More than 20 million people woke last week to a thick, acrid, and noxious smog that settled densely across the Indian capital.

Primary schools were forced to shut, vehicles restricted from traveling on roads and construction brought to a halt as a hazy gray enveloped New Delhi, blocking buildings from view and prompting residents to panic buy air purifiers.

Behind closed doors, state authorities and federal officials gathered to put together a plan that would clean up the city’s air after its Air Quality Index (AQI) passed 500 – a figure so high that experts warn it could be shaving more than a decade off the life expectancy of those who live there.

But the scene is hardly unprecedented.

Every year, New Delhi’s skies turn the same sickly yellow, prompting the same scramble by authorities to crackdown on the pollution. Every year, around this time, headlines about the issue dominate the news, reminding the country’s 1.4 billion people that smog season is back with a vengeance.

And every year, people ask why nothing has changed.

“It’s an invisible killer,” said Jyoti Pande Lavakare, author of “Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health: The Human Cost of Air Pollution” and co-founder of clean air non-profit Care for Air.

“And unfortunately, there is just no political will to solve this problem from any party. There is not one party that has put its head down and said, ‘we are sickening the entire country and let’s fix it’.”

A success story

New Delhi’s current toxic skies are reminiscent of another major Asian capital that about a decade ago was famous for a smog so thick that it could shroud entire skyscrapers from view: Beijing.

China’s capital has since cleaned up its act, which begs the question: if Beijing can clean up its toxic air, why can’t India too?

Like India, rapid industrialization and urbanization contributed to China’s remarkable rise as an economic superpower. And like India’s expansion, China’s came with an environmental cost: a deep reliance on fossil fuels and emission heavy industries that was making the air putrid with pollutants.

In Beijing, a city of nearly 22 million people, the air had become so bad that it was widely referred to as the “air-pocalypse.” Hospitals were often flooded with respiratory patients, and residents – especially families with children – were so desperate that many left the city to take jobs further south, and even overseas, where the air was better.

The United States embassy in Beijing published its own air quality data, infuriating Chinese officials but also raising awareness among the Chinese public about how bad things had become.

A key moment in China’s fightback came in 2013, when the government started to invest billions of dollars into a national air pollution action plan.

What followed was a rollout of new regulations, including restricting the number of vehicles on the roads in major cities, tightening environmental oversight and controls on emissions, building a nationwide system of air monitoring stations, and reining in coal and other heavy-polluting industries.

Beijing, said Frank Christian Hammes, Global CEO of IQAir, “took it seriously.”

“We see electrification. In restaurants, and on street food vendors, we don’t see coal being used anymore. The power generators have shifted to gas. All this has made a big difference,” he said.

In the decade since, China has seen its air quality improve dramatically. The country’s pollution levels in 2021 had fallen 42% from 2013, according to a report from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, which praised its “staggering success in combating pollution.”

A decade later, Beijing has long fallen off the top of the world’s worst pollution list and currently ranks 27 on the ranking by IQAir, a Swiss company that tracks global air quality.

New Delhi started the week by once again clinching the top spot.

Hundreds of thousands of lives saved

China’s raft of clean air policies have been so successful, they have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, research has shown.

The report warned, however, there is still work to do and Beijing’s particulate pollution – the tiny but highly dangerous pollutants that can evade the human body’s usual defenses – is still 40% higher than in the most polluted county in the United States.

Nonetheless, the data shows China is on the right track. And many in India want to see similar progress in their country.

“India has everything in place to change what’s happening. We have science and the finance, but we lack a reduction-based approach,” said Sunil Dahiya, from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) in New Delhi.

In comparison to Beijing’s strict measures that were intended for long-term success, New Delhi’s have been “reactive,” he argued.

“These are not solutions,” Dahiya added.

Traditionally, toward the end of the year after the winter harvest, millions of farmers clear their leftover rice stubble by setting fields alight to prepare for the incoming wheat crop. This, together with vehicular and industrial pollution, has created copious amounts of smog across the northern Indian states of Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi.

Tens of millions of poor households in the country also continue to rely on cheap and harmful fuels for cooking.

At a nationwide level, India launched its Clean Air Programme in 2019, ushering in strategies across 24 states and union territories to reduce particulate matter concentration by 40% by 2025-26. The measures include cracking down on coal-based power plants, setting up air monitoring systems and banning burning of biomass.

Some Indian cities have seen improvements in their air quality, according to government data. But a lack of strict enforcement and coordination means progress has been slow, experts suggest.

To deal with New Delhi’s persisting pollution, officials have tried sprinkling water on the roads, restricting traffic by requiring vehicles with odd or even license plates to travel on alternating days, and constructing in 2018 two smog towers worth 200 million rupees ($2.4 million), which are intended to act as giant air purifiers.

Though it isn’t increasing, between 2018 and 2022, New Delhi’s average PM2.5 concentration (a measure of pollutants in the air) for the month of November, when the pollution season typically begins, has stayed more or less the same, according to IQAir.

This November alone, New Delhi has remained on the top of IQ Air’s list of most polluted cities for at least five days so far. To tackle the problem the city this year plans to induce rain to wash away the dust – a method adopted by other Asian countries, including China, Indonesia and Malaysia.

However, scientists say it is unclear how effective this method really is.

“These are just band-aid solutions,” said Hammes. “We need to address the underlying issues. And that is stopping biomass burning and switching to cleaner fuels.”

China’s authoritarian one-party system, unlike India’s democracy, means that officials follow orders quickly, experts say.

“With Beijing, once the government decided they were going to tackle pollution, they did it,” said Lavakare from Care for Air. “The same could be achieved in India – maybe even faster – but it’s just not a national concern. It’s a systemic failure year after year. And nobody seems to want to solve it.”

A blame game

Publicly, local and national leaders repeatedly trade blame for the capital’s toxic air.

Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, considered to be the antithesis of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, has been accused of “inaction and insensitivity” by members of the national government.

They say Kejriwal’s team has done little in terms of implementing effective policies to clean New Delhi’s air. “Delhiites are complaining of itching and breathlessness and children are falling ill. Only Kejriwal is responsible for all this,” said Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva.

The AAP has retaliated by accusing the federal government of cutting their funding to tackle pollution and failing to take the issue seriously.

During a Supreme Court hearing last week, judges Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Sudhanshu Dhulia appeared visibly irritated at the political backsliding. “There cannot be a political battle every time. We are at zero level patience on this issue now,” they said as they instructed authorities to ban fireworks ahead of Diwali and stop farmers from burning crops.

“Every party had at least air pollution in their agenda, but over time because of other factors that momentum has been lost,” said Dahiya from CREA.

Pollution might be taking a back seat, even for India’s citizens, Dahiya said.

“It picks up at times and dies down,” he added. “India is faced with lots of other vulnerabilities. It might not be an issue they talk about every day. But it’s one they certainly face every day.”

When millions celebrated Diwali last weekend, many defiantly took to the streets, with little to no pushback from authorities, bursting firecrackers that emitted more smoke into the sky.

As a result, New Delhi started the week as the most polluted city in the world, with a “hazardous” AQI level higher than 420, according to IQAir.

“Your most vulnerable population will be affected for the rest of their lives,” said Hammes from IQAir. “You’re not even giving a fighting chance for an entire generation, really.”

Lavakre, from Care for Air, said people will lose years off their lives.

“How do you even begin to come to terms with that?” she said.

Since Israel’s complete siege on Gaza began, Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, the director of an orphanage in Gaza City, had been gripped with fear, worried about when food, water and other basic necessities might run out for the dozens of children and young people in his care, most of whom are living with disabilities.

When a strike hit a mosque near the Mabarat Al-Rahma orphanage on October 27, blowing out windows, scattering the building with debris, igniting a fire and filling the air with smoke, Al-Naizi said he was confronted with the agonizing decision of whether to evacuate the children and young people.

On November 2, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) closed in on Gaza City, Al-Naizi said he had no choice but to move the 40 people out of the orphanage — eight of them infants — loading them, along with non-perishable food and batteries, into three large buses. It took about two hours to evacuate the group, according to Al-Naizi, as many of the children had to be carried. They only managed to travel about 1.2 miles, before they had to set up a temporary shelter.

“Many streets have become closed as a result of the backfilling of destroyed buildings, as well as the street being unsuitable for vehicles to move,” Al-Naizi said. “We were not able to escape to the south of Gaza City. It had become completely besieged.”

Carers like Al-Naizi face an impossible choice — stay put and risk being killed or flee somewhere with no promise of safety. “Where will I leave these children, on the street?” Al-Naizi said. “We have no hope, except that this war will end soon.”

Israel launched its military campaign with the stated aim of destroying Hamas and to save the more than 240 hostages taken during the militant group’s brutal October 7 attack, which Israeli authorities said killed around 1,200 people. Israel’s relentless aerial bombardment and ground assault has so far killed at least 11,470 people, including 4,707 children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, citing medical sources in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have been internally displaced since the war started, with many of them now staying in overcrowded temporary shelters that are running out of food, water, drugs and sanitation capacity as aid trickles in. More than 15% of those internally displaced are disabled, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Streams of Palestinians – including women, children and the elderly – have been making their way south in a growing exodus along daily evacuation corridors announced by the IDF.

For Gazans living with disabilities — who number about 48,000, with more than a fifth of those children, according to a Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics report published in 2019 — the prospect of evacuating is fraught, if not impossible.

Fleeing strikes, unable to see or hear them

Heba Abu Jazar Sama was working on her laptop when she said her house in Gaza started to shake.

“My father and mother started screaming, thinking that I had been killed,” Sama added. “When the dust cleared and they found me and my sister (who is also deaf), we started crying a lot. Had I not moved for a few moments, the stones would have fallen on my head.”

The IDF has repeatedly called on civilians to move south of Wadi Gaza, a waterway bisecting the center of the strip, as it intensifies its assault on Gaza City and the north of the territory.

After Sama’s home was bombed, she and her family were displaced to a shelter.

“There was no hope, no water, no electricity, no internet, and no blankets to cover us from the cold at night. We were suffocated and very tired,” she said about the conditions in the shelter.

Up to 70 people could be sheltered in one room, with some forced to stay on the stairs, said Jamal Al Rozzi, executive director of the National Society for Rehabilitation, who used to live in Gaza City and fled south for his children’s safety. Children with disabilities who might lack the ability to chew could go hungry, because there are not enough staff members available to blend their food, he said.

People who are incontinent have reduced access to diapers or accessible toilets, which means they cannot clean themselves, increasing the spread of urinary tract infections, said Reham Shaheen, a rehabilitation specialist for the international NGO, Humanity & Inclusion. The scarcity of specialized mattresses for quadriplegic Palestinians further restricts their movement, causing bedsores.

Shaheen warned that in crisis situations, women with intellectual disabilities are more likely to face sexual violence because they are living in spaces where men and women are packed into one place – often sharing bathrooms. Communication challenges also prevent survivors from reporting sexual assault.

Lack of accessibility, connectivity is compounded at temporary shelters

For disabled Gazans who have made it to temporary shelters in the south, services that they rely on to get through each day either don’t exist or are scarce, making survival more challenging than for able-bodied people.

People have reported queueing for hours to access food and water, where the UN said civilians are exposed to potential Israeli airstrikes. Those who are hearing or visually impaired, need to be accompanied while collecting supplies, making it harder for them to get what they need.

“We have followed a new diet to reduce consumption of materials to be enough for us for a longer period. For example, adults are not allowed to eat more than one meal a day, and we add mashed biscuits to children’s milk,” he said.

“As for drinking and treated water, we cannot access it. We drink directly from the well.”

Israeli strikes have injured at least 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, forcing doctors to triage patients with life-threatening injuries. But the health care needs of especially vulnerable populations, including women and disabled people, can be overlooked.

Drug shortages mean people are running out of medication that is not always available in local pharmacies, including Baclofen, a muscle relaxant used by people with cerebral palsy, meningitis and motor neurone disease, and Novatrim, an antibiotic treatment, added Ćerimovic, of HRW.

In the early days of the escalation, Al Rozzi and his staff of volunteers were handing out first aid supplies, mattresses, walkers and crutches to evacuees with disabilities. Now, he said, having access to a wheelchair has become a “luxury.”

Diminished access to electricity supply and battery shortages mean people with disabilities cannot power wheelchairs, elevators, nebulizers (a machine that turns liquid medicine into mist) or hearing aids. At least three communications blackouts have engulfed Gaza since October 7, reducing civilians’ ability to access information, contact displaced family members and document the horrors of the Israeli bombardment.

Blackouts have particularly impeded communication for deaf people, who rely on internet access to make video calls with sign language and receive life-saving information, human rights workers said.

Those with hearing disabilities become “isolated from the world,” said Fidaa Fouad Khamis Omar, a psychologist at the National Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled, based in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.

‘Fear of the unknown dominates everyone’

Al Rozzi’s son Adham, 27, has cerebral palsy. Every time he hears the sound of shelling, he covers his ears and starts to shake. He cannot breathe properly, or move, Al Rozzi said. “He is becoming like stone.”

Trauma is not a new feeling for Gazan civilians, who have lived through years under siege. These severe restrictions have been fiercely criticized by international bodies including Amnesty International, who say Israel has violated international law.

Multiple carers and aid workers said they are struggling to provide mental health support for disabled civilians who are terrorized by the ongoing bombardment. Their own psychological trauma is compounded by the fear that they cannot protect their loved ones.

“Everyone has become withdrawn into themselves, not eating, drinking, sleeping, or thinking, and the fear of the unknown dominates everyone,” explained Omar, the psychologist.

As Israeli troops close in on Gaza City, Al-Naizi fears the orphanage will be displaced again. A second attempt to flee, he said, would be even more dangerous than the first. The longer journey to southern Gaza is limited to travel on foot, because there is not enough fuel for buses.

“We really suffer a lot and feel great terror,” said Al-Naizi. “We try to do our humanitarian duty towards these children, who have no fault except that they were born in Gaza.”

Up next for end-of-year celestial spectaculars is the Leonid meteor shower, set to produce bright meteors with persistent trains streaking across the night sky.

The Leonids have been active since early November but are expected to peak this weekend at 12:33 a.m. ET Saturday, according to EarthSky. Sky-gazers could see 10 to 15 meteors per hour in a dazzling display.

Those looking to catch a glimpse of a meteor from this shower are in luck because the moon will be in its waxing crescent phase, and there will not be as much light interference as there is with a full moon, said Dr. Sharon Morsink, a professor of physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. The moon will be 23% full on the night of the shower’s peak, according to the American Meteor Society.

While the peak is on Saturday, the same rates of meteors can be seen a few days before and afterward. The best time to view the shower will be after midnight in any time zone when the constellation Leo will be the highest in the sky, said Morsink, who also manages the university’s astronomical observatory. Leo is the meteor shower’s radiant, which is the point where the phenomenon appears to originate from, she explained.

“The most important thing is to get away from light pollution,” Morsink said. “You can still see some meteors if you’re in the city, but you’re not going to see anywhere near the number that you get to see if you get out of the city.”

Meteor storms from the Leonids

The Leonids are famed for generating meteor storms, the term used when a shower reaches rates of at least 1,000 meteors per hour, according to NASA.

Holding the record for the highest rate of meteors per hour seen in a meteor stream, the Leonids produced 144,000 meteors per hour in 1966, according to the American Meteor Society. The shower also produced outbursts of higher rates in 1999 and 2001, but the society does not expect another storm until 2099, when the Earth is predicted to encounter a dense cloud of debris from the parent comet, Tempel-Tuttle.

As the comet travels around the sun, it leaves a trail of rocks and dust that appears as the annual Leonid meteor shower when Earth moves through the debris while on its own orbital path.

Although a Leonid storm event is not predicted for this year, there is always a chance to see a few more meteors than the predicted rate, Morsink said.

“Getting out and seeing any meteor shower for the first time is always fun,” she said. “It’s just this interesting connection that we have with the whole solar system — here’s this comet that is far away from us that has been circling the sun for an incredibly long period, billions of years probably. … It’s a way for us to connect with things that are really far away.”

Meteor showers yet to peak this year

Meteors from the Leonids are expected to be seen blazing in the sky until the shower’s finality on December 2, according to the American Meteor Society. If you are eager to see more, here are the remaining meteor showers that peak in 2023:

● Geminids: December 13-14

● Ursids: December 21-22

Full moons

There are two full moons remaining in 2023, according to the Farmers’ Almanac:

● November 27: Beaver moon

● December 26: Cold moon

Since Hamas launched its brazen October 7 attacks and Israel responded with intensive air strikes and a ground offensive, both sides have been accused of war crimes.

The conflict is covered by a complex system of international law developed after World War II, which attempts to balance humanitarian concerns and the military requirements of states. Delivering justice would be the work of many organizations over many years, but the process has already begun.

So who will decide if war crimes have been committed, what will the criteria be, and will anyone ever be held to account?

Which laws apply to the conflict?

Conflicts are governed by two bodies of law. The first, the law on the use of force, aims to prevent conflict by dictating the conditions under which states may resort to force.

The second, called the “law of armed conflict” (LOAC) or “international humanitarian law” (IHL), regulates the conduct of states during war and seeks to limit suffering once they have begun.

Modern IHL is built around the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which have been ratified by almost all UN members. The conventions have since been supplemented by Additional Protocols and by rulings at international tribunals.

Israel, however, has not ratified the first and second additional protocols, which were introduced in 1977 to cover areas like collective punishments and the use of new weapons. But since these provisions are considered a norm of customary international law, they are nonetheless binding on all states.

Some dispute whether international law applies to non-state actors like Hamas. But the State of Palestine – which is how the Palestinians are represented at the UN as a non-member observer – has acceded to the Geneva Conventions and its three additional protocols. Given this, Hamas – which governs a Palestinian territory – must comply with their terms. The State of Palestine is also a signatory to the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), meaning Hamas leaders are accountable for war crimes.

Is there evidence of war crimes in the fighting between Hamas and Israel?

Not all violations of international humanitarian law constitute a war crime. A war crime is an especially grave violation of IHL. A UN report said last month said it was collecting evidence of war crimes in the wake of Hamas’ indiscriminate massacre of civilians and its abduction of more than 200 hostages.

The report said Israel may be committing the war crime of collective punishment, after officials ordered the “complete siege” of Gaza. A number of prominent human rights groups concur with the UN’s assessment.

When he visited the Rafah Crossing from Egypt into Gaza, Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the October 7 attacks “atrocities”, saying they – and the holding of hostages – were war crimes.

But he added “the collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.”

Some have argued Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. In an open letter, a group of UN experts said they “remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide,” although the crime is harder to prove under international law.

Other experts warn that Israel’s response, which has involved the displacement of more than a million Gazans from the north of the strip, poses a danger of becoming ethnic cleansing. However, ethnic cleansing still lacks a precise legal definition, and it is not recognized as an independent crime under international law.

What does proportionality mean?

Article 51 of the UN charter, which governs the use of force, gives states the right of self-defense, provided the force they use is necessary and proportionate. Proportionality is not about inflicting symmetrical harm. It means the defending state cannot use more force than is needed to respond to a threat.

Legal experts argue that Israel has considerable scope to respond to Hamas’ October 7 attack, and that its stated aim to “destroy” Hamas can be justified under international law.

Hamas has shown no intention to relent. Its founding charter mandates the killing of Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel. In an interview shortly after October 7, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas leader, told a Lebanese TV channel: “We will do this again and again.” He said the attack was “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”

While many consider Israel’s aim to destroy Hamas legitimate, others fear the force required to achieve this would be disproportionate.

“Some would argue that Hamas’s intent and capacity to launch future attacks makes it necessary to destroy it completely. But I would argue that the total harm this path would inflict on civilians renders it disproportionate. Israel has to settle for less than total victory.”

Israel must abide by a second type of proportionality under international humanitarian law. Under IHL, all states must minimize civilian casualties. Intentionally directing attacks against civilians is always illegal, but an attack that kills civilians incidentally can be legal if it achieves a military purpose, provided the harm caused to civilians is not “excessive” in relation to the military advantage anticipated.

When deciding whether to strike a target, Schmitt said commanders consult lawyers to complete proportionality calculations. Here, officials weigh expected civilian harm against expected military advantage. The greater the military advantage, the greater harm to civilians can be considered proportionate.

Schmitt, a former targeting officer and judge advocate in the US Air Force, said this calculation is “the hardest decision a commander can make on the battlefield, because there’s no bright-line test.”

The legality of a strike must be judged on the basis of information available at the time, rather than with hindsight. This makes forming a judgment on a particular strike a fraught task, due to the lack of information about how the IDF assesses the threshold for civilian casualties.

The sheer scale of Israel’s bombardment – which has destroyed nearly half of Gaza’s housing –  could suggest Israel’s definition of “military targets” is at best loose and at worst potentially criminal.

“The amount of destruction is very, very significant,” said Sari. “I think it’s important and entirely appropriate to ask questions, robust questions, as to whether Israel is in all of these cases complying with its obligations. That is ultimately something for the IDF to answer.”

Can Israel target hospitals and refugee camps?

Israel’s targeting of civilian areas like hospitals has caused unimaginable suffering and drawn fierce criticism. After its strikes on the Jabalya refugee camp, which destroyed several buildings and, according to the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry, killed hundreds, the UN said the attack could amount to a war crime, given “the high number of civilian casualties and the scale of destruction.”

While none dispute the horror of such attacks, legal experts are divided over whether they necessarily violate IHL.

“It is entirely legitimate and completely understandable to abhor the catastrophic consequences inflicted upon the civilian population as a result of the attack on the Jabalia refugee camp,” wrote Brian Cox, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University in the US, in a recent paper. “As unimaginably horrifying as those effects are, this reality alone does not render the attack illegal.”

Civilian buildings are protected under IHL, but protection is not unconditional. “They can lose their protection if they are used outside of their humanitarian function to commit acts harmful to the enemy,” Cordula Droege, chief legal officer of the International Committee of the Red Cross, explained in a video. Using buildings like hospitals to house combatants and weapons can turn civilian objects into legitimate military targets.

Hamas has long been known to station military operations inside buildings like hospitals – a practice known as “human shielding.” Human shielding is a war crime – but also a common military tactic during asymmetrical warfare.

“Human shielding is a horrific practice, but there is military utility to it,” said Schmitt, the law professor. “That is exactly why Hamas is encouraging people not to leave Gaza City. ”

And so it is possible for both sides to violate IHL in the same instance: Hamas by using human shields,  and Israel by launching a disproportionate strike. The former violation does not excuse or permit the latter; any strike must abide by the principle of proportionality.

In response to the Jabalya strikes, the IDF said it achieved significant military advantages, damaging Hamas’ tunnels and killing dozens of its operatives, including Ibrahim Biari, a commander the IDF said was responsible for the October 7 attack. But whether the civilian harm caused by the strike was greater than the IDF expected, or whether it decided ex ante that such a level of destruction was nonetheless proportionate, is not clear.

Ultimately, however, the conflict may reach a point where such distinctions seem beside the point. An act can be legally justified and morally abhorrent. And even if the IDF can justify particular strikes under IHL, its actions may become constrained by public opinion. Huge pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been held across the globe, causing even Israel’s staunchest allies to temper their support as its window of perceived legitimacy shrinks.

“Even if a targeted strike may be justifiable from a legal perspective, first impressions frame the narrative,” noted a 2019 NATO report on Hamas’ use of human shields in Gaza. “Public opinion tends to be influenced more by images depicting the suffering of innocent civilians than by well-thought-out legal arguments.”

Who will rule on whether war crimes have been committed?

The ICC is an international court established to investigate individuals accused of committing the most serious crimes, such as war crimes. It steps in when governments are unable or unwilling to investigate alleged crimes committed on their soil. It opened in The Hague in 2002, but many of the world’s major powers – including the US, China and Russia – are not members.

Israel is not a member of the ICC and rejects the court’s jurisdiction. That has not stopped the court from investigating its actions in the occupied Palestinian territories. Fatou Bensouda, then the ICC’s prosecutor, spent five years conducting a “painstaking preliminary examination” and concluded she was “satisfied that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.” But no arrests were made, and Bensouda left office in 2021.

While every government and military decision-maker must ensure they abide by international law, it is the job of the ICC to prove they have failed to do so.

Karim Khan, the current ICC prosecutor, said the acts committed by Hamas on October 7 are “serious violations, if proven, of international humanitarian law.” But he stressed “Israel has clear obligations in relation to its war with Hamas: Not just moral obligations, but legal obligations… It’s there in the Geneva Conventions. It’s there in black and white.”

When voters go to the polls this Sunday to elect Argentina’s next president, they will have to choose not only between two candidates, but between two opposite ideas of what type of country they want to live in.

That is an old adage in the era of identity politics. Still, it is hardly truer anywhere than in Buenos Aires, where Sergio Massa, the country’s current finance minister and a scion of the political establishment, is squaring off against Javier Milei, a former television pundit who entered politics less than 36 months ago.

The runoff between Massa, from the government coalition Union por la Patria (Union for the Homeland), and Milei of La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances), brings to an end a polarizing political campaign that has seen a series of surprising reversals, beginning in August when Milei stunned the country with a victory in a preliminary vote. After a weaker showing in the election’s first round in October, Milei was seen as being on the backfoot; this week he is once again leading in the polls.

One of the biggest questions now facing voters in this soccer-obsessed nation is: which of these two political polar opposites, both of whom played as goalkeepers in their youth, is the safest pair of hands for an economy currently suffering some of the highest inflation in the world?

More than 35 million Argentinians will be asked to cast their vote on Sunday on whether they trust Massa to lead the country out of its worst economic crisis of the past two decades through familiar policies that have failed before, or to dive into the unknown with Milei who proposes the radical idea of ditching the Argentinian peso in favor of the US dollar as national currency.

Argentine law prohibits the publication of opinion polls up to eight days ahead of the vote, but recent results from the past few weeks have shown the candidates almost neck-and-neck, and most analysts believe the election will be close.

On a personal level, the two candidates could not be more different: Massa is a family man who has dreamt of becoming a politician since he was 11 years old and has spent his career in and out of elected office; Milei lives alone with five English mastiffs – all genetically identical clones from a previous pet – and was elected to Congress in 2021.

Massa has carefully selected his political alliances to propel his ascent to government, while Milei rose to fame with political stunts, like wielding a chainsaw at rallies, and vowing to unleash a wrecking ball on the administrative class his opponent represents.

The Brave New World of Javier Milei

It is Milei who has attracted the most attention this year, not only because of his political style – on top of wielding chainsaws, he’s prone to raging outbursts and has embraced the nickname of ‘The Crazy One’ since climbing in the polls – but also because his proposed reforms would decisively shift Argentina to the right.

Outside of his controversial plan for dollarization, his political program includes slashing regulations on gun control and transferring authority over the penitentiary system from civilians to the military; both measures part of a tough-on-crime approach.

Milei proposes using public funds to support families who choose to educate their children privately – as a child he attended a Catholic private school in Buenos Aires – and privatizing the health sector, which in Argentina has always been in public hands in Argentina.

In recent weeks, Milei triggered an uproar when it appeared he was in favor of opening a market for organ transplants, although he later retracted his declarations.

He was similarly forced to apologize after calling Pope Francis, who is from Argentina and is seen as an icon of progressive politics in South America, “an envoy of Satan” in 2017. The apology, however, did not stop him from accusing Francis of siding with “bloodthirsty dictators” in an interview with right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson in September.

At university, Milei studied economics and idolized Milton Friedman, to the point of naming one of his beloved dogs after the free-market theorist.

But his most controversial proposal concerns public finances, as he plans to drastically cut government spending and, famously, eliminate the central bank and completely dollarize the country.

Can Argentina dollarize?

The idea to dollarize is not new – two other nations in Latin America, Ecuador and El Salvador, have dollarized in the past 30 years to combat inflation – but it’s untested in a country as big as Argentina.

Milei’s pitch is simple: Argentina’s rate of inflation, regularly among the highest in the world, is caused by politicians and central bankers who print new pesos to finance their social programs and electoral promises. As a result, the peso loses value, and everyone gets poorer. To fix the problem, Argentina should abandon the peso and adopt the dollar, whose value is set by the US Federal Reserve and cannot be printed at will.

The downside of dollarization is that a nation loses the power to influence the economy through monetary policy. For that reason critics of dollarization often refer to it as a straightjacket.

Because Argentina’s inflation rate is so high – just this week new data revealed prices had risen 142% from 2023 – the proposal has attracted interest from foreign institutions as well.

In recent months, for example, The Economist, a conservative international publication, warned against the allure of dollarization, arguing that Argentina does not possess enough dollars to finance the currency switch and that the downsides would far outweigh the benefits.

Conversely, analysts from the Cato Institute, a US-based rightwing economics think tank, favor the move as the only viable strategy to tame what is a decades-long problem.

In the early 1990s the Argentinian peso was ‘pegged’ to the dollar, which meant its value was fixed to the US currency, but Argentinians would still use pesos for their shopping.

Inflation came roaring back once the currency was allowed to float.

Massa has criticized the plan for dollarization as a surrender of national sovereignty and attempted to show that the government’s current actions are already paying dividends.

While still high – 142% year on year – , inflation in October was 35% lower than in September.

Other mainstream politicians, including former the President Mauricio Macri and another former election candidate, Patricia Bullrich, have endorsed Milei despite sharing some reservations on dollarization.

The world is watching

Interest in this Sunday’s elections goes far beyond Argentina’s borders.

Abandoning a tradition of non-intervention in another country’s elections, leftwing politicians in the region including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Spain’s José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero have endorsed Massa.

Milei meanwhile can count on the support of Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro, Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa and Spanish conservative former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

The stakes are high because a victory for Milei could be seen as a boost for far-right populist politicians like Bolsonaro and former US President Donald Trump just ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, while a win by Massa would be a showcase for center-left policies.

What else do you need to know?

Polls close at 6 p.m. local time (4 p.m. ET) and the vote count is expected to be quick – barring any unforeseen problems or objections, that is.

Milei appeared to question the results of the first round of voting in October, although his party did not formally appeal.

A 65-year-old Israeli woman who was kidnapped by Hamas militants on October 7 has been found dead near Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, the Israeli military said Thursday.

The body of Yehudit Weiss, a resident of kibbutz Be’eri, was found by Israeli soldiers in Gaza City and brought back to Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement.

The statement did not detail how or when she had been killed, but said military, medical and rabbinate personnel had identified the body and informed her family.

IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a televised news briefing that Hamas had killed Weiss. He did not offer further details of the precise cause of her death.

“Unfortunately, Yehudit was murdered by the terrorists in the Gaza Strip, and we didn’t reach her on time,” he said.

“The IDF sends its heartfelt condolences to the family,” the earlier IDF statement said. “The national task before our eyes is to locate the missing and return the abducted persons home.”

Weiss was among more than 200 people taken hostage by Hamas during its terror attack on October 7, when its fighters poured into southern Israel and killed more than 1,200 people. Weiss’s husband, Shmuel, was among those killed.

The IDF said her body had been recovered from what it called a “structure” near to the Al-Shifa hospital, where the IDF on Wednesday launched what it called a “precise and targeted” operation against Hamas, which it says has been using the hospital for military purposes.

Hamas and hospital officials have consistently rejected Israel’s claims that Hamas has built a command center under the hospital.

The IDF also claimed in its statement that “in the structure in which Yehudit was located, military equipment including Kalashnikov rifles and RPGs were also found.”

The Israeli military also said Thursday that it had found an “operational tunnel shaft” inside the Shifa hospital complex and published a statement that included a photo and video purporting to show it.

Israel is under significant international pressure to prove its claims about Hamas’ infiltration of the hospital, in order to justify some of its military decisions, which could otherwise constitute a possible serious violation of international humanitarian law.

Kibbutz Be’eri lies just a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip and its liberal community has been a frequent target of Hamas rockets fired from the enclave – usually intercepted by Israeli defenses.

But the kibbutz became the site of a massacre on October 7, as Hamas militants breached the compound and murdered more than 120 of its residents, including children, and kidnapped others.

The Hostages and Missing Person’s Families Forum, a group established by the families of those abducted by Hamas, said Weiss was a 65-year-old grandmother.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

After months of rebuilding and clearing red tape following the April explosion of the Starship system’s first test flight, SpaceX is set for its next attempt.

The megarocket — the most powerful launch vehicle ever built — was expected to lift off on Friday, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a social media post Thursday that the company would hold off until Saturday to allow for time to replace a small rocket part.

The company is targeting a 20-minute launch window that opens Saturday at 7 a.m. CT (8 a.m. ET), according to the SpaceX website.

Musk shared that the reason for the delay was the need to replace an actuator — or a mechanical component that allows movement — on one of the rocket’s grid fins. Grid fins are metal, mesh squares that line the top of Starship’s Super Heavy rocket booster, and they’re used to orient the booster as it heads in for a landing after flight.

Riding on Starship’s eventual success is the company’s hopes for human exploration of the moon and Mars.

The Starship spacecraft stacked atop the Super Heavy booster is intended to play a key role in the NASA Artemis III moon mission, currently slated for 2025. How the launch attempt fares could have a deep impact on the US space agency’s lunar exploration goals.

The inaugural integrated test flight of Starship and Super Heavy in April ended just minutes after takeoff when the vehicle began tumbling tail-over-head, forcing SpaceX to initiate self-destruct mode and explode both rocket stages over the Gulf. Debris rained down over parts of the South Texas landscape, sparking outcry among environmental and wildlife groups.

Local officials are expected to keep people far away from the launch site, recommending a viewing location about 5 miles (8 kilometers) across the water on Texas’ South Padre Island.

What to expect

Standing at 397 feet (121 meters) tall, the gargantuan rocket consists of two parts: the upper spacecraft, referred to as Starship, and the lower first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, that gives the initial burst of power at liftoff.

If all goes according to plan, the Super Heavy will ignite up to 33 of its massive engines and vault the Starship capsule out over the Gulf of Mexico. After its fuel is spent, the Super Heavy will detach from the Starship spacecraft and fall back toward the ocean.

Starship will then ignite its own engines and attempt to propel itself to speeds quick enough to enter Earth’s orbit, a feat that typically requires spacecraft to travel about 5 miles (8 kilometers) per second.

“Technically it’s a scooch below orbit because it’s going to do almost a complete circuit of the Earth but then splash down somewhere in the Pacific just off the coast of Hawaii,” said Musk, referring to the upcoming flight test, on October 5 during the International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijian.

All told, the mission will likely last about an hour and a half.

Musk’s Starship hopes and what’s at stake

If successful, the test flight will be considered a monumental step, queuing up SpaceX to begin testing far more complex Starship missions, including delivering satellites to orbit and attempting to refuel the spacecraft while it’s in orbit. Being able to top off the ship’s fuel in space could allow it to complete missions deeper into the cosmos.

If the test mission fails, the consequences will have a ripple effect, potentially pushing back deadlines for SpaceX’s — and NASA’s — stated goals for the rocket system.

SpaceX has framed Starship as the rocket that will fulfill the company’s founding purpose: Put humans on Mars for the first time and pave the way for a permanent Martian settlement.

Musk has said he thinks the first test flight to Mars could take place within the next “three or four years,” though he’s known for offering overly optimistic time frames.

Perhaps closer on the horizon is the mission that NASA is hoping Starship will help fulfill. The space agency intends to land humans on the moon — returning US astronauts there for the first time in five decades — as part of its Artemis program. And Starship is slated to complete the final leg of the journey, taking the astronauts from their spacecraft in lunar orbit and ferrying them down to the moon’s surface.

SpaceX received a $2.89 billion contract from NASA in 2021 to get the job done, with another deal worth up to $1.15 billion awarded a year later. The company will receive payments as it completes certain milestones in Starship’s development.

NASA hopes the first moon landing using Starship will take place as soon as late 2025.

“With the difficulties that SpaceX has had, I think that’s really concerning,” said Jim Free, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, in June. “You can think about that launch date slipping probably into ’26.”

The US space agency is aiming to put boots on the moon sooner rather than later, as it’s racing against China to create the first permanent lunar base.

What success looks like for SpaceX

High hopes aside, SpaceX has been known to embrace fiery mishaps and explosions in the early stages of developing a new rocket.

SpaceX has said its approach to rocket development is geared toward speed. The company makes use of an engineering method called “rapid spiral development.” That essentially boils down to a desire to quickly build prototypes and willingly blow them up in the name of learning how to construct a better one — faster than if the company solely relied on ground tests and simulations.

After the first test flight’s explosion, the company immediately sought to frame the mishap as a success, saying in a statement at the time, “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount.”

Previous explosions have grounded a rocket for a year or more. But SpaceX quickly developed a new prototype, implemented “thousands” of upgrades, and was ready to fly another test vehicle in early September, according to updates shared by Musk on social media.

Musk has said that the company has made enhancements to both the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy booster design to incorporate lessons learned from the first launch.

The launchpad, for example, was blown to bits after the inaugural launch because of the sheer force of the Super Heavy booster’s engines. SpaceX has since equipped the pad with a water deluge system that will spew water up as the engines ignite, dampening their blast and hopefully sparing the pad. Musk has likened the contraption to a colossal showerhead.

SpaceX is also changing the method Starship will use to break away from the Super Heavy booster midflight, opting to use the Starship’s own engines to push away, rather than a separate mechanical system.

It’s not clear whether all those changes will lead to success.

“I do want to set expectations, well, not too high,” Musk said at the October conference when asked about his goals for this test mission.

Musk also posted in August on social media that he foresees about a “50% probability of reaching orbital velocity,” though he cautiously added that “even getting to stage separation would be a win,” referring to the launch phase when the Super Heavy rocket detaches from the Starship spacecraft.

Those are still better odds than Musk gave the April test flight, which he had said would have been a success if the rocket made it off the launchpad.

Regulators and environmentalists

Starship couldn’t fly when SpaceX first claimed it was ready in September due to regulatory hurdles. The company was still waiting on the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, to close an investigation into the explosive April test flight and issue a new launch license.

William Gerstenmaier — SpaceX’s vice president for build and reliability who previously served as NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration — blasted the regulatory process during an October US Senate hearing, accusing them of hamstringing Starship’s development.

“It’s a shame when our hardware is ready to fly, and we’re not able to go fly because of regulations or review,” Gerstenmaier said. “These delays may seem small in the big scheme of things but … delays in each and every test flight adds up. And eventually we will lose our lead and we will see China land on the moon before we do.”

On the other end of the spectrum, however, are environmentalists, who say the FAA isn’t doing nearly enough to ensure the company is not damaging the public lands and wildlife refuges that surround SpaceX’s South Texas launch site.

The environmental groups have protested SpaceX testing operations, saying its explosive mishaps have spewed shrapnel onto public beaches and into the nearby wildlife reserves, in addition to burning acres of land with unintended brush fires.

SpaceX, which is involved in the case as an intervener, denied many of the allegations in the lawsuit but admitted its testing operations have flung debris into nearby areas. But both SpaceX and the FAA maintain that they have complied with federal environmental laws.

In a written reevaluation of its environmental assessment signed by the FAA on Wednesday, the agency noted that SpaceX made changes at the launchpad that could reduce the amount of debris generated by the next test flight.

The agency also concluded, “New information from the first launch and ongoing monitoring does not present any significant new circumstances or information relevant to environmental concerns.”

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment for this story, nor does the company typically respond to inquiries from reporters.

A sitting Ukrainian lawmaker who helped Rudy Giuliani smear Joe Biden during the 2020 US presidential campaign has been jailed on suspicion of treason, Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday, in a statement accusing him of carrying out a Russian disinformation operation.

The statement did not name the lawmaker, but a source with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) confirmed it was investigating Member of Parliament Oleksandr Dubinsky on suspicion of treason. The statement said the lawmaker “carried out information-subversive activities in favor of the Russian Federation” intended to destabilize and discredit Ukraine.

The SBU has also implicated two former Ukrainian officials in the pro-Russia scheme: ex-lawmaker Andrii Derkach and former prosecutor Kostiantyn Kulyk, who coordinated closely with Giuliani and other allies of former President Donald Trump to peddle false information about Biden and his family’s dealings in Ukraine during the 2020 campaign.

The US government previously sanctioned Dubinsky, Derkach and Kulyk, accusing them of being affiliated with a “Russia-linked foreign influence network” that tried to interfere in the 2020 election in favor of Trump and to undermine Biden. That sanctions announcement came during the final weeks of the Trump administration.

When Giuliani went to Ukraine in 2019 to try to dig up dirt on then-candidate Biden and his son Hunter Biden, Dubinsky was one of the people he met with. Giuliani has also met with Derkach, who was featured prominently in a conspiracy-tinged documentary released by the right-wing network OAN about the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine.

For his part, Kulyk wrote a dossier of disinformation about the Bidens, including claims about Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian energy company. Kulyk also gave interviews to pro-Trump journalists and hired former Trump lawyers to help him spread his message to US officials during Trump’s first impeachment.

Their activities dovetailed with Trump’s impeachment pushback. Trump embraced their claims, despite concerns that they were working for Moscow. With House Republicans now considering impeaching Biden, some of the GOP claims against him can be traced back to the smears promoted by the three Ukrainian officials now accused of treason.

The SBU said on Telegram that Derkach fled Ukraine on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion last year, and that Kulyk is in hiding, outside of the country. Neither has been arrested.

Anti-Biden information operations

Taken together, these developments add to existing allegations that Trump’s inner circle worked with accused Russian operatives to smear Biden, his 2020 opponent. The US and Ukrainian governments have now both said these three Ukrainian officials participated in the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere with the 2020 US election.

The SBU on Monday released a video of testimony from Igor Kolesnikov, a former parliamentary aide who has been convicted of treason, saying that he managed a Russian intelligence operation overseen by the GRU (Russian military intelligence) that included Dubinsky and others aimed at undermining Ukraine’s relations with its allies.

In the video, Kolesnikov says he met a top GRU official in Moscow in 2019 and was directed to “implement a set of information operations as press conferences, six in total, aimed at discrediting the current government, undermining Ukraine’s relations with strategic partners.”

Dubinsky and Derkach later held a series of news conferences that amplified false narratives about corruption by the Biden family in Ukraine. They also promoted the untrue conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 US presidential election to undermine Trump, contrasting with the reality that Russia meddled to help Trump win.

In his statement released by the SBU, Kolesnikov said he reported back to his Russian handlers after each news conference and they “used their resources to maximize the dissemination of the press conference materials in the media and on the Internet.”

This included translating the news conferences for foreign audiences. And the efforts to spread the material in the US paid off: In August 2020, Trump retweeted a post containing a propaganda audiotape released by Derkach as part of the effort to denigrate Biden.

In a statement on Telegram, Dubinsky denied the allegations and claimed the charges were politically motivated. Dubinsky accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his chief of staff Andriy Yermak of being responsible for a campaign to silence him.

“I am convinced that Yermak-Zelensky’s chaotic attempts to put me under arrest and ban me from running social networks are connected not only with my criticism of the president and his entourage, but also with the desire to prevent this information from reaching foreign media,” Dubinsky said.

Derkach has previously denied working for the Kremlin. Kulyk has not commented publicly about the allegations.

Space is full of extreme phenomena, but the “Tasmanian devil” may be one of the weirdest and rarest cosmic events ever observed.

Months after astronomers witnessed the explosion of a distant star, they spotted something they have never seen before: energetic signs of life releasing from the stellar corpse about 1 billion light-years from Earth. The short, bright flares were just as powerful as the original event that caused the star’s death.

Astronomers dubbed the celestial object the “Tasmanian devil,” and they observed it exploding repeatedly following its initial detection in September 2022.

But the initial stellar explosion that caused the star’s death wasn’t any typical supernova, an increasingly bright star that explodes and ejects most of its mass before dying. Instead, it was a rare type of explosion called a luminous fast blue optical transient, or LFBOT.

LFBOTs shine brightly in blue light, reaching the peak of their brightness and fading within days, while supernovas can take weeks or months to dim. The first LFBOT was discovered in 2018, and astronomers have been trying to determine the cause of the rare cataclysmic events since.

But the Tasmanian devil is revealing more questions than answers with its unexpected behavior.

While LFBOTs are unusual events, the Tasmanian devil is even stranger, causing astronomers to question the processes behind the repetitive explosions.

“Amazingly, instead of fading steadily as one would expect, the source briefly brightened again — and again, and again,” said lead study author Anna Y.Q. Ho, assistant professor of astronomy in Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences, in a statement. “LFBOTs are already a kind of weird, exotic event, so this was even weirder.”

The findings about the latest Tasmanian devil LFBOT discovery, officially labeled AT2022tsd and observed with 15 telescopes around the globe, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“(LFBOTs) emit more energy than an entire galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars like the Sun. The mechanism behind this massive amount of energy is currently unknown,” said study coauthor Jeff Cooke, a professor at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, in a statement. “But in this case, after the initial burst and fade, the extreme explosions just kept happening, occurring very fast — over minutes, rather than weeks to months, as is the case for supernovae.”

Tracking the Tasmanian devil

Software written by Ho initially flagged the event. The software sifts through a half-million transients detected daily by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, which surveys the night sky. Ho and her collaborators at different institutions continued to monitor the explosion as it faded and reviewed the observations a few months later. The images showed intense bright spikes of light that soon vanished.

“No one really knew what to say,” Ho said. “We had never seen anything like that before — something so fast, and the brightness as strong as the original explosion months later — in any supernova or FBOT (fast blue optical transient).
We’d never seen that, period, in astronomy.”

To better understand the quick luminosity changes occurring in the Tasmanian devil, Ho and her colleagues reached out to other researchers to compare observations from multiple telescopes.

Altogether, the 15 observatories, including the high-speed camera ULTRASPEC mounted on the 2.4-meter Thai National Telescope, tracked 14 irregular light pulses over 120 days, which is likely just a fraction of the total number of flares released by the LFBOT, Ho said.

Some of the flares only lasted tens of seconds, which to astronomers suggests that the underlying cause is a stellar remnant formed by the initial explosion — either a dense neutron star or a black hole.

“This settles years of debate about what powers this type of explosion, and reveals an unusually direct method of studying the activity of stellar corpses,” Ho said.

Either object is likely taking on large amounts of matter, which fuels the subsequent bursts.

“It pushes the limits of physics because of its extreme energy production, but also because of the short duration bursts,” Cooke said. “Light travels at a finite speed. As such, how fast a source can burst and fade away limits the size of a source, meaning that all this energy is being generated from a relatively small source.”

If it’s a black hole, the celestial object may be ejecting jets of material and launching them across space at near the speed of light.

Another possibility is that the initial explosion was triggered by an unconventional event, such as a star merging with a black hole, which could present “a completely different channel for cosmic cataclysms,” Ho said.

The afterlife of stars

Studying LFBOTs could reveal more about the afterlife of a star, rather than just its life cycle that ends with an explosion and a remnant.

“Because the corpse is not just sitting there, it’s active and doing things that we can detect,” Ho said. “We think these flares could be coming from one of these newly formed corpses, which gives us a way to study their properties when they’ve just been formed.”

Astronomers will keep surveying the sky for LFBOTs to see how common they are and uncover more of their secrets.

“This discovery teaches us more about the varied ways in which stars end their lives and the exotica that inhabit our Universe,” said study coauthor Vik Dhillon, professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, in a statement.

Spain’s parliament voted to make Pedro Sanchez prime minister for another term on Thursday, ending a protracted deadlock after an inconclusive general election in July.

His Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) reached separate deals with a number of regional parties to earn their backing, including a contentious bill on amnesty for Catalan separatists that has sparked protests across Spain.

Sanchez had 179 votes in favor and 171 against, with no abstentions.

His confirmation as premier ends months of uncertainty. Alberto Nunez Feijoo, a candidate with the conservative People’s Party (PP), won the most seats but failed to secure enough support from other parties in his own bid to lead the country.

It also represents a remarkable turnaround for Sanchez, who six months ago felt compelled to call a snap election after his party performed poorly in regional elections. Polls suggested he would be voted out of government but his party staged a late rally and managed to contain a surge from the PP.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz congratulated Sanchez on social media platform X.

“It is good that we can continue to work side by side,” Scholz said. “We see many challenges in the world from a very similar perspective.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she looked forward to working to address important challenges faced by the EU while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also sent his congratulations

The amnesty bill, which was registered in parliament on Monday, has angered many Spaniards. It proposes exculpating politicians and activists who took part in an attempt to separate Catalonia from Spain that reached its apex in 2017.

Protests

As the vote was completed, some of the 400 protesters outside parliament shook barricades erected by police and shouted their dissent.

Javier, 25, of the youth group Revuelta linked to Vox, said protests would continue outside PSOE headquarters in Madrid on Thursday night.

Alberto Nunez Feijoo, whose PP won the most seats in the July vote, walked across the chamber to shake Sanchez’s hand as leftist lawmakers applauded and cheered, while Vox party leader Santiago Abascal walked out.

Feijoo said he told Sanchez he was making a mistake for which he was responsible.

The European People’s Party (EPP) said on Thursday that the European Parliament had approved its request for a debate next week on whether the amnesty threatens judicial independence in Spain.

Esteban Gonzalez Pons, vice secretary of the PP, said the fact that Spain’s rule of law would be debated was a “humiliation for Spain’s prestige.”

Sanchez will continue to depend on regional parties to pass key legislation, which will require “continuous negotiation and strict adherence to the agreements, especially in the case of the Catalan separatists,” Thinking Heads, a Madrid-based think tank, said in a report.

While the Socialists say the deals include a guarantee of “stability” in the legislature, there is no formal agreement to support the budget. It will be negotiated “in good faith,” according to a senior Socialist source.

“If progress is not made, we will not endorse any initiative put forward by your government,” Junts parliamentary spokesperson Miriam Nogueras warned on Wednesday.

Feijoo described Sanchez as being “subject to a monthly contract with separatists” to be able to govern.

Sanchez has pledged to extend measures to help Spaniards with the cost of living by making public transport free for the unemployed and young people as well as providing mortgage relief for some home owners.

Sanchez’s attention will now turn to naming a new cabinet. Key among his considerations will be whether to retain Nadia Calvino as his economy minister since she is also the frontrunner to be named as the next head of the European Investment Bank.