severe hit, though. In 2017, federal prosecutors implicated the former president in their investigation of a vast corruption scheme that they said had taken root during his administration. Lula was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison for accepting a luxury apartment as a bribe—a charge he has always dismissed as a politically-motivated attack. (The judge who convicted him would later go on to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister.) In 2021, Brazil’s Supreme Court overruled Lula’s conviction, saying his right to a fair trial had been compromised—a ruling later agreed with by the U.N.’s human rights council—clearing him to run for re-election against Bolsonaro in 2022. But Brazilians remain deeply divided over Lula’s guilt or innocence: according to a September poll, 44% of voters still believe Lula was rightfully convicted, while 40% believe his conviction was unjust.

Daniel Munoz—VIEWpress/Corbis/Getty ImagesSupporters of former president of Brazil and presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attend his final rally before the election on Oct. 29, 2022 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

How did Lula win?

Bolsonaro’s approach to COVID-19, combined with his attacks on Brazil’s democracy, allowed the former president to command a broad unity coalition against him, including his former political rivals. Geraldo Alckmin, a center-right former São Paulo Governor who was Lula’s rival in the 2006 election, will be his Vice President.

Lula pledged to “rebuild Brazil”—that is, restore public services battered by years of underinvestment, use Brazil’s fossil fuel resources to lower domestic energy prices and battle inflation, and help the millions of Brazilians struggling with food insecurity.

Critics say Lula’s campaign relied largely on nostalgia, and that the former president has refused to share details of the economic plan that will underpin his vision for Brazil. “I am the only candidate with whom people should not be concerned about [economic policy],” he told TIME in March 2022. “Because I’ve been a President twice already. We don’t discuss economic policies before winning the elections. First, you have to win the elections.”

Lula’s next government will face a much more challenging economic landscape than his first one did in the early 2000s. Brazil has been staggering from economic crisis to economic crisis for eight years. Now, global economic turmoil from the war in Ukraine is driving up energy prices, while a years-long drought is curbing production in the crucial agricultural sector.

Mauro Pimentel—AFP/Getty ImagesBrazilian President and re-election candidate Jair Bolsonaro arrives to vote at a polling station in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Oct. 30, 2022, during the presidential run-off election.

Bye bye, Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro has had a transformative impact on Brazil since his election in 2018. The president has burned bridges with many of Brazil’s foreign allies: he clashed with E.U. leaders, for example, over his refusal to protect the Amazon rainforest. Bolsonaro scrapped enforcement of laws designed to protect the forest and Indigenous peoples, and ended projects involving international cooperation. The resulting surge in deforestation rates—a 60% increase in the first three years of Bolsonaro’s presidency—has been a major blow to global efforts to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to fight climate change.

In Brazil, the president may be most remembered for his response to COVID-19: Bolsonaro trivialized the disease as a “little flu,” encouraged Brazilians not to follow state-level social distancing rules, rejected vaccine manufacturers’ early offers to supply the country, and claimed, against scientific evidence, that the shots were unsafe. Bolsonaro’s critics say he is to blame for Brazil’s staggering pandemic death toll. To date, there have been almost 700,000 recorded COVID-19 deaths in Brazil, even higher than the U.S.’ toll on a per capita basis.

Mauro Pimental—AFP/Getty Images Supporters of Brazilian former President and candidate for the leftist Workers Party Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva celebrate while watching the vote count of the presidential run-off election at Largo Sao Francisco da Prainha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Oct. 30, 2022.

Return to a world in crisis

Many world leaders will likely welcome Lula’s return. During his first term, Lula played an influential role in global politics, often serving as a broker between western governments and their rivals. That may prove helpful in an era where diplomatic efforts to establish international cooperation on the climate crisis are increasingly urgent. The president-elect has vowed to bring deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon under control, which would do much to heal Brazil’s frayed relationship with the E.U.

But Lula may not be a straightforward ally for Western leaders when it comes to the major foreign policy challenge of the day: the war in Ukraine. In an interview with TIME in March, the leftist leader criticized both U.S. president Joe Biden and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky for failing to negotiate with Russia’s Vladimir Putin before war broke out.

“The United States has a lot of political clout. And Biden could have avoided [the war], not incited it,” he said. “He could have participated more. Biden could have taken a plane to Moscow to talk to Putin. This is the kind of attitude you expect from a leader.”

Lula also told TIME that the international community’s celebration of Zelensky since the war began has been a mistake, calling for a greater focus on behind-the-scenes negotiations. “You are encouraging this guy, and then he thinks he is the cherry on your cake. We should be having a serious conversation. OK, you were a nice comedian. But let us not make war for you to show up on TV.”

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Lula Narrowly Wins Brazil’s High-Stakes Election, Ending Bolsonaro’s Far-Right Presidency

2022-10-31T05:00:00.001+05:30

Lula Narrowly Wins Brazil’s High-Stakes Election, Ending Bolsonaro’s Far-Right Presidency

Brazilian voters narrowly decided against a second term for far-right president Jair Bolsonaro at national elections on Oct. 30, opting instead for the return of leftwing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took 50.82% of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 49.18% with more than 98% of votes counted.

The result is a stunning political comeback for Lula—as the 77-year-old president-elect is universally known. Lula left office in 2010 with an 83% approval rating, after overseeing an economic boom and a jump in living standards for poorer Brazilians. But in 2017, federal prosecutors implicated Lula in a vast corruption scheme and sent him to prison on charges of accepting a bribe. He, and Brazil’s left, have always denied the allegations and in 2021 Brazil’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction, ruling that his right to a fair trial had been compromised. That cleared him to run for president again this year.
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The race was Brazil’s closest-run in three decades. Voters faced a stark ideological choice between Lula, a progressive leftist, and Bolsonaro, a deeply conservative populist who promised to defend Christian values in Brazil. Bolsonaro becomes the first incumbent to lose a re-election bid in Brazil since the 1990s.

Bolsonaro, a 67 year-old former army captain, has captured international attention over the last four years for his dismantling of protections for the Amazon rainforest, his fierce opposition to COVID-19 vaccines and social distancing, and a series of offensive statements about women and minorities. In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s presidency has been marked by a wide-ranging relaxation of gun laws, an expansion of police powers, a crusade against so-called “gender ideology,” and a series of scandals involving norm-breaking abuses of power.

Joao Laet—Getty ImagesSupporters of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Workers’ Party cheer for their candidate during vote count in Largo Da Prainha area on presidential runoff day on Oct. 30, 2022 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In a campaign centered heavily on nostalgia for his first presidency, Lula pledged to “rebuild” Brazil by restoring public services, addressing inequality, and bringing down energy prices and inflation. He has shared few details about how he plans to do that amid challenging economic conditions in Brazil and around the world.

A tense time

Lula’s return to Brazil’s presidential palace is unlikely to run smoothly. President Bolsonaro has spent the past year warning of the risks of voter fraud in Brazil’s internationally-respected electronic voting system, without providing evidence. Many have heard clear echoes of former U.S. president Donald Trump’s behavior in the run-up to the 2020 election. He has repeatedly implied that he will not accept a result that shows him losing, proclaiming at a rally in 2021: “Only God can remove me from office.”

Bolsonaro, an avowed supporter of Brazil’s 20th century military dictatorship, has also tried to get Brazil’s military onside for a potential campaign to overturn the election. He has established deep ties between his government and the institution, appointing active generals to key ministries and Walter Souza Braga Netto, a reserve army general, as his 2022 running mate. Under pressure from the president, Brazil’s defense department agreed to conduct an audit of voting machines during the first round of elections in September. Brazilian newspapers reported that the audit had shown no evidence of irregularities, and that Bolsonaro declined to authorize its publication.

Analysts say military leaders are unlikely to lend their support to an actual coup attempt by Bolsonaro. But election day was marred by what many political commentators saw as a coordinated attempt at voter suppression. Residents of towns around the country—predominantly in Lula strongholds in the north and northeast of the country—shared footage on social media of Brazil’s federal highway police manning road blocks, while newspapers reported an unusually high number of traffic stops on buses, disrupting travel to polling stations. The highway police’s director general Silviney Vasquez has publicly endorsed Bolsonaro and the institution is seen as a bastion of support for the president. Alexandre de Moraes, the head of Brazil’s electoral court, ordered Vasquez to end the operations but claimed they had only delayed and not prevented voting.

Many fear Bolsonaro’s civilian supporters will stage a version of the U.S.’ Jan. 6 insurrection in the coming days. Social media watchdogs say that platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook—all widely used in Brazil—have been awash with disinformation and conspiracy theories in the run-up to the vote, claiming that leftists planned to steal the election, and would install a Communist dictatorship in Brazil if they succeeded.

Tensions are running high in Brazil. The two months before the first round were marked by a spike in political violence, with 121 politically-motivated attacks recorded, including 54 murders, according to a report by two human rights focused NGOs. Adding to fears of further violence is Bolsonaro’s flagship policy of cutting restrictions on firearms in Brazil, which has seen the number of guns in private hands double to nearly 2 million since 2018.

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There’s One Thing You Can Do to Help Stop America’s Holiday Butter Shortage

2022-10-30T21:00:00.001+05:30

There’s One Thing You Can Do to Help Stop America’s Holiday Butter Shortage

As the holiday baking season approaches, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and some suppliers are warning that stocks are lower than normal—prompting concerns about a possible butter shortage.

The amount of butter in cold storage is the lowest in at least four years, and 18% lower than last year.

And prices are rising fast, too. Overall food prices are up more than 11% in September over a year ago, but the cost of butter is rising far faster, up 26.6% year-over-year.
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However, industry groups say there’s enough cream to go around, and butter churners have increased capacity to meet the demand—ensuring that there will be enough for everybody’s holiday cookies and pies.

“I think it’s unlikely [we’ll have a butter shortage] and certainly, we’ve been down this road before where we’ve had tight supplies of a variety of products in the dairy category,” said Matt Herrick, Senior Vice President and spokesperson at the International Dairy Foods Association, a group representing the nation’s dairy manufacturing and marketing industry. “This is not unusual.”

But there’s one thing that could make butter hard to find—and it’s something consumers have in their power to stop. Herrick warns consumers to not hoard butter in anticipation of a butter shortage, lest it become a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” similar to the toilet paper shortage at the beginning of the pandemic.

What’s causing the possible butter shortage?

Concerns over butter supplies are tied to milk production setbacks earlier this year. The American dairy industry is notorious for its oversupply of milk. This year, however, milk production through June was slightly lower than the year prior, according to USDA data. Herrick says that the war in Ukraine’s effect on energy costs and supply chain issues, in addition to higher cow feed and labor costs, have put greater pressure on the dairy industry.

Typically, the oversupply of milk goes towards churning butter. But since milk production was lower than normal during the early months of the year, there was less milk available to make butter.

However, the USDA says butter production is increasing going into the holidays, and farmers are working to catch up, too. Milk production in September rose to 17.5 billion pounds, up 1.6% from a year earlier. And the availability of cream, which is used to make butter, is increasing across the country as butter makers are working diligently to keep up with demand and prepare for the winter.

“The media is reporting that there’s a butter shortage,” says Herrick. But in reality, stocks are just tight. “When folks go to the grocery store, we’re not seeing that they don’t have butter,” he says. “We’re seeing that the prices are up.”

And while butter prices have skyrocketed this year, they are expected to fall in the coming months, says Peter Vitaliano, chief economist for the National Milk Producers Federation, an industry group that represents dairy farmers and their cooperatives. CME group cash settlement prices, which are the expected market value of a commodity, shows that the cost of butter is predicted to decrease to 299 and again to 260 by December. “A price decline of that magnitude indicates that the supply and demand are going to be coming more closely back into balance even in the next month or so,” he says.

What should you expect?

Despite higher-than-usual demand and tight supply for butter, experts tell TIME that they expect butter to remain in stock at stores through the holidays. That is, unless people start panic-buying.

Unfortunately, prices are going to remain higher for the next several weeks. “Whatever [the] shortage situation is going to be, we’re pretty much at the peak of it now,” Vitaliano says. “It’s going to be easing as we go through the end of this year and into the new year.”

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Brazil’s Polarizing Bolsonaro-Lula Election Goes to Voters

2022-10-30T20:00:00.003+05:30

Brazil’s Polarizing Bolsonaro-Lula Election Goes to Voters

(RIO DE JANEIRO) — Brazilians began voting Sunday morning in a polarizing presidential runoff election that pits an incumbent vowing to safeguard conservative Christian values against a former president promising to return the country to a more prosperous past.

The runoff shaped up as a close contest between President Jair Bolsonaro and his political nemesis, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Both are well-known, divisive political figures who stir passion as much as loathing.

The vote will determine if the world’s fourth-largest democracy stays the same course of far-right politics or returns a leftist to the top job — and, in the latter case, whether Bolsonaro will accept defeat.
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Bolsonaro was first in line to cast his vote at a military complex in Rio de Janeiro. He sported the green and yellow colors of the Brazilian flag that always feature at his rallies.

“I’m expecting our victory, for the good of Brazil,” he told reporters afterward. “God willing, Brazil will be victorious today.”

Voting stations in the capital, Brasilia, were already crowded by morning and, at one of them, retired public servant Luiz Carlos Gomes said he would vote for da Silva.

“He’s the best for the poor, especially in the countryside,” said Gomes, 65, who hails from Maranhao state in the poor northeast region. “We were always starving before him.”

More than 120 million Brazilians are expected to cast ballots, and because the vote is conducted electronically, the final result is usually available within hours after voting stations close in late afternoon. Most opinion polls gave a lead to da Silva, universally known as Lula, though political analysts agreed the race grew increasingly tight in recent weeks.

For months, it appeared that da Silva was headed for easy victory as he kindled nostalgia for his 2003-2010 presidency, when Brazil’s economy was booming and welfare helped tens of millions join the middle class.

But in the Oct. 2 first-round elections, da Silva finished first among the 11 candidates with 48% of the votes, while Bolsonaro was second at 43%, showing opinion polls significantly underestimated the president’s popularity. Many Brazilians support Bolsonaro’s defense of conservative social values and he has shored up support with vast government spending.

Candidates in Brazil who finish ahead in the first round tend to win the runoff. But political scientist Rodrigo Prando said this campaign is so atypical that a Bolsonaro win could not be ruled out. The president secured endorsements from governors of the three most populous states, and allied politicians scored big wins in congressional races.

“Politically, Bolsonaro is stronger than had been imagined,” said Prando, a professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo. “Mathematically, Lula is in front.”

Twelve gubernatorial races will also be decided, among them Brazil’s most populous state, Sao Paulo, Amazonas state and northeastern Bahia state.

More than 150 million Brazilians are eligible to vote, yet about 20% of the electorate abstained in the first round. Both da Silva and Bolsonaro have focused efforts on driving turnout. The Supreme Court has issued a ruling enabling state capitals to provide free public transport on election day, and the electoral authority prohibited any federal highway police operations affecting voters’ passage on public transport.

The candidates presented few proposals for the country’s future beyond affirming they will continue a big welfare program for the poor, despite very limited fiscal room going forward. They railed against one another and launched online smear campaigns — with considerably more attacks coming from Bolsonaro’s camp.

His four years in office have been marked by proclaimed conservatism and defense of traditional Christian values. He claimed without any evidence that da Silva’s return to power would usher in communism, legalized drugs, abortion and the persecution of churches.

“I’m voting for Bolsonaro because I believe in his project, and I believe in the beloved nation Brazil, which is what he supports: family, God and country,” said Helena Alves, 53, a retiree in Brasilia. “He had very little time to govern becaue there were two years of the pandemic.”

Da Silva homed in on Bolsonaro’s widely criticized handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and said the president failed to care for society’s neediest members. And he painted Bolsonaro as an opponent of the Amazon rainforest, given that he defanged environmental authorities and presided over a surge in deforestation.

In campaign videos, da Silva also took aim at Bolsonaro for being behind a policy directing billions to lawmakers for pet projects in exchange for political support. It is referred to as the “secret budget,” due to a lack of transparency around the money’s final uses, and da Silva said it depleted funds for key social spending.

But for many, the record of da Silva’s Workers’ Party is equally off-putting. A sprawling investigation revealed the party’s involvement in vast corruption scandals that ensnared top politicians and executives.

Da Silva himself was imprisoned for 19 months for corruption and money laundering. The Supreme Court annulled his convictions in 2019, on the grounds that the judge was biased and colluded with prosecutors. That did not stop Bolsonaro from reminding voters of the convictions. Da Silva’s potential election would be like letting a thief return to the scene of the crime, the president warned.

The president’s tremendous digital mobilization was on display in recent days as his campaign introduced fresh — and unproven — claims of possible electoral manipulation. That revived fears that Bolsonaro could challenge election results should he lose — much like former U.S. President Donald Trump, whom he admires.

For months, he claimed that the nation’s electronic voting machines are prone to fraud, though he never presented evidence, even after the electoral authority set a deadline for him to do so.

More recently, allegations focused on airtime for political ads. Bolsonaro’s campaign claimed that radio stations failed to air more than 150,000 electoral spots and implied that might have resulted from an intentionally malicious effort to hurt his candidacy. The electoral authority declined to open an investigation, citing lack of evidence.

“We don’t know whether this result will be contested or not, and to what extent,” said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo. “It’s a very tough second round and a very tense Sunday, and tensions may continue beyond today.”

___

Bridi reported from Brasilia.

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South Korea Grieves as 153 Die in Halloween Crowd Surge

2022-10-30T20:00:00.001+05:30

South Korea Grieves as 153 Die in Halloween Crowd Surge

(SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA) — Concerned relatives raced to hospitals in search of their loved ones Sunday as South Korea mourned the deaths of more than 150 people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who got trapped and crushed after a huge Halloween party crowd surged into a narrow alley in a nightlife district in Seoul.

Witnesses said the crowd surge Saturday night in the Itaewon area caused “a hell-like” chaos as people fell on each other “like dominoes.” Some people were bleeding from their noses and mouths while being given CPR, witnesses said, while others clad in Halloween costumes continued to sing and dance nearby, possibly without knowing the severity of the situation.
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“I still can’t believe what has happened. It was like a hell,” said Kim Mi Sung, an official at a nonprofit organization that promotes tourism in Itaewon.

Kim said she performed CPR on 10 people who were unconscious and nine of them were declared dead on the spot. Kim said the 10 were mostly women wearing witch outfits and other Halloween costumes.

The crowd surge is the country’s worst disaster in years. As of Sunday evening, officials put the death toll at 153 and the number of injured people at 133. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety said the death count could further rise as 37 of the injured people were in serious conditions.

Ninety-seven of the dead were women and 56 were men. More than 80% of the dead are in their 20s and 30s, but at least four were teenagers.

At least 20 of the dead are foreigners from China, Russia, Iran and elsewhere. There is one American among the dead, the Interior Ministry said in a release.

An estimated 100,000 people had gathered in Itaewon for the country’s biggest outdoor Halloween festivities since the pandemic began. The South Korean government had eased COVID-19 restrictions in recent months.

Witnesses said the streets were so densely clogged with people and slow-moving vehicles that it was practically impossible for emergency workers and ambulances to reach the alley near Hamilton Hotel swiftly.

Authorities said thousands of people have called or visited a nearby city office, reporting missing relatives and asking officials to confirm whether they were among those injured or dead after the crush.

The bodies of the dead were being kept at 42 hospitals in Seoul and nearby Gyeonggi province, according to Seoul City, which said it will instruct crematories to burn more bodies per day as part of plans to support funeral proceedings.

Around 100 businesses in the Hamilton Hotel area have agreed to shut down their shops through Monday to reduce the number of partygoers who would come to the streets through Halloween day.

While Halloween isn’t a traditional holiday in South Korea — where children rarely go trick-or-treating — it’s still a major attraction for young adults, and costume parties at bars and clubs have become hugely popular in recent years.

Itaewon, near where the former headquarters of U.S. military forces in South Korea operated for decades before moving out of the capital in 2018, is an expat-friendly district known for its trendy bars, clubs and restaurants. It’s the city’s marquee Halloween destination.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a one-week national mourning period on Sunday and ordered flags at government buildings and public offices to fly at half-staff. During a televised speech, Yoon said supporting the families of the victims, including their funeral preparations, and the treatment of the injured would be a top priority for his government.

He also called for officials to thoroughly investigate the cause of the accident and review the safety of other large cultural and entertainment events to ensure they proceed safely.

“This is really devastating. The tragedy and disaster that need not have happened took place in the heart of Seoul amid Halloween (celebrations),” Yoon said during the speech. “I feel heavy hearted and cannot contain my sadness as a president responsible for the people’s lives and safety.”

After the speech, Yoon visited the Itaewon alley where the disaster occurred. Local TV footage showed Yoon inspecting the alley filled with trash and being briefed by emergency officials.

It was not immediately clear what led the crowd to surge into the narrow, downhill alley. One survivor said many people fell and toppled one another “like dominoes” after they were pushed by others.

The survivor, surnamed Kim, said they were trapped for about an hour and a half before being rescued, as some people shouted “Help me!” and others were short of breath, according to the Seoul-based Hankyoreh newspaper.

Another survivor, Lee Chang-kyu, said he saw about five or six men push others before one or two began falling, according to the newspaper.

In an interview with news channel YTN, Hwang Min-hyeok, a visitor to Itaewon, said it was shocking to see rows of bodies near the hotel. He said emergency workers were initially overwhelmed, leaving pedestrians struggling to administer CPR to the injured lying on the streets. People wailed beside the bodies of their friends, he said.

A man in his 20s said he avoided being trampled by managing to get into a bar whose door was open in the alley, Yonhap news agency reported. A woman in her 20s surnamed Park told Yonhap that she and others were standing along the side of the alley while others caught in the middle of the alley had no escape.

Choi Seong-beom, chief of Seoul’s Yongsan fire department, said that bodies were being sent to hospitals or a gym, where bereaved family members could identify them.

World leaders offered condolences, including Pope Francis.

“We pray the Risen Lord also for those — especially young people — who died last night in Seoul, due to the tragic consequences of a sudden crush,” Francis said after his Sunday’s Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square, inviting the crowd to pray for the victims.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tweeted that “All our thoughts are with those currently responding and all South Koreans at this very distressing time.” Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, tweeted that reports of the disaster were “heartbreaking” and said Washington “stands ready to provide the Republic of Korea with any support it needs.”

Among the 20 foreign dead are four from China; three from Russia; two from Iran; and one each from Vietnam, Austria, Norway, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka and the United States. The Interior Ministry said it wasn’t informed of the nationalities of the four other foreigners.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry said two of its nationals were among the dead, while the French Foreign Ministry said one French national also died during the Itaewon tragedy.

The last South Korean disaster this deadly also hit young people the hardest. In April 2014, 304 people, mostly high school students, died in a ferry sinking. The sinking exposed lax safety rules and regulatory failures. It was partially blamed on excessive and poorly fastened cargo and a crew poorly trained for emergency situations.

Saturday’s deaths will likely draw public scrutiny of what government officials have done to improve public safety standards since the ferry disaster.

This was the deadliest crushing disaster in South Korean history. In 2005, 11 people were killed and around 60 others were injured at a pop concert in the southern city of Sangju.

In 1960, 31 people died after being crushed on the stairs of a train station as large crowds rushed to board a train during the Lunar New Year holidays.

It was also Asia’s second major crushing disaster in a month. On Oct. 1, police in Indonesia fired tear gas at a soccer match, causing a crush that killed 132 people as spectators attempted to flee.

More than 1,700 response personnel from across the country were deployed to the streets to help the wounded, including about 520 firefighters, 1,100 police officers and 70 government workers. The National Fire Agency separately said in a statement that officials were still trying to determine the exact number of emergency patients.

___

Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Giada Zampano in Rome and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

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Robotaxis Are More Than a Decade Away, Says Luminar’s CEO Austin Russell

2022-10-30T17:00:00.001+05:30

Robotaxis Are More Than a Decade Away, Says Luminar’s CEO Austin Russell

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Austin Russell became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire back in 2020 at age 25. And he did it by betting against the hype.

The $2.8 billion company he founded, Luminar Technologies, makes light detection and ranging systems (LiDAR) for cars—basically high-tech laser arrays that help computers “see” the world around them in 3D, which many technologists believe will be essential for making cars that can drive themselves. The promise of driverless cars generated an enormous amount of hype over the past decade, with investors pouring billions of dollars into companies that promised to make steering wheels a thing of the past. Russell, however, says he thought getting rid of drivers would be harder than people realized, and he focused his company, which he founded when he was just 17, on deals and technology focused on augmenting human drivers, rather than replacing them.
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He may have been right. The autonomous vehicle industry is facing rough headlines about its failure to deliver on its optimistic promises. Russell, meanwhile, says he’s sitting pretty, with deals to deploy his LiDAR technology commercially with partners like Volvo and Nissan. TIME sat down with Russell, who is a TIME 100 Next honoree, to talk about the state of the industry, driver safety, and another notable driverless car contrarian, Elon Musk.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

(For coverage of the future of work, visit TIME.com/charter and sign up for the free Charter newsletter.)

You’ve gotten a lot of attention your age. What’s it been like running Luminar at such a young age? Have you learned anything in doing that that you think an older person might not?

Well sometimes it’s just as important what you don’t know or aren’t jaded with, as what you know. But that said, Luminar wasn’t always a sizable company. It obviously started out quite small when we first founded it. But at the same time, there’s no question that building a technology that can be fundamentally differentiated and seeing that 10 or 100 times improvement on what’s existing is very, very challenging. But frankly maybe even more challenging is actually being able to build a great business. It takes a lot more than a great technology to build a great business at the end of the day. The kind of operational skill set that you have to have is not one that can be taught in any traditional degree program, or really from anyone or anything. It’s trial by fire. It’s either sink or swim. Unfortunately, the vast majority of new companies end up sinking. It’s the few that end up swimming. And you have to continue to do so time and time and time again, as you scale it up.

You’ve said that you’re an autonomous vehicle skeptic. What’s the state of the industry from your perspective?

It’s maybe ironic-sounding because I’m in the industry, but I did describe myself as the chief autonomous vehicle skeptic. I’ll try not to take credit for things that are mostly luck, but I don’t think this one is. The huge contrarian bet that I made early on was that [autonomous driving] was less so going to be realized in any reasonable timeframe via what many had assumed would be robotaxi-type urban autonomous vehicles without any driver at all. That problem was just massively complex, and I saw that people were just dramatically underestimating the significance of that challenge by at least an order of magnitude—realistically, multiple orders of magnitude. Even today, it’s still not within grasp. There’s no commercially viable business that’s centered around all that. Not that it can’t exist —it can and ultimately will—but there was this assumption that it was going to all be solved in a couple of years. Everyone had said that by 2021, we’re gonna welcome our robot overlords, and they’re gonna be driving us around everywhere, and car ownership will be a thing of the past. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

That was the whole reason why, in the beginning, we were focused on the existing multi trillion [dollar] a year consumer vehicle industry. The objective isn’t just about replacing the driver. It’s about enhancing the driver. It’s about actually making the vehicle safer and saving the driver time. That’s what can make all the difference. From a market standpoint, we made the right bet, and that’s how we ended up where we are today. We effectively have more major commercial wins than any other LiDAR company, and probably any other autonomous vehicle industry company. We won most of the game.

Read More: Meet the 2022 TIME100 Next

Elon Musk is another notable contrarian. He’s been pretty skeptical about the need for LiDAR. What’s your counterargument to that? And do you think that Tesla’s is on the path to full self-driving?

There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of what they’re trying to do. The only discrepancy is the advertising of what it actually is, and some of the manipulation [of] consumers, which is pretty questionable. Calling it ‘self-driving’ at all, much less ‘full self-driving’ is a fundamentally inaccurate statement. They have a great assisted driving system. There’s so much more room for improvement from an assisted driving standpoint. From an autonomous standpoint, if you want to be able to get to a point where you’re truly autonomous, that’s where LiDAR comes into play.

The reality is that cars, including even the most advanced Teslas, the vast majority of the time will not come to a safe stop for an unknown object, or person, or whatever it is in front of you if you’re traveling at a reasonable speed. It can sometimes reduce the severity of the collision, but preventing it altogether is another story. That’s effectively what we’re doing, because we have a ground truth understanding of what’s going on. The whole concept of how you can utilize this technology is effectively moving toward the ‘uncrashable car.’ That’s something that no one is immune to, whether it be Tesla or Toyota or Volvo or whoever

So the reality is that the uncrashable car is the first benchmark you have to get to, and self driving comes after that?

Exactly. And the reality is that people have been thinking about it the other way around and trying to skip over steps when the capability just isn’t there. It’s not off by 20%. It’s off by a factor of 10,000. The hard part is autonomous systems have to be inherently perfect. When you have a human driving you only need to have the system take over when the human makes a mistake, but it’s not that frequent. Autonomous systems make silly mistakes all the time. Our LiDAR makes it a hundred to a thousand times easier, and it’s still hard, even with that. That’s why trying to do it without it is a joke.

So if you had to put a year on it, what’s your best guess of when people will be getting in self-driving robotaxis?

When it comes to [having] our technology on consumer vehicles, it’s literally right around the corner. We’re talking months. That will dramatically improve safety and enable certain autonomous capabilities starting on highways and expanding there on out. When it comes to robotaxis and truly full self-driving systems at any appreciable scale: well into the 2030s. If I were to pick a number I’d call it 2035. That would be my over-under on how that will materialize starting out. I think by 2050 we would see it more widespread. Super promising, it’s going to be hugely valuable. But the question is, what’s the right path to be able to get there and to be able to see the technology through?

You have talked about this “100, 100, 100” vision. Can you tell me about that?

The holistic goal behind everything that we do at Luminar is our 100-year vision, which is to save as many as 100 million lives and 100 trillion hours out on the road over the next 100 years. I think that this is going to be one of the most impactful things that we could do from a societal standpoint. For people between 1 and 44 by some metrics it’s the leading cause of death—car accidents. [That’s a] totally solvable problem, we just need the technology to see it through. Everything that we do ultimately all ties back to that big picture all around saving lives, and saving people time. And it also ties in to the overall notion that you don’t have to replace the driver from day one to be able to already start having a huge lifesaving impact. That’s the north star we’re centered around.

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Car Bombs Kill At Least 30 Civilians in Somalia’s Capital of Mogadishu

2022-10-30T03:00:00.001+05:30

Car Bombs Kill At Least 30 Civilians in Somalia’s Capital of Mogadishu

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — Two car bombs exploded Saturday at a busy junction in Somalia’s capital near key government offices, causing “scores of civilian casualties” including children, national police said. One hospital worker counted at least 30 bodies amid fears of possibly many more.

The attack in Mogadishu occurred on a day when the president, prime minister and other senior officials were meeting to discuss expanded efforts to combat violent extremism, especially by the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabab group that often targets the capital. It also came five years after another massive blast in the exact same location killed over 500 people.
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There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Al-Shabab rarely claims attacks with large numbers of civilians killed, as in the 2017 blast. But President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud blamed al-Shabab by name, calling the attack “cruel and cowardly.”

A volunteer at the Medina hospital, Hassan Osman, said “out of the total of at least 30 dead people brought to the hospital, the majority of them are women. I have seen this with my own eyes.” At the hospital and elsewhere, frantic relatives peeked under plastic sheeting and into body bags, looking for loved ones.

The Aamin ambulance service said they had collected at least 35 wounded. One ambulance responding to the first attack was destroyed by the second blast, director Abdulkadir Adan added in a tweet.

“I was 100 meters away when the second blast occurred,” witness Abdirazak Hassan said. “I couldn’t count the bodies on the ground due to the (number of) fatalities.” He said the first blast hit the perimeter wall of the education ministry, where street vendors and money changers were located.

An Associated Press journalist at the scene said the second blast occurred in front of a busy restaurant during lunchtime. The blasts demolished tuk-tuks and other vehicles in an area of many restaurants and hotels. He saw “many” bodies and said they appeared to be civilians traveling on public transport.

The Somali Journalists Syndicate, citing colleagues and police, said one journalist was killed and two others wounded by the second blast while rushing to the scene of the first.

The attack occurred at Zobe junction, which was the scene of a huge al-Shabab truck bombing in 2017 that killed more than 500 people.

Somalia’s government has been engaged in a high-profile new offensive against the extremist group that the United States has described as one of al-Qaida’s deadliest organizations. The president has described it as “total war” against the extremists, who control large parts of central and southern Somalia and have been the target of scores of U.S. airstrikes in recent years.

The extremists have responded by killing prominent clan leaders in an apparent effort to dissuade support for that government offensive.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre said the attack would not dampen the public uprising against al-Shabab, and he and the president expressed the government’s determination to wipe out the extremist group.

___

Associated Press journalist Mohamed Sheikh Nor in Mogadishu, Somalia, contributed.

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Putin Stirs Worry That Russia Is Stripping Home-Appliance Imports for Arms

2022-10-30T01:00:00.001+05:30

Putin Stirs Worry That Russia Is Stripping Home-Appliance Imports for Arms

A sudden and surprising spike in European exports of washing machines, refrigerators and even electric breast pumps to Russia’s neighbors is raising concerns among officials the trade boom may be helping Vladimir Putin’s war machine in Ukraine.

Armenia imported more washing machines from the European Union during the first eight months of the year than the past two years combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the EU’s Eurostat database. Kazakhstan imported $21.4 million worth of European refrigerators through August, more than triple the amount for the same period last year.

Kazakh government data meantime show a jump in refrigerators, washing machines and electric breast pumps being shipped into Russia.
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Some trade via Eurasian states into Russia may be opportunistic businesses making up for shortfalls of imports from elsewhere, or for Russian companies to break up the appliances and use components and semiconductors in civilian manufacturing.

But European officials familiar with the figures say they worry at least some of the goods and their components may be finding their way into military use, and are closely tracking the rise in exports to countries on Russia’s periphery.

Officials in Europe have already said publicly they have seen parts from refrigerators and washing machines showing up in Russian military equipment such as tanks since its invasion of Ukraine. People familiar with the assessments said it was quite possible that components and microchips from other household goods were being used for military purposes, too, even if mostly in relatively low-grade equipment.

The trade data show for example that EU exports of electric breast pumps to Armenia nearly tripled in the first half of 2022 versus the prior year, despite a 4.3% drop in the Armenian birth rate. Likewise, Kazakhstan’s demand for breast pumps from the EU soared 633% in the first half of 2022 even though the national birth rate fell 8.4% during the same period.

Putin’s war has seen Russia hit by sanctions on almost every sector of its economy, depriving it of imports including chips and other components it has long relied on for basic military equipment like radios and guns through to more sophisticated weapons including missile systems, fighter jets and submarines.

Authorities in Moscow stopped publishing trade figures after the invasion of Ukraine. Still, Russian demand for electric breast pumps from Kazakhstan more than doubled during the first eight months of the year versus all of 2021, according to Kazakhstan government data. The country also shipped $7.5 million worth of washing machines to Russia so far in 2022 — versus nearly zero the previous two years. Its exports of refrigerators to Russia have surged ten-fold versus the prior year.

“Even highly sophisticated Russian weapons systems are often built with run of the mill microelectronic components found in a range of commercial goods,” said James Byrne, director of Open Source Intelligence and Analysis Research at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think tank. “It’s entirely possible that Russia’s military industrial complex is importing commercial off-the shelf goods to cannibalize for parts.”

Assessing the final destination and the use for the household goods is complicated. Armenia, Kazakhstan and Russia are all in the Eurasian Economic Union, which means there are no customs borders between them. European companies may not want to ship directly to Russia even if their products are not sanctioned, given the optics of being seen to do business with the country right now. They also may not be aware their goods are being sent onto Russia.

European officials say targeting trade in household appliances is difficult, as those items and their so-called sub-threshold components are often not sanctioned. That’s even as the EU has recently introduced new powers that allow it to sanction entities outside the bloc if they help European companies evade its restrictive measures.

Kazakhstan has vowed to not help Russia circumvent sanctions and there is no evidence the government is aiding Moscow to do so. Officials in both Armenia and Kazakhstan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last month the Russian military was using chips from dishwashers and refrigerators in its military hardware because it was running out of semiconductors. The Biden administration made a similar claim earlier this year, citing reports of parts that had been found in captured Russian tanks in Ukraine.

It isn’t clear exactly which components might be salvaged from household goods, although they generally all contain microchips. And without workarounds for foreign parts, Russia could find its ability hindered to check Ukrainian military advances on the ground, shaping the course and outcome of the war.

European Commission spokeswoman Miriam Garcia Ferrer said the bloc was watching trade flows to identify where sanctions against Russia might be skirted. The commission also monitors “the items used by the Russian army in Ukraine based on forensic analysis of the debris of the remnants of destroyed Russian weapons,” she said.

She added low key components from washing machines or refrigerators are commercially available in many countries and regions and where the EU can identify items that are being used in Russian weapons it considers extending trade restrictions to them. For example a number of electronic components were sanctioned under the latest measures adopted earlier this month, Garcia Ferrer said.

After more than eight months of high-intensity warfare, Russia has sustained substantial equipment losses. US and European officials also say Moscow has run down its stockpiles of key weapons systems, such as high-precision missiles. Ukraine, by contrast, continues to draw on supplies of modern arms from its allies that, together with other advantages such as a ready supply of motivated recruits, has transformed the balance of forces on the battlefield.

Bloomberg News reported earlier in October that Russia had tried for years to reduce its reliance on imports for a vast array of its military equipment — and an internal review in 2021 found it was falling short on almost every metric.

The US has pushed since the war broke out to cut off Russia’s supplies of semiconductors. “One of the things I’ve been able to do, and I make no bones about it, because of — with Russia’s activities, we have curtailed their ability to access some of this stuff,” President Joe Biden said on Thursday.

“They’re not able to rebuild those devastating weapon systems to take out those civilians in Ukraine as well,” he said. “Not a joke. It makes a big difference. These things matter, and they matter a great deal.”

Other countries that Russia regards as partners, such as China, have largely remained reluctant to supply it with semiconductors and key components even if they have not signed up to the sanctions imposed by the US, Europe and others.

Still, Russia had long experience in evading sanctions to supply its military during the Soviet era, through smuggling and espionage.

An August study of 27 advanced Russian weapons systems by RUSI found 450 unique foreign made components, a majority of which were manufactured in the US, and most of the rest in Europe and other nations that have imposed sanctions on Russia.

“Common components used in weapons platforms such as microprocessors, analog-to-digital converters, field-programmable gate arrays and micro controllers can also be found in a wide range of commercial goods such as televisions, cars, computers and cameras,” said Byrne, one of the authors of the RUSI report.

At the same time, a global semiconductor shortage “has reportedly caused many firms struggling with their semiconductor supply chain to cannibalize goods for their microelectronics.”

One European official noted that Russian troops were also systematically seizing and looting household appliances in Ukraine. The theft has been widely documented, but it isn’t clear how much has been taken for state use or personal use.

–With assistance from Sara Khojoyan, Jorge Valero, Nariman Gizitdinov and Akayla Gardner.

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Deleting Twitter After Elon Musk’s Takeover? Try These Alternatives

2022-10-29T03:00:00.003+05:30

Deleting Twitter After Elon Musk’s Takeover? Try These Alternatives

When Elon Musk’s controversial acquisition of Twitter closed late Thursday, critics of the billionaire’s plan to reduce oversight of content on the platform began considering their options if they leave the site.

Twitter, a beloved social platform since 2006, boasts a user-friendly interface conducive to public discourse among its 240 million monthly active users. The platform serves as an information portal for public figures, journalists, governments, and companies. But, Musk’s vision for the platform is leaving some worried that hate speech and misinformation will again be allowed to thrive.

There are a myriad of other social platforms out there with similar features to Twitter—though none have close to as many users of the bigger platform.
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Whether people are looking to share their opinions, research, humor, or artistic content, the following platforms could be alternatives to Twitter for users who are looking to ditch the bird.

Mastodon

The first platform that online users often describe as a similar experience to Twitter is Mastodon. The platform prides itself as a decentralized open-source platform that can’t be sold and won’t go bankrupt because it doesn’t have a singular owner.

“At Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire,” Mastodon’s pinned Twitter post reads. “Your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company!”

On Mastodon, users can create profiles, upload photo and video content and post Toots—messages of up to 500 characters that happen to sound a lot like Tweets. The platform has a lot of other features that are similar to Twitter including a timeline view, “boosts,” which function like Twitter’s “retweets,” and “favorites,” similar to Twitter’s “likes.”

Unlike Twitter, however, Mastodon is not supported by advertising, therefore it’s free of ad-network surveillance. And because of Mastadon’s decentralized design, it doesn’t host all of its users in the same server like Twitter does. This means users can switch between different servers, but each server generally only hosts up to several thousand people at a time.

Discord

A gamer favorite, Discord offers an array of options for how people can use the platform to connect. Discord users can communicate through voice calls, video calls, and instant messaging privately with one another or in private groups—or they can share media and use those communication methods in larger public communities, called “servers.”

Discord’s thousands of different servers are a solid option for people hoping to connect around a specific topic—like video game streams, K-pop discussions, or cute-cat-photo compilations. One drawback of Discord’s server system is that users can only join up to 100 servers, and each server is only designed to host up to 250,000 users. Although server communities can apply to increase their capacity, they still remain significantly smaller than Twitter’s open platform.

Reddit is the largest and most established social media platform on this list. It connects people looking to meet others involved in specific communities. Like Discord’s servers, Reddit offers “subreddits,” pages that are dedicated to posts about a specific topic—allowing users to explore topics from the general (r/IAmA, famous for its “As Me Anything” Q&As) to the specific (r/MealPrepSunday) to the bizarre (r/breadstapledtotrees).

Unlike Discord, however, Reddit’s DNA is that of an old-school message board, and its functionality is largely limited to text and uploadable content. There are also fewer tools for person-to-person interactions, like the ability to place audio and video calls.

One thing to know: since the platform was founded in 2005, controversy has ensued over the company’s moderation of violent or offensive material and hate speech. Reddit has said that in its efforts to protect free speech, it does not ban content solely for being controversial, but the company has dedicated more resources in recent years towards regulating hate speech that violates the user guidelines.

Bluesky

This one is not quite online yet. The promising soon-to-be-launched platform is being created by one of Twitter’s own founders, Jack Dorsey. Bluesky, also known as “Bluesky Social,” started as a Twitter nonprofit initiative in 2019 under Dorsey when he was still the company’s CEO. Bluesky differs from Twitter and most major social media platforms with its decentralized protocol. The company says that Bluesky users will have control of their own data and the algorithms. Bluesky also touts “account portability,” meaning that users will be able to own their own published content and move their posts across different social networks.

Despite Bluesky’s ties to Twitter, the platform began with an independently hired team, and the company has previously said that Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter would not affect its operations or independence. As a “public benefit” project funded by Twitter, the company has no obligation to return revenue to its shareholders, and Twitter doesn’t have any controlling stake in the company.

In mid-October, Bluesky announced that the app would launch soon and that 30,000 people had signed up for its waitlist. The company is currently inviting people to sign up to try the app in its beta stages before it is publicly available.

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State Legislative Candidates Are Telling Personal Abortion Stories on the Campaign Trail

2022-10-29T03:00:00.001+05:30

State Legislative Candidates Are Telling Personal Abortion Stories on the Campaign Trail

The video opens with a woman sitting calmly next to her husband. “Like a lot of people, the issue of abortion is personal to us. We lost our first pregnancy, and I had to have a D&C,” she says, referencing to a dilation and curettage, a procedure used for miscarriages and abortions.

The woman is Jennifer, wife of North Carolina state Rep. Terence Everitt, and the video is an ad for Everitt’s reelection campaign to his seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives. While the ad goes on to say that Everitt’s opponent would “vote to ban abortion, criminalize doctors, and put women’s lives at risk,” the personal story is not what most voters are used to hearing from politicians—until this year.
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When the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June, it upended 50 years of precedent and instantly made the issue of abortion relevant to nearly every race in this year’s midterm elections. Since then, Democratic candidates and outside groups have spent millions on ads that focus on abortion and have made the topic a central theme of many campaigns.

Courtesy Terence EverittNorth Carolina state Rep. Terence Everitt

Though politicians at all levels have been talking about abortion in new ways, nowhere is that more true than in state legislative races. The end of Roe v. Wade means that abortion policy is now determined on a state-by-state basis, and that has given state legislatures more control over the legality of abortion for their constituents.

“I’ve spoken more about this issue than I ever thought I would in my lifetime,” Everitt says. His wife, he adds, made the decision to share her story after seeing the stakes of the election. Abortion is currently legal in North Carolina until 20 weeks of pregnancy, and while the state’s Democratic governor has vetoed abortion restrictions in the past, Republicans are vying for supermajorities in the General Assembly in November, which would allow them to override a veto in the future. The Everitts worry that if Republicans enact more abortion restrictions, they could make procedures like Jennifer’s harder to access and subject people experiencing pregnancy complications—and their doctors—to legal scrutiny.

Every abortion story is unique and personal. This is ours. pic.twitter.com/ciRTFRvKRM

— Terence J. Everitt (@TerenceEveritt) October 21, 2022

This isn’t the first time that political ads have featured abortion stories. Abortion rights activism has used first-person stories at “speakouts” and protests for decades, and politicians have occasionally spoken about their own experiences with abortion or sexual assault in the past. But the increase in Democratic campaign ads and candidates sharing personal abortion-related stories demonstrates both the salience of the issue since Dobbs and the Democratic Party’s changing messaging around abortion. “It’s meaningful when celebrities or public figures are talking about it, because that can change how society thinks about these issues. But it’s also really important for policymakers to reflect that they have experienced and understand these issues as well,” says Rebecca Kreitzer, an associate professor of public policy at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who studies abortion.

In the past, politicians typically talked about abortion in broad terms, used euphemisms, or avoided the topic completely. Democrats frequently used the phrasing of “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s, and moved to talking about “reproductive rights” in more recent years. Now, more politicians are saying the word “abortion” and sharing intimate, complex stories that show voters the range of situations under which someone might seek an abortion.

In Michigan, where the state is voting on a ballot measure that would put the right to abortion in the state constitution this fall, state Sen. Rosemary Bayer has been talking to constituents about an abortion she had after learning she had an ectopic pregnancy—a condition in which an egg implants outside the uterus, making the pregnancy nonviable and potentially life-threatening. Bayer first shared her story with colleagues over a year ago when Democratic lawmakers tried to repeal Michigan’s 1931 abortion ban and says she was nervous to talk about it publicly. “The shame and the stigma associated with it is so severe, even for medical ones like mine,” she says. But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, she’s telling the story more frequently to help constituents understand the kinds of pregnancy care that can be affected by abortion bans. “In the end, you take these jobs to help the people,” she says.

Another Michigan legislator, state Rep. Christine Morse, also began speaking more publicly about her abortion this year. When Morse was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, she went in for an MRI and found out she was pregnant. Her doctors said they couldn’t treat the aggressive cancer while she was pregnant, and without the medication, her life expectancy was three years. But they gave her a choice: she could either continue the pregnancy and wait to begin her treatment, or get an abortion so she could start treatment right away. With three children already at home, Morse said she wanted the “best shot at survival.” She got an abortion and started chemo a few weeks later. Morse says she knows that under many of the abortion laws taking effect since Dobbs, situations like hers could become more complicated.

“People are very sympathetic about my story. The hard part is, they will often sort of discount its importance in the abortion discussion because they take it as a given that my life was in danger, and so that’s acceptable,” Morse says. “Meanwhile, under our 1931 law here in Michigan, the only exception is for the mother’s life, but there is no legal definition of that, nor has it been considered in the courts. And I think it’s clear from my story that it wasn’t treated as an emergency.”

Other candidates have told their stories for the first time this year, moved by similar motivations to show the wide variety of medical care affected by laws restricting abortion and push back on anti-abortion arguments that the new laws are not as restrictive as Democrats are making them out to be.

New Hampshire state Rep. Allison Nutting-Wong recently wrote an op-ed in the New Hampshire Union-Leader describing her own recent miscarriage after seeing her opponent, conservative activist Di Lothrop, downplay the effects of abortion restrictions. In an op-ed in the same paper, Lothrop compared making abortion more difficult to access to someone needing to drive “20 miles, 50 miles, or 100 miles” to access specialized treatment because their local hospital couldn’t help them. “This doesn’t mean you have lost your freedom to have it done,” she wrote. “Your choice was narrowed, but the surgery remains available to you.”

“I was really upset,” Nutting-Wong says. She did not want to share her own story, but says she felt compelled to make the point that driving hundreds of miles to access necessary medical care is not merely “inconvenient” as her opponent was arguing. “My whole philosophy of being a state rep. is that I’m not unique at all. I just am in a unique place to do something about it,” Nutting-Wong says.

Some candidates who had abortions not for medical reasons are also speaking out. New Hampshire state Rep. Amanda Elizabeth Toll had an unplanned pregnancy as a teenager and chose to get an abortion. “It allowed me to have, when I was ready, children on my own terms,” she says. Toll was talking about her abortion long before this year, but she says now it is more important than ever for lawmakers to show constituents they understand the experience.

In the past, politicians who spoke about personal abortion stories were largely people like Toll—progressive women in liberal areas, says Kreitzer at UNC Chapel Hill. Another big difference this year is that Democratic men and candidates in competitive districts are speaking out too.

Paul Friel, a candidate for Pennsylvania’s 26th House district, is one of those people. Republicans currently control the state legislature in Pennsylvania, and Democrats are hoping to make gains to prevent them from passing abortion restrictions in the future. Friel spoke at a rally in July and revealed that when his wife Mary was pregnant with their son 23 years ago, doctors discovered a tumor on her ovary. They couldn’t operate initially without killing the fetus, so Mary decided to continue the pregnancy as long as she could. At about 15 weeks, doctors were able to remove the tumor—then about eight and a half pounds—and let her continue the pregnancy and give birth to the Friels’ son.

Pablo SartorCandidate for Pennsylvania’s 26th House district, Paul Friel.

“This was her decision, and thank God we had the ability to make that decision,” Friel says. He worries that if Pennsylvania restricts abortion, operations that could potentially end a pregnancy, like the one his wife needed, might not be legal. “Some women are going to die with these policies unnecessarily because legitimate healthcare options are not available to them and are being taken away by politicians that have this sort of black and white, all or nothing version of the world,” Friel says.

In Arizona, where Cindy Hans is running for state senate, abortion is now banned after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A state court has blocked a pre-Roe ban, and Democrats are hoping to take over Republicans’ thin majorities in the state legislature. Throughout her campaign, Hans has talked about her work as an abortion clinic escort shielding patients from protesters. But she decided at her local Women’s March in October to publicly share for the first time that she got an abortion when she was 17—three years before Roe v. Wade was decided.

Abortion was illegal in her home state of Indiana at the time, but she found a doctor in her area who said he could help. However, when he did the exam, Hans realized the doctor was drunk. She quickly left, and eventually found an appointment in New York, where abortion had recently become legal. “I’m fortunate. I had access to funds to get me to a safe place, to get me to a medical facility with licensed medical practitioners,” Hans says. “What if I hadn’t had that?”

Now she is concerned about people in her state who might not have access to the resources she did. “There are a zillion reasons why people get an abortion. None of them need the opinion of a politician,” she says. In sharing her personal story, she hopes people will connect the issue to their vote. “I want people to know that this is what we’re going back to, but we don’t have to,” she says. “We have a choice in the ballot box.”

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Here’s How Carbon Offsets Can Live up to Their Bold Promises

2022-10-29T02:00:00.003+05:30

Here’s How Carbon Offsets Can Live up to Their Bold Promises

As climate change threatens to reshape the planet forever, more and more companies are promising to improve their carbon footprint. But reducing greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t just happen overnight. That’s why many big corporations have turned to carbon offsets to bridge the gap.

“It’s a transitional tool,” says Sarah Leugers, chief strategy officer for Gold Standard, a voluntary carbon offset program based in Switzerland. “A company should be on a science-based decarbonization journey and use carbon offsets to take responsibility for emissions along the way.”

A carbon offset is a mechanism through which an individual or organization with an emissions reduction goal pays someone else to reduce emissions. Scientists think about climate mitigation and the greenhouse effect in terms of the whole earth; this means that atmospheric damage from carbon dioxide emitted by a factory in Chicago can be made up by the reduction in CO2 from a project introducing electric stoves to villages in rural India. Carbon offset projects often take place in developing countries in the Global South because the costs to take actions such as planting trees (or paying people to avoid cutting them down) or installing wind farms are significantly cheaper than in industrialized countries.
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Even the biggest proponents of carbon offsets agree they’re not a silver bullet—and there are some with an even harsher critique. “In many cases, [carbon offsets] take the place of someone reducing their own emissions, and they can justify or alleviate the guilt of continued emissions,” says Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

The system has come under scrutiny for not delivering on the emissions reductions promised. Both Haya and Danny Cullenward, policy director at the California-based climate research firm CarbonPlan, call the system “broken,” relying on flawed methodologies and incentives with little oversight. Both recommend that businesses focus on reducing emissions in their own operations—such as reducing business travel, using electric vehicle fleets, and switching to renewable energy—over a heavy investment in offsets.

The carbon offset market has grown dramatically in recent years, with major companies like Google and Amazon promising to go net-zero on emissions, in part through buying offsets, and airlines like United and American letting consumers purchase offsets equivalent to the tons of carbon emitted from their flights. In 2021, the total market value of voluntary carbon markets (VCM) reached nearly $2 billion, according to Ecosystem Marketplace, an initiative of Forest Trends, a nonprofit environmental finance organization in Washington, D.C. That figure is nearly four times higher than the value of VCMs the previous year at $520 million.

As the industry goes mainstream, there are hundreds of new carbon offset projects making big environmental promises and few resources to decipher what’s real and what’s bunk. Here’s how the process works and what a business should evaluate if it decides to use carbon offsets.

Certification is a Critical Part of the System

Carbon offset programs encompass many types of projects, although the most common ones include renewable energy projects (such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric), methane capture and combustion (burning methane turns it into a less harmful compound that can be used as fuel), energy efficiency (such as electrification), and forestry-related (like reforestation), according to the Las Vegas-based carbon offset company 8 Billion Trees, which runs big planting operations in the Amazon Rainforest.

One carbon offset credit represents one metric ton of carbon dioxide reduced in the atmosphere, whether through avoidance or capture of CO2. The prices vary depending on the project type, timeline, region, labor and material costs, and other factors. Projects must estimate the metric tons of CO2 avoided and then submit this information to a carbon offset registry, which then translates that climate impact into individual credits that can be bought and sold in a decentralized marketplace.

To receive internationally recognized credits for funding, projects are certified by one of the four major carbon offset registries that set the industry standards. The big four, according to experts, are the American Carbon Registry (ACR), Climate Action Reserve (CAR), and Verra (Verified Carbon Standard)—all three of which are based in the U.S.— and the Switzerland-based Gold Standard.

This certification involves an audit by a third-party verifier, commissioned by the project developer. Project protocols or methodologies approved by Verra, for example, must be scientifically sound, with permanent, measurable emissions that are conservatively estimated—meaning the methodology doesn’t overestimate the climate benefits of the project.

“Make sure [a carbon credit] is issued from an internationally recognized standard, because there are a lot of new organizations emerging that are claiming to issue carbon credits but don’t have the fundamental attributes,” says Leugers, of Gold Standard. Many projects, for example, do not have conservative baseline settings for calculating emissions reductions, or they would have happened even without the intervention of the program. Going with internationally verified projects can help alleviate this issue.

Nonetheless, Haya is skeptical of the methodologies used by carbon offset projects. “We’re in a poor-quality loop,” she says. “Because there are so many credits generated that exaggerate project impact, the prices are too low. At current prices, they’re not high enough to really drive emissions reductions.”

She says that registries should enforce stricter rules on what counts as a carbon offset credit within a project. A project that is liberal with its methodology will ultimately over-exaggerate credits generated and the benefit to the planet. But when registries do crack down on guidelines, project developers will often find another registry willing to accept their lenient protocols.

Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification

In any protocol, a project must include a plan for how progress is reported, emissions are calculated, and credits are issued. Once the plan is implemented, the project enters the monitoring, reporting, and verification, or MRV, phase.

Jodi Manning, vice president and director of marketing and partnerships for California-based Cool Effect, a nonprofit carbon offset provider, says the reporting timelines for their projects vary. Cookstove projects may be evaluated yearly, while forestry projects may be every three years. Nonetheless, Cool Effect says it requires updates every six to 12 months and performs regular site visits with photos and interviews.

At Gold Standard, most projects are required to report back about once a year, Leugers says. She points to Gold Standard’s membership with the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labeling Alliance (ISEAL) and its grievance process—to lodge complaints against projects or Gold Standard—as mechanisms for transparency and accountability.

Cullenward of CarbonPlan believes strict compliance with protocols can still be flawed. “We have a system for saying we followed the rules,” Cullenward says. “We don’t really have a system for checking whether or not the rules make any sense.”

Much of the uncertainty is inherent to carbon offsets as a whole, says Haya. “We know how to measure emissions. For offsets, you’re measuring emissions reductions and you have to measure against a counterfactual scenario of what would likely have happened without your program. It’s immeasurable, [and] the uncertainty is being deliberated by a set of actors that all benefit from more credits at poor quality.”

Assessing the Quality of the Carbon Credit

To assess a carbon offset credit’s quality, there are four major terms to know: additionality, permanence/durability, buffer pool, and leakage.

Many experts say the long-term climate benefits of carbon offsets rely on the concept of additionality, which means credits should only be generated for projects that would not happen without funding from carbon offset programs. “If the funds go to pay for trees that would’ve been planted anyway, then no offset should be generated for those trees,” Haya says. “You’re not reducing emissions, you’re just paying someone to do what they would’ve done anyway.”

Cullenward says many carbon offset companies exaggerate the additionality of projects. A recent study looking at wind farms in India found that at least 52% of carbon offsets were for projects that would likely have been built regardless of help from the United Nations-run Clean Development Mechanism, an international offset program established under the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

“Time and time again,” he says, “when academics and financially disinterested parties do research projects to try and carefully assess the plausibility of those baseline claims, they find smoldering dumpster fires.”

Permanence is the idea that the project’s benefit to the atmosphere is irreversible, while durability is the expected measurement of how long that benefit will last. Some reduction endeavors are permanent; for example, driving less and switching to an electric stove prevents greenhouse emissions from happening in the first place.

“When we put CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, it has permanent consequences,” Cullenward says. “The effect on the atmosphere and the oceans extends quite literally into geologic time. So if you want to use an offset credit to say, ‘It’s OK I put CO2 in the atmosphere [from driving or flying],’ the duration of the claim that’s being made needs to match the duration of the impact of CO2 emissions.”

Other projects cannot be guaranteed to be permanent. To reap the long-term environmental benefits of forestry projects, a tree would need to live for 100 years to store a metric ton of carbon. But droughts, fires, and diseases happen, and when a tree dies, the carbon dioxide is released. Therefore, project developers must take these risks into account when creating their protocols.

To mitigate natural disasters that could reverse the environmental benefits of a project and any other setbacks, carbon offset providers create a buffer pool as insurance. In any given project, between 10% and 25% of credits are held in a companywide pool, which ensures the project over-delivers on its goals.

And “if there is a fire,” Cullenward says, “the people who bought and sold credits on the market are kept whole, so long as their credits in the buffer pool are retired to account for those losses. If a million tons of CO2 goes up in flames in a forest, a million credits can be retired from the buffer pool. So as long as that system is solvent, the program is on track to meet its durability claim.”

But buffer pools are not foolproof. In a recent study of California’s forestry offset program, Cullenward and fellow researchers found that wildfires have diminished 95% of the carbon credits in the buffer pool during the program’s first 10 years. In other words, the carbon loss from wildfires is drastically outpacing the climate benefits of preserving trees through this state-mandated offset program.

Protocols need to account for leakage, which is the idea that projects can cause emissions to increase outside the areas generating offset credits. Haya says this occurs in some forest conservation projects. “If a landowner commits to reducing emissions by reducing the amount of timber they’re harvesting [without changing] the demand for timber products, someone’s conservation on one side of land just displaces timber harvesting somewhere else,” she says.

When evaluating a carbon offset scheme, many companies focus on the co-benefits of projects, such as sustainable development, jobs for locals in the region, community empowerment, health improvements, and biodiversity.

Dee Lawrence, founder of Cool Effect, says she always looks for projects with an environmental justice point-of-view that goes beyond the carbon benefits. She points to recent projects from the company, which include restoring mangrove trees in Myanmar that helps improve livelihoods in poverty-stricken communities by providing jobs, and a biogas digester project in China that transforms methane gas from waste into renewable energy and improves human health by providing cleaner air. “If a carbon offset is done correctly, it can be transformational,” Lawrence says.

As for Haya, she recommends thinking about carbon offsets as one tool of many in the toolbox—but ultimately, she says, cleaning up one’s own operations will truly have the biggest impact.

This article is part of a series on key topics in the climate crisis for time.com and CO2.com, a division of TIME that helps companies reduce their impact on the planet. For more information, go to co2.com

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DACA Is Slowly Dying Unless Congress Steps in to Save It

2022-10-29T02:00:00.001+05:30

DACA Is Slowly Dying Unless Congress Steps in to Save It

Since its inception in 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), has been the subject of legal fights and political sparring. The program, which grants certain young people protection from deportation, was first implemented by the Obama Administration via executive action, and in the decade since, Congress has never passed legislation into law that would make it permanent.

Now, DACA recipients, advocates, and political scientists say the program may be reaching the end of its slow demise—unless Democrats in Congress step in to save it.

“The 2012 DACA program is hanging by a thread and on life support,” says Tom Wong, associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. “We are at a point now where unless there’s a legislative solution to provide permanent protections for DACA recipients, many will likely lose what they have built over the last decade.”
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In early October, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a lower court questioning the legality of the DACA program and halting its expansion to new applicants. The appeals court said the roughly 600,000 current DACA recipients or “Dreamers”— young people who were brought to the United States as children and did not have the immigration status to legally reside and work in the U.S.—can keep their status for now, but no new applications can be processed.

Texas, along with eight other states, originally filed suit in 2018, arguing that the Obama Administration did not have the authority to implement DACA in the first place. District Judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas agreed and declared DACA unlawful in July 2021, and the Biden Administration appealed to the Fifth Circuit.

Earlier in 2021, President Joe Biden had issued a memorandum in an attempt to “to preserve and fortify DACA.” The new Biden version of DACA, which is essentially the same policy, but codifies it into federal regulation, is set to go into effect on Oct. 31, 2022. But on Oct. 5, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Judge Hanen, and it required Hanen to also review the legality of the new Biden DACA memo. “We have to continue to hold our breath and hope that Judge Hanen doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to end [DACA],” says Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, which advocates for a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. “DACA as we know it is dying, and this was a lethal blow to the program.”

Amid the legal uncertainty, and with Democrats expected to lose control of at least one chamber of Congress in the midterms, some see a window of opportunity closing to pass legislation codifying permanent protections for Dreamers. Others say they are clinging to hope that Democrats could muster legislation during the lame duck session.

Still, even with their current control of Congress, Democrats enjoy the slimmest possible majority in the Senate. Passing legislation would require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, which would mean getting at least 10 Republicans on board. Despite a successful effort by the House in 2021, a DACA bill went nowhere in the Senate. And Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, has tried to pass a law that would create a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers for more than 20 years, but Republicans and some Democrats have blocked it from passage five separate times.

Durbin relaunched negotiations with Senate Republicans on immigration reform last year, but the talks so far haven’t yielded legislation. “I have been working for the last 20 years to provide these inspiring young people with a permanent path to legal status,” Durbin tells TIME in a statement. “The recent Fifth Circuit decision should be a call to action for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We must pass the Dream Act now and give these amazing young people a real path to legal status in the only country they have ever called home.”

Wong argues that Democrats, too, need to change their posture towards immigration reform in order to pass anything meaningful. “A lot of Democrats who are looking at their reelection prospects don’t want to talk about immigration in a sincere and genuine way,” Wong says, “in a way where we can actually see some compromise happen in the Senate that leads to those 60 votes.”

If Democrats lose control of Congress in November, some advocates and lawmakers are still hoping they’ll propose legislation in the lame duck session—the period of time after the midterms before the newly elected leaders take office—to try to pass it while they still have the majority. Martinez Rosas says United We Dream plans to escalate actions and pressures to push Democrats to pass protections for Dreamers during lame duck.

Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California who introduced legislation in September that would create a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have resided in the U.S. long term, including DACA recipients, tells TIME that he hopes DACA and immigration reform measures would be a priority during the lame duck session.

“I still think there’s a press for… codifying a woman’s right to choose, trying to move forward on immigration reform,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

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Elizabeth Banks Plays a Suburban Mom Who Finds Her Purpose in the Abortion Drama Call Jane

2022-10-28T03:00:00.003+05:30

Elizabeth Banks Plays a Suburban Mom Who Finds Her Purpose in the Abortion Drama Call Jane

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, dramas about the old days of illegal—and dangerous—abortions are no longer just shivery recollections about how things used to be. They’ve become harbingers of the future for women in America. You could certainly say that of Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane, a drama inspired by a real-life network of activists: the Janes, a group of women in late-1960s and early-’70s Chicago who organized in secret to provide safe abortions for women in need. But the film, despite its heavy subject, has a bright, vibrant energy. It’s not so much optimistic as galvanizing.

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Elizabeth Banks plays Joy, a sunny, upper-middle-class housewife with a husband, Will (Chris Messina), who’s on the rise at his law firm and a teenage daughter, Charlotte (Grace Edwards), just on the cusp of adulthood herself. Joy also happens to be pregnant, a development she and Will are happy about—until they learn that going through with the pregnancy will endanger Joy’s life. Her obstetrician goes to the board of his hospital—an all-male group arranged around a table like a tribunal—and requests approval for a therapeutic termination. When they learn that Joy’s chances of survival are around 50-50, odds that seem acceptable to them, they turn down the request. Joy’s doctor offers a backup solution: if she can prove she’s suicidal, the board might reconsider. When that gambit fails—Joy is just too provably sane—a secretary in the psychiatrist’s office senses her desperation and whispers another suggestion: “Just fall down the stairs. It worked for me.”

Her options shrinking, Joy tries the back-alley route, but the atmosphere is so dismal and scary she can’t go through with it. In her lowest moment, she catches sight of a discreet-looking mimeographed flier: “Pregnant? Anxious? Need help? Call Jane.” She dials the number, not realizing she’s opening the door to a future she couldn’t have imagined for herself—not just as a woman who will have terminated a pregnancy, but as one who will help others do the same, safely if not legally.

What’s surprising about Call Jane—written by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi—is that even though it treats its subject matter seriously, it refuses to grind the audience down with grim admonishments. It accepts a woman’s right to choose an abortion as a given, and moves forward from there. Joy is escorted to her appointment—blindfolded, just in case she’s a cop—by a taciturn volunteer named Gwen (Wunmi Mosaku). The abortion will be safe, but it won’t be free. The poker-faced doctor who performs procedures for the group (Cory Michael Smith) is just a kid—with his bowl haircut, he looks like one of the Turtles. He pockets his exorbitant $600 fee and gets to work, his bedside manner as cold as a speculum. And once again, Joy isn’t sure she can go through with it. But both the space and the doctor’s tools are clean, and even with all her advantages as a well-off, white woman, she has nowhere else to go. After the procedure, she’s led to a room filled with bustling women volunteers—including a nun—who urge her to sit down and eat a bowl of spaghetti. Virginia, the group’s no-makeup, no-nonsense leader (played by Sigourney Weaver and modeled on Heather Booth, the real-life founder of the Jane Collective), eyes Joy’s perfect blond coif and tasteful suburban togs and thinks this will be the last she sees of her.

Wilson Webb—Roadside Attractions Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver in ‘Call Jane’

And why wouldn’t she? The beauty of Banks’s performance is that she doesn’t just lean on the crutch of playing Joy as a victim of her era. In an early scene, it’s made clear that Joy is college-educated; Will asks her to edit law documents for him, relying on her sound judgment. Even beyond that, though, she has a curiosity about the world that has little to do with education. Tidying up her daughter’s room, she spots a Velvet Underground record and puts it on. She’s dancing to “Sister Ray” in the kitchen, lost in its glorious fuzziness, when she passes out, an alarming indicator of the heart condition that threatens her life if she goes through with her pregnancy. Banks is playing a person with specific human qualities, not a symbol summoned from the mists of time. In the moment when those hospital board members decide what they think Joy’s fate should be, she looks genuinely surprised; this is a woman who, until that moment, believes the men around her will act in her best interest. Banks makes us feel the shock of that moment as if we were living it ourselves, dissolving time between then and now. She’s also drawing attention to our new reality: now is not all that different from then.

Call Jane covers a lot of territory in a short span of time. Though it’s a fictionalized story, it’s realistic about the ways in which underground volunteer groups, even very noble ones, are usually flawed, messy organizations. (At one point Gwen chastises Virginia for the group’s fixation on helping mostly white women, generally the only ones able to afford the $600 fee.) And there’s nothing dingy or dismal about its production design: the movie has a polished, appealing Mad Men-style glow—perhaps not surprising, considering that Nagy was the screenwriter behind Todd Haynes’s lush period love story Carol. The picture could use a little more dramatic tension; in places it goes a bit slack, losing its way on the path to its conclusion. Even so, its refusal to push the usual buttons is one of its finest qualities. Back-alley scare stories serve their purpose, but Call Jane has something else in mind. This is a story about women getting the job done when they have no one to rely on but one another. Because it’s time, once again, to make sure we know who our friends are.

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All the Ways to Remove Carbon Emissions From the Air

2022-10-28T03:00:00.001+05:30

All the Ways to Remove Carbon Emissions From the Air

The cost to halt global warming has been pegged at between $300 billion and $50 trillion over the next 20 years—a big range because experts disagree on the best strategies. Additionally, many methods are still being developed and not yet scaled up to tackle the magnitude of the problem.

The main way to slow climate change is an obvious one: Stop releasing greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions reduction strategies decrease the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from a specific activity or across a certain area. According to a 2013 study supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, reducing emissions could help prevent millions of premature deaths brought on by air pollution during the following century. Reducing carbon emissions not only improves overall air quality and safeguards human health—it is absolutely essential in the fight against climate change.
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Beyond the reduction of emissions (ultimately achieved by ending the use of fossil fuels), there are a few other ways to reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere. But there are a lot of similar sounding terms thrown about in this space. Here’s what you need to know.

Carbon Dioxide Removal

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) involves taking this greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and storing it underground or under the ocean floor, ideally for a very long time. There are both nature-based and technology-based approaches to CDR.

The two main strategies for removing carbon from the atmosphere are tree planting and forest restoration or conservation efforts, and direct air capture (DAC), according to a World Resources Institute report released in 2020. Trees have been one of the best CDR tactics for thousands of years because of their ability to sequester and store carbon as long as they stay standing. Earth’s forests have a net absorption of 7.6 billion metric tons annually, which represents about one-third of annual global emissions. DAC, on the other hand, vacuums carbon dioxide out of the air.

Direct Air Capture

DAC facilities use giant fans to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and either store it underground in geological formations, or reuse it (like for synthetic fuel and concrete). Carbon Engineering in Canada and Climeworks in Switzerland are two examples of companies developing this type of technology. Climeworks has built the world’s largest DAC plant in Iceland, which began operating in 2021. The facility, known as Orca, is capable of capturing 4,000 metric tons of carbon annually (equivalent to the emissions produced from 504 homes’ energy use in one year) and pumping it underground where, when mixed with water, the gas will cool and turn into stone.

There are currently 19 DAC facilities operating around the world. The International Energy Agency states that an average of 32 large-scale plants need to be built annually between now and 2050 to reach global climate goals.

Carbon Sequestration

Carbon sequestration refers to how—through biological, chemical, and physical processes—carbon dioxide is naturally removed from the atmosphere and locked away in the planet’s soils, oceans, trees, and rocks. For instance, as a tree grows, photosynthesis captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in the trunk, branches, leaves, and roots.

Carbon sequestration, however, also has its limitations. For instance, deforestation, wildfires, and other disturbances to the world’s woodlands cause around 8 billion metric tons of CO2 trapped in trees to be lost, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. This is why strategies to slow climate change often involve an emphasis on stopping deforestation, restoring cleared areas, and enabling damaged woods to regrow.

Other limitations exist, as well. Global warming is already reducing the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon. Additionally, carbon sequestration requires farmers to not till or plow their fields, disturbing the soil, because carbon dioxide that has been stored in the soil may be released back into the atmosphere, defeating the original purpose of keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. A shift to regenerative agriculture is occurring in some places of the world, which emphasizes the importance of soil health and adopting different practices so as to not disturb it.

Negative Emissions Technology

Carbon removal technologies are also referred to as negative emissions technologies (NETs). The potential of NETs to rapidly remove carbon dioxide on a massive scale is one key advantage in comparison to natural systems, which are slower to absorb carbon and sometimes face external threats (like wildfires).

However, while large-scale NETs are considered critical to meeting ambitious international climate change targets, these technologies still largely remain in the research and development phase, or are not yet scaled up. Facilities built so far remove just a tiny fraction of the carbon dioxide that scientists say is necessary to make a difference. But governments are getting behind these efforts. The U.S. Department of Energy announced in May 2022 that it would provide $3.5 billion to groups developing direct air capture and related technologies. In addition, the U.K.’s Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy announced in July 2022 the equivalent of a $64 million investment in carbon removal technologies.

Carbon Capture and Storage

A close cousin to both carbon dioxide removal and carbon sequestration is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which involves, for example, capturing CO2 from point sources, like a coal plant’s smokestack, and then permanently storing it underground or under the ocean floor; in fact, the International Energy Agency predicts that CCS could be responsible for removing as much as 20% of total CO2 emissions from industrial and energy production facilities. Removing carbon as soon as it is burned and either storing it underground or using it to improve oil and gas recovery is a more common and fully established approach than direct air capture.

But the implementation of commercial-scale CCS is costly, which creates a big barrier to widespread use. Additionally, “the deployment of CCS has been hindered by uncertainty in geologic storage capacities and sustainable injection rates,” according to the scientific journal PNAS. Other reports note the problem of leakage of CO2 from stored carbon.

Carbon Stock Protection

Then there’s the approach of carbon stock protection, which separates forest areas that should be preserved as High Carbon Stock (HCS) and High Conservation Value (HCV) from degraded lands with low carbon and biodiversity benefits that could be developed. In the context of wildlife survival and reducing carbon emissions, restoration efforts should strive to reduce net emissions of greenhouse gasses, maximize the capacity of habitats to store and reduce pollution, and preserve and enhance biodiversity.

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Coping With the Side Effects of Kidney-Cancer Treatment

2022-10-28T02:00:00.003+05:30

Coping With the Side Effects of Kidney-Cancer Treatment

Not long ago, the treatment options available to people with metastatic kidney cancer were few and feeble. Surgical removal of the affected tissue was an effective and often durable fix for people with cancer that was confined to the kidneys. But for the roughly 30% to 40% of people with kidney cancer that spreads to other parts of the body, the prognosis was dispiritingly grim.

Fortunately, things are much different today. “Since the early 2000s, we’ve had a class of drugs called blood-vessel inhibitors, and these made an immediate impact,” says Dr. Primo Lara, a professor, clinician, and director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Davis. Also known as angiogenesis inhibitors or targeted therapies, these drugs prevent the formation of the kinds of blood vessels that feed cancer cells with oxygen and nutrients. “These drugs are able to prolong life, shrink tumors, and create meaningful remissions,” Lara says.
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More recently, immunotherapies—drugs that help a person’s immune system identify and eradicate cancer cells—have also emerged as a highly effective treatment for metastatic kidney cancers. Today, patients often take a combination of both immunotherapy and angiogenesis-inhibitor drugs. This combination therapy has led to remarkable benefits for people with advanced kidney cancer, Lara says.

While these new drugs save lives, they can also cause side effects ranging from diarrhea and skin rashes to fatigue and hypertension. Meanwhile, people with localized cancers have their own set of treatment-related difficulties to manage. And all kidney-cancer patients face the psychological burden of grappling with a life-threatening illness.

While each person’s kidney-cancer journey is unique, experts recommend an arsenal of strategies that can help people control their symptoms and side effects. “In most cases, we can help patients manage them so they’re able to carry on with minimal hassle,” Lara says.

Here, you’ll find a guide to the most common symptoms of kidney cancer, side effects of treatments, and some of the methods doctors and other clinicians may employ to help people mitigate these challenges.

Loss of kidney function

Nearly all people who have kidney cancer that has not spread to other organs undergo a surgical procedure called a nephrectomy. During the procedure, part or all of the affected kidney is removed. “A complication of nephrectomy that frequently occurs is that you lose some kidney function,” says Dr. Pavlos Msaouel, a clinician and cancer biologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

A little loss of function isn’t a big deal. (Msaouel points out that people can live normally with just one kidney.) However, the job of your kidneys is to clean your blood. If their function deteriorates significantly, this can cause dangerous accumulations of waste products or fluid imbalances in your blood. “At first, it’s not really a side effect you feel—it usually just shows up in blood tests,” Msaouel explains. But over time, loss of kidney function can cause a host of symptoms including fatigue, nausea, weakness, and brain fog. In severe cases, it can be deadly.

A mixture of lifestyle tweaks and medications can help counteract this loss of function. “A lot of these lifestyle changes are things we should all do regardless,” Msaouel says. They include getting regular exercise and watching your sodium and sugar intake. In some cases, you may also need to adjust the amount of protein in your diet. Drugs, including blood-pressure medications or those that lower blood cholesterol, are also mainstays.

Hand-foot syndrome

This is one of the most common side effects among people taking blood-vessel inhibitors for metastatic kidney cancers. “These therapies are much more targeted than classic chemotherapy—they’re more focused on cancer cells—but sometimes they do hit other tissues,” Msaouel says. In the case of hand-foot syndrome, also known as palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia, these drugs can affect the skin of the palms or the soles of the feet. “This usually manifests as blisters,” he explains. It can also cause redness and swelling. Sometimes these skin issues can be so extreme that people can’t drive a car or engage in other necessary activities.

To prevent hand-foot syndrome, clinicians often tell people on these drugs to take special care of their hands and feet. Msaouel says over-the-counter moisturizers can help prevent dry skin and blisters. “We might recommend that people avoid exposing their hands and feet to really hot water, or to avoid wearing tight shoes,” he says. “We don’t want too much friction or things that can irritate the skin.” If these preventative measures fail and someone does develop redness or blisters, he says topical steroids—prescription skin creams that reduce inflammation—can be helpful. So can pain-relief creams like those containing lidocaine. “If despite all this it persists, then we might have the patient take a break for a few days or even weeks until the symptoms subside; then we can restart at a lower dose,” Msaouel says. “Often when we do that, if it does come back at all, it’s not going to be as bad.”

Hypertension

High blood pressure (hypertension) is a common side effect of several kidney-cancer drugs, particularly the blood-vessel inhibitors that have become a pillar of treatment for patients with metastatic cancer. High blood pressure can also arise because of poor kidney function. “This is one of most important side effects to manage because if we can’t control it, it knocks out this whole class of drugs that are one of the most effective we have,” says Victoria Sinibaldi, a nurse practitioner and research associate in oncology and urology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Sinibaldi says that some lifestyle measures—again, a healthy diet and exercise—can be helpful. But most people will need to take medications to ensure their blood pressure remains at safe levels. “It’s not uncommon to have people taking two or three drugs to manage their blood pressure,” she says. In many cases, your primary-care physician—not your oncology team—will lead the way when it comes to managing your blood pressure. “We do a lot of referring back to primary-care doctors because they’re the ones who really have clinical expertise in managing blood pressure,” she says.

Diarrhea

Unfortunately, diarrhea is another common difficulty for people with kidney cancer who are taking either targeted therapies, immunotherapy drugs, or both. “Some patients have to go as much as every two hours, which is significant,” Sinibaldi says. Diarrhea is not only uncomfortable and inconvenient, but frequent diarrhea can also cause unhealthy weight loss, nutritional deficiencies, or severe dehydration.

Sinibaldi often tells patients to keep a diary logging all their bowel movements as well as what they ate, which can help their care team identify problem foods or activities. “Over-the-counter medications like Imodium can help,” she says. Diet changes can also make a difference. These may include cutting back on lactose, a type of sugar found in milk and other dairy products.

“We usually refer people to a nutritionist who can help them modify their diet,” says MD Anderson’s Msaouel. While probiotics may be useful in some cases, they can also cause problems, such as making diarrhea worse. “People get excited and think they can fix everything with probiotics, but they can be harmful,” he says. “This is something each patient needs to discuss with their oncologist.”

Psychological distress

Too often, talk of cancer’s complications can focus solely on the body while ignoring the mind. “For people with kidney cancer, it’s not only the physical symptoms but also the emotional symptoms that need to be addressed,” says Dr. Jennifer S. Scherer, an assistant professor of nephrology and a palliative-care specialist at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. At all stages of a person’s cancer journey, she says, worry, fear, uncertainty, and spiritual distress can make life challenging. These can also contribute to a person’s experience of pain, fatigue, and other physical symptoms. Scherer and other palliative-care specialists can help people navigate these psychological roadblocks.

“Patients also face uncertainty and complex medical decisions they may need help understanding,” she says. Financial strain is another source of stress. “Palliative care looks at the patient from a holistic perspective and makes sure their care plan can address all these different domains.” She and her team often connect people with a psychiatrist or psychologist. They also arrange visits with a spiritual adviser like a chaplain. But in many cases, her work involves spending time talking with patients and helping them work through their feelings and difficulties. “We try to meet patients where they are, and to give them an open and safe space to talk about their illness,” Scherer says.

Side effects of immunotherapy

Unlike blood-vessel inhibitors or other kidney-cancer treatments, immunotherapy medications are not inherently toxic. These drugs work by turning up immune-system activity in ways that are intended to help it identify and eradicate cancer cells. “Most people on immunotherapy—60% to 70%—will have only minimal side effects,” Lara says. “But the other third will have more significant side effects, and these can be very unpredictable because they’re the result of the immune system overreaching and attacking healthy cells.”

He says inflammation of the lungs, skin, thyroid, or gut are all relatively common among people on these drugs. This inflammation could result in symptoms like fatigue, skin rashes, breathing problems, weight loss, or diarrhea. “But any part of the body is fair game, so just about any side effect is possible,” he says.

If these sorts of complications do arise, Lara says steroids, anti-inflammatories, or other medications that dampen immune activity can help bring them under control. Temporarily reducing or even stopping the immunotherapy may also be necessary.

A careful balancing act

Every person is unique. Likewise, every person’s response to cancer treatment is one of a kind. Experts say finding what works for a given person tends to involve periods of tinkering. Your care team will probably have to try different medications in various doses before they identify the optimal regimen for you.

This is likely to be an ongoing process. A game plan that is effective for a few weeks or months may eventually need to be adjusted. Understanding this from the outset can help you prepare for bumps in the road. “It’s important to manage patient expectations and to provide lots of information so they know what to expect,” Lara says.

Side effects are an unfortunate part of life for people with kidney cancer. But in most cases, they’re manageable. As Lara put it, “I would say that over 95% of the time, we will find that sweet spot where the side effects are reasonably well tolerated and the quality of life is good.”

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Adidas’ Initial Silence on Kanye West Is a Cautionary Tale for Other Brands

2022-10-28T02:00:00.001+05:30

Adidas’ Initial Silence on Kanye West Is a Cautionary Tale for Other Brands

The news earlier this week that Adidas had become the latest company to end a product relationship with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, was neither surprising nor unexpected. Pressure was mounting in the wake of Ye’s conspiratorial antisemitic remarks, and the walls were closing in on him as more and more celebrities and other public figures spoke out.

But just as companies lined up to end their partnerships with Ye, extremists were embracing him. White supremacists were praising him and raising their arms in Nazi salutes. Faced with this pressure, the Adidas decision should have been inevitable. And yet, the company internally wrestled with this for nearly two weeks, even as Ye doubled down on his hateful words.
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Even in the face of direct taunts—Ye told a podcaster “I can say antisemitic s*** and Adidas can’t drop me”—the German company’s leadership seemed unmoved. For a company whose founders were Nazis, who supported the Hitler Youth movement and signed letters “Heil Hitler,” their silence was deafening.

Ultimately, Adidas did the right thing and got out of the business of bigotry. They dropped Ye. But their failure to take more immediate action in the face of Ye’s unrepentant antisemitism raises new questions about corporate responsibility in the face of hate. These questions will continue to have larger repercussions for corporate America, especially as even more massive social media brands like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube grapple with how to effectively counter the rising antisemitism and harassment on their own platforms.

What role do large companies play in countering hate? How responsible are companies for the hate their brand ambassadors, partners, employees, or—in the case of social media companies—even their users espouse? As head of ADL, one of the oldest organizations fighting antisemitism and all forms of hate in the U.S., these are questions we tackle every day. In the case of Adidas, the answer was clear, which is why I engaged in tough conversations with Adidas executives, institutional investors and shareholders, and many others over the past two weeks, to get them to take meaningful action.

All of these questions matter deeply. We can’t end hate if we overlook it. And although no act of hate should go unchecked, the damage done by Ye’s unapologetic antisemitism is immeasurable.

Ye is no run-of-the-mill misguided celebrity. He’s on another level completely. Ye is one of the most well-known entertainers in the world. He’s a celebrity with hundreds of millions of fans—more than 31 million fans on Twitter alone and one of the most widely followed people on the platform. To put that in perspective, his Twitter following alone is more than double the entirety of the world Jewish population. And he’s more than a celebrity, he’s also a massive profit center for several consumer brands and a brand in and of himself.

So, when he wore a racist “White Lives Matter” shirt and then launched into anti-Jewish tirades, it was critical that everyone speak out and for brands to step up to do the right thing. After all, Ye was crystal clear in his antisemitism. The antisemitic conspiracy theories Ye unleashed have been around for millennia: Jewish power, Jewish control of Hollywood, Jewish greed, and Jewish responsibility for societal problems. These are all classic antisemitic tropes.

While it is bad enough to hear these ideas espoused in a closed white supremacist Facebook group, it is quite another to hear a celebrity pull the proverbial genie out of the bottle in front of millions.

What’s worse, Ye’s remarks came in an environment when antisemitic incidents have reached a historic, 40-year high. Four years ago to this day, a white supremacist who imbibed in similar hateful theories barged into the Tree of Life synagogue and murdered 11 worshippers. This attack and others are still fresh in people’s minds. The American Jewish community remains on edge and continues to live in significant fear and anxiety. We know all too well that when a celebrity of Ye’s stature takes to his platforms and claims Jews are out to get him, all it takes is one person to take those words to heart and to take action.

Which brings me back to Adidas’s initial silence in the face of Ye’s hate speech.

At a time when participation in organized religion is down significantly and when faith in our civic institutions and government is near historic lows, corporate brands are playing a more critical role as cultural trend-setters, societal advocates and role models. Today, many people define themselves through their connection to brands, whether it is a shoe company or social media platform. In short, brands matter.

And when household-name brands like Adidas say they uphold a set of values, such as opposition to racism, antisemitism and other forms of hate, they should be expected to abide by them. Which explains the reaction to Adidas when, at first, they apparently didn’t.

We will not win the battle for hearts and minds—or end antisemitism, racism, and hate—without corporate support. But it doesn’t stop there: Government leaders need to take more of a role too, both in denouncing hate even when it emanates from within their own ranks and in pushing forward policies that take aim at companies who allow hatred to spread.

It takes a whole-of-society approach. And if there’s anything to learn from the Adidas debacle, more and more Americans are looking to our corporate and civic leaders to step up.

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Elon Musk Visits Twitter Headquarters as Takeover Deadline Looms

2022-10-27T04:50:00.001+05:30

Elon Musk Visits Twitter Headquarters as Takeover Deadline Looms

Elon Musk visited Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday as the deadline looms for him to complete a $44 billion acquisition of the company. Musk tweeted a video of himself carrying what appeared to be a bathroom sink into the building with the caption “let that sink in!”

Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022

The world’s richest man, who appeared to have changed his profile bio on the platform to “Chief Twit” on Wednesday, has until 5pm E.T. on Friday to complete the takeover deal, or be forced to defend himself in court against legal action from Twitter.
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If the deal closes this week, it would mean the end of an on-again off-again saga that has captivated the tech world. But it would likely be just the start of a period of sweeping change inside Twitter, which could have huge ramifications around the world.

What Musk will do at the helm of the company remains shrouded in mystery. He is widely predicted to preside over a loosening of Twitter’s rules and mass cost-cutting. He has flirted with Republican talking points, railing against Twitter’s “left-wing” staff, calling for more “free speech” on the platform, and suggesting he will end former President Donald Trump’s permanent ban – potentially even in time for the November midterm elections.

A report that Musk planned to cut costs by firing as much as 75% of the company’s staff prompted internal pushback in the form of an open letter on Monday. “We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires,” the letter said.

But it is difficult to tell how serious even the broad, known outlines of Musk’s plan for Twitter are. The Tesla CEO reportedly told investors in July that he aims to increase Twitter’s revenue from $5.08 billion in 2021 to $26.4 billion by 2028—an increase of 420% (a number associated with smoking marijuana).

Here’s what to know about the deal.

How did we get here?

Depending on who you ask, the six months since Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter have either been a masterclass in business, or a chaotic mess.

In late January Musk began buying shares in Twitter. He then started tweeting about his belief that Twitter was not doing enough to protect free speech, and said he was giving “serious thought” to building an alternative platform. By April, Musk had become Twitter’s largest single shareholder, with a 9% stake. Twitter invited him to join the company’s board, in a move seen by many observers as an attempt to disarm a nascent hostile takeover attempt. Musk accepted and then, days later, rejected the offer. He then made an offer to buy the company for $44 billion. In May, Musk said the deal was “temporarily on hold,” citing the problem of fake accounts, or bots, on the platform. By July 8 he had formally abandoned the deal, accusing the company of failing to provide accurate bot numbers. Twitter sued him. Musk countersued. Twitter’s case against him was set to go to trial in October. Shortly before it was set to begin, Musk dropped his objections and said he would go through with the deal at the agreed price of $44 billion. The Delaware judge delayed the trial, giving Musk until 5 p.m. E.T. on Oct. 28 to close the deal.

What has Musk said he will do at Twitter?

Musk has suggested a grab-bag of (occasionally contradictory) ideas for how to make Twitter more popular and more profitable. They can be separated into three rough baskets: changes to the rules, new features, and cutting costs.

Musk has suggested a suite of new features for Twitter, in order to attract new users and drive up revenue. These range from grandiose plans—like integrating a payment system into Twitter, turning it into “X, the everything app”—to fine tuning nitty-gritty details, like allowing users to choose their own recommendation algorithms. He has suggested encrypting users’ private messages, and turbocharging Twitter Blue, the site’s paid membership tier, potentially even allowing users to pay to receive the blue “verified” checkmark.

Musk has also hinted at changes to the rules of Twitter. He has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and has said he wants to allow more content to remain on Twitter, so long as it isn’t spam and doesn’t break the law. He has said he wants to get rid of most forms of permanent bans, and indicated that he will allow Trump back onto the platform. Those rule changes may contradict his plans to bring new users to the site: plenty of research shows that sites with fewer restrictions on legal but harmful content, like hate speech and harassment, end up catering to a vocal minority of users with extreme views, while driving others away.

But in the challenging economic climate, it may be cutting costs where Musk makes his first real mark on the company. The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told investors he would fire as much as 75% of the workforce in an effort to streamline the business. Many Twitter employees who hold stock are concerned they will be fired immediately if the acquisition completes on Friday, two Twitter employees told TIME. The next round of Twitter stock held by employees vests on Nov. 1, and, which means the company would incur those costs if employees are still on payroll at that date, the people said.

What could get in the way?

Musk’s Twitter acquisition has cleared the U.S. government’s antitrust approval process, appearing to leave few obstacles in the way to him assuming control of the company as soon as the deal completes.

Bloomberg reported last week that the Biden Administration was weighing a review of the Musk acquisition on national security grounds, but an administration spokesperson later denied that report.

There’s a chance that Musk could once again back out of the deal, this time at the eleventh hour, potentially citing new legal arguments as to why he should not have to proceed with an acquisition at a price that he has admitted is far more for Twitter than it is worth. If that happens, Musk and Twitter would be headed for a potentially messy confrontation in a Delaware courtroom in November.

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Michelle Obama, Melinda French Gates, and Amal Clooney Are Teaming Up to Support Young Women

2022-10-27T03:00:00.003+05:30

Michelle Obama, Melinda French Gates, and Amal Clooney Are Teaming Up to Support Young Women

Michelle Obama, Melinda French Gates, and Amal Clooney appeared on stage together for the first time ever in New York City on Oct. 25 at an event in support of the Obama Foundation’s Girls Opportunity Alliance’s Get Her There campaign. There, the three women—each of whom has a foundation that bears her name—announced they would collaborate on efforts to advance gender equality and end child marriage.

The Girls Opportunity Alliance, founded by the former First Lady, is a network of community-led organizations that focus on the education and empowerment of young girls in developing countries and the U.S. It launched Get Her There on Oct. 11 as a global call to action to empower and educate adolescent girls around the world.
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Read More: Amal Clooney Won’t Back Down

Speaking on Tuesday, the women noted a rollback of progress in gender equity in recent years that had afflicted not just young women in poorer countries, but much closer to home. “This issue is personal to me,” said Obama. “I have always seen myself in these girls.” She recalled her own childhood: “I knew I was smart. I knew I was capable. But I also knew that I lived in a community that wasn’t necessarily willing to invest in my greatness. So we have to change that paradigm and we have to do it fast. Because when girls don’t learn we all suffer.”

Clooney, a co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, noted that more than 100 million girls were out of school, and 10 million a year were being forced into marrying too young. “Who knows how many of the 10 million could have gone on to find the cure for cancer or lead a country?” she asked. “And then it’s the next generation. What kind of mother can [a woman] be if she has five or six kids by the end of her teens?”

Obama spoke of her own self-doubt and said it persisted to this day. “Society intentionally does that to women and girls. It starts at a very early age,” she said. “There are people with power who want us to stay small, they want us to stay doubtful.”

French Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said that girls need to know it’s fine for them as adults to marry or not, to have children or not, and to work outside the home or not—but, crucially, it should be up to them. “One of the shared values that we have on stage is, how do we make sure that girls become the women they want to be?” she said. “And when we get them fully to where they want to be in society, they will actually change society at large.”

Through the collaboration, the three women will participate in joint advocacy and work together to scale and expand each organization’s programming around the world. “I am so grateful that Melinda and Amal—two of the world’s most compelling and influential leaders for gender equity—are teaming up with the Girls Opportunity Alliance to help remove the barriers that stand in the way of every girl getting the opportunities she deserves,” Obama said.

The triumvirate’s appearance was kept quiet ahead of time with most media being told only that French Gates would be present. They shared some family anecdotes with Clooney saying that her 5-year-old son recently drew a prison and announced it was for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and French Gates recalling that one of her daughters had—at a similar age—told a doll that she was going to look after it, because it had HIV/AIDS.

In a room dominated by donors, the former First Lady told guests that despite the firepower on stage, they still needed financial or popular support. “I don’t want you to look upon this stage and say, ‘Oh, Michelle, Amal, oh, they got it,” Obama said. “This issue is complex. We do not have it. We’re not here because we’ll fix it and you guys can just go about your merry way. We are living through that kind of apathy, complacency, and lack of engagement.”

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‘More Bad News For The Planet’ As Emissions Rise to Record Levels in 2021

2022-10-27T03:00:00.001+05:30

‘More Bad News For The Planet’ As Emissions Rise to Record Levels in 2021

GENEVA — The three main greenhouse gases hit record high levels in the atmosphere last year, the U.N. weather agency said Wednesday, calling it an “ominous” sign as war in Ukraine, rising costs of food and fuel, and other worries have elbowed in on longtime concerns about global warming in recent months.

“More bad news for the planet,” the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement along with its latest annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. It’s one of several reports released in recent days looking at several aspects of humanity’s struggle with climate change in the run up to the U.N.’s latest climate conference, in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
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Of the three main types of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide — the biggest jump from 2020 to 2021 was in methane, whose concentrations in the air came in with the biggest year-on-year increase since regular measurements began four decades ago, WMO said.

“The continuing rise in concentrations of the main heat-trapping gases, including the record acceleration in methane levels, shows that we are heading in the wrong direction,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Methane is more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, but doesn’t stay in the atmosphere nearly as long as carbon dioxide and there’s 200 times more carbon dioxide in the air than methane. Over a 20-year time-period, a molecule of methane traps about 81 times the heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide but over a century it goes down to trapping 28 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since pre-industrial times, which WMO sets at around the year 1750, CO2 concentrations in the air have increased by nearly 50% to 415.7 parts per million, with the U.S., China and Europe responsible for the bulk of emissions. Methane is up 162% to 1,908 parts per billion, and nitrous oxide — whose human-made sources are things like biomass burning, industrial processes and fertilizer use — is up about one-quarter to 334.5 parts per million.

Earlier on Wednesday the U.N’s climate office said current pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions put the planet on course to blow past the limit for global warming countries agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

It said its latest estimate based on 193 national emissions targets would see temperatures rise to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages by the end of the century, a full degree higher than the ambitious goal set in the Paris pact to limit warming by 1.5 C (2.7 F).

“We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required to put us on track toward a 1.5 degrees Celsius world,” the head of the U.N. climate office, Simon Stiell, said in a statement. “To keep this goal alive, national governments need to strengthen their climate action plans now and implement them in the next eight years.”

The report found that emissions will also increase by 10.6% by 2030 from 2010 levels, a slight decrease from the 13.7% estimates last year.

A report published Wednesday by Climate Action Tracker who track nations’ pledges to reduce warming found that of 40 indicators for reducing emissions — like weaning off coal, ramping up electric vehicles or reducing deforestation — the world wasn’t on track for any of them to match the levels of emissions reductions scientists say are needed to limit warming to 1.5C. Over half of the indicators showed the world is “well off track” to cutting emissions but added that promising progress has been made.

Climatologists and environmental advocates have been raising their voices for years about the impact of climate change, by pointing to vast changes in the weather in recent decades like forest fires in China and western United States, drought in the horn of Africa and unprecedented flooding in Pakistan – to name only a few.

CO2 remains the single most important greenhouse gas generated by human activity — mainly from burning of fossil fuels and cement production — amounting to about two-thirds of the warming effect on the climate, known as radiative forcing. Over the last decade, carbon dioxide has been responsible for about four-fifths of that warming effect.

Methane accounts for about more than one-sixth of the warming effect, said WMO. Three-fifths of methane reaches the atmosphere through the burps and farts of livestock, rice farming, use of fossil fuels, biomass burning and landfills; the rest comes from natural sources like wetlands and termites.

Rob Jackson, who heads the Global Carbon Project, suggested that the spikes in methane over the last two years were “mysterious” — either blips related to the coronavirus pandemic, which temporary dented emissions, or a sign of “a dangerous acceleration in methane emissions from wetlands and other systems we’ve been worrying about for decades.”

“Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide are not just rising, they’re rising faster than ever. While not losing our focus on carbon dioxide, we need to pay more attention to the ‘other’ greenhouse gases,” he added. “Fortunately, methane is beginning to get the attention it deserves” through initiatives like the Global Methane Pledge, a capping effort supported by the U.S. and European Union, among others.

Nitrous oxide remains “mostly ignored,” he added.

Taalas, who has been repeating warnings about global warming for years, says the focus should remain on CO2.

“As the top and most urgent priority, we have to slash carbon dioxide emissions which are the main driver of climate change and associated extreme weather, and which will affect climate for thousands of years through polar ice loss, ocean warming and sea level rise,” he said.

NASA announced that an instrument on the International Space Station designed to look at mineral dust turned out to be a useful tool to find “super emitters” of methane from orbit. NASA shared three images showing plumes several miles long that are spewing methane.

A group of a dozen leaks from pipeline and other gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan is leaking 55 tons of methane per hour, about the same as the infamous 2015 Aliso Canyon leak, drilling in New Mexico that’s spewing 18 tons per hour and a landfill in Iran that’s emitting 8 tons per hour.

“We’re looking in places where no one is planning to look for methane,” said NASA instrument scientist Robert Green. “If it’s there we’ll see it.”

Science writer Seth Borenstein in Washington and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed.

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What the West Should Do If Putin Uses a Nuclear Weapon

2022-10-27T01:00:00.001+05:30

What the West Should Do If Putin Uses a Nuclear Weapon

As Vladimir Putin becomes more desperate in Ukraine, watching his killed-in-action tally rise weekly alongside the butcher’s bill of destroyed equipment, his thoughts will turn to other options. We’ve already seen him launch a significant bombing campaign directed against critical Ukrainian infrastructure—primarily the electric grid—just in time to threaten civilians with blackouts and freezing home temperatures.

Like his conventional ground attack, that tactic will likely fail. Just as the British responded with high morale and determination to the Nazi terror bombings of World War II, the Ukrainians will continue to coalesce around their inspirational leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and above all continue to defend their homeland. Once Putin realizes he cannot win with air power and terror bombings, he may consider seriously using a tactical nuclear weapon or a radioactive “dirty bomb.” What should the west do if he chooses to do so?
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This is a real possibility. A few days ago, in a strange move, the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, reached out to several NATO counterparts, including the U.S., United Kingdom, and France. He laid out a preposterous lie, purporting to have evidence that the Ukrainians were preparing to use a “dirty bomb” soon. These “dirty bombs” are simply large explosives combined with radioactive material—they scatter the radioactivity around a large area, although the lethal effects are actually relatively small. The NATO ministers correctly pushed back strongly, including issuing a joint statement denying such a scheme existed.

This smells like the Kremlin laying the tracks for a classic “false flag” operation, meaning they would detonate such a weapon, then point an accusing finger at the Ukrainians. The Russians have done exactly that with their Syrian partners, using chemical weapons against their opponents but accusing the Syrian rebels and the U.S. of having planted them or even of having used them actively themselves. Additionally, Putin continues to muse in public on using a tactical nuclear weapon, an even more serious device that can be “dialed up” to destroy city blocks and large troop formations. Russian hard right commentators routinely encourage him to do so.

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Should Putin become desperate enough (and pressured enough by his own far right, who demand far stronger pressure on Ukraine and defiance of the west) to use a radioactive weapon—either a dirty bomb or a tactical nuclear weapon—the west should respond forcefully and immediately along these lines:

Publicize and condemn the Russian use of nuclear weapons, the first use since the Second World War
Provide incontrovertible evidence that the radiation is the result of Russian activity
Demand Russian expulsion from the U.N. Security Council, going through the General Assembly to overcome a presumed Russian veto in the U.N. Security Council.
Push China, India, and other major “swing voter” nations to condemn Putin and cut off trade with Russia
Confiscate all Russian financial assets in western hands, around $300 billion, for the express use of reconstructing Ukraine
Deliver MIG-29 Soviet era fighter aircraft (currently in the hands of the Poles) to the Ukrainians immediately, as their pilots already fly them very capably. In this scenario, the U.S. would immediately backfill with F-16s to Warsaw
Consider giving the Ukrainians U.S. F-16 fighter aircraft, particularly some of the early models. These are relatively simple to fly, very lethal in both air-to-air scenarios and in air-to-ground attacks. The U.S. would train a cadre of Ukrainian pilots, probably taking them to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany
Increase the supply of advanced surface to air defensive missile systems, probably older Hawk systems but also the modern Patriot (wide area, relatively easy to train to operate) and Iron Dome (developed jointly with Israel, excellent point defense systems to be used around big population centers and critical infrastructure)
Strongly consider putting up a NATO “no fly” zone in support of the Ukrainian air forces, using NATO jets operating out of Polish and German bases
Strongly consider a response is the world of cyber, particularly going after Russian military capabilities aggressively.
Directly and overtly target the Russian Black Sea fleet and provide Ukraine with the intelligence and long-range cruise missiles to sink a significant number of high value warships

All of these measures should be communicated now to Putin, so he understands the reaction to his use of radioactive weapons would swift and formidable.

One thing we should not contemplate is responding in kind, with NATO nuclear capability. Although the Alliance has such means and recently conducted its annual exercises demonstrating this ability, avoiding further nuclear escalation must be avoided at all costs.

The war in Ukraine is going badly for Putin. But he must understand it will go even more badly—exponentially so—if he reaches for the lever to use a radioactive nuclear device of any kind.

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Here Are All the Tributes Given at the TIME100 Next Gala 2022

2022-10-26T09:00:00.005+05:30

Here Are All the Tributes Given at the TIME100 Next Gala 2022

The world’s most influential rising stars gathered in New York City Tuesday evening for the TIME100 Next Gala 2022.

Amid a star-studded event that featured TIME100 Next 2022 members like Keke Palmer, Machine Gun Kelly, Trinity Rodman, and Law Roach—five honorees offered toasts that gave tribute to people and causes that were important to them.

Bridgerton actor Simone Ashley spoke about the importance of pursuing your dreams; environmental activist Nalleli Cobo honored women who are fighting for change; author George M. Johnson talked about the lasting impact of giving voice to queer stories; Emily in Paris actor Lily Collins paid tribute to staying true to yourself; Machine Gun Kelly gave an off-the-cuff speech on reading and art; and comedian Joel Kim Booster thanked the fierce women who inspired him.
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“Everyone who is here today at TIME100 Next is here because they have made a significant impact in their fields,” said Collins. “And that impact wouldn’t be what it is if not for each of your willingness to bring your gifts to the world.”

The TIME100 Next list is a cohort of 100 emerging leaders who are shaping their industries and beyond.

Here’s what the recipients had to say:

Simmone Ashley: ‘To staying loyal to our dreams’

Tonight has been an incredible experience for me. I have always been very ambitious, and much like every person in this room, I have always been a dreamer.

Since I was a little girl I knew what I wanted to do with my life—I wanted to use my voice to connect with people and to perform, to create art. I grew up watching movies all the time, a whole variety, I loved musicals, I loved singing, so I was very drawn to classic Disney movies and ones by Pixar. This continued when I was a teenager. And I remember watching a short film from the 1970s that had a quote by a motivational speaker called Dr. Wayne Dyer, and I came to learn this quote was inspired by Albert Einstein. And this quote inspired me to continue chasing my dreams, and it helped me understand when I meet my dreams, how to face the fear and excitement and the vulnerability that comes with them. The quote is:

Fear of the unknown.

They are afraid of new ideas.

They are loaded with prejudices,

not based upon anything in reality, but based upon…

If something is new, I reject it immediately because it’s frightening to me.

What they do instead is just stay with the familiar.

You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all of the universe are the most mysterious.

So I’d like to raise a toast, to not only chasing our dreams, running after them bravely, but to continuing to run with them, to staying loyal to our dreams, because we don’t have to be familiar. We can be ourselves, we can be the change no matter what we look like, where we come from, the color of our skin, what our journey might look like. We can celebrate the new or perhaps we can celebrate what was already there and never got the chance to be seen. And we can celebrate the next. Cheers.

Nalleli Cobo: ‘To the people who fuel us and the people who protect us’

Thank you, TIME, for this incredible honor.

And thank you, TIME, for asking us such a powerful question: “who inspires us?” Reflecting on this question has reinvigorated my fire to do what I do.

When I was 4 years old, my family and I moved into an apartment complex, 30 feet across from an active oil well. As I walked to school every day, I passed by signs that read: “dangerous chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects and reproductive harm.” My childhood was defined by: asthma attacks, cardiac issues and endless visits to the the hospital.

At 19, I was diagnosed with reproductive cancer. Just like that sign said. Sometimes I feel like my childhood was erased because of where I lived. And after my cancer diagnosis, I felt like my future was also taken away from me because I lost the ability to bear children.

My community’s battle to end urban oil drilling has been long and hard. Yet, it has also been filled with many powerful victories.

And none of these triumphs would have been possible without the strong women in my community and across the world who are actively fighting to create change. These women inspire me to continue this journey.

I would like to highlight and toast a few of those brave women tonight.

To Lydia Cacho, an investigative journalist who has selflessly put her life on the line while fighting against evil forces—including human traffickers—harming women and children in Mexico. Through her activism and her reporting, Lydia has saved the lives of countless women and children.

To my sisters in Iran, who even in the face of death chose to stand up and speak out because they know without freedom and liberty there is no life

And lastly, I want to toast the strongest woman I know, my mom, who’s here with me today.

Mom, thank you. Thank you for being my rock, my best friend, and my biggest support. You have taught me to know my worth and value as a woman, and have inspired me every single day. If I’m 1% of the woman you are, I know I’m more than enough. Thank you for always believing in me because without you I don’t think it would be possible to be at the Time 100 Next Gala.

So here’s a toast to the people who inspire us, to the people who fuel us and the people who protect us. Thank you for all that you do.

George M. Johnson: ‘The work we do now is for the people we will never know one hundred years from now’

Every morning before I pick up my phone and see what the trending mess of the day is on Twitter, I take about 5 minutes to myself to sit at my altar and pray with my ancestors. And right before I go to bed, I have a few words with them, too. They are my inspiration to do the work that I do, and the people I can always count on when the noise that is this world gets too loud.

Ancestor Zora Neale Hurston once said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” When I wrote my memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, I knew I wasn’t just telling my story. I was telling the story of so many Black queer people who never had the ability to read or write. Never had the ability to share their voice or even live in truth as I get to do today. This last year, I’ve been fighting to keep those types of stories from ever being silenced again.

As I look around this room, I see so many people who refused to be silent about their pain. But even more, I see people who are being vocal in their joy. And that’s something to me that is very ancestral. Even in their hardships, the ancestors found joy. Found ways to survive, to thrive, and pass down those lessons for generations after them to be led by. We all probably have an ancestor whose name we call on in our hardest days. Ancestors that we wish were still here in the physical to celebrate our wins.

If my grandmother Louise Kennedy Evans Elder were still here, she would have found a way to be in this room, even if it meant if some of you honorees couldn’t be here. She had sayings like, “Scared money don’t make money, Matt,” “Once you take the trash out to the curb, you don’t go back outside and get it” and my favorite: “It’s a sad rabbit that only got one hole.” She was talking about multiple streams of income. I hear her voice often when I’m working. I lean on her words throughout my day to keep me encouraged and to keep me going.

It’s because of her and the ancestors that I know my work and the work that many of us do today isn’t just for today. The work we do now is for the people we will never know one hundred years from now who will read our writings, watch our interviews, see our work and be inspired. The people who will one day consider us the ancestors. So as Toni Morrison said, “If there is a book you want to read and it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

So let that be your inspiration when you leave this room tonight. Remember those words in all that you do. If there is a TV show that you want to watch and it isn’t there, create it. If there is an initiative you wish to see, and it doesn’t exist. Create it. Be reminded that so many before us laid the foundation of the roads we travel today. Be inspired by what they built, and continue to pave that road for the future generations who will one day walk down the path you laid.

So I’ll raise my glass to the ancestors. And I raise my glass to everyone who hears this as I end with a quote from ancestor Lucille Clifton: “Drink with me my friends, to a world that has tried to kill us and as of yet has not succeeded.” Thank you.

Lily Collins: ‘Staying true to who you are’

Sometimes, it can be hard to stay true to yourself—to be authentically and unapologetically the person you were meant to be. It’s a truth everyone in this room can attest to. And yet—it’s through authenticity that every honoree here tonight was able to make the change that they did, and become as influential and impactful as they are.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nonlinear journey that is everyone’s coming of age story—the idea that who you are can evolve and shift depending on your priorities and your commitments. Depending on where you are in life, and what it is that you are working to achieve. But even as your story changes, and you change with it, it’s so important to reflect on the core of who you are—your morals, your values, the parts of you that have stayed constant through the years.

JP Yim—Getty Images for TIMELily Collins gives a toast during the TIME100 Next Gala in New York City on Oct. 25, 2022.

I was always raised with the sentiment that the quirky things that make you different are what make you beautiful. So being who we are unapologetically is both a kind of gift that we can give to ourselves, and also, ultimately, an essential ingredient to our work. Everyone who is here today at TIME100 Next is here because they have made a significant impact in their fields. And that impact wouldn’t be what it is if not for each of your willingness to bring your gifts to the world.

I was once asked if I considered myself a workaholic or a romantic. I remember being jarred by the question because I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be both. I was unapologetically in love with love, but also in love with what I do and with my career. And I think that’s something to be celebrated. We can love ourselves, we can love others, and we can also love what we do. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s also what brings us here today. The fact that each of you has stayed true to who you are, despite the doubt or the challenges that you have faced. The fact each of you is uniquely yourselves, in all of your complexity and in all of your power.

So a toast—to staying true to who you are and making the impact you were meant to make. Unapologetically.

Machine Gun Kelly: ‘Suspend logic and invite magic’

I was asked to give my speech 30 minutes ago so I don’t have one, but I woke up today and I felt weird. I don’t know if any of you guys did. But then I found out that it’s a solar eclipse and a new moon and there’s three planets conjunct with Scorpio and scored with Pluto. Which just basically means it’s going to be a wild night after this.

I really appreciate everything that you [George M. Johnson] had said about ancestors. I also like the fact that you’re an author. And I feel like, if I’m speaking frankly, the art of reading is dying in our generation and it’s really sad. And I just want to point that out, because we’re here with TIME, which is a magazine, which you read. I’ve read many magazines. I grew up loving reading. I know that sounds funny coming from me, but I really—I still, even at meet and greets, fans connect with me by giving me a book, and that’s a thing that we have. So I encourage the 100 and all of the people that have an influence on people to encourage the next generation to connect that with reading.

I’ll share a New York memory. My first time in New York, I was 18 years old, I had a baby on the way, and I was working at Chipotle. And I came to the Apollo in Harlem, on 125th street, and I tried out for Amateur Night. And I became the first rapper to win first place at Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater. And my first music check was for $45, which I never cashed and I framed and I kept it, hoping that I could look back on it and appreciate it. Which, a day like today, being here in New York honored by this, I am appreciating it.

JP Yim—Getty Images for TIMEMachine Gun Kelly gives a toast during the TIME100 Next Gala in New York City on Oct. 25, 2022.

Everyone said these really great quotes. I think one that maybe I’ll just lay off, I love this one. It was, ‘Suspend logic and invite magic.’ That’s what I encourage from all of us. I think the world is in an odd place. I think if you’re an entertainer, hold off on doing s— that pays to do s— that matters. If you’re an author, write your f— heart out as if no one is reading, because those are the best words that you’re ever going to speak. If you’re the person who’s saving us all from drinking s— water and making the water work and saving the ocean, f— yes.

My daughter is a teenager now. I still feel like a teenager now. I see the will that she has going so far beyond the dreams that I thought that I could achieve. And I really love that. I just met somebody in the hallway who was—she had the most epic speech earlier, and she was so kind and so nice. And if those are the hands that the world is left in, I feel good.

Joel Kim Booster: ‘To all the women who made me gay.’

Growing up in a conservative home, there were a lot of theories about what made a person gay. Overbearing mother, a distant father, not enough time spent in the church. Of course all these reasons are completely ridiculous and wrong. A person doesn’t become gay because their mother hugged them too hard or their dad didn’t hug them enough, no. They become gay after spending their childhood idolizing iconic female celebrities.

I was asked tonight to give a toast to someone or something that was important to me. A toast about what shaped me into the man I am today. And I couldn’t pick just one. So tonight I’d like to raise my glass to all the women who made me gay.

To Lucy Lawless, Famke Janssen, Michelle Yeoh, and any other woman who has crushed a man’s skull with their thighs on screen, I toast to you. While all the boys in my class were obsessing over James Bond and the Terminator, I was busy focusing on the Bond girls and Linda Hamilton. I could not escape the allure of women doing all the same martial arts moves as the men, but in impossibly high heels. I didn’t understand at the time why I was so fascinated with these women, but it’s because they taught me about strength, the kind that comes from being underestimated and dismissed. And not that it matters, but they looked incredible doing it.

To Madeline Kahn, Maya Rudolph, and Margaret Cho, and countless others—thank you for teaching me how to be funny. I had a picture of Margaret Cho hanging in my bedroom when I was growing up, and I would tell everyone it’s because I had a crush on her, having no idea how funny it was that Margaret Cho was actually one of my earliest beards, a role I’m sure she was intimately familiar with. I wouldn’t understand until later how hard you had to fight for your place on stage, only until I was fighting a similar battle as a queer Asian stand up comedian. You taught me so much, more than I could ever hope to fit into one toast. Thank you.

I want to take some time to toast many of the women in my life who might not be celebrities to you, but who live in the story of my life as titans and icons. To all the girls I went to high school with who accepted me on my terms, protected me from bullies, and held my hand as I tearfully came out in the cafeteria during 3B lunch. Thank you Kelsey, thank you Sarah, thank you Kristen. Not names I made up, I swear those are actual people.

And finally, thank you mom. You did hug me too hard. And while it didn’t make me gay, it made me feel loved and not that it matters, but no woman will ever measure up. You taught me how to love. How to be loved. That you should always make small talk with the girl at the register because everyone should be treated with kindness. And when my dad died, you taught me about strength beyond measure. You’ll never see this, and that’s okay. It just wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t include you here.

So tonight please, let’s raise a glass, not only to all the women I talked about tonight, but all the women in this room who may not have had a hand in making me gay, but are no doubt at this very moment making little boys all over the country gay as hell.

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Megan Fox on Ageism in Hollywood and the Drawbacks of Being a Sex Symbol

2022-10-26T09:00:00.003+05:30

Megan Fox on Ageism in Hollywood and the Drawbacks of Being a Sex Symbol

Actor Megan Fox opened up about ageism in Hollywood during an appearance at the TIME100 Next Gala 2022 on Tuesday in New York City.

Fox, 36, who was at the event to support fiancé and TIME100 Next honoree Machine Gun Kelly, told TIME she hasn’t had to face that type of discrimination—yet.

“I still look the way I look. And what I mean by that is, as long as you are still a commercial commodity, they don’t come after you,” Fox said. “So I haven’t experienced that side of Hollywood yet.”
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Fox, however, also noted that people “seem to not be able to value me for much more beyond” her looks. “I never had a problem being a sex symbol. I never thought that that was a negative thing,” Fox said. But she added that it results in a “false narrative” when people overlook her other virtues like her intellect and humor.

Last year Fox opened up about feeling objectified and only recognized for her looks throughout her career. In a series of interviews, she recalled being typecast in overtly sexual roles since the age of 15, beginning with Bad Boys II. She said her experiences culminated in a “psychological breakdown” eight years later after shooting Jennifer’s Body—a poorly-received comedic thriller.

The TIME100 Next Gala featured a diverse array of up-and-coming talent from across fields and industries. The night featured Bridgerton actor Simone Ashley, environmental activist Nalleli Cobo, author George M. Johnson, and Emily in Paris star Lily Collins.

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The Biggest Takeaways from the Fetterman and Oz Debate

2022-10-26T09:00:00.001+05:30

The Biggest Takeaways from the Fetterman and Oz Debate

After weeks of attacks from the right about auditory processing issues resulting from a stroke he suffered in May, John Fetterman took the stage Tuesday night for his only debate with Republican opponent Mehmet Oz.

The debate was the first major televised test for the Democrat, who relied on closed captioning technology as he faced a polished celebrity doctor with years of TV experience. Two weeks from now, Pennsylvania voters will decide who made the better case in one of the most important Senate races in the country.

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With the Senate currently split 50-50 between the parties, the race in the Keystone State could help decide who controls the Senate next year. As Democratic incumbents face challenges in states like Georgia and Nevada, the Pennsylvania seat held by retiring Republican Senator Pat Toomey represents one of the Democratic Party’s best opportunities to shore up its majority—and is one Republicans almost certainly need to keep if they want to win control of the upper chamber.

Throughout the year, Fetterman, the current lieutenant governor of the state, led Donald Trump-endorsed Oz in nearly every public poll, sometimes by double digits. But the race has recently tightened. A poll conducted in mid-October found Fetterman leading Oz by six points; another, conducted over the past few days, found him leading by just two.

Here are four key takeaways from Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate.

Fetterman stumbles

Moderators opened the debate by pointing out the closed captioning screens behind them. They explained to the audience that experienced captioners were on hand to transcribe questions and Oz’s responses in real-time. Fetterman previously said that auditory processing issues resulting from his stroke sometimes make it difficult for him to understand what he’s hearing. Closed captioning technology, he explained, helps him be precise in his answers.

The moderators’ first questions to each candidate were softballs about what qualified them to be a senator. But Fetterman did not directly answer the question, as would be the case repeatedly throughout the night. Starting by telling the audience “good night,” he quickly pivoted to attacks against Oz. He also established a refrain that he returned to throughout the debate: “It’s the Oz rule: If he’s on TV, he’s lying.”

With less than a minute to answer each question, Fetterman’s responses at times did not make sense or he fumbled for words, and he often seemed more comfortable returning to familiar attack lines than addressing the moderators’ queries.

But even with his auditory processing issues on full display for the audience, Fetterman doubled down on his previous refusal to release his complete medical records. “My doctor all believes that I am fit to be serving and that’s what I believe—is where I’m standing,” he said.

Fetterman’s team had already tempered expectations ahead of Tuesday night by releasing a campaign memo stating that Oz had a “huge built-in advantage,” that “John did not get where he is by winning debates or being a polished speaker,” and “John is going to win this race—even if he doesn’t win the debate.”

Different views on minimum wage

When moderators asked both candidates if they support raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, Fetterman immediately said that he did, before suggesting that his multi-millionaire opponent could never understand the experiences of working people.

“He has never met an oil company that he doesn’t swipe right about,” Fetterman said.

Oz did not directly address whether the federal government should raise the minimum wage and instead said that Pennsylvanians should be making far more than $15 per hour and that “market forces” were already making that happen.

Oz accused Fetterman of failing to pay his taxes while seeking to raise taxes on other Pennsylvanians, seemingly referencing a budget proposal by Pennsylvania’s governor. “John Fetterman thinks the minimum wage is his weekly allowance from his parents,” Oz said.

Oz says the federal government should not regulate abortion

“I don’t want the federal government involved with that at all,” Oz said when asked about his stance on whether he would support a federal abortion ban for cases not involving rape, incest, or life of the mother, after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in a decision last term.

Abortion decisions should be between “women, doctors, local political leaders,” Oz said.

Oz accused Fetterman of fear-mongering by painting him as more extreme than he is on the issue. “He’s purposefully trying to alarm them,” Oz said.

“You roll with Doug Mastriano,” Fetterman interrupted, referencing the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate in the state, who has stated his support for a total abortion ban. Fetterman said he supports Roe v. Wade.

Asked repeatedly if he would support South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s bill banning abortion after 15 weeks, Oz did not say yes or no, instead claiming that he had been clear in his response.

Fetterman’s fracking flip-flop

Near the end of the debate, the moderators questioned both candidates on their shifting positions on fracking, an issue of critical importance for Pennsylvania.

Oz, who once wrote that there needed to be more health studies on fracking, stated that he’s in full support of the practice. “It’s the jobs I want,” he said.

“I’ve always supported fracking,” Fetterman said. “We can’t be held ransom to somebody like Russia.”

A moderator asked Fetterman to explain his change in position on fracking, which he previously opposed. “I do support fracking,” Fetterman replied, searching for another phrase and stumbling.

“And I don’t, I don’t—I support fracking, and I stand—and I do support fracking.”

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