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First Evidence for a Non-Gravitational Acceleration of 3I/ATLAS at Perihelion

By the date of its perihelion, 3I/ATLAS displayed the first evidence of a non-gravitational acceleration. The report (accessible here) was filed by Davide Farnoccia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who received his PhD in Mathematics from the Galileo Galilei School of Graduate studies at the University of Pisa, Italy.

The non-gravitational acceleration was measured at the perihelion distance of 1.36 times the Earth-Sun separation (defined as an astronomical unit or `au’), equivalent to 203 million kilometers. It had two components in the orbital plane of 3I/ATLAS:

· A radial acceleration away from the Sun of 135 kilometers (=9×10^{-7}au) per day squared.

· A transverse acceleration relative to the Sun’s direction of 60 kilometers (=4×10^{-7}au) per day squared.

If 3I/ATLAS is propelled by the rocket effect of ejected gas, then momentum conservation implies that the object would lose half its mass over a characteristic timescale equal to the ejection speed divided by the measured non-gravitational acceleration. For a thermal ejection speed of a few hundred meters per second, the evaporation half-life of 3I/ATLAS is 6 months. This implies that over the month it takes 3I/ATLAS to cross a spatial scale of order its perihelion separation from the Sun, 3I/ATLAS would lose about a tenth of its mass. Such a massive mass loss should be detectable in the form of a large plume of gas surrounding 3I/ATLAS during the upcoming months of November and December 2025.

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These Are The States Where Most Americans Need Housing Assistance

Housing costs keep climbing faster than wages in many parts of the U.S., putting extra pressure on low-income renters.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao, maps all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico by how many low-income renters receive federal housing assistance relative to their population.

Data is sourced from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Policy Development and Research (HUD).

HUD’s 2024 estimates count more than 9 million Americans (27 per 1,000) currently receiving vouchers, public-housing units, or other subsidies.

Households typically pay 30% of their adjusted income (i.e. after taxes) as rent, and the government covers the rest.

Ranked: Americans Needing Rental Assistance, by State

D.C. stands out with 72 assisted renters per 1,000 residents.

That’s more than double the U.S. average of 27 and reflects both DC’s high housing costs, its population growth since 2000, and the limited growth in housing in the same time period.

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MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Urges Viewers to Ruin Thanksgiving by Confronting Family Over Rumored Trump ‘Third Term’ Run

MSNBC host Ali Velshi has urged his dwindling audience to turn Thanksgiving dinners into heated political showdowns over the idea of Donald Trump seeking a third term as president.

In a segment titled “How We Prepare,” Velshi laid out a paranoid four-point plan to “resist” what he claims are Republican efforts to undermine future elections, while specifically calling on viewers to confront family members who dare mention a Trump third term.

“When people actually show up, that’s what works,” Velshi said.

The unhinged host continued, “In 2020, lawyers, judges and ordinary citizens forced the certification of the presidential election in the states. In Wayne county, Michigan, ground zero for the first nullification attempt, when officials flirted with refusing to certify the election, the public flooded the meeting. The plot collapsed the moment that locals caught wind of it. Republicans were willing to subvert democracy in the dark, but not so much in front of an engaged public. That’s lesson one for 2025.”

Next, he pushed for “voter buddy systems” to protect so-called vulnerable groups like Latino voters from intimidation, bizarrely warning about ICE agents lurking at polling places to scare people away. It appears to be an admission of his belief that illegal aliens are voting, as this would not be a concern for American citizens.

“Number two, create voter buddy systems, especially for neighbors who fear intimidation at the polls,” Velshi continued. “One tactic experts are worried about is the potential deployment of ICE agents to polling places. You can see why some qualified Latino voters — never mind Latino voters — anybody who’s a little bit brown like me, wouldn’t want to get caught up in a raid, thrown into detention until they can clear their names, just for going out to vote.”

His third plan point? Form “rapid-response teams” of everyday citizens to stake out polling places, voter dropboxes, and county meetings like some amateur surveillance squad.

“Build local rapid response teams, groups of ordinary citizens who show up as they’re doing in courts right now, at county meetings, at certification hearings, at voter dropboxes your physical presence is a deterrent to improper and illegal behavior,” he said.

The Trump Derangement Syndrome poster boy also advised monitoring election practices in other states as “test runs” for bigger schemes.

“Follow what’s happening in other states,” he urged. “That’s why these elections on Tuesday are so important, whether you live in one of them or not. The military deployments, attempted voter purges, the election monitors — consider them all trial runs for the bigger play, the one that’s going to happen right where you live.”

Ultimately, he asks his viewers to ruin Thanksgiving.

Velshi suggested shoving a pocket Constitution in the face of “that one uncle” who brings it up, pointing to the 22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.”

“And finally, do not let Donald Trump and Republicans normalize talk of a third term — a third presidential term is illegal. Full stop,” Velshi declared. “So when that one uncle floats a third term loophole conspiracy over Thanksgiving dinner, don’t let it slide. And if your uncle insists that it’s doable, hand him one of these: A pocket Constitution opened to the 22nd amendment, section one, which reads, quote, ‘No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.’”

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REPORT: Obama Preparing to Step Up Efforts to Resist Trump — ‘Not So Sure’ Country Will Survive His Presidency

Barack Obama is ready to throw his hat back into the political fray.

According to CNN, the two-time former president is “not so sure” that the country will survive Donald Trump’s presidency and is preparing to step up his campaigning efforts in support of the Democratic Party.

Their report states:

After deliberately stepping back during the Biden years — while remaining the party’s biggest fundraiser even then — Obama and his aides are reworking his longstanding strategy of minimizing his public presence to allow the next generation of Democrats to emerge.

Trump’s moves to block Democrats from power since his return to the White House and his calls to indict or shut down liberal institutions might, Obama fears, deny that next generation the chance.

…

Hitting the campaign trail for moderate gubernatorial candidates, as Obama is scheduled to do in back-to-back stops on Saturday for Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, is the easy part for the former president.

It’s what to do every other day of the year, and each of the years to come, that he’s been struggling with, according to CNN’s conversations with two dozen top Democratic officials and operatives, as well as several friends who have spoken with the former president since Trump returned to office.

The story quotes former Democratic attorney general Eric Holder, a close friend of the former president, as saying that Trump’s “harm is so profound that this calls for both a different approach generally, and a different involvement specifically by President Obama.”

“If we are focused, if we’re willing to engage, if we are willing to do the work, the nation and our democracy can survive this,” he explained.

“There will be damage done along the way — there’s no question about that. We won’t win every battle.”

Despite remaining a spiritual leader of the Democratic Party, Obama has rarely gotten involved in full-scale political campaigning since leaving office in 2017, although has stepped up for both the 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns and significant national races.

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Uber CEO Predicts All Cars Will Be Autonomous in 20 Years, Driving Will Be a Hobby Like ‘Horseback Riding’

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi believes that in “20 plus years,” all cars will be autonomous, leading to a decline in private car ownership and a shift in the perception of driving to be a hobby, which he compares to horseback riding.

Business Insider reports that in a recent conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi shared his vision for the future of transportation, predicting that all cars will be autonomous in around 20 years. This shift, according to Khosrowshahi, could lead to a significant reduction in private car ownership and an increased focus on safety metrics for autonomous vehicles.

Khosrowshahi’s comments come at a time when many companies, including Tesla and Waymo, are developing and releasing robotaxis or autonomous software for personal vehicles. While these advancements have been met with both excitement and skepticism, the Uber CEO believes that the transition to fully autonomous vehicles is inevitable.

“Humans are fallible, and I think there’s much less permissiveness for machines to make those kinds of mistakes, especially if those mistakes lead to fatality,” Khosrowshahi said during the MD MEETS podcast. He emphasized that as autonomous driving technology matures, machines will undoubtedly become safer than human drivers.

This shift towards autonomous vehicles raises important questions about the future of driving and car ownership. Khosrowshahi suggested that societies will need to grapple with the idea of allowing humans to drive on open roads, given the potential safety advantages of autonomous vehicles. He sees driving becoming a hobby like horseback riding is today.

As companies continue to develop and deploy autonomous driving technologies, they face increasing scrutiny over safety concerns. Tesla, for example, was recently ordered to pay over $242 million in damages after a Florida jury found its Autopilot technology partially responsible for a fatal crash.

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Obama Privately Endorses Communist Zohran Mamdani in Phone Call and Offers Him Political Support

Former President Barack Obama has privately endorsed the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, a communist, in New York City.

According to The New York Times, Obama called Mamdani for around half an hour, during which time he praised his campaign and offered him political support.

Their report states:

Former President Barack Obama called New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Saturday, praising his campaign and offering to be a “sounding board” into the future.

The private, roughly 30-minute phone call, which has not previously been reported, was described by two people who participated or were briefed immediately on what had been said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversation.

Mr. Obama said that he was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success beyond the election on Tuesday. They talked about the challenges of staffing a new administration and building an apparatus capable of delivering on Mr. Mamdani’s agenda of affordability in the city, the people said.

The former president’s outreach on the eve of what has been a contentious election is notable, given how divided the Democratic establishment has been over Mr. Mamdani and the role that Mr. Obama still plays in the party.

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Covid injections pose risk of pilots having in-flight seizures even years after having taken a shot

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Kevin Stillwagon posted an update on pilot incapacitation.  The Federal Aviation Administration does not maintain records of who took covid injections and when, he said.

But it gets worse, he said.  “The FAA stopped entering data into the incapacitation data registry very early in the year 2021 and completely cancelled the program in 2022.”

“Trying to identify risks is even more critical now, because starting in December of 2020, airline pilots were forced to get injected with a product that causes subclinical myocarditis and has been tied to cerebrovascular events, including seizures, even several years after the injections.”

He concluded by issuing a call for pilots and other airline crew members to voluntarily have medical tests done to assess their risk of, for example. an in-flight seizure or cardiac event.

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Moscow’s “Root Causes” Memo Reportedly Angered White House, Which Then Nixed Budapest Summit

The Financial Times is out with more reporting Friday on why the United States canceled a planned summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest earlier this month. The FT report says Moscow issued sweeping demands on Ukraine, according to sources privy to the conversations, and that ultimately this ‘annoyed’ President Trump, who opted to listen to those admin officials calling for a firmer position in support of Ukraine.

Also, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly told Trump that Moscow was “showing no willingness to negotiate” after he held a phone call with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Russia has reportedly made clear that a precondition for lasting peace rests on significant territorial concessions in the east.

Trump “was not impressed with their position,” FT quoted one source as saying, who also explained the president remains open to meeting Russian leaders only “when and where he thinks there can be progress.”

However, the ‘demands’ from the Russian side shouldn’t have come as any surprise, given also Russian forces have the initiative on the ground in the east. A “root causes” of the conflict memo laying out Moscow’s position demanded Ukraine give up large parts of its territory, cut its troops and forever abandon plans to join NATO.

President Putin has meanwhile emphasized that the planned Russian-American summit in Budapest was postponed and not canceled.

Russia seems to want to keep dialogue with Washington as positive as possible, and wants to present ‘progress’ in bilateral relations, while downplaying ongoing disagreements.

The reality remains that President Trump is trying to negotiate in favor of the Zelensky government, while Zelensky’s own forces have little to no leverage over the military situation. Russia knows it is in the driver’s seat on the ground, despite Ukraine’s unrelenting cross-border drone attacks on oil refineries. And yet the mainstream media still floats simplistic narratives and mythologies like the following:

Russian foreign ministry allegedly sent a memo to Washington outlining how Putin was still calling for the supposed “root causes” of his invasion to be addressed – even though the West widely believes he invaded Ukraine in a land grab.

President Putin has floated the idea of a “ceasefire for journalists” to allow them to reach the frontlines and report honestly on the situation.

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Antifa-Linked Leftist Arrested for Hockey Stick Attack on University of Colorado TPUSA Chapter Secretary

Boulder police have arrested 36-year-old Taylor James Rose of Arvada, Colorado, for assaulting the University of Colorado Turning Point USA chapter secretary with a hockey stick while on rollerblades.

The unprovoked attack, which the victim described as “politically motivated,” occurred just after 7 p.m. on October 23.

The victim, Nathaniel Ellis, a CU Boulder student, was riding his bike when Rose allegedly called him a “fascist” before striking him with the hockey stick.

Rose was arrested on Thursday and charged with second-degree assault, a felony.

Deputy District Attorney McKenna Mayfield explicitly noted the incident was a “politically motivated unprovoked attack.”

Police spoke to a second person of interest, a rollerblader seen with Rose shortly before the assault, who was observed posting flyers near the scene. He is not currently a suspect and is cooperating with detectives.

In a press release about the case, the City of Boulder briefly summed up the incident and charges, but added, “To protect the integrity of this active investigation and future prosecution, the Boulder Police Department is unable to release more specifics at this time.”

According to independent reporting from AntifaWatch, the attack followed the doxxing of Ellis by local Antifa groups who were demanding that he was a “Nazi.”

Rose has allegedly been associated with Denver Communists, where he appeared to introduce himself as an anarchist from Arvada in chat logs discussing protests.

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Will The AfD Party Be Banned In Germany?

There are once again efforts to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag, with the far-left Social Democrats (SPD) leading the way. However, there is some difficult math facing the proponents of an AfD ban, which makes it unlikely — but not impossible — for the party to be banned.

In order to understand why a ban is unlikely, let us first look at what would actually happen if a ban of the AfD went forward.

The AfD is currently the most popular party in the country, according to multiple polls, scoring between 25 and 27 percent of the vote. This alone makes a ban unthinkable to many, but the German establishment does not especially care what the electorate thinks on a number of key issues, so why not just ban the party?

For starters, and most importantly, a ban of the AfD would radically reshape the German electorate in favor of the left. This would translate into the Christian Democrats (CDU) losing a massive amount of power, and potentially being relegated to the political dustbin. Due to this cold, hard reality, a ban could be suicidal for the CDU.

How one local elections tells us about the federal election

What happened in the local mayoral election in Ludwigshafen tells us what the likely outcome of an AfD ban would be for the country at the federal level. In Ludwigshafen, the AfD’s Joachim Paul was leading the polls to become mayor before he was banned from running through backroom bureaucratic channels, a move later confirmed by judges during a number of appeals. The judges all argued Paul would have to challenge the ban after the election. Paul is still filing legal actions against the decision, but the outcome of the appeal could take months or even years.

Regardless of the outcome of Paul’s appeal, the election had some interesting outcomes.

First, the voter participation rate crashed to a record low of just 29.3 percent. In 2017’s mayoral election in Ludwigshafen, the then-SPD candidate Jutta Steinruck won with 60.2 percent participation. That means voter turnout was cut in half from that election.

That is not all. For those who did vote, many of them appear to have submitted “spoiled” ballots. A record-high number of ballots were ruled invalid, at 9.2 percent. Eight years ago, that number was just 2.6 percent. The number of “spoiled ballots” jumped by nearly 400 percent.

If this same outcome occurred at the federal level, including a dramatic crash in the voter participation rate as AfD supporters boycott the election, it would be a disaster for the CDU’s electoral chances.

The way the German system works means that the pool of right-wing voters would shrink dramatically, leaving CDU voters and the left as the only remaining voting pool. However, this remaining, much smaller pool, would then feature a dramatically larger share of left-wing voters consisting of the SPD, the Greens, and the Left Party.

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