At least 3,661 people have been killed in Haiti since January due to rampant gang violence, “maintaining the high levels of violence seen in 2023,” the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said in a report issued on Friday. 

At least 11 schools being used as shelters by internally displaced Gazans have been hit so far this month, with nearly 100 deaths reported, said UN aid coordination office, OCHA, on Friday.

The world needs a “reset” the Prime Minister of Barbados told the UN General Assembly on Friday morning.

The UN Security Council debated the current situation on the ground in war-torn Gaza on Friday, where Israeli strikes have killed more than 41,500 Palestinians amid mass displacement and stymied humanitarian efforts as Israel continues hampering the entry of lifesaving aid. UN News app users can catch up with our live coverage here.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif told the UN General Assembly on Friday that with the world gripped by daunting challenges, from conflict to terrorism and climate change, “we feel the chill of a new Cold War.”

Women and girls in the midst of the brutal conflict between rival militaries in Sudan are being disproportionately impacted, including 5.8 million who are now displaced, according to an alert released by UN Women on Friday.

Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh paid tribute to the role of youth in his country, as he urged global leaders at the UN General Assembly to invest in the potential of their own countries’ younger generations to shape a fairer, more equitable world. 

Gaza is still garnering the most attention, as the Security Council convened a high-level meeting on the crisis in the war-battered enclave. As world leaders continued to deliver national statements in the General Assembly Hall, elsewhere at the UN’s Midtown East campus, delegates discussed harmony among cultures, and wrapped up the annual UNGA treaty event, where a large number of signatures and ratifications went to a year-old treaty known by the shorthand, BBNJ, which aims to protect biodiversity in ocean territory beyond national jurisdiction.

At the UN General Assembly on Friday, leaders from Asia and the Pacific underscored a dire reality: climate change is a clear and present danger for everyone on the Planet, but their countries and peoples will likely suffer the most.

In his address to the UN General Assembly’s annual debate, Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre of Somalia highlighted the multitude of challenges facing the world today, including transnational conflicts, humanitarian crises, and the existential threat of climate change. 

The sudden and massive escalation between Israel and the Hezbollah armed group in Lebanon has created widespread fear that even worse is to come, UN humanitarians said on Friday.

Last year, Trisha’s morning commute was simple. She’d walk a few steps outside her door, wait with the other kids from her neighborhood, and then hop on the yellow bus that took them all to school.  Trisha, now 11 and in sixth grade, enjoyed the ride to her school outside Houston, Texas. “I really liked how you could talk to your friends, and it was very easy getting to the bus because it was so close by,” she told me. This year, because of budget cuts, her school district no longer provides bus service to students who live within two miles of their school. For Trisha, who lives 1.9 miles away, walking an hour by herself each way — in a place where temperatures topped 100 degrees the first week of school — wasn’t an option. Now, she has a long wait in the sun every afternoon as her parents slowly inch through an interminable line of cars to pick her up. “It’s just a mess,” Trisha said. Her experience is part of a growing trend: the yellow school bus is becoming an endangered species as districts cut routes and more families drive their kids to school. In 2022, for the first time ever, the majority of American students got to school in a private car. In Chicago, bus service to magnet schools was canceled just before the 2023-24 school year began. And in Louisville, Kentucky, this year, students recorded a song to protest the disappearance of their bus routes.   The erosion of school bus service is causing problems for parents, who have to spend hours of their workdays idling in dropoff lines — an especially difficult task for lower-income parents who are less likely to have flexible schedules or access to remote work.  It might be even worse for children. Bus problems are contributing to absenteeism, experts say, as some kids literally can’t make it to school. The long lines of cars envelop schools in dangerous pollution, posing a risk to student health and even potentially lowering test scores. And the loss of the bus is changing the school experience for a generation of kids, many of whom will miss out on what some say is an important (if at times chaotic) rite of passage. The bus ride isn’t just a mode of transportation, it’s also a social and emotional education, Daniele Roberts, a long-time bus driver in Gwinnett County, Georgia, told me. Kids learn how to wait in line, how to be aware of their neighbors, and how to extend a little grace and forgiveness if, for example, the bus is a few minutes late. “I always think of it as a civics lesson on wheels,” Roberts said. The first school “buses” were horse-drawn carriages, mobilized in the late 19th century to get far-flung rural children to newly state-mandated schools. Motorized buses followed by the 1910s, and in 1937, a group at a bus-improvement conference settled on what’s now called National School Bus Glossy Yellow as the standardized color for the vehicles. Today, more than 25 million students ride a bus to school every year. Suburban schools have gotten bigger and farther apart, making bus transportation a necessity for more students, as Kendra Hurley writes in the Atlantic. Students who attend magnet schools outside their neighborhoods, or need special education services, also often use buses. But in the last few years, America’s school bus system has been crumbling. Districts around the country have faced driver shortages in recent years, caused in part by low pay; they make an average of $20 an hour for difficult work. Out-of-control kids screeching in your ears can be not just distracting but downright dangerous when you’re trying to handle a 35,000-pound vehicle, Roberts points out.  Driver shortages combined with district budget cuts have led to worse service, which has led to a decline in ridership, Slate’s Henry Grabar writes. The situation was exacerbated by the pandemic. And falling ridership, in turn, has led school districts to cut service even further. For Trisha’s dad, Arun Aravindakshan, losing bus service means spending a full hour, several times a week, waiting in his car outside his daughter’s school. “We are all working parents,” he said. “For us to find time to do this in the middle of the workday is very difficult.” While walking or biking to school used to be more common, it’s no longer a viable alternative for many kids. Many of the roads around Trisha’s school have no sidewalks, because they were never designed with a walk to school in mind, Aravindakshan said, a common problem in suburban areas.  Getting to school without a bus is especially difficult for low-income students, whose parents are less likely to be able to drive them during the workday. These students are also more likely to be chronically absent from school, and some experts think declining bus service might be part of the reason why.  “If we’re concerned about absenteeism — which we are — we’re literally getting rid of something whose job is to take kids to school,” economist Michael Gottfried told the Washington Post. The bus, meanwhile, is also a social and educational experience of its own, where students spend time with kids from a variety of grades and classrooms, whom they might not see during the school day.  The experience isn’t always positive. Videos of fights on school buses have gone viral in recent years. Reader Teresa Bjork told me in an email that on her bus growing up, “there was an older boy who harassed me to get my attention — he would kick me, snap my bra straps (which boys loved to do back then), call me sexually explicit names. It was awful.” But a skilled driver can do a lot to influence the bus environment, says Roberts, who has been driving for 16 years. “If you’ve got a good driver, you learn how to be a good rider.” Buses are also an important part of American educational history. In the 1970s and ’80s, courts around the country prescribed them as a way to integrate schools, transporting Black children to schools in majority-white neighborhoods and sometimes vice versa. Busing, as it came to be called, faced intense racist backlash, said Zebulon Miletsky, a professor of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University and the author of Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle. But Nikole Hannah-Jones and others have argued that the policy was actually highly successful in the South, ensuring that Black children in the region had access to racially integrated classrooms and the resources concentrated in predominantly white schools. And for some, the school bus remains a symbol of efforts to combat school segregation and of the bravery of Black students who were at the forefront of those efforts.  Today, nonprofits across the country are working to improve school bus service, and to make its benefits available to underserved students. In New York City, for example, NYC School Bus Umbrella Services is using GPS to allow parents to track their kids’ bus rides, and electric buses to reduce pollution and provide families with a tangible example of the fight against climate change, said Matt Berlin, the nonprofit’s CEO. In Los Angeles, the group Move LA is giving students transit passes so they can ride the city buses.  Trisha’s parents, meanwhile, got together with several other families in the neighborhood to arrange a carpool. They made a schedule taking all the parents’ work obligations into account, and a group chat to talk through any changes. For now, it’s working, Aravindakshan said, but he worries about other families, like the parents across the street who have four kids in three different schools.  Kids, too, are feeling the stress that life without the bus is putting on their families. “It’s a lot of extra work for both the parents and the kids,” Trisha said. “It’s just really hard for everyone.”

New polling shows roughly 80 percent of Democrats feel the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies. Still, prominent party donors are urging Kamala Harris to dump Lina Khan.

Last year was the hottest year on record, and this year’s temperatures may reach even higher. With so many extraordinary heat waves, floods, and storms piling up, one may wonder: Just how much warmer is the Earth going to get? The answer hinges on two main factors: how much more heat-trapping gasses humans will emit, and how the planet will respond.  Whether humanity continues to dawdle or actually takes aggressive action to cut emissions is the biggest source of uncertainty in the future of the planet since the bulk of the warming we’re experiencing is due to the waste gasses from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’s climate science team, has chalked out five scenarios with different levels of action needed from global leaders to curb climate change to plug into its climate models. On the other side of the equation, scientists have been working to narrow down the scope of possible reactions that the planet has to all of this heating. They’ve been getting better measurements of the Earth’s behavior, refining their physical models of things like rainfall and ocean currents, and designing more sophisticated computer simulations to get a better sense of what complicated reactions could happen and the kind of events that could be put into motion as the planet heats up. With these inputs, they’ve come up with a range for how much further Earth will warm for a given amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a parameter known as equilibrium climate sensitivity. If the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to double relative to the era prior to the Industrial Revolution, the most recent major IPCC report finds the world will warm between 2 degrees Celsius and 5 degrees Celsius, with a best estimate of 3 degrees Celsius. It means that some of the more dire forecasts of warming from the past are much less likely, and so are some of the more optimistic predictions.  But, in assembling this report, scientists were surprised that a subset of climate models were producing warming estimates that were much hotter than others. In response, they changed how they factor these outliers into the overall estimate, reducing their influence rather than weighing them equally. Last year, a team led by former NASA scientist James Hansen found that previous sensitivity estimates had vastly underestimated the role of aerosols, such as soot and dust, and that there may be more warming baked in than we realized. These fine particles suspended in the sky can have myriad effects on the global climate.   Figuring out the future of warming is not just an academic exercise. If you’re constructing a road, a home, a power plant, or if you simply have any stake in the world decades away, you need to start planning and building now for that future. If the world does go down one of the more extreme warming scenarios, curbing greenhouse gas emissions may not be enough to keep the planet livable for humans. We could be forced to employ more extreme and controversial interventions like geoengineering to rein in runaway warming.  So how exactly do we figure out whose vision of the future is most accurate before that future becomes the present? It’s an ongoing process. As scientists expand the boundaries of knowledge of the planet, they’re also coming up with ways to reconcile these diverging views.  The fundamental concept of climate change is fairly straightforward — more heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere cause the planet to retain more heat — but the practical ways this plays out get extraordinarily complicated very quickly.  For example, warmer air can hold onto more moisture. Water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, so that can create a feedback that accelerates warming. In addition, more moisture in the air can lead to extreme rainfall in some areas and less in others. It also forms clouds, which can reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the area below, or trap even more heat. Now calculate these effects over the entire planet and over the course of decades and you end up with models that demand the most powerful supercomputers in the world just to run.  Scientists are gradually filling in the blanks in these models with lab experiments and real-world measurements, but even the most sophisticated simulations have to make assumptions and judgment calls about which variables are the most important and how much they should shape the final calculations. That’s why climate researchers can come to different conclusions about how much the planet will warm. One scientist might think that cloud cooling effects offset more warming, while another might stipulate that melting ice caps will have a stronger feedback effect.  One of the more confounding variables in climate models is the effect of aerosols. Like carbon dioxide, aerosols are a by-product of fossil fuel combustion, but they also come from natural sources like sand and sea spray. Aerosols have a range of impacts on the climate.  “Some aerosols are light-colored and scatter more light, which means we get a cooling effect, and some aerosols, like soot, are dark and absorb light, which means we get a warming effect,” said Eliza Harris, a senior scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center. “And that effect also varies depending on how high it is in the atmosphere.”  As humanity burned more fossil fuels since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the concentrations of both greenhouse gasses and aerosols rose in the atmosphere.  Scientists like Hansen think that aerosols helped mask some of the warming caused by carbon dioxide and hypothesize that the global climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gasses than conventional estimates predict. Since many aerosols drive air pollution and are health hazards, efforts to limit air pollution have unintentionally reduced their cooling side effects, and further reductions will speed up warming further. Hansen has described this reduction in air pollution leading to more warming as a “Faustian bargain.” (Hansen declined to comment for this story).  There have actually been a number of historical examples of aerosols cooling the global climate. Major volcanic eruptions like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines inject so many gasses and particles into the sky that they dim the sun enough to cool the planet. After the Pinatubo eruption, global average temperatures fell by roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) for more than a year.  But getting a full inventory of aerosols can be difficult. Satellite measurements can end up obscured by clouds while ground-level sensors don’t pick up what’s going on high in the atmosphere.  “There’s a lot of uncertainty on the abundance of aerosols today,” said Loretta Mickley, who co-leads the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard University. “That said, we are confident that anthropogenic aerosols certainly did increase in the late 20th century as industry ramped up in much of the developed world. There is a decline in aerosols in much of the developed world now, but increasing aerosols in places like India and China.” More recently, a new international regulation drastically limiting sulfur aerosol pollution from global shipping went into effect. That sudden drop in pollution over the busiest shipping routes in the world led to a sudden warming in those regions, contributing to record-high temperatures in waters like the Atlantic Ocean. A study this year found that a major drop in air pollution over China contributed to warming in the Pacific Ocean.  Of course, a number of scientists dispute Hansen’s recent findings and think his team is overestimating the role of aerosols. The question then is how do you weigh results like this in the context of all the other climate research?  For the IPCC, the conventional method was to include all the major climate models and average out their findings, giving each one equal weight. Climate models are often evaluated by examining how well they match historical observations of warming using starting conditions from the past. On this front, the aggregate model tended to outperform most individual models.  But in the most recent assessment, the IPCC decided to change its approach. The models that skewed hotter did a poorer job of reproducing historical temperature patterns, so the IPCC gave them less weight in the aggregate in calculating the final range of sensitivity.   That makes sense if you’re mainly concerned with temperature, but that’s only one dimension of the climate.  Neil Swart, a researcher at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, developed one of the hottest models used in the latest IPCC assessment. He noted that climate models that may not be as good at predicting temperature might be better at forecasting other important variables like precipitation. By evaluating models solely on temperature, modeling groups could end up tuning their results to better fit within the selection criteria rather than letting the simulations run their course. So there is still a compelling argument for egalitarianism.  The debate highlights how even with the best measurements and models, scientists have to make some subjective decisions. For people who have to make decisions now that depend on the future climate, it adds to the frustration and can fuel distrust. Still, it’s important to note that the vast majority of scientists agree on the broad contours of climate change and that it’s prudent to halt the relentless rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  “Look, the climate is sensitive to greenhouse gasses. We’re not exactly sure to the right decimal place what that sensitivity is, but we have no doubt that it’s sensitive,” Mickley said. “We do know if we cut greenhouse gasses to zero today, we would vastly improve the outlook going forward.” 

Enlarge When security researchers in the past found ways to hijack vehicles' Internet-connected systems, their proof-of-concept demonstrations tended to show, thankfully, that hacking cars is hard. Exploits like the ones that hackers used to remotely take over a Chevrolet Impala in 2010 or a Jeep in 2015 took years of work to develop and required ingenious tricks: reverse engineering the obscure code in the cars’ telematics units, delivering malicious software to those systems via audio tones played over radio connections, or even putting a disc with a malware-laced music file into the car’s CD drive. This summer, one small group of hackers demonstrated a technique to hack and track millions of vehicles that’s considerably easier—as easy as finding a simple bug in a website.

A salvage ship raises a portion of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster from the Gulf of Mexico. This booster was used on the most recent Starship test flight in June. . Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. A Chinese rocket narrowly misses a landing. A Chinese space startup conducted what it called a "high-altitude" test flight of its Nebula-1 rocket on Sunday, launching the vehicle to an altitude of about 5 kilometers or so before attempting to land it back at the Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia. The test flight went well for about two and a half minutes before the vehicle experienced a problem just before landing and erupted into a fireball, Ars reports. The company said it learned a lot from the test, completing 10 of its 11 major objectives. It plans to attempt another high-altitude test flight as early as November. Deep Blue Aerospace is one of several Chinese aerospace startups seeking to emulate the success that US-based SpaceX has had with vertical takeoff and vertical landing of rockets.