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Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Comet ISON to Approach Sun on Thanksgiving

Comet ISON is expected to near the sun at 1:37 p.m. Eastern time on Thanksgiving.

After astronomers worried that Comet ISON had dimmed, they now say the comet is on track for its close approach to the sun at 1:37 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, passing about 730,000 miles above the sun’s surface.

At that distance, the comet will actually be within the sun’s atmosphere, or corona.

When we reported in recent days on ISON’s approach, some astronomers said they thought it might have fallen apart. But then the comet brightened up again. On Wednesday afternoon, Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, reported that ISON was still “a very healthy sungrazing comet!”

Dr. Battams and other astronomers are at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona observing ISON. NASA’s sun-watching spacecraft are also taking close note of the comet, which spent most of the last 4.5 billion years in the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Because ISON appears to be a pristine relic of the very beginnings of the solar system, scientists hope to glean clues on how the bits of dust and ice came together to form planets.

Will ISON survive its close encounter? “Unfortunately,” Dr. Battams wrote, “the answer is not particularly satisfying: we will not know if ISON will survive until it actually does so, or gets vaporized before our very eyes!”

Regardless of what happens, there is no chance that ISON could pose any danger to Earth, Dr. Battams said.

Even if it dies, the comet could still give off an impressive light show.

Last year, another sungrazing comet, named Lovejoy, appeared to have survived its passage through the corona, but it later became apparent that its nucleus had disintegrated. Nonetheless, its remnants provided a spectacular night sky for people in the Southern Hemisphere. This time, it will be people in the Northern Hemisphere who may get the good view of the comet show.



Comet ISON to Approach Sun on Thanksgiving

Comet ISON is expected to near the sun at 1:37 p.m. Eastern time on Thanksgiving.

After astronomers worried that Comet ISON had dimmed, they now say the comet is on track for its close approach to the sun at 1:37 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, passing about 730,000 miles above the sun’s surface.

At that distance, the comet will actually be within the sun’s atmosphere, or corona.

When we reported in recent days on ISON’s approach, some astronomers said they thought it might have fallen apart. But then the comet brightened up again. On Wednesday afternoon, Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, reported that ISON was still “a very healthy sungrazing comet!”

Dr. Battams and other astronomers are at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona observing ISON. NASA’s sun-watching spacecraft are also taking close note of the comet, which spent most of the last 4.5 billion years in the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Because ISON appears to be a pristine relic of the very beginnings of the solar system, scientists hope to glean clues on how the bits of dust and ice came together to form planets.

Will ISON survive its close encounter? “Unfortunately,” Dr. Battams wrote, “the answer is not particularly satisfying: we will not know if ISON will survive until it actually does so, or gets vaporized before our very eyes!”

Regardless of what happens, there is no chance that ISON could pose any danger to Earth, Dr. Battams said.

Even if it dies, the comet could still give off an impressive light show.

Last year, another sungrazing comet, named Lovejoy, appeared to have survived its passage through the corona, but it later became apparent that its nucleus had disintegrated. Nonetheless, its remnants provided a spectacular night sky for people in the Southern Hemisphere. This time, it will be people in the Northern Hemisphere who may get the good view of the comet show.



Crackdown in Egypt Fuels New Dissent

Video shot by Simon Hanna for the Egyptian news site Ahram Online showed protesters defying a new ban on demonstrations in downtown Cairo on Wednesday night.

There were street protests in Egypt’s two largest cites on Wednesday, amid signs that attempts to stifle dissent by the military-backed government were fueling a backlash.

Thousands of protesters marched in downtown Cairo, defying a new law that effectively bans demonstrations, and there was widespread anger on social networks at the harsh prison sentences handed down by a court in Alexandria to young, female supporters of the ousted Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi.

While the activists who marched in Cairo were clear about their opposition to both the current military chief, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, and the former president, Mr. Morsi, even fierce opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood expressed shock that the young Islamists had been sentenced to 11 years in jail for waving placards and holding balloons at a protest last month.

As the rights activist Heba Morayef explained, anger at the sentences was intensified by the fact that several of the young women were minors.

Faced with growing unrest, the authorities issued warrants for the arrest of two prominent activists, Ahmed Maher and Alaa Abd El Fattah. The fact that both men have been persecuted by successive Egyptian governments gave rise to a number of sardonic comments from activists and journalists on Wednesday.

For their part, both men attacked the decision in messages posted on their popular Twitter feed, which are read by nearly 700,000 people.



Kerry and Zarif Turn to Selling Nuclear Deal to Skeptics Back Home

A video message from Secretary of State John Kerry outlining the nuclear deal with Iran.

Having finally reached an interim agreement to freeze Iran’s nuclear program in Geneva on Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, turned their attention this week to selling the deal to skeptics back home.

Perhaps taking a leaf from Mr. Zarif’s playbook, Mr. Kerry recorded a YouTube video to outline the deal’s terms to members of Congress and the American people, and correct what he called “misinformation” spread by opponents of the agreement. Responding to critics who have accused him of “appeasement,” Mr. Kerry insisted, “We drove a very hard bargain.”

As the BBC Persian correspondent Bahman Kalbasi noted on Twitter, Mr. Kerry’s statement is also, in part, a sort of introductory lecture on the basics of uranium enrichment and what it takes to make a nuclear bomb.

Meanwhile in Tehran, Mr. Zarif appeared on state television to explain and defend the nuclear deal while his ministry shared links to interviews with citizens who praised him for reaching an agreement with the United States and five other world powers. Arguing for the agreement, Mr. Zarif was quick to point out that it was described by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as “the deal of the century, for Iran.”

Video of Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javed Zarif, defending the nuclear deal on state television this week.

The sense that Iran’s government is mobilizing in support of the deal was reinforced by the way public opinion on the agreement was presented on television. In a series of interviews with ordinary citizens â€" underscored by uplifting music and interspersed with images of reactors and centrifuges â€" one person after another described the deal as a positive development for the country.

Television interviews conducted this week in Iran, in which citizens expressed their support for the nuclear deal.

Iranians praising their foreign minister for negotiating the nucelar deal.



A Defaced Gap Ad Goes From the Subway to the Web to Its Demise

As the New York City-based photographer Robert Gerhardt waited last Sunday for the No. 6 subway train to take him from the Bronx to Manhattan, he spotted a poster from Gap’s “Make Love” ad campaign. It featured a female model and a man wearing the distinctive turban of the Sikh religion.

Someone had defaced the advertisement, crossing out the word “Love” and replacing it with “Bombs!” Another line of graffiti scrawled underneath, in a different hand, read: “Please Stop Driving Taxis!”

So Mr. Gerhardt, 36, who has been documenting the lives of Muslims in the United States for years, took out his camera and posted a photograph of the defaced ad on his Facebook page and on Instagram. “It was anti-Muslim graffiti on a man who is clearly Sikh but was being confused as a Muslim,” Mr. Gerhardt told The Lede. “Hatred doesn’t ever seem to go away.”

Shortly after Mr. Gerhardt uploaded the image, Arsalan Iftikhar, a senior editor for Islamic Monthly, saw it and shared it with about 40,000 followers on Twitter and on Facebook. Reza Aslan, a historian and professor, also shared it online.

It finally came to the attention of Gap, which wrote to Mr. Iftikhar on Twitter asking for the location of the graffiti-scrawled ad.

The man in the advertisement is Waris Ahluwalia, a jewelry designer and actor. The woman is Quentin Jones, an illustrator and filmmaker.

On Wednesday, Mr. Ahluwalia told his Facebook followers, “Make sure to say thank you to those awesome Taxi drivers that take you places,” linking to a BBC report on the difficulties drivers face in New York City.

And Ms. Jones wrote on Twitter, referring to the ad:

Mr. Iftikhar said on Wednesday that Gap was displaying the picture as the background art on its Twitter account @Gap.

In response to a reporter’s query, Gap said that it was not answering questions about the graffiti, but added, in part:

Gap is a brand that celebrates inclusion and diversity. Our customers and employees are of many different ethnicities, faiths and lifestyles and we support them all.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Gerhardt, the photographer, returned to the same Pelham Bay subway platform at Buhre Avenue in the Bronx, which he regularly uses, and noticed that the advertisement was no longer there.

In its place was a poster for a Tyler Perry movie, “A Madea Christmas.”



Tracking Holiday Travel Delays in Real Time

FlightAware, an online flight tracking service, shows the percentage of delays and cancellations in red on its “MiseryMap” across the country in real time.

Updated 1:12 p.m. Most air travelers were able to avoid major delays Tuesday as a powerful storm moved up the East Coast and into the mid-Atlantic states. But on Wednesday, the busiest travel day of this Thanksgiving holiday week, they may not be so lucky, according to FlightAware’s online, real-time interactive map.

With heavy rain and wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour reported along the East Coast this morning, the storm began affecting airline operations by 7 a.m. in Philadelphia and New York’s three major airports, causing a ripple effect at airports across the country.

More than 150 flights were canceled out of Philadelphia and New York airports on Wednesday, according to FlightAware. But the delays and flight cancellations have not been nearly as bad as many meteorologists had been predicting earlier this week. There was initial concern that the heavy rain and strong winds moving up the East Coast would collide with a storm system, over the Great Lakes, that produced snow in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and western New York state.

While passengers were scheduled to board 1,300 flights across the country this morning, drivers make up the majority of the 43 million people expected to travel more than 50 miles this holiday week.

On Wednesday morning, motorists found heavy rain had eventually tapered off along the busy Interstate 95 corridor. Snow-covered, icy roads could be found in parts of West Virginia, western and central Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and western New York State, as my colleagues, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Timothy Williams reported.

Here’s a look at what meteorologists and local airport officials are saying about the weather and holiday travel up and down the East Coast on Wednesday:

In Philadelphia, airport officials on Wednesday have been actively using an official Twitter account, @PHLAirport, to keep travelers updated on conditions.

For motorists in the Philadelphia area, flooding and a deadly crash that killed one person and injured seven others early Wednesday morning on the Schuylkill Expressway, Interstate 76, near the Montgomery Drive exit, snarled traffic for both commuters and holiday travelers.

For the New York City metropolitan area, the National Weather Service’s regional office in Upton, N.Y. issued a flood warning in parts of the area and wind advisory, warning of gusts up to 60 m.p.h.

In New England, the National Weather Service in Boston identified strong winds and heavy rain as the primary threats for travelers on Wednesday. Boston’s Logan Airport reported some delays and the winds brought down power lines, causing power failures in some parts of the Boston area as the storm headed north toward Maine.

Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport was reporting no delays early Wednesday.

For the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang blog reported that the rain could turn to light snow later on Wednesday but the rest of the holiday weekend would be dry. And Thanksgiving Day? Cold.

In central Pennsylvania, the National Weather Service issued an ice storm warning with freezing rain coating roads and trees.

A possible tornado touched down late Tuesday night along the North Carolina coast, in the Atlantic Beach area near Morehead City, downing power lines. The Associated Press reported three people were injured when a roof blew off their condominium.

On the other side of North Carolina, snow was falling in the west. And spotted in Atlanta.

In Atlanta, Kathryn Prociv and Heather Hunter, producers for the Weather Channel, noted on Twitter that snow flakes were falling outside the studio early Wednesday morning, a significant weather event for Atlanta.