For nearly nine months, tens of thousands of Israelis have protested every week against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary, concerned that it risks severely curtailing the powers of the Supreme Court, the only body that provides a check on the executive and legislative branches of government.

Meanwhile, watching and worrying from the sidelines, many Palestinians fear a weakened Supreme Court could lead to the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and the eventual annexation of the territory they want for a future state.

Most Israelis have cited the erosion of democracy and human rights in protesting the overhaul, but its potential implications on more than three million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank haven’t played a significant part in the public discourse.

Sawsan Zaher, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and human rights lawyer working with the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, argues the implications could be enormous. She refers to the overhaul as a “judicial coup,” saying it risks facilitating the “de facto annexation of the West Bank without any critique or any review” from the Supreme Court.

Zaher’s concern is rooted in words and actions that Netanyahu government has taken since coming into power at the end of last year. The cabinet includes a number of West Bank settlers in powerful positions, and the agreement that brought together the government calls for extending Israel’s sovereignty in the West Bank, effectively a call for annexation.

Under Netanyahu’s far-right government, Israel has approved a record number of housing units in West Bank settlements, Peace Now said in a July report.

Most countries and the United Nations consider the West Bank and East Jerusalem as occupied and therefore view Israeli settlements there as illegal under international law. Israel says the territory is disputed and denies its settlements there are illegal.

Many Israelis support their government’s expansion into the occupied territories. A 2020 survey by the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute found that more than half of Jewish Israelis supported extending Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank, an ambition that Netanyahu has voiced.

The overhaul includes a number of bills, the first of which passed in July by a 64-0 vote, thanks to the entire opposition walking out in protest before the vote. That law strips the Supreme Court of the power to declare government decisions unreasonable.

Supporters of the overhaul say that the judicial system in Israel is flawed, and gives too much power to the court. Some have been calling for judicial reform for years, saying it would balance all three branches of government.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard challenges to the reasonableness law, with the entire panel of 15 judges convening for the first time ever to hear a case.

Justices grilled lawyers from both sides rigorously, giving little indication which way they would rule. It is unclear when the court will announce its decision on the reasonableness law.

The ruling could be historic, since the reasonableness law is an amendment to one of Israel’s 13 Basic Laws. Unlike many democracies, Israel doesn’t have a written constitution. Instead, it relies on Basic Laws, as well as court ruling precedents that could one day become a constitution. The court has never struck down a Basic Law or an amendment to one.

A narrow avenue for legal recourse

Experts say that while the Supreme Court has generally supported Israel’s settlement expansion, it has sometimes provided a narrow avenue for legal recourse by Palestinians.

Eliav Lieblich, a law professor at Tel Aviv University said the court has never hindered the settlement movement. “It never ruled on the overall legality of the settlement projects.”

But Zaher said that Palestinians have never considered the Supreme Court as sympathetic to their cause, and that Netanyahu’s overhaul risks scrapping any remaining mechanisms, no matter how small, that can override policies viewed by Palestinians as violations of their rights.

“Did the Supreme Court protect Palestinian rights in the West Bank? The answer clearly is that in 95% of cases, no,” Zaher estimated.

Palestinians in the West Bank fall under a different set of laws than Israelis. They are subject to the jurisdiction of multiple, separate authorities, including the Palestinian Authority and Israeli military laws. West Bank Palestinians have the option of petitioning Israeli courts to rule against evictions, demolitions or land seizures, even if there’s a slim chance of success.

According to human rights organizations, the Supreme Court approves the majority of the orders for demolition of the family homes of Palestinians engaged in attacks against Israelis, and rarely grants petitions filed by Palestinians against those measures. The practice has been criticized by rights groups as collective punishment. Israel argues that it deters future attacks.

Palestinians have however had some rare victories. In 2005, the Supreme Court ordered the government to come up with a new route for part of its security barrier in the northern West Bank to minimize hardship for Palestinians. The International Court of Justice in The Hague had said a year earlier that the entire barrier is illegal.

And in 2012, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of a group of Palestinian landowners, ordering the removal of five settler buildings in the West Bank above the Palestinian village of Dura al-Qara.

More recently in 2017, Israeli security forces bulldozed nine homes built on private Palestinian land in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. The decision to destroy the homes came after the High Court of Justice struck down an appeal by the settler residents of Ofra to evacuate the homes but not destroy them. The court had issued the demolition ruling in 2015, seven years after the legal aid group representing the Palestinian landowner filed the case in 2008.

In other cases, however, rulings in favor of Palestinians have been reversed. Last year, in an unprecedented move, the high court ruled that a settlement outpost – Israeli housing in the West Bank built without government authorization – on private Palestinian land can remain place, almost two years after ordering its removal.

Fears of ‘speedy’ annexation

Palestinians say that settlement expansion under the Netanyahu government suggests there will be even less restraint on expansion when the Supreme Court is no longer a bureaucratic hurdle for the government.

There may be “an acceleration of the annexation in a speedy way that we did not see before,” Zaher said.

Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian-Israeli member of Israel’s parliament and head of the Ta’al party, said that supporters of the reasonableness law include far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, both of whom are settlers. These supporters, Tibi said, “aim to control the judicial system to facilitate the annexation of occupied territories.”

Gershon Baskin, director of the Holy Land Bond, a new investment fund aimed at investing in housing projects for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, sees settlement expansions as being at the heart of Netanyahu’s judicial plan.

“The small avenues that Palestinians have found within the Israeli High Court are going to be closed doors in the not-too-distant future if Netanyahu is successful in pushing through the reform,” Baskin said.

While the formal annexation of the West Bank is “an extreme scenario,” Lieblich said, it would be easier to do if the Supreme Court is severely weakened, with no authority to review government decisions. Weakening judicial review would also make it easier to take incremental steps that could amount to annexation for all practical purposes, he said.

“Once you diminish judicial review, you empower the executive, in what is already a zero-sum game (between Israel and the Palestinians),” he added.

Nigerian singer and songwriter Asake is creating a new Afrobeats sound that is deeply African and completely global.

Originally a dancer, he began recording music in 2018. By 2020, Asake had a hit single with “Mr. Money,” a banger he performed at nightclubs across Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

2022 was his breakout year. He signed a record deal with YBNL Nation and landed the highest-charting Nigerian debut album in Billboard history with “Mr. Money with the Vibe.” Since then, he has been selling out tour dates internationally, including a show at the Barclays Center in New York earlier this month, a first for an African act at that venue.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Madowo: Do you feel that the fame just came all of a sudden?

Asake: I didn’t know it would come at this time. Everything just changed for me. All of a sudden, in Dubai people that don’t even understand it are singing it — like from there to London, everybody just shouting it without even knowing what they are saying. I’m so happy that God gave me the knowledge and the confidence to be where I am today because I don’t know where I will be tomorrow.

Madowo: What do you think makes Afrobeats music so great? Why has it blown up around the world?

Asake: For me, I think it’s the spirit, and for people that are coming from Nigeria and from Africa to actually want to be involved in something and take it from where someone like Fela [Kuti] actually dropped it, and still make it bigger, because we love to actually make something bigger in Nigeria.

Madowo: You infuse a lot of Fuji sound in your music; how would you describe your sound?

Asake: I grew up listening to Fuji [a music genre that began with Nigeria’s Yoruba people]. But to me, I think I do a lot of things because, you know, I love to come with the vibe. It’s just like a bit of Amapiano, a bit of Afrobeat, a bit of Fuji, a bit of R&B, a bit of hip hop, just to make Asake.

Madowo: What is your earliest memory of thinking, ‘I think I want to be a performer. I think I’m going to be somebody who puts on a show’?

Asake: I just fell in love with it. My father used to be a singer, and my mother danced a lot, too. So, I feel like it’s like a family thing that has been in the blood … but they didn’t do it professionally. They were just doing it for the fun of culture and for the fun of what they are seeing around them.

Madowo:  Why did you adopt your mother’s name as your stage name?

Asake: I just like the feeling that comes with this, with the fact that I love my mother, and they are using my mother’s name to call me. I know the kind of mother I have and she’s very powerful. I’m Ahmed Ololade, but I have a strong name now.

Madowo: Before you were a professional singer, you were a dancer; how did you move from dance to full-on musician?

Asake: The main reason why I left dance is for the love of money. I know I want to be very honest. Dance is something that I love. I can’t even do without moving, but I feel like the kind of money I want, I’m not sure dance can give me. I think both music and dance work together because in a video without a dancer, it’s like this song is boring. Even if you want to make it so gangster-like, oh, there are so many people bumping, you still need to use the dancers. So, as they work together, I think for the love of money, I’d rather be singing (laughs).

Madowo:  So, if the dance had a bit more money that you could be commercially successful as a dancer, that’s what you would be doing?

Asake: No, I would join music and dance together. So, I will have more money (laughs).

Madowo: You met Olamide, and that changed the trajectory of your career; what’s been the influence of Olamide on Asake?

Asake: How can I explain this? You know when you are trying to go downstairs, and there’s no lift, and there’s no stairs? How can you get there? So, I think the best way I can explain it is Olamide is like the lift and the stairs for me to get to the top.

Madowo:  How do you prepare for a performance? How do you get into the frame of mind to present a show for thousands of people?

Asake: I see art. I want to see another Asake entirely. Performance for me is like a movie. Every song needs to have its own mood and its own interpretation to it on stage. Everything just works together, like the audio, me in person, and the video interpretation itself.

Madowo: What are the dreams you still have?

Asake: I want the songs everybody in the world will be singing. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but the most important thing for me is to keep going.

Ukraine has launched a missile attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Russian-appointed governor of Sevastopol, Crimea, said on Friday.

“The enemy launched a missile attack on the headquarters of the fleet,” Sevastopol governor Mikhail Razvozhayev said on Telegram.

Over the past month, Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian military bases and other installations, including air defenses, in Crimea.

Sevastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters, is one of the largest cities on the Crimean peninsula and was illegally annexed by Moscow’s forces in 2014.

Russian state media TASS reported that debris was “scattered for hundreds of meters” following the missile strike. TASS added that a large number of ambulances were on their way to the scene of the attack.

Razvozhayev also said a piece of shrapnel fell near the Lunacharsky Theater.

The Russian-appointed governor said operational services went to the scene of the attack and that information about any casualties is being clarified.

In an update later Friday, Razvozhayev said there was no more “missile and aviation danger” following the incident.

Razvozhayev had previously warned that another attack was possible and encouraged residents to avoid the city center.

Ukrainian officials have yet to comment on the incident.

Over the past month, Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian military bases and other installations, including air defenses, in Crimea.

In recent weeks, Ukraine launched a missile attack on a shipyard in Sevastopol. Officials said a Russian S-400 missile system was destroyed in Crimea, and most recently a Russian command post near Sevastopol on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Ukraine Defense Intelligence spokesman, Andrii Yusov, told Ukrainian television that “Crimea is still being used as a logistics hub for, among other things, the transfer of enemy forces and means to other parts of the front,” and stated that “in order to destroy this logistics hub, certain operations are being used and implemented: at sea, on land, and in the air.”

The European Commission has sent a letter to Poland asking for “clarifications,” amid reports that Polish officials have been involved in an alleged cash-for-visas scandal.

Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Polish consulates have been accused of participating in a widespread illegal scheme through which migrants from Africa and Asia were issued Polish visas in exchange for large sums of money.

As Poland is a member of the passport-free Schengen area, visas issued by the country grant holders free access to the 27 European Union member states, as well as Switzerland and Iceland.

The allegations could further exacerbate European tensions over grain supplies, which have led to Poland saying it will no longer send arms to Ukraine, and Kyiv filing lawsuits against three EU member states, including Poland.

Brussels is “following the recent media reporting about these alleged cases of fraud and corruption very closely,” according to the European Commission’s spokesperson Anitta Hipper.

“These allegations are very concerning and give rise to questions regarding the compliance with EU law,” Hipper said in a Wednesday statement. “This is why Commissioner (Ylva) Johansson wrote a letter to the Polish authorities to ask for clarifications.”

Johansson sent a memo posing a “set of detailed questions,” and asked the Polish authorities to reply by October 3, Hipper said.

“So, we count on the Polish authorities to provide the necessary information to the Commission and to investigate these allegations,” Hipper added.

The Polish Foreign Ministry refuted allegations the ministry “has imported hundreds of thousands of migrants from Muslim countries and Africa.”

“It is not true,” the ministry said in a statement on September 15. Claims that Poland is the EU leader issuing entry permits to the Schengen zone are also not true, the ministry added.

But Polish prosecutors announced they had brought charges against seven individuals in a visa-issuing scandal that resulted in the firing of the deputy foreign minister, according to state news agency PAP.

“The investigation was initiated on March 7 based on information provided by the Central Anticorruption Bureau,” Daniel Lerman, deputy director of the National Prosecutor’s Office Department of Organized Crime and Corruption, said at a news conference on September 14, PAP reported.

“It concerns paid protection in the acceleration of visa procedures in relation to several hundred visas,” he said, adding that most of the visas were refused.

Those visa applications related to foreigners who applied for visas at Polish diplomatic missions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, Singapore and the Philippines, PAP said.

The Polish Foreign Ministry said 1,951,000 national and Schengen visas were issued in the last 30 months.

Of that figure, Ukrainian nationals accounted for 990,000, Belarusian nationals accounted for 586,000, and other nationalities comprised 374,000 of the visas issued. The ministry said the number of visas distributed to Russian citizens “has decreased significantly in recent years.

It repeatedly dismissed “false” allegations that consuls received orders from the ministry regarding visa issuance, adding that decisions on those applications are made independently.

“Representatives of the management of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs do not have the authority to instruct consuls to issue a specific visa decision,” the ministry said.

“It is not true that Poland outsourced all technical support for processing visa applications to an external company and that visa brokerage companies acted as consular officers,” the ministry added.

The ministry said visa applications are submitted by candidates directly at the consular office, or at the visa application acceptance point.

Ukraine endured a deadly nationwide Russian missile barrage targeting energy facilities in Kyiv and other cities on Thursday, just hours before President Volodymyr Zelensky was set to meet US President Joe Biden at the White House.

Five people died in the southern region of Kherson, while a 9-year-old girl was among seven people injured in the latest attack on Kyiv. The child and an 18-year-old woman were hospitalized after debris fell from an infrastructure facility onto a residential building, according to Mayor Vitalii Klitschko.

Officials called it “a terrible night for Kherson city,” with at least three people killed and six injured, noting that apartment buildings and cars were also damaged in Russian shelling on residential areas. Two people were injured in the city of Kharkiv, where Russia launched six strikes in the early hours of the morning, according to local officials. And at least 10 people were injured in overnight missile attacks on the city of Cherkasy in central Ukraine.

The strikes marked the first time in six months that Russia has launched attacks on Ukraine’s power infrastructure, according to the state energy provider Ukrenergo, just as the country gears up for colder seasons that will require more energy use for heating. Last year, Russia began a series of intense attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in October.

Ukrenergo said the overnight missile attacks resulted in damage to power facilities in western and central regions and caused blackouts in several areas.

Ukrainian air defenses shot down 36 of 43 missiles launched by Russia on Thursday, Ukraine’s army chief said. But air raid alerts remain in place in parts of the country, as some Ukrainian officials warn that the missile threat is ongoing.

The attacks came as the capital Kyiv crossed the 1,000-hour mark of air raid alarms since the start of the Russian invasion, according to the head of the city’s military administration.

“It’s a restless morning,” Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko said Thursday, as he urged Ukrainians to follow the safety rules.

The air raid alarms, which frequently blare on loudspeakers throughout the city and on residents’ cell phones, are so commonplace that government officials have had to appeal to residents to continue to use bomb shelters.

“Do not neglect the air raid alarms,” the head of Kyiv City Military Administration Serhii Popko said on Thursday, highlighting that a year and a half of continuous alarms has taken a toll on the capital. “We have survived it and we will overcome much more together.”

The latest round of missile strikes comes after a contentious United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, where Zelensky argued that removing Russia’s veto power “will be the first necessary step.”

“It is impossible to stop the war because all efforts are vetoed by the aggressor,” Zelensky said during a speech at Wednesday’s UN Security Council meeting.

While allies have already imposed sanctions on Russia since the start of the war, the Ukrainian president called for applying preventative sanctions to countries that engaged in conflicts.

“Anyone who wants to start a war should see before their fatal mistake what exactly they will lose when the war would start,” Zelensky said.

On Thursday, Zelensky travels to meet Biden, who is seeking to hear a “battlefield perspective,” the White House said.

It comes as the Ukrainian president pleas for additional aid for his war-torn country and the US Congress remains divided about how to proceed. Biden will also reiterate US support “that we’re going to continue to be with them for as long as it takes,” National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby said.

One of Ukraine’s closest and most vocal allies has now said it will stop sending arms to Kyiv, a major reversal that threatens to upend Europe’s strategic relationship with the country as it wages a counteroffensive against Russia.

Poland’s decision was both sudden and predictable, coming after months of tensions over a temporary ban on Ukrainian grain imports to a number of European Union countries.

It also follows a pattern of increasingly confrontational behavior towards Kyiv from Poland’s government, just weeks before a tight general election.

And it could have implications for Ukraine’s attempts to push Russian forces out of the country’s southern regions, in an ongoing assault that has been making slow and grinding progress.

Here’s what you need to know:

What has Poland announced?

“We no longer transfer weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in a blunt social media statement on Wednesday.

Morawiecki added in a television interview that Poland will now focus on supplying “the most modern weapons” for its own purposes, state news agency PAP reported. “If you want to defend yourself you have to have something to defend with,” the prime minister said.

It marks a major change in policy. In the spring, Poland became the first NATO country to send fighter jets to Ukraine – months ahead of the United States, which only agreed last month to approve the transfer of F-16 jets, pending the completion of training by Ukrainian forces.

It has also previously sent more than 200 Soviet-style tanks to Ukraine, and most Western military equipment and other supplies reach Ukrainian forces by crossing Polish territory.

Poland will now only carry out the supplies of ammunition and weapons to Kyiv that were agreed before Warsaw made its decision to stop shipments, government spokesman Piotr Muller said Thursday, according to PAP.

Muller emphasized that Ukraine has made a series of “absolutely unacceptable statements and diplomatic gestures” and that “Poland does not accept this type of unjustified actions,” PAP reported.

Ukraine seemingly moved to ease the rift on Thursday. Kyiv’s minister of agrarian policy said he had spoken with his Polish counterpart and issued a statement saying the pair “discussed the situation and Ukraine’s proposal to resolve it, and agreed to find a solution that takes into account the interests of both countries.”

It also agreed to establish a grain trade system with Slovakia that would enable a ban on imports of Ukrainian grain to be lifted, Slovakia’s agriculture ministry said on Thursday.

How did we get here?

Pressure has been building for months over a ban on Ukrainian grain, initially put in place earlier this year by several EU nations to protect the livelihood of local farmers worried about being undercut by the low price of Ukrainian grain.

Last week, the EU announced plans to suspend the rule. But three nations – Poland, Hungary and Slovakia – said they intended to defy the change and keep the restrictions in place. It prompted protests from Ukraine, which this week filed lawsuits against all three countries over the issue.

Ukraine, often called the “breadbasket of Europe” due to the vast quantities of grain it produces, had its Black Sea ports blockaded by Russia following its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Fearing that the situation was “threatening global food security,” the European Commission set up what it called “solidarity lanes” in May to facilitate exports, and temporarily eliminated all duties and quotas on Ukraine’s exports, allowing a glut of cheap Ukrainian grain to flow into the continent.

Anger in Poland has been simmering since the spring, when farmers led demonstrations against the moves. But they erupted once again in recent days, after the decision of the three nations to ignore the removal of the ban.

In a swipe against the trio on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the UN General Assembly in New York that “it is alarming to see how some in Europe, some of our friends in Europe, play out solidarity in a political theater – making a thriller from the grain.”

Zelensky added that the nations involved “may seem to play their own role but in fact they are helping set the stage to a Moscow actor.” His comments sparked immediate condemnation from Poland, with the foreign ministry summoning the Ukrainian ambassador to convey its “strong protest.”

A tight election looms

Poland’s initial response to the war on Ukraine earned its populist government a rare swelling of goodwill from across Europe, and made it a major player in the Western response to Russia’s aggression.

The country has taken in more than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees and allowed 15 million to cross its borders to flee the conflict. The two countries shared a decades-old suspicion of Moscow and Warsaw had warned for years of the pitfalls of buying Russian energy, which melded their relationship in the initial phases of the war.

But tensions have frayed in recent months, exacerbated by a pivotal election.

Poland’s populist ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), are preparing for a vote on October 15 which opinion polls suggest could result in them losing their parliamentary majority. They are particularly suffering in their stronghold rural regions in eastern Poland, where agriculture is an important economic pillar.

PiS is losing a chunk of its typical voter base to the Confederation party, a historically far-right group that has been rallying against the costs of Warsaw’s military aid to Kyiv and complained that Ukraine’s plight has become a greater priority for the government than that of Polish people.

In response, PiS has seemingly toned down its support for Kyiv in recent months and shown willingness to take on a more combative stance. In August, Warsaw summoned the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland after a Polish foreign policy adviser accused Kyiv of being ungrateful for Poland’s support in exporting its grain.

What does this mean for the war?

If a solution is not found, Kyiv will have concerns that Poland’s decision to stop sending weapons will reverberate through Europe.

Warsaw has been among the most eager nations to bolster Kyiv’s arsenal since the initial days of the full-scale war, and has shown a willingness to push other European powers and the US into joining them.

In January, when Germany agonized over whether to provide Leopard 2 battle tanks to Kyiv’s troops, Poland took a leading role in bringing together a European coalition that gave Berlin enough leeway to make the move.

For days, Polish officials talked up publicly and privately their desire to get the high-tech combat vehicles onto the front lines, and insisted they would do so whether or not fellow nations came with them.

Kyiv and its allies will have concerns that if Warsaw takes a new attitude to future arms shipments, other hesitant European countries will feel less pressure to also donate supplies.

The urgency of the war to Poland has also slipped over the course of year. Poles had long warned that their country was in the crosshairs of Russia’s imperial designs, and Moscow’s invasion spiked fears that Poland would be a future target.

But with the war now bogged down in Ukraine’s east and Moscow’s army suffering serious deficiencies in manpower and leadership, the prospect of Russian President Vladimir Putin attacking a NATO country such as Poland appears slim.

The ongoing Ukraine counteroffensive has meanwhile benefited from Western support and supplies, but Kyiv has pushed for more to see it through what is likely to be a lengthy and stubborn conflict. It will worry that Poland’s decision could cause a domino effect that leaves future shipments in jeopardy.

When the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft swings by Earth on Sunday, it is expected to deliver a rare cosmic gift: a pristine sample collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.

If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will release a capsule containing an estimated 8.8 ounces of asteroid rocks and soil from space toward a landing zone in the Utah desert.

NASA will provide a live stream of the sample delivery beginning at 10 a.m. ET Sunday. The capsule is expected to enter Earth’s atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. ET, traveling about 27,650 miles per hour (44,498 kilometers per hour). It will land in Utah about 13 minutes later.

After releasing the capsule, OSIRIS-REx will continue on its tour of the solar system to capture a detailed look at a different asteroid named Apophis.

Studying the sample can help scientists understand key details about the origins of our solar system because asteroids are the “leftovers” from those early days 4.5 billion years ago. But the sample can also provide insights into Bennu, which has a chance of colliding with Earth in the future.

Returning NASA’s first asteroid sample collected in space to Earth has been years in the making. Here’s a look at the mission milestones so far — and what lies ahead.

A spacecraft’s cosmic tour

OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, has been on quite a journey over the past seven years. Launched from Cape Canaveral in 2016, the NASA spacecraft arrived in orbit around Bennu in December 2018.

The first US mission sent to a near-Earth asteroid, OSIRIS-REx made history several times over. It performed the closest orbit of a planetary body by a spacecraft. Bennu became the smallest object ever orbited by a spacecraft.

OSIRIS-REx surveyed the asteroid in its entirety to determine the best location to collect a sample. Bennu, a rubble-pile asteroid shaped like a spinning top, is about one-third of a mile (500 meters) wide and composed of rocks bound together by gravity.

The views of Bennu provided by the spacecraft afforded the mission team unprecedented insights about the asteroid, which included the discovery of water ice locked within Bennu’s rocks and carbon in a form largely associated with biology. The team also witnessed particles from the asteroid releasing into space.

The spacecraft spiraled closer and closer to the asteroid until it went in for a historic TAG, or Touch-and-Go sample collection event, on October 20, 2020.

Along the way, challenges threatened the success of the mission, including that the sample collection head on the spacecraft collected so much material that the container couldn’t seal properly, leaking precious asteroid material into space.

During the historic collection event, the sampling head of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sank 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) into the surface of the asteroid. Apparently, Bennu’s exterior is made of loosely packed particles that aren’t bound together securely, based on what happened as the spacecraft collected a sample. If the spacecraft hadn’t fired its thruster to back away after its quick collection of dust and rocks, it might have sunk right into the asteroid.

That’s when the mission team learned that the asteroid’s surface is similar to a pit of plastic balls.

The OSIRIS-REx team was able to meet and overcome these challenges, and the spacecraft is slated to return the largest sample collected by a NASA mission since Apollo astronauts brought back lunar rocks decades ago.

The team was also able to organize a final flyby of Bennu by the spacecraft in April 2021, allowing it the chance to see how OSIRIS-REx disturbed and altered the surface of the asteroid during the collection event. The before and after photos showed some intriguing differences created by the sample collection and the firing of the spacecraft’s thrusters after it pushed away from the asteroid, including moving and rearranging large boulders on the asteroid’s surface.

Returning to Earth

Since bidding Bennu farewell in May 2021, OSIRIS-REx has been on a return trip to Earth, circling the sun twice so it can fly by our planet at the right time to drop off the asteroid sample.

NASA and Lockheed Martin Space have spent much of this year rehearsing every step of the sample retrieval process.

If the spacecraft’s trajectory is on track, the sample capsule is expected to release from OSIRIS-REx 63,000 miles (102,000 kilometers) from Earth on early Sunday. Since departing Bennu, the spacecraft has made numerous maneuvers and fired its thrusters so it will fly by Earth at the right time to release the capsule. The capsule will land within an area of 36 miles by 8.5 miles (58 kilometers by 14 kilometers) on the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range.

Parachutes will deploy to slow the capsule to a gentle touchdown at 11 miles per hour (17.7 kilometers per hour), and recovery teams will be standing by to retrieve the capsule once it is safe to do so, said Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx program manager at Lockheed Martin Space, which partnered with NASA to build the spacecraft, provide flight operations and help recover the capsule.

A helicopter will carry the sample in a cargo net and deliver it to a temporary cleanroom established at the range in June. There, a team will prepare the sample container for transport on a C-17 aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday. Details about the sample will be revealed through a NASA broadcast from Johnson on October 11.

Scientists will analyze the rocks and soil for the next two years at a dedicated cleanroom inside Johnson Space Center.

It’s crucial to understand more about the population of near-Earth asteroids such as Bennu that may be on an eventual collision course with our planet. A better grasp of their composition and orbits is key in predicting which asteroids may have the closest approaches to Earth and when, as well as developing methods of deflecting these asteroids.

The sample will be divided up and sent to laboratories around the globe, including OSIRIS-REx mission partners at the Canadian Space Agency and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. About 70% of the sample will remain pristine in storage so future generations with better technology can learn even more than what’s now possible.

The sample will reveal information about the formation and history of our solar system as well as the role of asteroids in helping develop habitable planets such as Earth. Scientists believe that carbonaceous asteroids such as Bennu crashed into Earth early during their formation, delivering elements like water.

“We’re looking for clues as to why Earth is a habitable world — this rare jewel in outer space that has oceans and has a protective atmosphere,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“We think all of those materials were brought by these carbon-rich asteroids very early in our planetary system formation. We believe that we’re bringing back that kind of material, literally maybe representatives of the seeds of life that these asteroids delivered at the beginning of our planet that led to this amazing biosphere, biological evolution and to us being here today.”

India’s parliament passed a landmark bill Thursday that will reserve a third of its seats in the lower house and state assemblies for women, in a major win for rights groups that have for decades campaigned for better gender representation in politics.

A total of 215 lawmakers from the upper house voted in favor of the bill, which was introduced by prime minister Narendra Modi’s government in a special parliamentary session on Tuesday. It was approved by the lower house on Wednesday.

“A historic moment in our country’s democratic journey!” Modi wrote on Twitter after its approval. “With the passing of this bill, the representation of women power will be strengthened and a new era of their empowerment will begin.”

Six attempts to pass the bill, first introduced in 1996, have failed, at times due to strong disapproval from some lawmakers.

In India, the world’s largest democracy of 1.4 billion people, women make up nearly half of the country’s 950 million registered voters but only 15% of lawmakers in parliament and 10% in state assemblies.

Despite being voted through, the implementation of the quota could take years as it depends on the redrawing of electoral constituencies, which will happen after the completion of India’s once-in-a-decade census.

That huge census project was meant to take place in 2021, but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and has been stalled ever since.

Nonetheless, the bill’s passage in parliament will be seen as a further boost to Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of national elections next year.

While India has made progress on women’s issues in recent years, it remains a deeply patriarchal country and has some of poorest participation numbers for women in politics.

It has, since its independence in 1947, had one female prime minister. India Gandhi served as the country’s leader twice before her assassination in 1984.

India’s current President, Droupadi Murmu, who was appointed to the position last year became only the second woman to take the seat.

The world must learn from the mistakes made after the war in Bosnia to avoid putting Ukrainian victims of rape and conflict-related sexual violence through decades of trauma, a new expert report has warned.

Ukrainian prosecutors and independent investigators from the United Nations and other international organizations have said there is mounting evidence that Russian troops are using rape and sexual violence as part of their campaign of terror in Ukraine – similar to the systematic use of rape by the Bosnian Serb army during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. Russia has denied the allegations.

The report by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a US-based think tank, is set to be released and discussed in a debate in the UK Parliament on Thursday.

It says that if the world wants to avoid the repeat of the trauma faced by the victims in Bosnia, it needs to focus on the victims first in Ukraine. Many in Bosnia have waited for decades before coming forward and the vast majority of sexual crimes committed there have gone unpunished.

“Rape was one of the main aspects of the war in Bosnia and yet when we look at the Dayton Peace Accords, there were no women around the table, there were no survivors of conflict-related sexual violence,” said Emily Prey, one of the report’s lead authors, referring to the 1995 agreement that ended the Bosnian war.

Prey said that when considering survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, it is crucial to put aside biases and stigma and make sure everyone who is impacted is included.

“We often think sexual violence is a crime that only happens to women, but it’s a crime that happens to everyone. Women and girls, men, boys, people with diverse gender identities,” Prey said.

“Men who were victims of conflict-related sexual violence in the Bosnian war are only just coming forward to say that they survived this crime, and so they have gone decades without receiving the support that they need. And we’re seeing this in Ukraine as well.”

Prey added that children born of wartime rape are often forgotten as well. Between 2,000 and 4,000 children were born just from the documented cases of wartime rapes in Bosnia, although the real number is likely much higher.

“If we don’t really think about conflict-related sexual violence enough, then we especially don’t think about children born of wartime rape. In Bosnia, they were called the ‘Invisible Children’… and they have been fighting for years to get recognition because they’ve faced barriers and difficulties throughout their lives,” she added.

The report also says it will be crucial for Ukraine’s allies to be ready to prosecute perpetrators on behalf of Ukraine. This can happen either under the UN’s Genocide Convention or in national courts under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows national or international courts to prosecute individuals for crimes against international law committed in other territories.

Prey said a recent case of a Bosnian Serb soldier charged with murder and rape that was transferred from Bosnia to Montenegro, where the accused was living, was a good example of this mechanism working well.

The International Criminal Court has already issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and launched an investigation into alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Several countries including Lithuania, Germany, Sweden, and Spain have all opened their own investigations into alleged Russian atrocities.

However, Prey said these cases could be costly and lengthy, which means there needs to be an extra focus on providing immediate help to the victims, including psychological and social support, free health care and free legal aid.

“They might not see any conclusion to a court case for 10 or 20 years,” she said. “And survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, they deserve more than that. They deserve justice for themselves, accountability, but they also need to live, they need to take care of their families, they need to pay their bills and they need the support for this.”

Britain will delay a series of key climate targets, its beleaguered Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Wednesday at a hastily organized press conference, in a move that angered businesses and political allies and intensified the government’s assault on green policies.

Sunak told reporters on Wednesday he will push back a ban on selling new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, dramatically slow down plans to phase out gas boilers, and reject calls to regulate efficiency for homeowners.

The prime minister reiterated plans to expand oil and gas developments in Britain’s North Sea and drill for the fossil fuels that environmental groups condemned. He also announced that the ban on onshore wind will be lifted.

It marks a sharp turn away from a long-standing political consensus on the climate, just two years after the United Kingdom hosted the crucial COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, and seriously undermines efforts to portray Britain as a leader in the fight against the climate crisis.

The move intensifies Sunak’s newfound and controversial electoral strategy: binning Britain’s bolder emissions-cutting policies and picking fights with climate activists, in a gamble that the confrontation will appeal to traditional Conservative voters.

Sunak, who is scrambling to reverse dismal opinion polling ahead of an election anticipated next year, sought to present the rollbacks as a “more pragmatic, proportionate and realistic” way of reaching net zero – framing the reversals as a longer-term and overdue change to approaching climate policies.

In an attack on his own Conservative predecessors as prime minister, Sunak said: “You don’t reach net zero simply by wishing it. Yet that’s precisely what previous governments have done, both Labour and Conservative.”

“This idea that we’re watering down our targets is just wrong,” he said, adding, “If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people.”

He said he will “set out the next stage” of his environmental agenda in the coming weeks, ahead of COP28.

Boris Johnson, whose premiership included the COP26 and embraced the net zero pledge, had earlier shot back in a rare public attack on his former chancellor-turned-political rival. “Business must have certainty about our net zero commitments,” Johnson said in a statement, calling on Sunak to give firms “confidence that government is still committed Net Zero and can see the way ahead.”

“We cannot afford to falter now or in any way lose our ambition for this country,” Johnson said.

Political pushback

Sunak attempted to stake an occasionally awkward middle ground in his Wednesday speech, insisting his plans will keep Britain on track to reach net zero by 2050, while presenting the previous plans as overbearing and unfair on British workers.

“We’ve stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country that no one seems to be happy with,” Sunak said. “Too often, motivated by short-term thinking, politicians have taken the easy way out… I’ve made my decision: we are going to change.”

It’s an argument that will do little to convince climate experts, many of whom have warned the UK was already missing its targets. The Climate Change Committee, the government’s independent adviser on climate change, published a report in June that criticized the UK’s net zero plans and said there was not enough urgency to reach the country’s goals.

Britain is legally required to have reached net zero – meaning the country would remove from the atmosphere at least as much planet-warming pollution as it emits – by 2050.

But the delays in phasing out petrol and diesel vehicles and gas boilers will mean the products remain on Britain’s roads and homes well into the 2040s, potentially complicating any efforts by future governments to accelerate emissions-cutting plans.

There was a dramatic political pushback on Wednesday too. Johnson’s comments led a chorus of concerns from within Sunak’s Conservative party at the plans, which were apparently hurriedly brought forward after Tuesday’s leaks to the media. Opposition lawmakers, businesses and climate groups joined the green wing of the party in attacking the shift.

Alok Sharma, a Conservative politician who served as president of the pivotal COP26 conference, told the BBC before Sunak’s press conference on Wednesday that rowing back from the cross-party consensus on net zero would be “incredibly damaging for business confidence.”

“Frankly, I really do not believe that it’s going to help any political party electorally which chooses to go down this path,” Sharma added. Chris Skidmore, the Conservative former energy minister, told the PA Media news agency the moves were “the greatest mistake of his premiership.”

Wednesday’s announcement comes at the same time as the Climate Ambition Summit at the UN General Assembly summit in New York, which Sunak is not attending.

“I have heard from many of my friends in the UK – including a lot of Conservative party members, by the way – who have used the phrase ‘utter disgust’ and some of the young people there feel as if their generation has been stabbed in the back. It’s really shocking to me, but again this is an issue for the UK to handle,” he continued.

“From a global perspective, this is not what the world needs from the United Kingdom,” the climate campaigner added.

“At least from the point of view of civil society from around the world, we’re really profoundly concerned about what’s happening in the UK. And it’s a sign that science doesn’t seem to be listened to anymore with that government,” Ioualalen said.

An anti-green agenda

Sunak has leaned into an anti-green agenda since his party unexpectedly and narrowly won a by-election in the far western edge of London in July that was dominated by plans to extend London’s low-emissions zone, charging drivers of the most polluting vehicles a fee for every day they used their car in the area.

The prime minister’s Conservative party is deeply unpopular with voters, with opinion polls projecting anything from a comfortable defeat to a historic wipeout at the next general election, which must be called by January 2025 at the latest.

Amid that context, and with a struggling economy that leaves the government with little wiggle room for dramatic fiscal changes, Sunak has emphasized a range of cultural issues and trumpeted socially conservative policies in a push to appeal to the party’s rightwing base.

But polls show that the climate crisis is increasingly high on the list of British voters’ concerns, and the opposition Labour party has sought to attack Sunak on what they describe as a withdrawal from Britain’s former position as a global leader. “Rolling back on key climate commitments as the world is being battered by extreme flooding and wildfires would be morally indefensible,” Friends of the Earth’s head of policy, Mike Childs, said in a statement.

British businesses also criticized Sunak’s plans on Wednesday. Lisa Brankin, the chair of Ford UK, said in a statement that the automobile giant “needs three things from the UK Government: ambition, commitment and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three.”

And Ed Matthew, Campaigns Director for independent climate change think tank E3G, said the moves would drive up household bills and “damage the UK’s ability to compete with other countries on clean technology.”

“Just as the United States, China and the European Union are racing ahead on green growth, Rishi Sunak appears ready to surrender,” he said. “The economic damage to the UK could be catastrophic.”