Poland has warned that the migration crisis on its border with Belarus could last for months or even years, as security forces were involved in violent clashes with migrants who tried to storm a border crossing, causing injuries on both sides.
Violence erupted after days of high tension on the European Union’s eastern frontier yesterday. Polish riot police fired water cannon and tear gas at migrants throwing stones and stun grenades at its Kuznica border crossing with Belarus. The grenades were provided by Belarusian security forces to foment unrest, Polish officials alleged.
Nine police officers, a border guard and a soldier were injured on the Polish side. The Belarusian health ministry said that six people, including four children, were taken to hospital from the migrant
The number of dangerous pollution particles in New Delhi's air was measured at seven times the safe level on Wednesday, climbing above 300 micrograms per cubic metre in some parts of the city.
Image:Schools have already been closed indefinitely as severe smog choked people living in the Indian capital
Image:As one of the world's most polluted capitals, New Delhi battles chronic winter smog each year
The World Health Organisation designates the safe level for the tiny, poisonous particles at 25.
Some coal-based power plants have been closed, but India's top court is considering implementing a lockdown - a first of its kind in the country - to stem pollution and not to control coronavirus infections.
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It's not clear how far the lockdown would go, but the New Delhi government has already shown its willingness to impose emergency weekend restrictions, similar to those implemented during the pandemic.
India, which is heavily reliant on coal, pushed for a watering down of the COP26 agreement last week in regards to fossil fuels.
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A last-minute intercession from the nation, and China, saw the wording on coal change from "phase out" to "phase down", causing disappointment among small island nations and European countries.
COP president Alok Sharma said India and China would have to "justify" their decision to have the agreement altered at the 11th hour.
India is now waiting for the Supreme Court's decision on a potential lockdown, which could come as early as 24 November.
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China, India must 'justify' themselves
Some experts say such a move would have a limited impact and would only cause disruption to the economy and the livelihoods of millions as the government is considering allowing industry to remain open.
The government is discussing whether it would keep the industries open, and some experts say a lockdown would achieve very little in controlling pollution but rather would cause disruptions in the economy and impact the of people.
"This is not the solution that we are looking for, because this is hugely disruptive. And we also have to keep in mind that the economy is already under pressure, poor people are at risk," said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at the Center for Science and Environment, a research and advocacy organisation in New Delhi.
Image:The number of dangerous pollution particles in New Delhi's air were measured at seven times the safe level on Wednesday
Suresh Chand Jain, 60, a shopkeeper in the city, said: "We are already suffering losses for the past one to two years because of the [pandemic] lockdown and now shutting work and businesses in the name of pollution.
"As is, there is hardly any work. Pollution is here to stay unless the government takes measures to control it. It's an annual feature now. It's very important to take care."
Soaring pollution levels in the capital prompted a federal environment ministry panel to issue strict guidelines on Tuesday night to show residents that the government was taking action to control an environmental crisis that has been plaguing the capital for years.
Besides the closure of schools, the Commission for Air Quality Management ordered a stop to construction activities until 21 November and banned trucks carrying non-essential goods.
The panel also directed the states to "encourage" work from home for half of the employees in all private offices.
Forecasters have warned the air quality could worsen before the arrival of cold winds next week that will blow away the smog.
As one of the world's most polluted capitals, New Delhi battles chronic winter smog each year.
It prompted a stern warning last week from India's Supreme Court, which ordered state and federal governments to take "imminent and emergency" measures to tackle what it called a crisis.
Several studies have estimated that more than a million Indians die every year because of air pollution-related diseases.
Two more bodies have been found at the site of a New Zealand coal mine explosion which killed 29 workers, including two Scots, more than a decade ago.
Police used new camera images to make the discovery at the Pike River mine, but added the area is still too dangerous to enter so they will not be able to recover the remains.
Officers have been investigating the disaster, caused by a methane explosion, for years.
Pete Rodger, 40, from Perthshire, and Malcolm Campbell, 25, from St Andrews, both died in a series of blasts at the mine in November 2010.
An order of service for the Thanksgiving service for Malcolm Campbell at St Leonard's Parish Church in St Andrews. (Image: PA)
The families’ legal case was settled ahead of a court hearing.
Now Police Detective Superintendent Peter Read said they had located at least two bodies and possibly a third after a camera was sent down a newly dug hole of the mine in the West Coast region of the South Island.
He said the bodies were found at the far end of the mine, where methane levels remain high.
Mr Read said imaging technology had improved markedly since the disaster - on November 19 2010 - and added this had helped them make the discovery.
Dozens were killed (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
He said they had not yet been able to identify the bodies, although they were working with forensic experts to see if that was possible.
"This is only two days away from the eleventh anniversary of the mine explosion, and we'd like to acknowledge the families of all the men," Mr Read told reporters.
"It's a really stark reminder of the pain and the loss."
He added police would not be releasing the images out of respect to the families and declined to describe the conditions of the bodies.
"It's what you might expect after 11 years, but I'm not really going into any details of what the images show."
Scots miner Pete Rodger died (Image: DR)
Anna Osborne, whose husband Milton was killed in the explosion, said it was unfortunate the bodies could not be retrieved.
"They all died together and they will all stay together," she said.
An earlier investigation concluded the Pike River Coal company had exposed miners to unacceptable risks as it strived to meet financial targets.
The report found the company ignored 21 warnings that methane gas had accumulated to explosive levels before the disaster.
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The company, which went bankrupt, did not contest labour violation charges against it.
Labour violation charges against former chief executive Peter Whittall were dismissed after he and the company made a financial settlement, a development that angered many of the grieving families.
New Zealand's Supreme Court later ruled the settlement was unlawful.
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Human remains have been found in a New Zealand coal mine more than a decade after one of the country's worst industrial disasters, police have said.
Twenty-nine men were killed after a series of methane gas explosions ripped through the Pike River mine on the west coast of the South Island in November 2010.
Two workers managed to escape.
Entry was banned to the mine for years - and it was permanently closed due to safety concerns.
Image:An aerial view shows the Pike River Coal mine following the underground explosion
In 2019, nine years after the incident, investigators were allowed access in following calls from the families of the miners.
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Police said pictures taken confirmed two bodies had been found, with the possibility of a third, during a search in the mine last week.
However, the remains were far from the mine entrance and could not be recovered.
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Detective Superintendent Peter Read said: "While we have been unable to identify the remains, we are working with forensic experts to see what we can do to confirm their identities."
He added that investigators believe there were six to eight people working in the area where the remains were found.
Two years after the blast, a Royal Commission report found that the Pike River Coal mining company ignored 21 warnings that methane gas had accumulated to explosive levels before the fatal blast.
It found broad safety problems and said the firm had exposed miners to unacceptable risks to meet financial targets.
At the time of the disaster, there were only two mine inspectors who were unable to keep up with their workload, it said.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said: "The company completely and utterly failed to protect its workers."
The workers were around 5,000ft from the mine entrance when the explosion took place. Further blasts occurred and the men were presumed to have been killed.
Joe Biden and Xi Jinping have agreed to hold talks aimed at reducing tensions, as US anxiety grows at China’s expanding nuclear arsenal and its recent test of a hypersonic weapon.
Jake Sullivan, US national security adviser, said the US and Chinese presidents had discussed the need for nuclear “strategic stability” talks in their virtual meeting on Monday. China has previously refused to hold nuclear talks, partly because the US has a much larger weapons arsenal.
“The two leaders agreed that we would look to begin to carry forward discussions on strategic stability,” Sullivan told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The two sides did not decide on a format for the talks and the US wants to see if China will follow through on the pledge from Xi. The Chinese Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The development is the first sign that the two sides have reached agreement on easing tensions over serious security issues. It comes against a backdrop of the worst relations between the US and China since the two countries normalised diplomatic ties in 1979.
In the more than three-hour meeting on Monday, Biden stressed that the two countries needed to create “guardrails” to ensure that their competition “does not veer into conflict”. Xi said they needed to avoid derailing US-China relations.
The Pentagon last week said that China planned to more than quadruple its stockpile to at least 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. The US has about 3,800. It said that China was building hundreds of silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles and had a nascent “nuclear triad” — the ability to launch nuclear missiles from land, sea and air — after deploying a nuclear bomber.
The US defence department also said China was changing its nuclear posture in ways that suggested that it was shifting away from “minimum deterrence” — a policy intended to ensure it had just enough weapons to retaliate against an enemy strike — after five decades.
Last month the Financial Times reported that China in July tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon that can orbit the earth. General Mark Milley, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the test was close to a “Sputnik moment”, in a reference to the Soviet Union putting a satellite into space in 1957.
Asked about China’s rapid nuclear expansion, which has become more apparent over the past year, and the hypersonic missile test, Sullivan said the issues “matter profoundly for America’s national security”.
“President Biden did raise with President Xi the need for a strategic stability set of conversations . . . that needs to be guided by the leaders and led by senior empowered teams on both sides that cut across security, technology and diplomacy,” Sullivan said.
The national security adviser added that the talks with China would not be at the same level as the “strategic stability dialogue” that the US holds with Russia, which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and with which the US has held decades of arms-control negotiations.
“There’s less maturity to [the nuclear aspect] in the US-China relationship, but the two leaders did discuss these issues. And it is now incumbent on us to think about the most productive way to carry it forward from here,” Sullivan said.
While the leaders made progress on the nuclear issue, there was no sign of any easing of tensions over Taiwan. Biden said he supported the “one China” policy, in which Washington recognises Beijing as the sole seat of government of China, but voiced concern about Chinese military activity near the island.
Xi warned him that anyone who supported advocates of Taiwanese independence was “playing with fire” and would “burn themselves”.
Some experts think Beijing is expanding its arsenal to neutralise Washington’s ability to threaten China with nuclear weapons, which would make it easier for the Chinese military to beat the US in a non-nuclear conflict over Taiwan.
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Russia has carried out a missile test, destroying one of its own satellites. The action has caused international outrage because the debris could threaten the International Space Station (ISS) and satellites in low-Earth orbit.
Russia's test of an anti-satellite (A-Sat) missile system is not the first of its kind.
Of the orbiting fragments considered a threat to the ISS, about a third are from this Chinese test. And at the speeds these objects travel in orbit, even small pieces can threaten spacecraft with destruction.
The A-Sat tests fit into the wider issue of space debris, which is being made worse by our continued activities in space.
There is now a wild jungle of debris overhead - everything from old rocket stages that continue to loop around the Earth decades after they were launched, to the flecks of paint that have lifted off once shiny space vehicles and floated off into the distance.
It's estimated there is close to 10,000 tonnes of hardware in orbit - much of it still active and useful, but far too much of it defunct and aimless.
Almost 30,000 pieces of debris are being tracked on a daily basis. These are just the big, easy-to-see items, however.
Go below the scale of 1cm (0.39in), and objects move around more or less untracked. There may be 300 million of these.
All of this stuff is travelling at several kilometres per second - sufficient velocity for them to become damaging projectiles if any were to strike an operational space mission.
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The threat was starkly demonstrated in 2009 when an active communications satellite operated by the US company Iridium and a defunct Soviet-era military communications satellite were obliterated when they collided in orbit.
Now consider the threat to a space vehicle with humans aboard.
On Monday, Russia carried out the A-Sat test from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, about 800km (500 miles) north of Moscow. The missile destroyed an old Soviet spy satellite, called Kosmos 1408, that was once part of Russia's Tselina radio signal surveillance programme.
US state department spokesman Ned Price said the destruction of Kosmos 1408 had generated about 1,500 pieces of larger orbiting objects, for which tracking information is available to civilian sources. But it also created hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments.
Some of these tinier objects likely can be tracked, because the US military doesn't want to give away information about the sensitivities of its hardware. But others are probably too small to detect from the ground.
The debris field from the A-Sat test is found at an altitude of between 440km and 520km above Earth, threatening the ISS, China's Tiangong space station and other spacecraft.
When the ISS passed close to the debris cloud on Monday, crew members were told to shelter in the Soyuz and Crew Dragon spacecraft attached to the orbiting outpost. This is so that the crew could detach and come back to Earth if the space station was damaged by fragments of the satellite.
While vehicles such as the space shuttle were hit by smaller pieces of debris, it's likely that a collision with any large objects at orbital speeds would be catastrophic to the ISS.
The action by Russia has been condemned by other countries, including the US and the UK.
The Russian military said it was carrying out planned activities to strengthen its defence capabilities, but denied the test was dangerous.
"The United States knows for certain that the resulting fragments, in terms of test time and orbital parameters, did not and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities," it said.
Many countries now have their own A-Sat systems; the US and Russia (and previously the USSR) have been developing weapons of this kind since the 1950s. In 1985, the US used a missile launched from an F-15 fighter jet to destroy the Solwind scientific satellite.
After the Chinese A-Sat incident in 2007, the US military again shot down one of its own satellites - at a lower altitude than the Chinese or Russian operations - using a ship-launched missile. The lower height above the Earth was intended to ensure that any debris would quickly burn up in the atmosphere rather than staying aloft to threaten space-based assets.
Since modern militaries rely on satellites for intelligence gathering, navigation and communications, A-Sat systems could be used to undermine an adversary's command and control system during conflict.
Environmental impact
Gravity ensures that everything that goes up will eventually come back down - but the bath is currently being filled faster than the plug hole and the overflow pipe can empty it.
Some material from the A-Sat tests will come down to Earth, out of harm's way, but a significant proportion will head off to high altitudes where they will remain a hazard for years to come.
Humans and nature are also conspiring in unexpected ways to make the situation worse. The extra CO2 pumped into the atmosphere down the years has cooled some of its highest reaches - the thermosphere.
This - combined with low levels of solar activity - have shrunk the atmosphere, limiting the amount of drag on orbital objects that ordinarily helps to pull debris from the sky. In other words, the junk is also staying up longer.
Leaving aside the growth in debris from collisions for a moment, the number of satellites being sent into space is also increasing rapidly.
Go back to the 2000s, and the average for the number of satellites launched each year would be about 100. In this decade, the proliferation of small satellite technologies will likely see the annual average rise above 1,000.
Ideas to clean up space
By and large, everyone operating in orbit now follows international mitigation guidelines. Or tries to.
These include ensuring there is enough propellant at the end of a satellite's life so that it can be pulled out of the sky or at the very least pushed into a graveyard orbit.
Hardware that can't be commanded to de-orbit should have its fuel tanks vented and its batteries disconnected to reduce the chances of an explosion (a major source of the debris now up there).
The goal is to make sure all low-orbiting material is removed within 25 years of launch.
However, compliance, even from well-intentioned actors, has traditionally been quite poor.
There are lots of ideas out there to clean up space. Many of them look far-fetched and utterly impractical. Some of the more sensible proposals have reached the demonstration phase.
The Japanese-UK company Astroscale is currently in orbit showcasing how it would approach and grab redundant and unco-operative hardware.
It's likely soon to have to perform this procedure for real on a broadband satellite belonging to the UK operator OneWeb.
It has a spacecraft in its fleet that has failed at an altitude of more than 1,000km. At that height, the satellite would take many centuries to come down on its own.
It has been calculated that just taking away a few key spent rocket stages or broken satellites each year would substantially reduce the potential for collision and cap the growth in space debris over coming decades.
