Activists on Wednesday accused Iran’s morality police of assaulting a teenage girl for not wearing a headscarf in a Tehran metro station, leading to her hospitalization with serious injuries. But Iranian authorities and the teenager’s parents said she was hospitalized due to low blood pressure.

A Norway-based group focused on Kurdish rights, Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, said that 16-year-old Armita Geravand was “assaulted” by morality police and has been in a coma since Sunday. Another opposition network, IranWire, said it had obtained information that Geravand was admitted to the hospital with “head trauma.”

“Following this confrontation, she managed to enter the metro, but collapsed later on,” Shekhi added.

The CEO of the Tehran metro however told state media that there was no physical or verbal interaction between Geravand and members of his staff. “According to our investigation, after reviewing the CCTV footages from the moment she entered the station and gets on the train, there was no verbal or physical altercation between the passengers with them or our staff. There was nothing recorded on the videos,” Tehran metro managing director Masoud Dorosti, told state media.

Some of the girls entering with Geravand appeared to not be wearing headscarves. Moments later, the video goes on to show a group of girls carrying Geravand out of the metro train, placing her on the metro platform as the metro leaves the station, the video shows.

Geravand’s mother and father told state media in an interview that their daughter seemed to hit her head after fainting from low blood pressure while she was on her way to school. The parents said there were no signs from the videos they saw that Geravand was assaulted.

“I think they said she had low blood pressure… drop in blood pressure or fallen on the floor… her head hit the edge of the metro and then (her friends) took her off (the train),” her mother Shahin Ahmadi said.

“We checked the cameras. She went there…I am not sure…one of the girls was in front and one was behind her. She got on the train and fell down… I don’t know …what happened…whether she was unconscious…she fainted…..they pulled her out and called the emergency care. She was then taken to the hospital,” said her father, Ahmad Garavand.

It is unclear if Geravand’s family were coerced into speaking to state media. In the past, UN human rights officials and rights groups have accused Iranian authorities of pressuring families of protesters killed to make statements supportive of the government narrative.

The teenager is currently being treated at a hospital in Tehran, Fars News Agency reported. IranWire is reporting that she is being treated at Fajr Air Force Hospital, in a separate statement it published on Wednesday.

Iran was besieged with protests following the case of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in custody after being arrested by Iran’s morality police last year for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Amini’s death sparked nationwide protests.

More than 300 people were also killed in months-long protests, including more than 40 children, the UN said in November last year. US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) in January placed the number of dead at more than 500, including 70 children. Thousands were arrested across the country, the UN said in a report in June, citing research released last year by their Human Rights Committee.

A journalist from Iranian pro-reform outlet Shargh Daily had gone to Fajr Air Force Hospital to report on Geravand’s condition when she was arrested on Tuesday, according to a post Shargh Daily on X, formerly known as Twitter. The reporter, Maryam Lotfi, has since been released, the outlet reported.

Scientists have taken their first glimpse of a sample collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu — and stumbled upon a good bit more than they expected.

When they opened the canister containing the sample on September 26, the researchers discovered an abundance of dark, fine-grained material on the inside of the container’s lid and base surrounding the mechanism used to collect the extraterrestrial rocks and soil. That unexpected debris could reveal key insights about the asteroid before the primary sample is analyzed.

The sample’s historic landing in the Utah desert September 24 marked the culmination of NASA’s 7-year OSIRIS-Rex mission, which traveled to Bennu some 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) from Earth, touched down on the asteroid and then flew back by Earth for the sample drop. (Total trip distance: some 3.86 billion miles.)

The mission team whisked away the canister the day after its arrival to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, which has a clean room specially built for careful analysis of the cosmic sample.

What the Bennu sample could reveal

Asteroids are remnants from the formation of the solar system, offering insights into what those chaotic, early days were like as the planets formed and settled into place. But near-Earth asteroids also pose a threat to our planet, so understanding their composition and orbits is key to unlocking the best ways to deflect space rocks on a collision course with Earth.

When OSIRIS-REx briefly used its TAGSAM, or Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism head, to disturb the surface of Bennu and collect a sample in October 2020, it gathered so much material that particles could be seen slowly drifting off into space before the head was stowed in the canister.

This led scientists to believe they might be able to do a quick analysis of any material they discovered upon opening the canister — and there’s plenty of it before they even reach the bulk of the sample, located within the mechanism head, which means the scientists will need to take their time to collect all of the material.

“The very best ‘problem’ to have is that there is so much material, it’s taking longer than we expected to collect it,” said Christopher Snead, deputy OSIRIS-REx curation lead, in a statement.

“There’s a lot of abundant material outside the TAGSAM head that’s interesting in its own right. It’s really spectacular to have all that material there.”

The actual asteroid sample won’t be revealed until October 11 in a live NASA broadcast. The TAGSAM head will be moved to a new specialized glovebox for careful disassembly, unveiling the sample inside.

Meanwhile, the quick-look analysis of a sample taken from outside the TAGSAM head is underway, and it could offer initial findings from the material collected from Bennu.

“We have all the microanalytical techniques that we can throw at this to really, really tear it apart, almost down to the atomic scale,” said Lindsay Keller, OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team member, in a statement.

The team will use scanning electron microscopes, X-rays and infrared instruments for a first examination of the material collected from Bennu.

Together, the instruments will provide scientists with an understanding of the sample’s chemical composition, detect any hydrated minerals or organic particles, and reveal any abundance of specific types of minerals present on the asteroid.

“You’ve got really top-notch people and instruments and facilities that are going to be hitting these samples,” Keller said.

The initial analysis will help researchers have a better idea of what to expect from the bulk sample collected from Bennu.

Scientists believe that asteroids like Bennu might have delivered necessary elements such as water to Earth early in our planet’s formation — and studying the pristine sample could answer lingering questions about the origins of our solar system.

Meanwhile, the spacecraft that delivered the sample, now named OSIRIS-APEX, is on its way to study the near-Earth asteroid Apophis, which will come close enough to Earth in 2029 to be seen by the naked eye.

The governing party called it a ceremonial passing of the baton. But the opposition lambasted it as a “passing of the scepter.”

Constitutionally barred from running for reelection, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sought to show last month, in a very public way, that presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum has his blessing. So he handed his hoped-for successor an actual baton, in a ceremony outside a Mexico City restaurant not far from the National Palace – the seat of the country’s executive power.

Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor and longtime political ally of Lopez Obrador, hit all the right notes in thanking him. Accepting the baton along with the leftist Morena party’s presidential nomination, Sheinbaum said she would assume “the full responsibility of continuing the course marked by our people, that of the transformation initiated by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”

When Mexicans go to the polls next June, they will choose between two women for president – a first in the country’s history. Only four days before Morena nominated Sheinbaum, Mexico’s opposition coalition Broad Front chose another formidable female candidate, former senator Xochitl Gálvez from the conservative PAN party.

It’s not the first time Mexico sees women running for the presidency; before Sheinbaum and Gálvez, were six other female presidential candidates. But with the two major political sides nominating women, this is the first time that it’s practically a given that starting in December 2024, Mexico, a country previously known for machismo, will be run by a woman.

Still, some critics say the outgoing Lopez Obrador’s shadow looms over the contest.

Meet the candidates: Sheinbaum and Galvez

Gálvez’s rise in Mexican politics has been meteoric; this spring, she said she wasn’t even the favorite of the PRI, PAN and PRD, the parties that now form the Broad Front coalition. It was a public spat with Lopez Obrador himself – who regularly attacked her as a “wimp,” “puppet,” and “employee of the oligarchy” in news conferences – that ultimately rocketed her into the spotlight.

In June, Gálvez went viral when she attempted to enter the National Palace with a judicial order that granted her the right to reply to the president, after successfully suing López Obrador. “This is not a show,” she told reporters at the doors of the National Palace. “The law is the law, period.”

In some respects, she appears progressive. Gálvez has advocated in the Mexican Congress for the rights and welfare of indigenous groups and Afro-Mexicans, and in a regional forum earlier this year in Monterrey, said that oil-rich Mexico should shift to renewable energy. “We haven’t done it because we are dumbasses,” Gálvez unapologetically said.

She has also said leftist Lopez Obrador’s pension for all senior citizens should continue, and proposes what she calls a “universal social protection system” of welfare programs for a large portion of the middle and lower classes.

But when it comes to security and the fight against organized crime, Gálvez’s three-pronged plan is muscular, based on what she describes as “intelligence, heart and a firm-hand”: strengthening local and state police and giving them access to intelligence, advocating for and protecting victims, and respecting the rule of law.

Macario Schettino, a political analyst and Social Science professor at ITESM, a renowned Mexican university, describes Gálvez’s political momentum as impressive, considering that only a few months ago, she wasn’t even considered a candidate with a national profile. “She barely begun to register in political terms, and she’s already had great growth. Many people in Mexico still don’t know her. She is going to grow [..] in popularity,” Schettino said, “While Claudia Sheinbaum can no longer move from where she is because she is already known by most Mexicans.”

Sheinbaum, a physicist with a doctorate in environmental engineering, would also be the first president with Jewish heritage if she wins, although she rarely speaks publicly about her personal background and has governed as a secular leftist.

She is currently ahead in most polls, and will be a formidable opponent to beat. Not only does Sheinbaum have the full support of the governing party, she has also long enjoyed the spotlight as mayor of Mexico’s most important city for the last five years until her resignation in June to run for the presidency.

On policy, Sheinbaum has vowed to continue many of Lopez Obrador’s policies and programs, including a pension for all senior citizens, scholarships for more than 12 million students and free fertilizers for small farm owners. But the high-profile ex-mayor rejects criticism of her close political alignment with the president. “Of course we’re not a copy (of the president),” she said in July.

Still, she does not shy away from touting the principles they share: “For everybody’s good, let’s put the poor first. There cannot be a rich government if the people are poor. Power is only a virtue when it’s used to serve the people,” Sheinbaum said, repeating the same campaign slogans Lopez Obrador has used for years.

Lopez Obrador promises to ‘retire completely’

Schettino believes the immensely popularly Lopez Obrador views Sheinbaum as his extension in power. He points to their party Morena’s roots in the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed Mexico for more than seven decades until 2000, which came to be known as “The Dinosaur,” and the Party of Democratic Revolution that branched off from it.

In 2012, Lopez Obrador created Morena as a political party. Schettino describes the party today as a “tyrannosaurus” under Lopez Obrador’s influence – representing what he says is the current leader’s desire for a successor to hew closely to his own agenda. “President López Obrador, a dinosaur who not only is a dinosaur, but also has the vocation of a tyrant. He doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay in power,” Schettino said.

“I believe that he built Claudia’s candidacy,” Schettino said.

López Obrador however has repeatedly dismissed accusations of authoritarian leanings or that he favors a candidate he will be able to control. Earlier this year, Lopez Obrador denied he had any favorites among his party’s hopefuls or that he was pushing for one candidate or another behind the scenes.

He has also said that he is going “retire completely” after his six-year term in office comes to an end. “I am retiring, I will not participate in any public event again, of course. I am not going to accept any position, I do not want to be anyone’s advisor, much less am I going to act as a chief. I am not going to have relations with politicians. I am not going to talk about politics,” the president told press in February.

The 14-year-old boy was arrested on Tuesday shortly after the shooting rampage at the busy Siam Paragon mall in central Bangkok’s bustling commercial and tourist district.

A Chinese citizen and a Myanmar national were killed in the shooting and five others – three Thai citizens, a Chinese national and a Laos national – were injured with “varying degrees of severity,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Kanchana Patarachoke said Wednesday.

Police Major General Nakarin Sukhonthawit said the suspect was taken from Pathum Wan police station, where he was being held, to a juvenile court in Bangkok on Wednesday to hear the charges.

They include “premeditated murder, attempted murder, possessing a firearm without permission, carrying a firearm into a public area without permission and shooting in a public area without permission,” Nakarin said.

The suspect is reported to have mental health issues and Nakarin added a “doctor said he is not in a state to be interrogated today.”

It is still unclear where the suspect obtained the weapon used in the shooting or what his motive was, but Nakarin said he had used a modified gun that was bought online.

“These kind of modified guns are widely available on the internet, we are investigating where he purchased this gun,” he said.

Thai Police General Torsak Sukvimol told reporters Tuesday the suspect “surrendered himself” after the shooting and still had ammunition when he was apprehended.

“Any of his personal issues, we can’t talk about that much since he’s still a youth,” the police chief said of the suspect, adding “he has mental issues” for which he had been treated at Rajavithi Hospital.

Video from the scene shows crowds of terrified shoppers running out of the luxury mall after gunshots rang out.

‘I didn’t want to use force’

Police Captain Thanamorn Noonart said he was the first officer to encounter the suspect inside the shopping mall and told Thai media Wednesday the teen threw his gun away once he saw the officers’ rifles.

Thanamorn said he was prepared for such an incident and had received active shooter training following a deadly mass shooting in the northeastern city of Nakhon Ratchasima in 2020, which also targeted a mall.

The suspect was on the phone with a radio center that was “persuading him to surrender and give up the weapon,” Thanamorn said from outside Bangkok’s Pathum Wan police station.

“I received initial information that he was a juvenile so I thought I didn’t want use force against him,” the officer added.

Seeing the police team, the suspect indicated on the phone that he wanted to fight saying, “it’s too late because there were many people carrying guns,” according to Thanamorn.

Thanamorn said he brandished his rifle as police thought there was a good chance the suspect would fight back.

“I had to show my capacity by showing off my rifle so he knew that my capacity was higher than his,” he said. Not long after, the suspect surrendered and police were able to apprehend him, he added.

Video from inside the shopping center appears to show the suspect on his knees with his hands raised in the air. Two police officers then can be seen smashing a glass door before entering a store and apprehending him.

The suspect was arrested just under an hour after the shooting started around 4:20 p.m. local time (5:20 a.m. ET) and taken to a nearby hospital after being interrogated by police, Thai Police General Torsak told reporters Tuesday.

A difficult time for tourism

The shooting comes at a delicate time for Thailand as it tries to woo back tourists and revive the country’s economy following pandemic restrictions.

Last week, Thailand announced a visa-free policy for Chinese and Kazakh tourists, signaling the recovery of its vital tourism industry is a top priority. The policy came just in time for China’s “Golden Week” holiday period when many Chinese nationals traditionally travel.

China was once the largest source of tourists to Thailand, with almost 11 million visitors heading to the Southeast Asia nation in 2019, accounting for more than a fourth of international arrivals before the Covid-19 pandemic tanked the global tourist market.

By contrast, only 2.2 million Chinese travelers arrived between January and September 10 this year, according to data from the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

And the shooting of Chinese victims in downtown Bangkok may make some tourists think twice about traveling to Thailand.

Already, social media users in China had reportedly expressed fears of visiting the country, because of rumors that claimed travelers could be kidnapped and sent across the border to work in scam call centers in Myanmar or Cambodia. Meanwhile, a hashtag that translates to “why people are unwilling to travel to Thailand” earned 420 million views on social platform Weibo last month.

The Bangkok mall where the fatal shooting took place is in the busy shopping and entertainment heart of the capital that’s popular with tourists, including Chinese nationals.

Nearby is the Erawan Shrine, which was targeted in a bombing that killed 20 people in 2015.

Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin expressed his “deepest condolences” to the relatives of those who died in the shooting and said he had spoken with China’s ambassador to Thailand.

“I called the Chinese ambassador and apologized for the unfortunate incident. And I have reassured him that the Thai government is doing all we can,” Srettha told reporters Wednesday.

“His excellency was kind enough to give me support and understanding, he is certain that it will not affect the confidence of the Chinese government and Chinese tourists.”

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Srettha said his government would implement the “highest security measures” for the safety of tourists.

Gun ownership in Thailand is high compared with its neighbors.

According to 2017 data from the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey (SAS), more than 10.3 million civilians hold firearms in Thailand, or around 15 guns for every 100 people. About 6.2 million of those guns are legally registered, according to SAS.

Thailand tallies the second-highest gun homicides after the Philippines in Southeast Asia, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s 2019 Global Burden of Disease database.

But mass shootings in the country are rare. In October 2022, at least 36 people were killed in a gun and knife attack at a child care center in northeastern Thailand.

The massacre in Nong Bua Lamphu province was believed to be the country’s deadliest incident of its kind.

Western militaries are running out of ammunition to give to Ukraine, NATO and British officials warned Tuesday, as they urged the bloc’s nations to ramp up production to “keep Ukraine in the fight against Russian invaders.”

The news of possible ammunition shortfalls comes after money to buy weapons for Ukraine was not included in a stopgap spending bill the US Congress passed at the weekend to avoid a federal government shutdown.

Fresh uncertainty over the future of US aid arose Tuesday when US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who advocated for support of Ukraine, was ousted from his leadership position by Republican colleagues.

The developments are troubling news for Ukraine as the war with neighboring Russia is in its 20th month and raises questions over whether Moscow may feel able to outlast western commitment promises.

“The bottom of the barrel is now visible,” Adm. Rob Bauer of the Netherlands, the chair of the NATO Military Committee and NATO’s most senior military official, said of the West’s ammunition stockpile Tuesday during a discussion at the Warsaw Security Forum.

“We give away weapons systems to Ukraine, which is great, and ammunition, but not from full warehouses. We started to give away from half-full or lower warehouses in Europe” and those stores are now running low, Bauer said.

James Heappey, minister of state for the armed forces of the United Kingdom, speaking at the same panel, said even though stockpiles may be thin, aid for Kyiv must continue and Western countries need to increase their capacity to make more ammo.

“We have to keep Ukraine in the fight tonight and tomorrow and the day after and the day after,” Heappey said. That means, “continuing to give, day in day out, and rebuilding our own stockpiles,” he added.

Meanwhile, analysts are warning that the US “arsenal of democracy” needs to start working overtime or Ukraine’s war effort may be in trouble.

“The United States and its allies are sending to Ukraine a wide range of munitions, but they are not being produced or delivered as quickly as needed,” Atlantic Council nonresident senior fellow Thomas Warrick wrote last week.

Warrick wrote that as Ukraine delayed the start of summer offensive to get more ammo and equipment to the front lines, Russia was able to build up defenses that have significantly blunted Ukrainian advances.

“Ukraine’s forces have proven themselves flexible and adaptive, but they need to have sufficient ammunition and weapons,” he wrote.

But events in Washington are placing supplies – and Ukraine’s standing on the battlefield – in doubt.

“An inability to ensure timely procurement and deliveries could undermine essential Ukrainian operations to retake additional territory or defend against potential future Russian offensives,” US Undersecretary of Defense Michael McCord wrote in a letter to congressional leadership on Friday as the spending bill that ultimately eliminated aid for Ukraine was being negotiated.

“Without additional funding now, we would have to delay or curtail assistance to meet Ukraine’s urgent requirements, including for air defense and ammunition that are critical and urgent now as Russia prepares to conduct a winter offensive and continues its bombardment of Ukrainian cities,” McCord wrote.

US military aid to Ukraine has amounted to a staggering $46.6 billion from the war’s start through July 31, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. NATO allies have contributed billions more.

But military leaders acknowledge ammo especially is being used at a staggering rate on the Ukraine battlefields.

The Pentagon said in July it had provided Ukraine with more than 2 million artillery rounds to date.

“This is an artillery intensive fight,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the time. “You know, we’ve seen large amounts of artillery be employed on both sides of the fence. And so that puts a strain on the international supply of munitions, artillery munitions.”

At the time, Washington’s supplies of NATO standard 155mm artillery rounds were so low that it was decided to supply Ukraine with controversial cluster munitions.

The emergence of Chat-GPT and similar platforms has created a buzz around large language model AI – artificial intelligence trained on vast sets of data from the internet to respond to text commands.

Despite growing interest in AI in the Middle East, Arabic-language models have lagged behind. But a team of academics, researchers and engineers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently unveiled a powerful tool tailored to the world’s Arabic speakers, which its creators say could pave the way for large language model (LLM systems) in other languages that are “underrepresented in mainstream AI.”

Named after the UAE’s largest mountain, “Jais” was created in collaboration between Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Silicon Valley-based Cerebras Systems, and Inception, a subsidiary of UAE-based AI company G42.

Although ChatGPT, Meta’s LLaMA and other LLMs have Arabic-language capabilities, they were mostly trained on English data on the internet, according to Timothy Baldwin, acting provost and professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI.

Instead, Jais used English and Arabic datasets, with a focus on content from the Middle East, allowing it to go beyond “what anyone else has been able to achieve for Arabic,” Baldwin says.

Languages that use the Latin alphabet dominate the internet, with English by far the most-used. That means datasets are largest in those languages, according to Mohammed Soliman, director of strategic technologies and the cyber security program at the Middle East Institute, in Washington DC.

Typically, language models trained in English have Western-centric data sets. “[These LLMs] lack awareness of other cultures, adversely affecting the user experience for people of diverse backgrounds,” Soliman added.

As a result of its training, Jais understands cultural nuances and dialects, according to MBZUAI, enabling it to be used more widely across different industries. In future releases, the team aims to have Jais work with images, graphs or tabular data instead of just text, broadening its uses and potentially enabling it to interpret medical scans, investment data or data from satellites.

Different dialects

Arabic is the sixth most spoken language in the world and is rich with a “constellation” of different dialects, which adds to the complexity of training a language model, Baldwin said. Modern Standard Arabic is typically used for official documents and formal writing, but local dialects are often used on blogs or social media. By training on a diverse set of data Jais can usually switch between dialects, said Baldwin.

“There’s certainly room for improvement there, but the focus has been more on the robustness in terms of being able to understand if we do have more informal inputs to the model,” Baldwin added.

A recent update allows Google’s Bard to also understand questions in over a dozen Arabic dialects, including Egyptian colloquial Arabic and Saudi colloquial Arabic; the response are then returned using Modern Standard Arabic.

Jais has 13 billion parameters, and a 30-billion parameter update is in the works, Baldwin said. Parameters quantify the size of a language model, but not necessarily the accuracy. ChatGPT-3.5 has around 175 billion parameters, according to OpenAI.

Jais, like other generative AI models, uses instruction tuning to prevent it from creating “toxic” or “harmful” answers, Baldwin said. It won’t generate anything that could lead to self-harm, damage to others, or is suggestive of addiction. The responses it generates adhere to local rules and customs on topics such as homosexuality and drugs.

MBZUAI had “various dialogues” with the UAE government and other institutions around responsible AI, which were referenced when developing Jais, according to Baldwin.

Regional developments

There have been growing efforts in the UAE to develop generative AI systems. It was the first country in the world to appoint a minister of AI, in 2017, and the region’s largest generative AI model, Falcon, was unveiled by Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council and the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in March, with a new iteration released in September.

Although not currently available in Arabic, Falcon is more powerful than Jais in English, with 180 billion parameters, and outperforms competitors such as Meta’s LLaMA 2 based on its ability to reason, code and complete knowledge tests, according to TII. Unlike Google’s Bard and ChatGPT, Falcon and Jais are open-source, which means their code is available for anyone to use or change.

A 2018 report by consulting firm PwC estimated that the Middle East could accrue up to $320 billion in benefits from AI by 2030. The region wants to make sure it has its “own capabilities” in terms of AI, says Ali Hosseini, PwC’s Middle East chief digital officer.

“Some of the best open-source models are actually developed in our region,” Hosseini added, referencing Falcon and Jais.

Its makers hope that Jais will further the development of generative AI in the Middle East. “This is kind of step one of many future steps,” Baldwin said. “Not just for Arabic large language models, but elsewhere.”

Italian authorities were on Wednesday investigating the cause of a horrific bus crash near Venice that killed at least 21 people including two children.

RAI reported that the 40-year-old bus driver, identified as Alberto Rizzotto, was among the dead, while 18 people were also injured.

Italy’s fire services said they would consider whether the bus’s battery may have caused the fire to spread more rapidly after it overheated.

According to the company website of the bus operator, the bus was electric-powered.

According to Lungo, concerns about the battery slowed down the rescue operation on Tuesday. Meanwhile the Venice public prosecutor has opened an investigation into the crash.

Video recently delivered to investigators is being examined to determine if any other vehicles were involved in the incident or if the driver suffered a health issue, the spokesperson said.

The bus was traveling from Venice to nearby Marghera and was “full of people returning home from work,” Venice mayor Luigi Brugnaro told state media RAI.

“It completely went off the road, it flew off the bridge. It was a bus; it was a highway. We are in mourning,” he added. Brugnaro described the scene as “apocalyptic” in a post on Facebook.

The accident occurred on the overpass of a road that leads from Mestre to Marghera and the A4 motorway, Italian media skytg24 reported.

For reasons that have yet to be determined, the bus broke through a wall of the overpass, falling between a warehouse and the tracks of the Mestre station below, according to skytg24.

Massimo Fiorese, the head of the company that operates the bus, said he had seen footage of the moments prior to the crash.

The video showed the single-decker bus slowing down and appearing “almost stationary” before crashing through the guardrail and toppling over, he told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, according to Reuters.

On Wednesday morning, the Italian Senate, which is the upper house of the parliament, held a minute of silence for the victims of the crash, its feed on X said.

The country’s president and prime minister expressed their condolences in the aftermath of the accident as did other world leaders.

“I express my personal and the Government’s deepest condolences for the serious accident that occurred in Mestre. Our thoughts go out to the victims and their family and friends,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote on X.

French President Emmanuel Macron said “thoughts this evening are with the Italian people, with the families and loved ones of the victims of the terrible tragedy in Venice” in a post on X.

“I am deeply saddened by the terrible accident of a bus in Mestre this evening. I offer my deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims at this sad time. I’m close to you,” President of the European Council, Charles Michel, wrote on X.

Five people have died and 23 Indian Army personnel are missing in India’s northeastern state of Sikkim after a cloudburst led to flash floods.

The flooding happened in the Teesta River in Lachen valley, Sikkim, due to a “sudden cloudburst” over Lhonak Lake in the northern part of the state, the Indian Army said in a statement. A cloudburst is a very sudden and destructive rainstorm.

River water levels rose very quickly, increasing to around 15-20 feet higher than normal, said the Army, which added that 41 of its vehicles were submerged under the resulting slush.

Five bodies have been recovered, according to a statement by the government of Sikkim. A search and rescue operation is ongoing and three people have been rescued.

At least three bridges have collapsed and about 420 people from two districts have been moved to relief camps, according to the government of Sikkim.

Flooding is not unusual in Sikkim, a state in the Himalayas, but scientists are clear that extreme weather such as storms is becoming more frequent and more intense as the human-caused climate crisis accelerates.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists who worked to discover and develop quantum dots, used in LED lights and TV screens, as well as by surgeons when removing cancer tissue.

Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov were lauded as “pioneers in the exploration of the nanoworld” by the Nobel committee for chemistry as it announced the prize in Swedish capital Stockholm on Wednesday.

“For a long time, nobody thought you could ever actually make such small particles. But this year’s laureates succeeded,” said Johan Aqvist, chair of the committee.

Heiner Linke, a member of the chemistry committee, explained at the announcement ceremony what made the laureates’ work so revolutionary.

“The core thing about quantum dots is that, just by changing their size… you change their properties, for example their color. This is completely unusual,” Linke said.

“If you imagine, for example, you want to dye T-shirts – a red one, a green one, a yellow one, a blue one. For each of these colors, you would use a different molecule. Different atoms in different constellations give you different colors – that’s what chemistry is all about,” he said.

But, thanks to the scientists’ work in nanotechnology, quantum dots allow us to “use precisely the same atoms in the same constellations and just change the size, how many of the atoms you have, and get new colors and new other properties.”

Bawendi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Brus, professor emeritus at Columbia University, are American. Ekimov is Russian and works for Nanocrystals Technology Inc., which is based in New York.

Uncovering a new world of color

In the “nanoworld,” matter starts to be measured in millionths of a millimeter. At this level, strange phenomena start to occur called “quantum effects.”

Quantum dots consist of just a few thousand atoms. In terms of size, one quantum dot is to a soccer ball as a soccer ball is to the Earth.

In the early 1980s, this year’s chemistry laureates Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov succeeded in creating
– independently of each other – quantum dots, which are nanoparticles so tiny that quantum effects determine their characteristics.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/QPd3AhaBeX

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 4, 2023

When light is passed through quantum dots they emit a specific color. This can be finely tuned and is determined by the size of the dots. The bigger dots glow red, while the smallest glow green or blue.

The slightest of changes in the size of the particle can change its hue right across the spectrum of the color wheel.

The laureates’ work has allowed scientists to capitalize on some of the properties of the nanoworld, and quantum dots are now found in living rooms and operating theaters across the world.

They are now widely used in TVs and have several advantages over traditional LCD panels, creating more vibrant and accurate colors, as well as requiring less energy to operate.

The dots are also widely used in medical diagnostics. Doctors use them to illuminate molecules that can bind themselves to cancer tumors, allowing the surgeon to distinguish the healthy tissue from the diseased.

The Nobel committee explained how the scientists’ work had helped develop quantum dots.

In the 1980s, Ekimov created size-dependent quantum effects in colored glass. A few years later, Brus became the first scientist to prove size-dependent quantum effects in particles floating freely in a liquid.

In 1993, Bawendi then changed the chemical production of quantum dots, resulting in what the committee called “almost perfect particles.” This development allowed the dots to be used in applications.

Judith Giordan, president of the American Chemical Society, praised the laureates’ work.

An unfortunate mistake

The deliberations of the Nobel committee are usually shrouded in total secrecy. No shortlists for the Nobel prizes are revealed and the winners are called shortly before the official announcement.

But the Swedish Academy of Sciences inadvertently published the name of the winning trio before the official announcement on Wednesday.

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published a copy of an email it said was from the academy, Reuters reported. Aqvist told Reuters ahead of the announcement that the email had been a “mistake” and stressed that a final decision had not been made. But hours later, the leaked names were confirmed as laureates.

“Let me say that this is of course, very unfortunate. We deeply regret what happened for sure,” Hans Ellegren, secretary general of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said at the announcement ceremony.

“There was a press release sent out for still unknown reasons. We have been very active this morning to trying to find out what actually happened but at this place, we don’t know that. we deeply regret that this happened. The important thing is that it did not affect the awarding of the prize.”

On September 19, the day Azerbaijan began its offensive in the majority Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Marut Vanyan heard an ominous noise in the sky over his hometown.

“I’m not a military expert,” Vanyan, a journalist, recalled. “But I heard very, very clearly… the roar above me. I’m sure it was a drone.”

Vanyan, a lifelong resident of Stepanakert, once Nagorno-Karabakh’s largest city, recognized the sound from 2020, when Azerbaijan waged a 44-day war for the territory and surrounding regions with the help of Turkish and Israeli weapons.

Vanyan took a video of the sky above Stepanakert, gray and cloudy, the whine of a propeller distinct in the background, and posted it on X.

According to Leonid Nersisyan, a defense analyst and researcher at the Applied Policy Research Institute (APRI) Armenia, an independent think tank, it was the sound of Israel Aerospace Industries’ Harop, a loitering munition known for the piercing noise it produces as it descends on a target.

Though their relationship is relatively discreet, Israeli equipment makes up most of Azerbaijan’s arms imports, according to arms researchers. Azerbaijani officials touted Israel’s weapons as integral to their country’s success in Nagorno-Karabakh during the 2020 war.

Israel’s ‘fingerprints’

Now, as over 100,000 ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh in the latest conflict there, Israeli-Azerbaijani ties have come under scrutiny, with an editorial in Israel’s most prominent left-wing newspaper Haaretz proclaiming that the country’s “fingerprints are all over the ethnic cleansing” in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan “used Harop kamikaze strike drones…Hermes-450 and Orbiter-1K, Orbiter-2, Orbiter-3 reconnaissance drones,” the ex-officer said. All were produced by Israeli arms companies.

Azerbaijan won the 2020 war in a little over a month, regaining much of the territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but populated and governed, until now, almost exclusively by ethnic Armenians, following the expulsion of ethnic Azeris in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

September’s battle barely took 24 hours, leaving the whole of Karabakh under the control of Azerbaijan after months of blockade. All of the roughly 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the territory have either fled to Armenia or are expected to flee, fearing full-fledged ethnic cleansing or mass atrocities, although Azerbaijan has insisted that it would respect their rights there.

Azerbaijan and Israel are close military partners. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), more than 60% of Azerbaijani weapons imports came from Israel between 2017 and 2020, making up 13% of Israeli exports during the same period. SIPRI research reveals that Azerbaijan purchased a wide variety of drones, missiles, and mortars from Israel between 2010 and 2020.

However, according to SIPRI senior researcher Pieter Wezeman, certain specifics are unknown about the extent of the ongoing Azerbaijani-Israeli weapons trade.

“We had quite some information before 2020 and then it stops,” Wezeman said. “And that doesn’t really make sense because in 2020 Azerbaijan used a significant amount of its equipment… Most likely they have continued their relationship with Israel, but that’s about as far as we know.”

The trade is believed to be particularly active in periods just before Azerbaijan has gone to war. A March 2023 investigative report by Haaretz found that flights by an Azerbaijani airline between Baku and Ovda air base, the only airport in Israel through which explosives can be flown, spiked in the months just before Azerbaijan attacked separatist positions in Karabakh in September 2020.

“We don’t know what was on board, but very likely it is something related to the military equipment that Israel already has supplied to Azerbaijan before,” Wezeman said.

Beyond guns and ammunition

The weapons trade between Israel and Azerbaijan mirrors their diplomatic relationship, once described in a leaked US diplomatic cable as “like an iceberg, nine-tenths of it… below the surface.” Despite decades of bilateral cooperation, Azerbaijan only opened an embassy in Israel this year.

But their ties go beyond guns and ammunition: OEC figures show that Israel bought 65% of its crude oil from Azerbaijan in 2021. The countries are also believed to share intelligence on Iran, Israel’s archenemy, with which Azerbaijan shares a border and which has a substantial ethnic Azeri population that constitutes the country’s largest minority. Azerbaijan has also reportedly allowed the Israeli spy agency Mossad to use it as a hub to spy on Iran. (The Israeli Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the matter.)

According to Efraim Inbar, an expert on Israel-Azerbaijan relations and president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, ties between the two have grown stronger since 2020.

In a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post, Armenia’s ambassador to Israel said Israeli weapons are being fired at “peaceful civilians” despite Israeli civil society being “very pro-Armenia in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh and recognition of the Armenian genocide.” (Israel’s government does not recognize the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War I as genocide, fearing damage to its relationship with Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire.)

Arms sales ‘good for Israel’

But there is little political opposition in the country to selling arms to Azerbaijan, Inbar said.

“Arms sales do not receive much publicity,” he added. “The contribution of Israeli drones to Azerbaijan’s war is well known, however. Israelis are proud of their weaponry. Arms sales are considered good for Israel.”

Yet despite their high visibility in Karabakh, the role of drones should not overshadow that of other Israeli weapons, according to Nersisyan, the defense analyst at APRI Armenia.

“People consider them to be some kind of a super weapon,” he said. “Of course, they are very important, but there are roles of other types of weapons.”

Among those are Israel’s LORA missiles, which Azerbaijan first purchased from Israel in 2017 according to SIPRI.

The question remains as to how far Israel is willing to go in supporting Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia. An ongoing border crisis between the two countries has resulted in Azerbaijani incursions into Armenian territory, and Azerbaijani troops currently occupy land well within Armenia’s borders in its southern Syunik province. Many in Armenia worry that an emboldened Azerbaijan will attempt to invade their country, which Azerbaijan denies. Some fears center around Nakhchivan, a landlocked exclave of Azerbaijan that borders Turkey and Armenia, and Baku’s desire for a transport corridor linking it with the rest of the country.

“Azerbaijan doesn’t have any military goals or objectives on the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia,” Hikmet Ajiyev, the foreign policy advisor to Ilham Aliyev, told Reuters on October 1.

Israeli ‘realpolitik’

Some in the international community are calling for action against Azerbaijan in the wake of the Armenian exodus from Karabakh. In the United States, where there is a large Armenian diaspora, nearly 100 members of Congress have called for sanctions on Baku, and lawmakers in the European Union have also called on the bloc to consider punitive measures.

Wezeman, the researcher at SIPRI, said Israel could come under pressure from its Western allies to reconsider arms sales to Azerbaijan.

“It will damage its relations with Azerbaijan, but at the same time, Israel will have to think about its relations with European states, which are more important partners.”

Efraim Inbar said Israel wants to keep its reputation of being a reliable supplier to Azerbaijan.

“In any case,” he added, “Azerbaijan is much more important for Israel than Armenia. It is realpolitik that drives Israeli foreign policy.”