Divers descending into azure waters far off the Texas coast dip below a horizon dotted with oil and gas platforms into an otherworldly landscape of undersea mountains crusted with yellow, orange and pink coral as far as the eye can see. 

Some of the world’s healthiest coral reefs can be found in the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off the Texas coast. Sheltered in a deep, cool habitat far from shore, the reefs in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary boast a stunning amount of coral coverage. But scientists say that like all reefs, they are fragile, and their location will only offer protection for so long in the face of a warming climate. 

“To see that much coral in one place is really magnificent — an experience that most people don’t get on reefs in this day and age,” said Michelle Johnston, the acting superintendent and research coordinator for the federally protected area. 

The sanctuary had some moderate bleaching this year but nothing like the devastation that hit other reefs during the summer’s record-breaking heat. Still, Johnston said that’s among her top concerns for the sanctuary’s future. Waters that get too warm cause corals to expel their colorful algae and turn white. They can survive if temperatures fall but they are left more vulnerable to disease and may eventually die. 

Mass bleaching in many parts of world

Florida’s coral reef — the world’s third largest — experienced an unprecedented and potentially deadly level of bleaching over the summer. Derek Manzello, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, said that so far this year, at least 35 countries and territories across five oceans and seas have experienced mass coral bleaching. He said it’s too early to know how much of Florida’s reefs will recover since coral may die as much as a year or two after the bleaching. 

Manzello said climate models suggest that all the world’s coral will be suffering severe bleaching every year beginning around 2040. 

“If you have severe bleaching events every year, the prognosis is not good because that basically means the corals aren’t going to have a chance to recover,” he said. 

Sanctuary officials say even in the occasional years when Flower Garden Banks has experienced more serious bleaching than this year, it has bounced back quickly thanks to its overall health and depth, and it’s already recovering this year. 

A report expected in the coming months will look at the sanctuary’s vulnerability to the projected effects of climate change. 

Color like a blooming garden

The Flower Garden Banks stands out for its amount of coral cover — an average of over 50% across some areas of the sanctuary — compared with around 10% cover in the Caribbean and Northwest Atlantic region, Manzello said. Its corals are also about 60 feet (18 meters) below the surface and surrounded by even deeper waters, compared with many reefs where corals are in shallower water just offshore. 

In the early 1900s, fishermen told of peering into the Gulf’s waters and seeing a colorful display that reminded them of a blooming garden, but it was such an unusual spot so far from shore that scientists making the initial dives in the 1960s were surprised to find thriving coral reefs. 

The corals in the Flower Garden Banks were able to flourish so far from shore because of mountain-like formations called salt domes, which lifted the corals high enough to catch the light, Johnston said. 

Divers travel from around the world to see the reefs at Flower Garden Banks, where colorful fish, manta rays, sharks and sea turtles waft through and worms that look like Christmas trees pop in and out of corals. 

Andy Lewis, a Houston attorney, said he knew from his first trip to the sanctuary about a decade ago that it was “going to have to be part of my life.” Lewis became a divemaster and is now president of Texas Caribbean Charters, which takes about 1,000 people a year out on diving trips there, with about half making a return trip.  

“It’s just a real adventure,” said Lewis, who also serves on the sanctuary’s advisory board. “I love getting on the boat.” 

That boat leaves from a spot near Galveston, where currents from Mississippi River drop sediment that turns the water near shore a murky brown. By the time the boat motors out to the sanctuary, the water is clear and blue. 

“You drop down and you are on top of live coral as far as you can see,” Lewis said. 

The Flower Garden Banks is one of 15 national marine sanctuaries and two national marine monuments protected by the NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, and the only one in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The sanctuary is made up of 17 separate banks that cover 160 square miles (414 square kilometers). When it was designated in 1992, the sanctuary had two banks. Its largest and most recent expansion of 14 banks came in 2021, a process that included input from the advisory committee, which includes representatives from industries that rely on the Gulf, from oil and gas to recreation to fishing. 

Johnston said that one way to help the reefs stay healthy is to reduce stresses. That includes making sure mooring buoys offer boats a place to tie up so their anchors don’t damage reefs, and removing invasive species that could cause the number of fish to decline. 

Manzello said efforts like those are being done in hopes that greenhouse gas emissions also will be cut globally. 

“We need all of these things happening in concert to really shepherd coral reefs through the next 20, 30, 40 years,” Manzello said. 

Coral reefs support about a fourth of all marine species at some point in their life cycle.  

“Because coral reefs are declining all over the globe, when we find ones that are healthy, we want to keep them that way,” said Kelly Drinnen, education and outreach specialist for the Flower Garden Banks. “And they kind of serve as the repositories for what could help restore some other reef potentially in the future.” 
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The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified a new contract with Ford, a pact that, along with similar deals with General Motors and Stellantis, will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles. 

Workers at Ford voted 69.3% in favor of the pact, which passed with nearly a 15,000-vote margin in balloting that ended early Saturday. Earlier this week, GM workers narrowly approved a similar contract. At Stellantis, 68.7% of workers favored ratification, an insurmountable lead with votes at only two small facilities left to be counted. 

The agreements, which run through April 2028, will end contentious talks that began last summer and led to six-week-long strikes at all three automakers. Shawn Fain, the pugnacious new UAW leader, had branded the companies enemies of the UAW who were led by overpaid CEOs, declaring the days of union cooperation with the automakers were over. 

After summerlong negotiations failed to produce a deal, Fain kicked off strikes on September 15 at one assembly plant at each company. The union later extended the strike to parts warehouses and other factories to try to intensify pressure on the automakers until tentative agreements were reached late in October. 

The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW. The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April 2028. 

Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers. They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead. 

“I think this is a huge win for the UAW that they got all three contracts ratified,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University. “It’s lifting the boats of all or many autoworkers.” 

Three nonunion, foreign automakers in the United States — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers. They did so after Fain said the UAW would mount an aggressive effort to unionize their plants. He also said the union would try to recruit workers at Tesla. 

Foreign automakers have argued in the past that their workers earn about the same as UAW members, thereby negating the need for a union. They also have accused the UAW of forcing GM and the former Chrysler into bankruptcy in 2009 and of engaging in corruption after federal prosecutors broke up a wide-ranging bribery and embezzlement scandal starting in 2017. 

But with Fain’s election and the new contracts, the union has “cured or readjusted all of that rhetoric,” Wheaton said. 

While wages at nonunion factories may be nearly equal, he said, UAW workers receive far better health care and retirement benefits, which is likely to be attractive to workers at nonunion plants as they age. 

Contracts with the auto companies should also lead to higher wages at auto-parts supply companies and in other industries, Wheaton said. 

“The union’s got way more power” because of the deals, said Mark McGill, a 67-year-old worker at Ford’s assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan, where employees went on strike for the entire six weeks. “Look at everybody now. People want to unionize.” 
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SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, was presumed to have failed in space minutes after lifting off on Saturday in a second test after its first attempt to reach space ended in an explosion.

The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica, Texas, soaring roughly 90 kilometers (55 miles) above ground on a planned 90-minute flight into space.

But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster, though it appeared to achieve a crucial maneuver to separate with its core stage, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after detaching.

Meanwhile, the core Starship booster carried further toward space, but roughly 10 minutes into the flight a company broadcaster said that SpaceX mission control suddenly lost contact with the vehicle.

“We have lost the data from the second stage. … We think we may have lost the second stage,” SpaceX’s livestream host John Insprucker said.

The launch was the second attempt to fly Starship mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, following an April attempt that ended in failure about four minutes after liftoff.

A live SpaceX webcast of Saturday’s launch showed the rocket ship rising from the launch tower into the morning sky as the Super Heavy’s cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life.

The test flight’s principal objective was to get Starship off the ground and into space just shy of Earth’s orbit. Doing so would have marked a key step toward achieving SpaceX’s goal of producing a large, multipurpose spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo back to the moon later this decade for NASA, and ultimately to Mars.

Musk — SpaceX’s founder, chief executive and chief engineer — also sees Starship as eventually replacing the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket as the centerpiece of its launch business, which already takes most of the world’s satellites and other commercial payloads into space.

NASA, SpaceX’s primary customer, has a considerable stake in the success of Starship, which the U.S. space agency is counting on to play a central role in its human spaceflight program, Artemis, successor to the Apollo missions of more than a half century ago that put astronauts on the moon for the first time.

The mission’s objective was to get Starship off the ground in Texas and into space just shy of reaching orbit, then plunge through Earth’s atmosphere for a splashdown off Hawaii’s coast. The launch had been scheduled for Friday but was pushed back by a day for a last-minute swap of flight-control hardware.

During its April 20 test flight, the spacecraft blew itself to bits less than four minutes into a planned 90-minute flight that went awry from the start. SpaceX has acknowledged that some of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines malfunctioned on ascent, and that the lower-stage booster rocket failed to separate as designed from the upper-stage Starship before the flight was terminated. 
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U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed earlier this week that Beijing will crack down on companies in China that produce precursor chemicals for fentanyl, an agreement that Biden said would “save lives.”

In exchange, the Biden administration agreed to lift sanctions on China’s Physical Evidence Identification Center of the Ministry of Public Security and the National Drug Laboratory. In May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce sanctioned the lab for allegedly participating in human rights violations against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

China, which is the source of most fentanyl precursors used in the U.S., argued that U.S. export controls have “severely affected” China’s inspection and testing of fentanyl-related substances and impaired its “goodwill to help the U.S. in drug control,” according to the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the United States.

Although a cooperative effort to curb the supply of fentanyl brought some results over the years, enthusiasm dampened as tensions grew between China and the U.S. On Aug. 5, 2022 — after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, a self-governing island Beijing considers its own — China officially announced the suspension of anti-drug cooperation with the U.S.

Here is some background to the Biden-Xi deal.

What is fentanyl?

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. It is a prescription drug in the United States used for treating severe pain.

Illegally manufactured fentanyl “is often added to other drugs because of its extreme potency, which makes drugs cheaper, more powerful, more addictive, and more dangerous,” according to the CDC.

Fentanyl sold on the black market is often mixed with heroin and/or cocaine to increase a user’s sense of euphoria, according to the CDC.

Why does the United States care about the fentanyl issue?

Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 49, according to U.S. Department of Justice data.

What does the fentanyl problem in the United States have to do with China?

According to a report by the Congressional Research Service: “Prior to 2019, China was the primary source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl, fentanyl-related substances, and production equipment.” It said Chinese traffickers supplied fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances to the U.S. via international mail and express consignment operations.

Xi promised then-U.S. President Donald Trump to tighten regulation of fentanyl and related substances when the two met in 2018 on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This was seen as a move taken by China to ease trade disputes.

China then passed new laws that took effect on May 1, 2019, to put all fentanyl-related substances under national control.

In July 2022 testimony, a senior adviser to the Office of National Drug Control Policy stated that as a result, “the direct shipment of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances from China to the United States went down to almost zero.”

What role does China play?

After China regulated fentanyl-related substances, Mexican transnational criminal organizations became the main operators in the production and distribution of illegal fentanyl in the U.S., according to data from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

“The cartels are buying precursor chemicals in the People’s Republic of China (PRC); transporting the precursor chemicals from the PRC to Mexico; using the precursor chemicals to mass produce fentanyl; pressing the fentanyl into fake prescription pills; and using cars, trucks, and other routes to transport the drugs from Mexico into the United States for distribution,” said Anne Milgram, administrator of DEA, at a Senate hearing in February.

Why does the US accuse China of lax cooperation?

Certain precursors used in the production of fentanyl are internationally classified as unscheduled chemicals and legal to produce in China and export. Beijing argues that it cannot restrict the export of precursors that are not illegal.

The U.S. has repeatedly called on China to adopt a “know-your-customer” approach such as identifying and verifying customer identities to ensure that these chemicals are not sold to likely drug traffickers and to alert authorities about such buyers.

However, in an interview with Newsweek in September 2022, Qin Gang, the then-Chinese ambassador to the U.S., said that approach “goes far beyond the obligations of countries under the United Nations Convention on Drug Control.”
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Former U.S. first lady Rosalynn Carter is in hospice care at home in Plains, Georgia, the Carter Center announced Friday.

The center said the 96-year-old is at home with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, now 99. The Carter family said through the statement that they are “grateful for the outpouring of love and support.”

The family announced earlier this year that the former first lady is suffering from dementia. The former president entered hospice care at home in February.

They have been married for more than 77 years, through his rise from their Georgia farm to his election to the presidency in 1976. After his 1980 defeat, the couple established the Carter Center in Atlanta as a global center to advocate human rights, democracy and public health.

“The best thing I ever had happen in my life was when she said she’d marry me,” Jimmy Carter said, long after leaving the Oval Office.

The couple’s grandson, Jason Carter, described his grandmother in a recent interview as the former president’s “partner No. 1, 2 and 3,” and the former first couple themselves both agreed that she has been the more aggressive political personality of their long pairing.

Nicknamed ‘the Steel Magnolia’

In Washington, the political press of the late 1970s dubbed Rosalynn Carter “the Steel Magnolia,” reflecting the quiet grace stereotypical of the era’s Southern political wives and a tough core that made her a force on her husband’s behalf and in her own right.

“She knew what she wanted to accomplish,” said Kathy Cade, a White House adviser to Rosalynn Carter.

Expanding the role of first lady, she worked in her own office in the East Wing, with her own staff, on her own initiatives. She also huddled with the president’s advisers and sat in on top-level meetings, raising eyebrows in Washington power circles.

“She didn’t say anything in Cabinet meetings, but she wanted to be fully informed so she could give her husband good advice,” said Carter biographer Jonathan Alter.

Alter considers Rosalynn Carter’s only peers as influential first ladies to be Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, although he said the Carters’ partnership was more seamless, because it lacked the infidelity and personal drama of the Roosevelts and Clintons.

The bond also involved friendly rivalry and humor: “I never knew I’d be married to somebody that old,” he wisecracked when Rosalynn was 91.

They often raced to finish writing their next book or best the other in tennis, skiing or any other pursuit.

‘Uncanny political instincts’

Rosalynn Carter was at the center of Carter’s political campaigns, starting with his first state Senate race in 1962.

“In the beginning, I wrote letters to people. He would go out and then I would write letters to them,” she told The Associated Press. “But then it developed into a full-time job for me, working to help him get elected.”

She first campaigned solo during his 1966 bid for governor. She was initially nervous but warmed to the role and ultimately demonstrated what White House adviser Stuart Eizenstat called “uncanny political instincts.”

In the White House, it was Rosalynn Carter who urged her husband to think more about the 1980 election as he set priorities and talk through how decisions might play in the media.

When Jimmy Carter stayed in Washington to work every angle to free the American hostages in Iran, the first lady hit his reelection campaign trail.

“I had the best time,” she told the AP. “I campaigned solid every day the last time we ran.”

Pushed for mental health care

Rosalynn Carter’s signature policy issue — improving treatment and removing societal stigma about mental health — traced back to her husband’s Georgia campaigns.

Voters “would stand patiently” waiting to tell of their family struggles, she once wrote. After hearing one overnight mill worker’s story of caring for her afflicted child, Rosalynn Carter decided to take the issue to the candidate. She showed up at her husband’s rally that day, unannounced, and stood in line to shake his hand like everyone else.

“I want to know what you are going to do about mental health when you are governor,” she asked him. She recounted his reply: “We’re going to have the best mental health system in the country, and I’m going to put you in charge of it.”
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The United States on Friday imposed sanctions on six people affiliated with the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataeb Hezbollah, which is accused of being behind a spate of recent attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

Included in the sanctions are the militia’s foreign affairs chief, a member of its governing council, its military commander and a media spokesperson. The sanctions block access to U.S. property and bank accounts and prevent the targeted people and companies from doing business with Americans.

A spate of drone attacks hit U.S. bases in Iraq as recently as Friday, as regional tensions have flared up following the bloody war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Two U.S. defense officials confirmed three additional attacks on U.S. military facilities in Iraq and Syria on Friday, bringing the total number of attacks on U.S. and coalition military facilities in Iraq and Syria to at least 60.

The three bases attacked as of Friday by one-way drones were Al Harir air base in Irbil, with no casualties reported but an infrastructure damage assessment ongoing; Al Asad air base in Iraq with no injuries or infrastructure damage; and Tall Baydar, Syria, with minor injuries to one service member who was able to return to duty, one of the defense officials said.

Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have threatened to attack U.S. facilities there because of American support for Israel.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said Kataeb Hezbollah is supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. The State Department has previously designated it as a terrorist organization.

Brian E. Nelson, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said the U.S. is “fully committed to security and stability in the Middle East and are steadfast in our efforts to disrupt these destabilizing activities.”

At least 11,470 Palestinians — two-thirds of them women and minors — have been killed since the war in Gaza began, according to Hamas-controlled health authorities, who do not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths. About 2,700 people are reported missing.

About 1,200 people have been killed in Israel, mostly during the initial attack, and around 240 were taken captive by militants.
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In the Arctic, the impact of climate change is happening at an accelerated pace, with temperatures rising two to four times faster than the global average.

“It’s called the polar amplification,” explains Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “Snow and ice reflect lots of energy back to space when ice and snow are melting, and the surface turns much darker. So this amount of energy will be absorbed by the surface, and it will make the surface warmer – at the same time making the atmosphere warmer as well.”

Communities in circumpolar regions of Alaska are dealing with a triple challenge of climate change: coastal erosion, thawing of permafrost on which buildings and infrastructure stand, and, for some communities, the challenge of managing encounters with apex predators — polar bears pushed onshore.

“An optimal habitat for polar bears now is basically absent, it’s disappeared,” says Todd Atwood, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological Survey. He has been studying polar bears for the past 12 years and says melting sea ice makes it harder for bears to hunt seals.

“That tends to be the trigger for bears to either stay with the sea ice as it retreats further over those deeper waters, or, for a growing proportion of the population to make the swim to shore.”

In addition to the high risk of succumbing to sea conditions on a long swim, bears trying to adapt to life on land face an additional risk as they search for new sources of food.

“They’re coming ashore in areas where people are active, whether it’s near communities where people are engaged in subsistence activities, or whether it’s in the oil and gas industrial footprint where people are working [outdoors] on a daily basis,” Atwood says. “And that raises the likelihood of human-bear interactions and conflict.”

In the Inupiat village of Kaktovik on Alaska’s North Slope, posters warn people to be on the lookout for polar bears.

Six hundred kilometers from the nearest big city, Kaktovik hosted visitors on polar bear tours before the COVID pandemic. Those restrictions are now lifted, but it’s contractors, not tourists, occupying the main hotel as they work to complete repairs to the local school and maintain infrastructure before the harsh winter weather and darkness set in.

Lee Kyoutak picks up visitors from the landing strip where small planes carrying a few passengers and supplies land when the island’s frequently foggy weather allows it. He says not to worry about hearing shots or firecrackers. “There’s a polar bear patrol patrolling the village,” he said. “If you go out, just make sure you look around when you go out because there’s polar bears hanging around.”

Kaktovik is one of six communities in North Alaska where residents receive special training provided by the North Slope Borough and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to join Polar Bear Patrols that use non-lethal deterrents to haze bears who sneak into areas where people live or work.

In traditional indigenous communities such as Nuiqsut, Utqiagvik (Barrow), and Kaktovik where there is seasonal whale hunting, polar bears attracted to bowhead whale bones discarded outside the village keep those patrols especially busy. Some encounters between bears and humans can be lethal — for either side.

Inupiat wildlife guide Robert Thompson says he rarely walks around the village unarmed, especially at night.

“I had to shoot two bears that came after me,” he said. “I don’t want to do it, but when bears come after you, you got to defend yourself. One was four to five feet from my doorway, and another one tried to jump into the house though my bedroom window.”

Thompson came to Kaktovik more than 50 years ago. Back then, he says “ice was visible all summer. Pack ice, meaning ice that doesn’t melt. And so, recently, we had 700 miles of open water toward the North Pole. So that’s affecting the polar bears. With the ice around us melting, they are trying to swim ashore. The cubs don’t make it.”

Scientists have recorded polar bears swimming as far as 350 kilometers over several days. Even strong swimmers may not survive the challenge.

Research led by the U.S. Geological Survey shows that in the first decade of the 21st century, the number of polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea dropped 40%.

“One of the things that we’re pretty confident of as a polar bear research community is that without sea ice, you’re not going to have polar bears,” Atwood said. “They represent a kind of the canary in the cryosphere in the sense that they are the animal that is probably most associated with the threat of climate change to wildlife persistence.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the polar bear as a vulnerable species most threatened by the loss of sea ice. With an estimated 26,000 bears remaining worldwide, the group says all but a few of those bears could be lost by the end of the century without action on climate change.
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