Tag Archives: erupt

World

Huge COVID protests erupt in China’s Xinjiang after deadly fire

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Nov 26 (Reuters) – Rare protests broke out in China’s far western Xinjiang region, with crowds shouting at hazmat-suited guards after a deadly fire triggered anger over their prolonged COVID-19 lockdown as nationwide infections set another record.

Crowds chanted “End the lockdown!”, pumping their fists in the air as they walked down a street, according to videos circulated on Chinese social media on Friday night. Reuters verified the footage was published from the Xinjiang capital Urumqi.

Videos showed people in a plaza singing China’s national anthem with its lyric, “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!” while others shouted that they wanted to be released from lockdowns.

China has put the vast Xinjiang region under some of the country’s longest lockdowns, with many of Urumqi’s 4 million residents barred from leaving their homes for as long as 100 days. The city reported about 100 new cases each of the past two days.

Xinjiang is home to 10 million Uyghurs. Rights groups and Western governments have long accused Beijing of abuses against the mainly Muslim ethnic minority, including forced labour in internment camps. China strongly rejects such claims.

The Urumqi protests followed a fire in a high-rise building there that killed 10 on Thursday night.

Authorities have said the building’s residents had been able to go downstairs, but videos of emergency crews’ efforts, shared on Chinese social media, led many internet users to surmise that residents could not escape in time because the building was partially locked down.

Urumqi officials abruptly held a news conference in the early hours of Saturday, denying that COVID measures had hampered escape and rescue but saying they would investigate further. One said residents could have escaped faster if they had better understood fire safety.

[1/3] Protests against coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak measures in Urumqi city, Xinjiang Uygur, China in this screen grab obtained from a video released November 25, 2022.Video obtained by Reuters/via REUTERS

‘BLAME THE VICTIM’

Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said such a “blame-the-victim” attitude would make people angrier. “Public trust will just sink lower,” he told Reuters.

Users on China’s Weibo platform described the incident as a tragedy that sprang out of China’s insistence on sticking to its zero-COVID policy and something that could happen to anyone. Some lamented its similarities to the deadly September crash of a COVID quarantine bus.

“Is there not something we can reflect on to make some changes,” said an essay that went viral on WeChat on Friday, questioning the official narrative on the Urumqi apartment fire.

China defends President Xi Jinping’s signature zero-COVID policy as life-saving and necessary to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system. Officials have vowed to continue with it despite the growing public pushback and its mounting toll on the world’s second-biggest economy.

While the country recently tweaked its measures, shortening quarantines and taking other targeted steps, this coupled with rising cases has caused widespread confusion and uncertainty in big cities, including Beijing, where many residents are locked down at home.

China recorded 34,909 daily local cases, low by global standards but the third record in a row, with infections spreading numerous cities, prompting widespread lockdowns and other curbs on movement and business.

Shanghai, China’s most populous city and financial hub, tightened testing requirements on Saturday for entering cultural venues such as museums and libraries, requiring people to present a negative COVID test taken within 48 hours, down from 72 hours earlier.

Beijing’s Chaoyang Park, popular with runners and picnickers, shut again after having briefly reopened.

Reporting by Yew Lun Tian; Editing by William Mallard

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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World

Protests and strikes erupt across Europe as soaring inflation, cost of living drives ‘winter of discontent’

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Workers in Greece and Belgium walked off the job this week as protests have unfolded all across Europe pushing back against soaring cost of living prices driven by inflation in what some have labeled a “winter of discontent.”

Workers in Greece held a 24-hour general strike this week when thousands of protesters marched through Athens and the northern city of Thessaloniki, prompting brief clashes with small groups of protesters breaking off from the main group, and throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks at police who responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

The strike disrupted services around the country, with ferries tied up in port, severing connections to Greece’s islands, state-run schools shutting, public hospitals running with reduced staff and most public transport grinding to a standstill.

INFLATION IN GERMANY HITS NEAR 50-YEAR HIGH AMID ENERGY CRISIS

A Molotov cocktail explodes near riot police outside the Greek Parliament during clashes in Athens, Greece, Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022. 
(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A similar scene unfolded in Belgium, as traffic backups were reported across the country after workers set up picket lines at supermarkets and shopping centers to protest runaway inflation and energy bill spikes due in part to Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

More than 100,000 government workers could be walking off the job this winter in the United Kingdom to protest cost of living hikes, according to The Sun, and Reuters reported that drivers working for 12 British train operators announced they will strike on Nov. 26.

INFLATION HOLDS GRIP ON US ECONOMY IN OCTOBER AS PRICES REMAIN STUBBORNLY HIGH

Protesters hold banners and chant as they demand decent pay on the eve of winter in front of the Parliament building in Sofia, Bulgaria, Friday, Nov. 11, 2022.
(AP Photo/Valentina Petrova)

Striking subway workers shut down half of the Paris Metro lines Thursday, a nationwide day of walkouts and protests by French train drivers, teachers and other public-sector workers demanding the government and employers increase salaries to keep up with inflation.

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in France last month in a strike that called for pay hikes to keep up with inflation that had hit 6.2%.

BIDEN SAYS THERE’S NO ‘GUARANTEE’ COUNTRY WILL ‘GET RID OF INFLATION’

Scotland’s main teaching union said on Thursday that it had won an “overwhelming mandate” to strike along with a major rail union and postal worker union, who are also threatening to strike this winter, Financial Times reported.

Workers in Spain are also pushing back against cost of living increases as truck drivers have called for an indefinite strike next Monday, News24 reported.

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People stand in front of a closed subway station Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022 in Paris. Striking workers, demanding higher wages shut down half of subway lines in the French capital on Thursday
(AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Thousands of Bulgarians took to the streets on Friday in a rally organized by the country’s two largest labor unions to protest inflation and demand higher salaries this winter to compensate for the rising cost of living.

Inflation hit a new record in October in the 19 countries that use the euro currency. Economic growth also slowed ahead of what economists fear is a looming recession, largely as a result of those higher prices sapping Europeans’ ability to spend.

Associated Press contributed to this report.

Andrew Mark Miller is a writer at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.

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Science

NASA Says Shallow Lakes in the Icy Crust of Jupiter’s Moon Europa Could Erupt

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This illustration depicts a plume of water vapor that could potentially be emitted from the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. New research sheds light on what plumes, if they do exist, could reveal about lakes that may be inside the moon’s crust. Credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI

New scientific research makes hypotheses that

Europa is considered one of the most promising places in our solar system to find present-day environments suitable for some form of life beyond Earth.

Scientists are almost certain that a salty-water ocean thought to contain twice as much water as Earth’s oceans combined is hidden beneath the icy surface of Europa. And like Earth, Europa is thought to also contain a rocky mantle and iron core.

Very strong evidence suggests Europa’s ocean is in contact with rock. ​ This is significant because life as we know it requires three essential “ingredients”: liquid water, an energy source, and organic compounds to use as the building blocks for biological processes.

Europa could have all three of these ingredients. And there would have been plenty of time for life to begin and evolve there, as its ocean may have existed for the whole age of the solar system.

However, scientists think the ocean isn’t the only water on Europa. Based on observations from NASA’s Galileo orbiter, they believe the moon’s icy shell could contain salty liquid reservoirs – some of them close to the surface of the ice and some many miles below.

The more scientists understand about the water that Europa may be holding, the better chance they will know where to look for it when NASA sends Europa Clipper in 2024 to conduct a detailed investigation. The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter and use its suite of sophisticated instruments to gather science data as it flies by the moon about 50 times.

Now, research is helping scientists better understand what the subsurface lakes in Europa may look like and how they behave. A key finding in a paper published recently in Planetary Science Journal supports the longstanding idea that water could potentially erupt above the surface of Europa either as plumes of vapor or as cryovolcanic activity (think: flowing, slushy ice rather than molten lava).

The computer modeling in the paper goes further, showing that if there are eruptions on Europa, they likely come from shallow, wide lakes embedded in the ice and not from the global ocean far below.

“We demonstrated that plumes or cryolava flows could mean there are shallow liquid reservoirs below, which Europa Clipper would be able to detect,” said Elodie Lesage, lead author of the research and Europa scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (

This color view of Jupiter’s moon Europa was captured by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Scientists are studying processes that affect the moon’s surface as they prepare to explore the icy body. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

Different Depths, Different Ice

Lesage’s computer modeling lays out a blueprint for what scientists might find inside the ice if they were to observe eruptions at the surface. According to her models, they likely would detect reservoirs relatively close to the surface, in the upper 2.5 to 5 miles (4 to 8 kilometers) of the crust, where the ice is coldest and most brittle.

That’s because the subsurface ice there doesn’t allow for expansion: As the pockets of water freeze and expand, they could break the surrounding ice and trigger eruptions, much like a can of soda in a freezer explodes. And pockets of water that do burst through would likely be wide and flat like pancakes.

Reservoirs deeper in the ice layer – with floors more than 5 miles (8 kilometers) below the crust – would push against warmer ice surrounding them as they expand. That ice is soft enough to act as a cushion, absorbing the pressure rather than bursting. Rather than acting like a can of soda, these pockets of water would behave more like a liquid-filled balloon, where the balloon simply stretches as the liquid within it freezes and expands.

Sensing Firsthand

Scientists on the Europa Clipper mission can use this research when the spacecraft arrives at Europa in 2030. For example, the radar instrument – called Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON) – is one of the key instruments that will be used to look for water pockets in the ice.

“The new work shows that water bodies in the shallow subsurface could be unstable if stresses exceed the strength of the ice and could be associated with plumes rising above the surface,” said Don Blankenship, of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics in Austin, Texas, who leads the radar instrument team. “That means REASON could be able to see water bodies in the same places that you see plumes.”

Europa Clipper will carry other instruments that will be able to test the theories of the new research. The science cameras will be able to make high-resolution color and stereoscopic images of Europa; the thermal emission imager will use an infrared camera to map Europa’s temperatures and find clues about geologic activity – including cryovolcanism. If plumes are erupting, they could be observable by the ultraviolet spectrograph, the instrument that analyzes ultraviolet light.

Reference: “Simulation of Freezing Cryomagma Reservoirs in Viscoelastic Ice Shells” by Elodie Lesage, Hélène Massol, Samuel M. Howell and Frédéric Schmidt, 21 July 2022, Planetary Science Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ac75bf

More About the Mission

Missions such as Europa Clipper contribute to the field of astrobiology. This is an interdisciplinary research field that studies the conditions of distant worlds that could harbor life as we know it. Although Europa Clipper is not a life-detection mission, it will conduct a detailed exploration of Europa and investigate whether the icy moon, with its subsurface ocean, has the capability to support life. Understanding Europa’s habitability will help scientists better understand how life developed on Earth and the potential for finding life beyond our planet.

Managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.



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