A photograph of a beaming Princess Charlotte has been released by the Prince and Princess of Wales to mark her ninth birthday.

The celebratory snap was posted to the couple’s official social media accounts on Thursday with a note of thanks “for all the kind messages today.” The photo is credited to Catherine, Princess of Wales, and was taken in the last few days in Windsor.

It’s the second photo in as many weeks from the Waleses, who last week celebrated their youngest son, Prince Louis’ sixth birthday. Prince William and Kate have made it a tradition to release portraits of their children each year to mark their birthdays.

Kensington Palace appears to be reclaiming some of the control and narrative by only posting to social accounts on the day, aware that any lack of honesty or sense of inauthenticity will spark all sorts of conspiracy theories like it did last time.

It’s been a difficult start to 2024 for Britain’s royal family. Kate has been away from her public duties since Christmas and is currently undergoing treatment for cancer.

Princess Charlotte was last seen in public during the British royal family’s traditional Christmas Day walk to church on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. The nine-year-old was also seen earlier in December alongside her parents and siblings at her mother annual carol concert at Westminster Abbey in London.

At a visit to a school in the UK’s West Midlands last week, Charlotte’s father Prince William shared her favorite joke with students of St Michael’s Church of England High School – a “knock knock” gag involving an interrupting cow.

Charlotte is third in line to the throne, after her father and older brother Prince George. And while she may be one of the younger members of the family, her mom revealed in 2017 that she is “the one in charge.”

Royal-watchers may remember a clip of Charlotte at her grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral in 2022, where she appeared to be reminding her elder brother George to bow as the late monarch’s coffin passed them at Wellington Arch. She was also spotted at a previous Trooping the Colour parade in London stopping her younger brother, Prince Louis, from waving perhaps a little too enthusiastically to the crowds as their carriage drove by.

Meanwhile, the little royal won hearts last year with her regal twinning with her mother when the pair attended King Charles’ coronation. For her grandfather’s big day, Charlotte wore a mini-me version of her mom’s ivory silk dress and silver headpiece.

Charlotte is the first British princess who wasn’t overtaken in the line of succession by a younger brother. That’s because her grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, changed the rules with the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013 so that all royal children born after 2011 would have an equal right to the throne regardless of gender.

Two years later, Charlotte Elizabeth Diana was born on May 2, 2015 at St. Mary’s Hospital in west London. The change meant that did not lose her position in the line of succession after Prince Louis was born in 2018.

“You have to ask the Israelis,” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Brigadier General Ali Belali says with a smirk when asked how many ballistic missiles the Islamic Republic fired towards Israel in its April 14 strike.

But he’s more than happy to show the missiles and drones Iran used in its first ever attack against Israel launched directly from Iranian soil.

“It was a punitive measure,” Belali says, as he uses a laser pointer to indicate the missiles deployed, towering above him in the exhibit.

Two weeks after the Middle East came to the brink of an all-out war, with Iran firing hundreds of projectiles toward Israel in retaliation for a suspected Israeli airstrike on an Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, Tehran is keen to show the world that it is capable of fighting a wider conflict should it be faced with one.

On April 19, Israel responded with a suspected attack inside Iran’s borders. Both the Iranian and Israeli actions resulted in minimal damage and appeared by both sides to be aimed at restoring deterrence. That situation de-escalated, but the threat of war continues to loom large over the region as Israel’s offensive in Gaza grinds on.

At the permanent exhibit of the Revolutionary Guard Aerospace Forces in western Tehran, dozens of long- and medium-range ballistic missiles stand tall along with cruise missiles and drones. The exhibit is meant to show the development and progress of Iran’s drone and missile program.

Iran’s attack on Israel included drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. The night sky over Israeli cities lit up as the country’s air defenses worked to intercept the projectiles. Meanwhile, the air forces of Israel, the US, the UK, France and Jordan were busy in the skies, also trying to take down as many Iranian drones and missiles as possible.

“NATO, The United States and Arab countries of the region wanted to create barriers for our drones, missiles and cruise missiles, but they failed,” Belali says. “The world was not able to stop us.”

The Israeli military said that “99%” of projectiles fired by Iran were intercepted by Israel and its partners, with only “a small number” of ballistic missiles reaching the country.

The Iranians claim they managed to hit two locations inside Israel, including the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said that ballistic missiles that reached Israel fell on the airbase and caused only light structural damage.

“Accurate, (to) less than five meters,” Brigadier General Ali Belali claims, standing in front of two of the ballistic missiles he says were involved in the strikes against Israel, the Ghadr and the Emad. The missiles have a range of more than 1,000 miles and can carry warheads between 450 and 500 kilograms (1,102 lbs), he says. Another missile, called Kheybar, which he says was also used, carries a warhead of about 320 kilograms, the general adds.

Region’s largest ballistic missile force

Iran’s ballistic missiles have long been a cause for concern for the US and its allies in the Middle East, who have called for curbs on the missile program to be part of any deal that Washington strikes with Tehran.

The US says Iran has the largest ballistic missile force in the Middle East and considers its missile arsenal as one of its “primary tools of coercion and force projection.”

Iran has in the past insisted that its missile program is solely for defensive purposes.

Belali says Iran’s missile development is key to the Islamic Republic’s defense strategy. “In our defense capabilities we don’t rely on anyone. We have had good progress in this field and we will progress more. There are achievements that have not yet been talked about.”

Drones are equally as important for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards. The exhibit shows various stages of their drone development, starting from small wooden UAVs used in the Iran-Iraq war, all the way to models the Iranians claim have stealth capabilities.

One the most prominent is the Shahed 136, a cheap “fire and forget” drone, meaning a flight path is programmed, the UAV is launched, and it then independently flies towards the target area.

While the Iranians acknowledge using dozens of Shahed 136 drones to target Israel, both the US and Ukraine also accuse Tehran of giving hundreds to Russia, with Moscow using them to hit Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. The Iranians have consistently denied those claims.

The Shaheds fly low and slow and usually attack in swarms, the general says, standing in front of an unmarked truck that serves as a secretive launching platform.

“Everything is preprogrammed. The flight route is chosen according (to) the enemy’s capabilities and blind spots of radars and all the elements that can help us reach the target.”

A 40-something woman was buried in a cave 75,000 years ago, laid to rest in a gully hollowed out to accommodate her body. Her left hand was curled under her head, and a rock behind her head may have been placed as a cushion.

Known as Shanidar Z, after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where she was found in 2018, the woman was a Neanderthal, a type of ancient human that disappeared around 40,000 years ago.

Scientists studying her remains have painstakingly pieced together her skull from 200 bone fragments, a process that took nine months. They used the contours of the face and skull to guide a reconstruction to understand what she may have looked like.
The striking recreation is featured in a new documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals” produced by BBC for Netflix, which is available for streaming on Thursday.

With pronounced brow ridges and no chins, the skulls of Neanderthals look different from those of our own species, Homo sapiens, said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist and associate professor with the University of Cambridge’s department of archaeology who unearthed the skeleton and appears in the new film. The Shanidar Z facial reconstruction suggests that these differences might not have been so stark in life, Pomeroy said.

“There is some artistic license there, but at the heart of it is the real skull and real data on what we know about (these) people,” she said.

“She’s actually got quite a large face for her size,” Pomeroy added. “She’s got quite big brow ridges, which typically we wouldn’t see, but I think dressed in modern clothes you probably wouldn’t look twice.”

Neanderthals lived across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia Mountains for around 300,000 years, overlapping with modern humans for 30,000 years or so. Analysis of DNA from present-day humans has revealed that, during this time, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occasionally encountered one another and interbred.

New analysis

When Pomeroy first excavated the skeleton, its sex wasn’t immediately obvious because only the upper half of the body was preserved. It lacked telltale pelvic bones. The team that initially studied the remains relied on a relatively new technique involving the sequencing of proteins inside tooth enamel to determine Shanidar Z’s sex, which is revealed for the first time in the documentary.

Those researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool estimated the specimen’s height to have been around 5 feet (1.5 meters) by comparing the length and diameter of her arm bones with data on modern humans. An analysis of wear and tear on teeth and bones suggested she was in her mid-40s at the time of her death.

“It’s a reasonable estimate, but we can’t be 100% sure, actually, that they weren’t older,” Pomeroy said. “What we can say is this is someone who had lived a relatively long life. For that society, they probably would have been quite important in terms of their knowledge, their life experience.”

The cave where Shanidar Z was buried is well-known among archaeologists because a Neanderthal grave discovered there in 1960 led researchers to believe that Neanderthals may have interred their dead with flowers — the first challenge to the prevailing view that the ancient humans were dumb and brutish. Subsequent research by Pomeroy’s team, however, has cast doubt on that flower burial theory.
Instead, they suspect the pollen discovered among the graves may have arrived via pollinating bees.

Still, over the years scientists have found increasing evidence of Neanderthals’ intelligence, sophistication and complexity, including art, string and tools.

Neanderthals repeatedly returned to Shanidar Cave to lay their dead to rest. The remains of 10 Neanderthals have been unearthed at the site, half of which appear to have been buried deliberately in succession, research has found.

Neanderthals may not have honored their dead with bouquets of flowers, but the inhabitants of Shanidar Cave were likely an empathetic species, research suggests. For example, one male Neanderthal buried there was deaf and had a paralyzed arm and head trauma that probably rendered him partially blind, yet he lived a long time, so he must have been cared for, according to research.

Shanidar Z is the first Neanderthal found in the cave in more than 50 years, Pomeroy said, but the site could still yield more discoveries. During the filming of the documentary in 2022, Pomeroy uncovered a left shoulder blade, some rib bones and a right hand belonging to another Neanderthal.

“I think our interpretation at the moment,” she said, “is that actually this is probably the remains of a single individual, which has then been disturbed.”

Reconstructing the skull

Pomeroy described reconstructing Shanidar Z’s skull, which had been crushed relatively soon after death as a “high-stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle.” The fossilized bones were hardened with a glue-like substance, removed in small blocks of cave sediment and wrapped in foil before researchers sent them to the University of Cambridge for analysis.

In the Cambridge lab, researchers took micro-CT scans of each block and used the scans to guide extraction of bone fragments. Pomeroy’s colleague Dr. Lucía López-Polín, an archaeological conservator from the Catalan Institute for Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, pieced over 200 bits of skull together by eye to return it to its original shape.

The team scanned and 3D-printed the rebuilt skull, which formed the basis of a reconstructed head created by Danish paleoartists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, twin brothers who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal Shanidar Z’s face.

Pomeroy said the reconstruction helped “bridge that gap between anatomy and 75,000 years of time.”

Colombia says it will break diplomatic relations with Israel on Thursday over its actions in Gaza.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro made the announcement at a rally in Bogotá’s Bolívar Square on Wednesday, describing the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza as “genocidal.”

Israel launched its assault in the Palestinian territory following terror group Hamas’ attacks on October 7, which left more than 1,200 people dead and saw more than 250 taken hostage – many of whom remain in captivity today.

Now nearing its eight month, Israel’s war in the isolated enclave has killed more than 34,000 people, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, condemned Colombia’s announcement and accused Petro of rewarding Hamas, which controls Gaza, saying he was siding with the “most despicable monsters known to humanity.” Katz also called Petro a “hate-filled, antisemitic president,” but said relations between both countries would remain warm despite the president’s actions.

Hamas said it “highly appreciated” Petro’s position, saying in a statement that it considered the decision “a victory for the sacrifices of our people and their just cause” and calling on other countries to follow suit.

South Africa has previously accused Israel of violating international laws on genocide, telling the United Nations’ top court that Israel’s leadership was “intent on destroying the Palestinians in Gaza” – a case which Israel dismissed as “absurd blood libel.”

The International Court of Justice later ordered Israel to “take all measures” to prevent genocide but stopped short of ordering its government to halt the war.

Regional neighbor Bolivia also cut diplomatic ties with Israel last year, citing “crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian people” in the wake of Israel’s war with Hamas.

This is a developing story. More to come.

Gatherings of people across north and central Gaza on Wednesday expressed gratitude to students on US college campuses who have been protesting the war in Gaza.

In Deir al-Balah, in front of Al Aqsa Martyrs hospital, doctors, nurses, and medical staff held signs with messages that included “United against genocide,” “The killing of children must stop,” and “Teep on fighting for justice.”

Palestinians in Gaza have been showing support for the US protesters for several days. In several refugee camps in the Palestinian enclave on Wednesday, children could also be seen holding signs and banners with the names of different American universities where pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been held, saying “thanks for your solidarity!”

“Arab populations haven’t cared about us, while students at American universities have felt with us, have felt the blood that spills from us, our buildings that get struck and our kids whose lives get destroyed … a thousand thanks to them,” she said.

The public appreciation from people in Gaza come amid growing controversy in the US over the campus demonstrations, which have spread across the country in recent weeks amid mounting tensions over Israel’s war on Hamas, launched after the terror group’s October 7 attack that left more than 1,200 dead.

The protests in the US are broadly aimed at demanding an end to Israel’s devastating assault in the Palestinian enclave, which has killed more than 34,000 people, according to the Palestinian health ministry, and is nearing its eighth month.

But critics say some demonstrations have crossed the line into anti-semitism. Israel has claimed the protests are being manipulated by “outside agitators.”

Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan denounced the university demonstrations in a speech to the General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

Erdan accused the demonstrations of being made up of “antisemitic protesters affiliated with outside agitators.” He said the students should face expulsion, while university professors and presidents should face “swift and severe action.”

The speech in the General Assembly followed a Security Council vote last month on a resolution that would have recognized a Palestinian state. That vote was vetoed by the US.

Erdan lashed out at his UN colleagues, accusing the General Assembly of spreading anti-Israel rhetoric which he claimed had helped galvanize the protesters. He yelled “shame” toward the countries seated in the hall.

Several colleges have recently hardened their stance by calling in law enforcement to clear their campuses – a crackdown hailed by former US President Donald Trump as “a beautiful thing to watch” at Columbia University in New York.

Meanwhile, Shiraz university in Iran’s Fars province has offered scholarships to students from universities in the US and Europe who are expelled over the protests.

Additional reporting by Artemis Moshtaghian and Richard Roth

An unusual asteroid traveling near Earth is thought to be a chunk of the moon, but exactly how it ended up zooming through the solar system has remained a mystery. Now, researchers say they’ve made a key connection in this cosmic puzzle.

The space rock, known as 2016 HO3, is a rare quasi-satellite — a type of near-Earth asteroid that orbits the sun but sticks close to our planet.

Astronomers first discovered it in 2016 using the Pan-STARRS telescope, or Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, in Hawaii. Scientists call the asteroid Kamo’oalewa, a name derived from a Hawaiian creation chant that alludes to an offspring traveling on its own.

While most near-Earth asteroids originate from the main asteroid belt — between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter — new research has revealed that Kamo’oalewa most likely came from the Giordano Bruno crater on the moon’s far side, or the side that faces away from Earth, according to a study published April 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

It’s the first time astronomers have traced a potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid to a lunar crater, said lead study author Yifei Jiao, a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and a doctoral student at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

“This was a surprise, and many were skeptical that it could come from the moon,” said study coauthor Erik Asphaug, professor at the University of Arizona’s laboratory, in a statement. “For 50 years we have been studying rocks collected by astronauts on the surface of the moon, as well as hundreds of small lunar meteorites that were ejected randomly by asteroid impacts from all over the moon that ended up on Earth. Kamo’oalewa is kind of a missing link that connects the two.”

In addition to helping confirm Kamo’oalewa’s potential relationship to the moon, the findings could ultimately lead to other revelations — including how the ingredients for life made their way to Earth.

Once upon a crater

Measuring between 150 and 190 feet (46 and 58 meters) in diameter, Kamo’oalewa is about half the size of the London Eye Ferris wheel. During orbit, it comes within 9 million miles (14.5 million kilometers) of Earth, making it a potentially hazardous asteroid astronomers keep track of and learn more about in case it ever strays too close to our planet.

Previous research focused on the asteroid’s reflectivity, which unlike typical near-Earth asteroids is similar to lunar materials, as well as the space rock’s low orbital velocity in relation to Earth, a quality that suggests it came from relatively nearby.

For the new study, astronomers used simulations to narrow down which of the moon’s thousands of craters could have been the asteroid’s point of origin.

Based on the modeling, the team determined that the impactor that potentially created the asteroid would need to be at least 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in diameter to dislodge such a massive fragment. When the object hit the moon, it likely dug Kamo’oalewa out from beneath the lunar surface, sending the space rock flying and leaving a crater larger than 6 to 12 miles (10 to nearly 20 kilometers) in diameter.

These simulations also helped the team search for a relatively young crater, given that the asteroid is only estimated to be a few million years old, while the moon is believed to be 4.5 billion years old.

These parameters helped researchers zero in on Giordano Bruno, a 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater estimated to be 4 million years old, as the likely spot where Kamo’oalewa started its journey.

The anatomy of an impact

The study’s simulations showed that Kamo’oalewa was excavated from the lunar surface at several miles per second.

“You’d think the impact event would pulverize and distribute the (lunar material) far and wide,” Asphaug said. “But there it is. So, we turned the problem around and asked ourselves, ‘How can we make this happen?’”

Based on their models, the team believes the impact event sent tens of hundreds of 32.8-foot (10-meter) fragments flying into space. Yet Kamo’oalewa survived as a massive, singular fragment.

“While most of that debris would have impacted the Earth as lunar meteorites over the course of less than a million years, a few lucky objects can survive in (sun-centric) orbits as near-Earth asteroids, yet to be discovered or identified,” Jiao said.

Understanding how such a giant chunk of the moon could remain intact enough to become an asteroid could help scientists studying panspermia, or the idea that the ingredients for life may have been delivered to Earth as “organic hitchhikers” on space rocks such as asteroids, comets or other planets.

“While Kamo’oalewa comes from a lifeless planet, it demonstrates how rocks ejected from Mars could carry life — at least in principle,” Asphaug said.

Kamo’oalewa specimen: A connecting puzzle piece

Studying crater impacts on the moon can also help scientists better understand the consequences of asteroid impacts should a space rock pose a threat to Earth in the future.

“Testing the new model of Kamo’oalewa’s origin from a specific, young lunar crater paves the way for obtaining ground-truth knowledge of the damage that asteroid impacts can cause to planetary bodies,” said study coauthor Renu Malhotra, a planetary sciences professor at the University of Arizona, in a statement.

China’s Tianwen-2 mission, launching in 2025, will visit Kamo’oalewa with the aim of collecting samples from the asteroid and eventually returning them to Earth.

“It will be different in important ways from any of the specimens we have so far — one of those connecting pieces that help you solve the puzzle,” Asphaug said.

Studying a sample excavated from the lunar far side could reveal insights into a part of the moon that has been less studied and shed light on the composition of its subsurface. Given that the impact likely happened a few million years ago — relatively young on astronomical timescales — the samples could also help scientists study how space radiation causes weathering and erosion on asteroids over time.

“The exciting thing is that when a space mission visits an asteroid and returns some samples, we have surprises and unexpected outcomes, that usually go beyond what we were anticipating,” said study coauthor Dr. Patrick Michel, astrophysicist and director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. “So, whatever Tianwen-2 will return, it will be an extraordinary new source of information, as all asteroid missions so far.”

For a long time, astronomers thought it was impossible for meteorites to come from the moon until lunar meteorites were found on Earth, said Noah Petro, NASA project scientist for both the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Artemis III. Petro was not involved in the study.

The hope is that future samples could confirm the lunar origin of Kamo’oalewa.

“Going there and finding out is absolutely a way to go about it now,” Petro said. “It’s a great, great reminder that we live in a very exciting solar system and we live in a very exciting corner of the solar system with our moon. There’s no other place, no other planet in our solar system with a moon like our moon. And things like this are great reminders of how special the Earth-moon system is.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is coming under fierce pressure from far-right members of his government not to agree to the ceasefire proposal currently on the table, which could prevent an Israeli military offensive in Rafah from moving forward.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday capped off his seventh round of shuttle diplomacy in the region since Hamas’ October 7 attack, as the Biden administration continues to push for a “ceasefire that brings the hostages home.”

But a far-right Israeli government minister said the proposed deal was “terrible” and would throw the sacrifices of Israeli soldiers “in the trash,” causing outrage among some Israeli lawmakers and highlighting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s struggle to appease the most extreme wing of his coalition.

“The deal [is] horrible and terrible. A government that throws everything in the trash in order to return 22 or 33 people has no right to exist,” settlement minister Orit Strook, a member of the far-right Religious Zionism party, told Israel’s Army Radio (GLZ) on Wednesday.

Strook’s remarks come as Netanyahu mulls an incursion into Rafah, the southernmost point of Gaza to which more than 1 million Palestinians have fled after being displaced and where Hamas is believed to have regrouped after Israel’s destruction of much of the north of the Strip.

Despite domestic and international pressure to agree to a hostage-ceasefire deal, a vocal part of Netanyahu’s coalition have urged Israel’s military to continue into Rafah, prioritizing the destruction of Hamas over the return of Israeli hostages.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, said Tuesday that accepting the proposed deal would mean “raising a white flag, and a victory for Hamas.”

“We have reached a crossroad in which Israel should decide between a clear victory and being defeated in this war with humiliation,” he said, urging Netanyahu not to accept the deal.

Former Israeli Prime Minister and opposition leader Yair Lapid hit back at Strook’s remarks.

“A government with 22 or 33 extreme coalition members has no right to exist,” he wrote on X.

Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet but widely seen as Netanyahu’s most formidable rival and a potential successor, said over the weekend that the return of the hostages held in Gaza was more pressing than an operation in Rafah.

“Entering Rafah is important in the long struggle against Hamas. The return of our hostages, abandoned by the 7.10 government, is urgent and of far greater importance,” said Gantz, referring to the October 7 Hamas’ attacks on Israel when more than 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 people taken hostage.

“If a responsible outline is reached for the return of the hostages with the backing of the entire security system, which does not involve the end of the war, and the ministers who led the government on 7.10 prevent it – the government will not have the right to continue to exist and lead the campaign.”

Strook accused the radio station of misrepresenting her remarks and later sought to clarify her comments, saying that a deal would “finally abandon many of the hostages.” Any deal with Hamas would also see Israel abandon its efforts to “destroy the Hamas regime,” she said.

The latest proposal, which Israel helped craft but has not fully agreed to, is laid out in two phases.

In the first phase, between 22 and 33 hostages are to be released over several weeks in exchange for the pause and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

In the second phase, which sources have described as the “restoration of sustainable calm,” the remaining hostages, captive Israeli soldiers and bodies of hostages are to be exchange for more Palestinian prisoners.

Blinken met with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv Wednesday, following stops in Saudi Arabia and Jordan earlier this week.

“We’re determined to get a ceasefire that brings the hostages home, and to get it now,” Blinken said during a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, adding the “only reason that wouldn’t be achieved is because of Hamas.”

“We also have to be focused on the people in Gaza who are suffering,” he added, saying the focus also needs to be on “getting them the assistance they need, the food, the water, the medicine, the shelter.”

Outside the building where Blinken and Herzog met, protesters gathered outside holding posters and chanting, urging US President Joe Biden to “stop the war,” “save the hostages” and “bring them home.”

Nineteen people have been killed after a highway collapsed in China’s Guangdong province on Wednesday, according to the country’s state broadcaster, CCTV.

A section of the express highway connecting Meizhou City and Dapu City in Guangdong Province collapsed at around 2:10 a.m. on Wednesday, leaving eighteen cars trapped, CCTV reported.

Widely circulated social media videos shot in darkness showed a raging fire beneath where the road would have been and emergency service workers at the scene.

Images taken after daybreak showed cars piled up at the bottom of a ravine.

As of 11:45 a.m. on Wednesday, 30 people were receiving medical care in hospitals, and they were “without immediate risk,” CCTV said without specifying their injuries.

The Guangdong provincial government had dispatched a rescue force of approximately 500 people, the state broadcaster said.

Rescue efforts were still underway, according to the update from the local police department.

Southern China has been bombarded with heavy rain in recent weeks.

Guangdong province, an economic powerhouse home to 127 million people, has seen widespread flooding, which has forced more than 110,000 people to relocate, state media reported, citing the local government.

The floods have killed at least four people in Guangdong, including a rescue worker, state news agency Xinhua reported Monday. At least 10 people remain missing, it added.

China’s newest, largest and most-advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian, took a big step to joining the world’s largest naval fleet on Wednesday as it set out from Shanghai for its first sea trials.

The naval assessment is expected to take place in the East China Sea, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) from the Jiangnan Shipyard where the carrier has been under construction for more than six years, according to Shanghai’s Maritime Safety Administration.

“The sea trials will primarily test the reliability and stability of the aircraft carrier’s propulsion and electrical systems,” read an announcement from the state-run Xinhua news agency on Wednesday.

The warship was launched in 2022 and has “completed its mooring trials, outfitting work and equipment adjustments” working up to the latest sea trials, Xinhua said.

With a displacement of 80,000 metric tons, the Fujian dwarfs the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) two active carriers, the 66,000-ton Shandong and the 60,000-ton Liaoning. Only the United States Navy operates bigger aircraft carriers than Fujian.

“The Fujian’s sea trials represent an important milestone for the PLAN, marking its entry into the small club of top-class carrier aviation-capable navies,” said John Bradford, a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow.

The Fujian’s key feature is an electromagnetic catapult system that will enable it to launch larger and heavier aircraft than the Shandong and Liaoning, which use a ski-jump style launch method.

Analysts say the Fujian’s ability to launch larger warplanes carrying higher munitions loads to farther distances will give the carrier a greater combat range than its predecessors in the Chinese fleet, providing the PLAN with so-called “blue-water” capabilities.

“These sea trials mark the first major step in China’s developing the capacity to project sea-based air power into deep ocean areas,” said Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain and former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Comparison to US carriers

The electromagnetic catapult system puts the Fujian on par with the US Navy’s newest carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, the only active carrier in the world with an electromagnetic catapult system. The US Navy’s 10 older carriers, the Nimitz class, rely on steam-powered catapults to launch aircraft.

All the US carriers, however, will retain two key advantages over the Fujian: power and size.

The US carriers are nuclear powered, giving them the ability to remain at sea for as long as crew provisions last, while the Fujian is powered by conventional fuel, meaning it must either make a port call or be met by a tanker at sea to refuel.

As for the US Navy’s size advantage over the Fujian, the Ford displaces 100,000 tons and the 10 Nimitz-class ships 87,000 metric tons. The larger US ships can take on more aircraft, around 75 compared to an expected complement of 60 on the Fujian, according to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Analysts have also noted that the US carriers have more catapults, a larger airway and more elevators to allow for quicker deployment of aircraft from the hangar deck below.

The US carriers “remain in an echelon of their own,” Bradford said.

Schuster said the current round of sea trials for Fujian are expected to last three to six days and would not include flight operations.

“Radars and communications equipment will get some testing, but the first sea trials always focus on hull integrity, propulsion and engineering since problems there prevent everything else from working well,” Schuster said.

In total, analysts expect the Fujian’s sea trials to take at least a year, with its commissioning likely to come next year or in 2026. A story on the website of the Chinese Defense Ministry in January noted the Liaoning underwent 10 sea trials and the Shandong nine before entering service.

When it joins the PLAN fleet, the Fujian will become the icon of what is now the world’s largest naval force,with more than 340 warships and counting as Chinese shipyards turn out new warships at a frenetic pace.

“It will be the most visible symbol of China’s growing naval power,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the CSIS.

Meanwhile, the announcement of a fourth carrier for the Chinese fleet could come soon, PLAN political commissar Yuan Huazhi said in March, according to a report in the state-run Global Times.

When that announcement is made, the answer as to whether China will have a nuclear-powered carrier will be answered, the report said.

The US Navy already has three new Ford-class carriers under construction, the future John F Kennedy, Enterprise and Doris Miller.

In the early days of 2020, as science looked for answers to a mysterious viral outbreak in central China, a prominent Chinese virologist stepped forward to share critical data with the world.

Zhang Yongzhen’s disclosure of the genome of the virus that causes Covid-19 was a crucial step in the race to combat the pandemic, helping researchers globally to identify the pathogen and create vaccines to counter it.

He was lauded for his integrity by the scientific community, but in the years since, people who know Zhang say he has faced a series of unprecedented roadblocks in his career in China – with yet another barrier placed in front of his research over the past week.

On Sunday and Monday, Zhang, 59, slept overnight in protest outside his lab at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center after administrators closed the facility abruptly for renovations, according to accounts posted on his Weibo social media page.

A post on his page early Wednesday said a “tentative agreement” had been reached for Zhang’s team to resume their scientific work at the lab, some of which is related to tracing the origins of Covid-19.

The ordeal is just the latest hindrance to Zhang’s research since 2020, according to a colleague who has been in contact with the Chinese scientist in recent years.

An account by Zhang’s research students posted online also laid out a litany of challenges faced by the scientist since the formal transfer of his official employment to the Shanghai center in 2020, when his 19-year tenure at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention also ended.

“That a top scientist in his field, a person who has made contributions to the country and mankind should have fallen to this point – is really sad and chilling,” the post read.

In a statement Monday, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center said it had closed some labs for renovation due to safety concerns and claimed it had provided additional office and experimental spaces for Zhang and his team.

The “institute always respects … and supports scientific researchers and students in carrying out normal research work,” the statement said.

Images posted on social media this week appeared to show Zhang wrapped in blankets and sleeping on the doorstep of the lab building as security guards hovered over him.

More than a dozen students’ research had been impacted by the lab closure, he said, adding it was “inconvenient” to say more at that time.

The earlier post by Zhang’s students said the two days originally allocated by the center for them to move their scientific work was insufficient. Their lab had been renovated as recently as 2020 and a second lab hadn’t been in use since the pandemic, they added.

Neither Zhang nor the online post detailing the circumstances leading to his protest connected the lab closure to his sharing of the coronavirus genome sequence in 2020.

‘Broken machine’

Zhang became the first scientist to share Covid-19’s genomic sequence on January 11, 2020 as the World Health Organization waited for China to provide the data following its announcement nearly two weeks earlier of a viral outbreak in the central city of Wuhan.

He was hailed internationally for his work and named by Nature as one of 10 people who helped shape science in 2020.

In an interview with the journal that year, Zhang reflected on his global recognition.

“They say, ‘January 11 was a turning point for understanding that this is serious. It was a turning point for China. It was a turning point for the world,’” he said.

But in China, Zhang faced challenges to his work that stemmed from that moment, according to his long-time collaborator Edward Holmes, a University of Sydney professor who published the genome with Zhang’s permission on an international data sharing website.

Following the release of the data, Zhang’s lab had limitations placed on it, which barred it from isolating the Covid virus, Holmes said.

It’s unclear if this move was separate from a Chinese government “rectification” order received by Zhang’s team that reports at the time said resulted in the temporary closure of the lab a day after the sequence release. Zhang told Nature in 2020 that the order merely required his lab to update its biosafety protocols after moving equipment during construction work.

Zhang, a scientist with China’s CDC since 2001, was also forced out of the agency in September 2020, according to a person familiar with the situation.

These changes for Zhang came as China – already known for top-down control on the academic sector – tightened oversight of scientific information related to the virus. That included imposing restrictions by April 2020 on the publication of academic research on the origins of the novel coronavirus.

Beijing has repeatedly defended its scientific transparency and data sharing related to the outbreak.

“In the old days, pre-Covid … he was like a machine and now the machine is broken. He’s just been slowly crushed by this.”

‘No regrets’

In the months after he shared the Covid-19 sequence, Zhang’s employment was transferred to the Shanghai Public Health Center, where he had held a five-year cooperation agreement and part-time professorship since 2018. It’s unclear if this move was already in the works prior to January 2020.

Since then, he has continued to publish in journals such as Cell and Nature Microbiology on the presence of viruses in animals and nature in China and received at least two international awards.

The most recent of his international publications in March looked at coronavirus variants in Shanghai in the initial months of the Covid-19 outbreak, and Zhang’s team continues to work on research related to the virus and its emergence.

Ongoing research includes a National Natural Science Foundation of China project at the laboratory, the post said.

In a Weibo post on January 11 marking the fourth anniversary of his Covid disclosure, Zhang appeared to allude to the challenges he has faced in the years since.

“Four years ago this morning, on behalf of the research team, we insisted on putting life first and made the right choice,” Zhang wrote.

“Despite going through continuous ups and downs, experiencing the warmth and cold of human emotion, and the harshness of the world, we have no regrets.”

But recent years have taken a steep toll on Zhang, according to Holmes.

“He’s not the same in terms of his productivity, he’s completely different – not the same person at all. It’s just been extraordinary to watch and extraordinary that it’s come to this,” he said.

Holmes, who had limited email contact with Zhang during his protest this week, said the Chinese virologist had told him he recently failed in his pursuit of a legal case against the Shanghai center for its handling of his contract.

“(All this has) gone on for a long time … but I hadn’t realized how bad it had got,” Holmes said.