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.

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.”

Pope Francis has made his strongest statement yet on the accelerating climate crisis, pinning blame on big industries and world leaders as well as “irresponsible” Western lifestyles, in a blistering statement on Wednesday.

“Our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” the pontiff wrote in a 7,000 word encyclical called Laudate Deum (“Praise God”).

“Some effects of the climate crisis are already irreversible, at least for several hundred years, such as the increase in the global temperature of the oceans, their acidification and the decrease of oxygen,” he wrote.

The pope leveled heavy criticism at climate change deniers and delayers.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident. No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest,” he wrote.

Climate change will likely only get worse and ignoring it will heighten “the probability of extreme phenomena that are increasingly frequent and intense,” he wrote. 

The pope paid particular attention to the disproportionate responsibility of rich countries for climate change.

“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he wrote. 

He also leveled blame at leaders and businesses which he said prioritize short-term profits and gains over climate action. “Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time.”

He even directed criticism at his own church, referring to “certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church.” 

The pope’s statement is a follow-up to his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si (“Praised Be To You”), which was the first ever ponitifcal writing completely dedicated to ecological issues, which have been a cornerstone of his papacy.

It comes ahead of the UN COP28 climate conference, which starts at the end of November in Dubai, where countries will undergo “global stocktake” to assess how quickly they are progressing towards climate goals.

An annular solar eclipse will make its appearance in the skies over North, Central and South America on October 14, creating a singular spectacle for those in its path — and a rare opportunity for scientists.

The dazzling celestial event will allow millions of people to witness “the awe and the wonder of seeing a beautiful ring of fire eclipse,” said Peg Luce, acting director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA headquarters.

The “ring of fire” nickname comes from the appearance of annular solar eclipses, which are like total solar eclipses, except the moon is at the farthest point in its orbit from Earth, so they can’t completely block the sun. Instead, the sun’s fiery light surrounds the moon’s shadow, creating the so-called ring of fire.

The annular solar eclipse will begin in the United States at 9:13 a.m. PT (12:13 p.m. ET) and pass from the Oregon coast to Texas’ Gulf Coast, appearing in Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas. The lunar shadow will also be visible in parts of California, Idaho, Colorado and Arizona. The eclipse will end in the US at 12:03 p.m. CT (1:03 p.m. ET).

After leaving the US, the eclipse will cross Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Panama and Colombia before ending off South America’s Atlantic coast at Natal, Brazil.

Weather permitting, a cresecent-shaped partial solar eclipse, where only part of the sun is covered by the moon, will be visible October 14 in all 49 continental US states, including Alaska, according to NASA. Use the agency’s interactive eclipse map to check when the eclipse will pass over your area.

Unable to see the eclipse? NASA will share a live stream beginning at 11:30 a.m. ET on eclipse day, sharing views from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Kirbyville, Texas, and White Sands, New Mexico, according to Kelly Korreck, eclipse program manager at NASA.

“The next annular eclipse seen in this part of the country is actually going to be in 2046,” Korreck said. “It’s going to be a long stretch before we will see this phenomenon again, so we’re really encouraging folks to go out there and observe safely.”

What to see

Those in the path of the annular eclipse will experience several phases of the event. First, as the moon begins to pass in front of the sun, it will create a crescent-shaped partial eclipse.

An hour and 20 minutes after the partial eclipse begins, the moon will move directly in front of the sun, creating the ring of fire (also called annularity). Depending on your location along the path, this phase will last between one and five minutes.

During annularity, the sky will grow darker, though not as dark as during a total solar eclipse when all of the sun’s light is blocked. Animals may behave like they do at dusk, and the air may feel cooler, according to NASA.

The moon will continue its trek across the sun for another hour and 20 minutes, creating another partial eclipse, before the moon moves out of sight.

Safe viewing

It’s never safe to look directly at the sun without using specialized protection, and there is no phase of an annular eclipse that is safe to view with the naked eye because the sun’s light is never completely blocked.

To view the annular eclipse, wear certified eclipse glasses or use a handheld solar viewer. Separately, you can observe the sun with a telescope, binoculars or camera that has a special solar filter on the front, which acts the same way eclipse glasses would.

“You need certified ISO 12312-2 compliant solar eclipse glasses. There are plenty of safe sellers online,” said Alex Lockwood, strategic content and integration lead for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. “We cannot stress enough how important it is to obtain a pair of safe certified solar eclipse glasses in order to witness this annular event.”

Sunglasses won’t work in place of eclipse glasses or solar viewers, which are thousands of times darker and held to an international standard. Don’t use torn, scratched or damaged eclipse glasses or solar viewers.

Don’t look at the sun through any optical device — cameras lens, telescope, binoculars — while wearing eclipse glasses or using a handheld solar viewer, according to NASA. Solar rays can still burn through the filter on the glasses or viewer, given how concentrated they can be through an optical device, and can cause severe eye damage.

Eclipses can also be viewed indirectly using a pinhole projector, like a hole punched through an index card. These function by standing with your back to the sun and holding up the card. The pinhole projects an image of the sun on the ground or other surfaces. But never face the sun and look directly at it through the pinhole.

If you’re sitting outside for a while awaiting the eclipse, don’t forget to apply sunscreen and wear a hat to protect your skin.

The next eclipse

A total solar eclipse will be visible in parts of Mexico, Canada and more than 10 US states on April 8, 2024.

The eclipse will first appear over the South Pacific Ocean and begin its journey across North America. Mexico’s Pacific coast is the first point of totality on the path, expected at 11:07 a.m. PT.

The pathway will continue across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Then, it will cross over Canada in southern Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, ending on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland at 5:16 p.m. (3:46 p.m. ET).

What we can learn from eclipses

Eclipses afford scientists the opportunity to study the sun and how it interacts with Earth in unique ways. NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the annular eclipse to monitor how the drop in sunlight impacts Earth’s upper atmosphere, called the ionosphere.

About 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, the ionosphere is where air becomes electric. The sun’s ultraviolet rays separate electrons from atoms, creating an atmospheric layer full of charged particles. But at night, the atoms recombine to become neutral.

The eclipse causes a more drastic change as the temperature and density of the ionosphere drop and rise again over a shorter time scale.

“If you think of the ionosphere as a pond with some gentle ripples on it, the eclipse is like a motorboat that suddenly rips through the water,” said Aroh Barjatya, designer of the sounding rocket mission and a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, in a statement. “It creates a wake immediately underneath and behind it, and then the water level momentarily goes up as it rushes back in.”

Atmospheric changes were detected in 2017 during a total solar eclipse across the US.

“All satellite communications go through the ionosphere before they reach Earth,” Barjatya said. “As we become more dependent on space-based assets, we need to understand and model all perturbations in the ionosphere.”

The rockets will launch before, during and after the peak of the eclipse, flying just outside of the path of annularity, to measure the changes that occur in the ionosphere between 45 and 200 miles (72 and 322 kilometers) above the ground.

Amateur radio operators will try an experiment during both the annular and total solar eclipses to see how these phenomena change the way radio waves travel. Operators in different locations will record the strength of their signals and how far they travel. Scientists are interested in tracking this distance because the sun directly influences the ionosphere, which allows radio communications to travel farther. But when the moon blocks the sun, that can change.

The sun is currently approaching solar maximum in mid-to-late 2024, and scientists are eager to capture this peak of activity through a variety of observations, like studying the sun’s corona, or hot outer atmosphere, that can only occur during eclipses.

A magnitude 4.0 earthquake struck south of Naples, Italy, on Tuesday, just days after the volcanic region saw its strongest earthquake in 40 years, according to Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV).

Italy’s fire brigade said there was slight damage to buildings in the latest earthquake, but no people were injured. The 4.2 magnitude quake on September 27 rattled the region and was felt as far away as Rome.

Campi Flegrei, also known as the Phlegraean fields, is a volcanic area that encompasses multiple ancient volcanoes that date back 39,000 years.

Seismic activity in the area, which stretches 200 kilometers (125 miles) under the Bay of Naples and the islands of Ischia and Capri, has intensified this year, with the region experiencing many small quakes before the most recent two. Campi Flegrei experiences a seismic phenomenon known as bradyseism, defined by cycles of uplift and gradual lowering of the ground.

The last major eruption of Campi Flegrei was in 1538, which created a new mountain in the bay. So far in 2023, Campi Flegrei has logged 2,868 earthquakes — 1,118 in August alone.

Carlo Doglioni, head of the INVG, gave testimony on the potential outcomes in front of the Italian government’s Environmental Commission’s lower chamber on September 28.

“There are two possible scenarios relating to the evolution of the situation in the Campi Flegrei: the best is that the ongoing bradyseism crisis ends as happened in 1983-84, the worst is an eruption similar to that of 1538,” he said.

“It is an evolution that we do not know and that we are monitoring.”

During the episode of bradyseism from 1983 to 1984, the ground rose 3.5 meters (11.5 feet).

The INGV has requested that the municipality of Naples carry out evacuations of some residents closest to the volcanic area to check the places most vulnerable to underlying structural damage from the rising soil. Most of the structures in question have been built in the past 20 years.

Italy’s civil protection agency estimates that at least 800,000 people live in a designated “yellow zone” and 500,000 in the “red zone,” the highest-risk area in the vicinity of the seismic region.

The last time an evacuation plan was tested was in 2019. However, local residents have demanded an updated plan that outlines what should happen in case of an eruption.

Police in Thailand arrested a 14-year-old boy after a shooting at a luxury shopping mall in the capital Bangkok on Tuesday left at least two people dead and five others injured, causing terrified shoppers to flee the scene.

Local authorities held the suspect with a weapon, and are assessing the exact number of casualties, Thailand’s Central Investigation Bureau said. The suspect, who is reported to have mental health issues, was taken to a nearby hospital after being interrogated by police, Thai Police General Torsak Sukvimol told reporters.

One of the deceased victims is a Chinese citizen and the other a Myanmar national, Sukvimol said. Thai citizens and foreigners were among the injured, according to the director of Bangkok Emergency Center, Dr. Yutthana Setthanan.

Bangkok Emergency Center revised an earlier death toll, which stated that three people were killed in the shooting. The director of Bangkok Emergency Center, Dr. Yutthana Setthanan, told reporters he was initially told the death toll was three but later clarified that only one person was killed. The death toll later rose to two, according to Sukvimol.

Several people described chaotic scenes of employees and shoppers trying to escape the mall as the attack took place on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Shir Yahav, 26, said the shooting happened “in just a few minutes,” the agency reported.

“We saw all the people run, run, run, we didn’t understand what was happening,” Yahav said. “We went with them and then we heard several shots, like six or seven shots. We blocked the door of the store.”

Susinee, 35, said she and about half a dozen other workers “just ran out” of a Japanese ramen restaurant, Reuters reported.

‘Personal issues’

The suspect “surrendered himself” after the shooting and still had ammunition when he was apprehended, according to Sukvimol.

“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 that officers have spoken to his parents.

“He has mental issues, and he is receiving treatment at Rajvithee Hospital,” he added.

The police general did not specify where the juvenile obtained the weapon.

Sukvimol commended mall security for effectively dealing with an active shooter. “When the shooting happened, there were a lot of people at the mall, it was rush hour and raining outside.”

Gun ownership in the Southeast Asian country is high compared with other countries in the region.

More than 10.3 million civilians held firearms in Thailand, or around 15 guns for every 100 people, 2017 data from the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey (SAS) said. 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.

Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin expressed his “deepest condolences” to the relatives of those died in the shooting.

“I would like to offer my support to the families of the deceased and all those who were injured as well,” the prime minister wrote on X, previously known as Twitter.