NL and JOR work together to strengthen Jordan’s electric vehicle infrastructure – The Netherlands and You

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News item | 09-06-2021 | 14:51

Amman Wednesday 9 June, 2021: Today, Wednesday 9 June 2021, the first of three online dialogue sessions between the Netherlands and Jordan on electric vehicle infrastructure kicked off. These sessions intend to contribute to the Jordan-Netherlands cooperation on Electric Vehicles (EV) charging infrastructure. They will also facilitate experience and knowledge exchange on topics such as charging infrastructure systems, market models, and related regulatory framework to accelerate the roll-out of electric vehicles and charging infrastructure in Jordan.

The sessions are developed in joint cooperation between the Jordanian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR), the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Jordan and the Dutch Energy Transition Facility (ETF). The sessions are moderated by the director of the Netherlands Knowledge Platform for Public Charging Infrastructure (NKL) and are attended by representatives of MEMR, the Energy and Minerals Regulatory Commission, Ministry of Transport, and the Greater Amman Municipality. Participating knowledge institutions from the Netherlands include NKL and the Dutch Organization for Electric Transport as well as the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO).

H.E, Eng. Hala Zawati, Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources kicked off the session with opening remarks. She noted that Encouraging expansion using Electric Transportation is part of the Jordan Energy Strategy 2020-2030 which seeks to achieve four main priorities: provide a sufficient number of electric charging stations; develop mechanisms to motivate citizens to use electric cars and buses; adopt more electric cars and buses in the government sector and encourage the use of electric buses by motivating the replacement of old buses with new buses that run on electricity. This will reduce our export from petroleum products, reduce carbon emissions and contribute to reducing the cost of energy on the consumers and the transport sector, since the transport sector consumes about 47% of energy.

The transport sector is the fastest growing emitter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore the challenge is to provide energy for mobility while avoiding an increase in air pollution and CO2 emissions. Since shares of renewable energy sources become more significant in the energy mix, electric vehicles are an economic path to a more sustainable mode of transportation.

For the past 10 years Jordan has been developing its e-mobility sector; with over 21,500 electric vehicles, the first charging infrastructure facilities and an Electric Vehicles Association. Furthermore, Jordans Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) Action Plan commits to achieving a 14% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and e-mobility can play a major role in helping Jordan achieve this.

In his welcoming remarks, H.E Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Jordan, Mr. Dolf Hogewoning said We are very happy to partner with MEMR to hold these important dialogue sessions between Dutch and Jordanian partners. E-mobility has a very important role to play in reducing greenhouse gases and social and economic inequalities. We look forward to strengthening trade and knowledge exchange between our two countries.

The Netherlands is fifth in the world in number of electric passenger cars and it is home to the most dense network of charging stations for electric vehicles. Thus, the Netherlands has built a broad spectrum of experience and knowledge in the e-mobility sector, especially in the field of charging infrastructure.

The Energy Transition Facility is commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and implemented by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). The ETF aims to collaborate at policy level. It supports national governments in their transition to a sustainable energy future. ETF is open for projects in nine countries including Jordan.

The remaining two workshops will be held on June 15 and 22, 2021.

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NL and JOR work together to strengthen Jordan's electric vehicle infrastructure - The Netherlands and You

The Air Jordan 1 Patent Bred Expected To Release On October 23rd – Sneaker News

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Early on in 2021, leakers revealed whats due from Jordan Brand seasons ahead. Among the many standouts, there was a common thread between most as many a classic was due to return with subtle but noticeable tweaks. And though all were alluring in their own right, few could rival the reception of the Air Jordan 1 Patent Bred.

Teased via mock-up months ago, the colorway modifies the beloved OG colorway with swatches of patent leather. While difficult to perceive in digital format, the pair has recently received its first look, insiders photographing pairs in-hand and in close-up detail. As expected, the classic Black and Red scheme returns true-to-form, alternating all the same though with a newly applied shimmer. Whats more, aside from the rather standard exterior branding, the pair commemorates its release with a calligraphic Family embroidery on the inside collar.

To catch a look at these for yourself, see below. A release is expected to hit October 23rd in fully family sizes.

Where to Buy

Make sure to follow @kicksfinder for live tweets during the release date.

Mens: $170Style Code: 555088-063

Source: @fxxkvlogvi

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The Air Jordan 1 Patent Bred Expected To Release On October 23rd - Sneaker News

Jordan Spieth 3.0: How the three-time major champ reverse-engineered his swing – GolfDigest.com

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If social distancing during the pandemic has revealed anything noteworthy about how PGA Tour pros go about their business, it might be just how much thought Jordan Spieth puts into every shot he hits. Without large galleries to muffle what is said inside tournament ropes, Spieths conversations with his caddie, Michael Greller, have been a fascinating peek inside the mind of one of the games most thoughtful and determined players.

Hes worked very hard over a long period to get his swing to where, when he takes the club back, hes only got a picture in his mind about the ball flight hes trying to create. Thats what hes talking [to Michael] about, says his longtime coach, Cameron McCormick. His swing is now jelling with what he sees. Theres no conflict.

A victory (the Valero Texas Open) and four other top-four finishes in a stretch of eight events earlier in 2021 speak to the resurgence of Spieth and the golf swing that won three majors. McCormick says that Jordan 3.0 is a blend of what he did right earlier in his career and some new wrinklesand how he arrived at this point is whats really interesting.

We reverse-engineered the swing changes starting with creating a good feel at impact and then building the rest around that, McCormick says. We recognized that if he started feeling better about impact, then pre-impact, then transition, the jigsaw-puzzle pieces fit together really well. Make sense?

It does, but thats not typically the way elite golfers go about improving. Diagnostics usually follow the sequence of the swing, starting at address. But Spieth and McCormick went directly to the moment of truth, the strike, and worked backward. Spieth is now in a place where hes giving himself permission to go after the ball, McCormick says, and he has returned to predominantly hitting a bullet cut, meaning a lower-flying drive that starts a little left and works back to the right and rolls out once it lands.

Spieth is not chasing yards. Hes keeping his tee shots in play and relying on his irons and short game to challenge the field regularly since finishing tied for fourth in the Waste Management Phoenix Open in February. Spieth ranked in the top 25 in strokes gained/approach the green and top 15 in putting average on tour through April.

The key is that at the top of the swing, Spieth senses the club is in great position to create the feel he wants through impact. Hes swinging much more like he did when he first came out on tour, McCormick says.

Watch our fun 'Off-Course' video with Spieth below:

Specifically, Spieth takes the club back on a steeper angle than he returns it to the ball. He doesnt roll his forearms clockwise through the middle of the backswing, and the butt end of the shaft points inside his target line as he approaches the top. But in transition, things dramatically change. As Spieth begins to unwind aggressively starting with hip rotation, the shaft flattens with the butt end now pointing at the ball or even outside the target line. From there, Spieth knows he can just turn hard and produce the ball flight he sees in his mind during those in-depth conversations with Greller.

If you want to know what that move feels like, Spieth and McCormick talk about the club going from light to heavy. Its light as Spieth takes the club back, by virtue of the shaft being more vertical in orientation. But when Spieth transitions into the downswing, the club starts to feel heavy in his right hand because the shaft is lying down or flattening.

Thats what some people call the slot or the hitting position, McCormick says. The earlier he can set that hitting position, the better he feels about it. Its funny, but when he won at Valero and finished third at Augusta, he actually got to the point where he was setting it up way too early. He couldnt wait to get there.

Overcooking a great swing feel aside, Spieth is mostly doing everything right with his full swing these days, McCormick says. Hes gripping the club slightly stronger after recovering from a hand injury that forced him to hold the club in a weaker position in recent years. That weak grip helped contribute to his predominant miss right of the target. Hes also standing more athletically over the ball (a deeper hip hinge), McCormick says. And when he swings through the impact zone and gets into the follow-through, its a result of good body turn and a feeling of passive hands.

He can still hit a draw and get some extra distance when he needs it, but its not something Spieth looks to do often.

With his covered cut, youd expect hed lose some carry distance because hes launching the ball lower, McCormick says. But honestly, so what, hes still hitting it around 300 yards and control trumps distance.

Among the improvements Jordan Spieth and his coach, Cameron McCormick, have worked on is to get Spieth in a more athletic setup. A deeper hip hinge at address (above left) puts him in position to make a more dynamic swing.

Since recovering from a painful injury to his left hand, Spieth has been able to strengthen the orientation of his hands on the club so the right palm is turned slightly more under the shaft (above right). This gives him better control of the clubface, so he doesnt lose many shots to the right.

Spieth takes the club back with the shaft in a more vertical position as he reaches the top but then lets it flatten during the transition to the downswing (above left). From a feel standpoint, this laying down of the shaft mentally gives him the green light to go after the ball aggressively.

Spieth isnt trying to guide the clubhead into the ball with his hands. Instead, impact is a result of good body rotation toward the target in the throughswing (above right). He gets the club in the position he wants at the top of the swing and then its turn, turn, turn.

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Jordan Spieth 3.0: How the three-time major champ reverse-engineered his swing - GolfDigest.com

Scottie Pippen throwing the book at Michael Jordan in new tell-all – Fox News

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Chicago Bulls legend Scottie Pippen isnt holding back.

After not being "too pleased" with how he was portrayed in "The Last Dance" documentary, which was about the 90s Bulls and NBA icon Michael Jordan, Pippen announced that he was releasing a tell-all book called "UNGUARDED" to share his side of the story.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

Pippen made the announcement on his Instagram.

"Ready to hear my side of the story? UNGUARDED. I'm giving you a behind-the-scenes look at growing up in Arkansas, college days at UCA, getting drafted, takes on my teammates and coaches, the locker room, and the rings. Stories I've kept to myself for years," Pippen wrote.

Back in December, Pippen admitted to The Guardian that he reached out to Jordan directly to voice his displeasure about the documentary.

"I dont think it was that accurate in terms of really defining what was accomplished in one of the greatest eras of basketball," Pippen told the website. "But also by two of the greatest players and one could even put that aside and say the greatest team of all time."

In the summary on the Simon & Schuster website, some interesting topics were teased.

According to the site, Pippen says theres "no Michael Jordan as we know him" and he added that the "1990s Chicago Bulls teams would not exist as we know them" without Pippen himself.

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The book will detail how Pippen "cringed at being labeled Jordans sidekick" and talked about how "he could have (and should have) received more respect from the Bulls management and the media."

Finally, Pippen talks about dealing with Jordan on a daily basis, and what it was like "serving as the real leader within the Bulls locker room."

Pippens "UNGUARDED" memoir will be released on November 16 and is available for pre-order now.

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Scottie Pippen throwing the book at Michael Jordan in new tell-all - Fox News

A UNC version of the Air Jordan 6 is rumored to be releasing in 2022 – Keeping It Heel

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CHAPEL HILL, NC - MARCH 04: Michael Jordan speaks to the crowd at halftime during their game against the Duke Blue Devils at the Dean Smith Center on March 4, 2017 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

Its no secret that one of the best perks for the UNC Basketball program is having access to Air Jordan shoes with the university being sponsored by Jordan Brand.

Over the years we have seen numerous UNC-inspired colorways of popular Air Jordan models with some being available to players and staff only, while others have released to the public. Just in the past year alone we have seen a few different Air Jordan shoes release in the awesome Carolina Blue colorway as Jordan paid homage to his alma-mater.

And it appears as if we are set to get another in 2022.

In the past few days a new colorway of the retro Air Jordan 6 shoe has surfaced and it pays homage to UNC. The Air Jordan 6UNC is set to be released in 2022 per multiple sneaker websites. Instagram account zSneakerheadz first tweeted about the release, showing a mockup of what the pair is likely to look like.

NOTE: This is NOT a final design but instead a rendering.

This isnt the first time the Air Jordan 6 has had a UNC feel to it either. A pair released in 2017 that featured a black upper with Carolina Blue accents throughout. This version will likely feature a white upper with Carolina and Navy accents throughout.

The render also shoes the retro Nike tag that was featured on the recently released Air Jordan 4 UNC colorway back in late April as well.

There is no set release date for the shoe but expect a price tag of $200 on it and a release set for some retail stores like FinishLine, Champs Sports, Nike and the Nike SNKRS app.

For more on the release of this shoe as well as other UNC-inspired colorways, make sure to check back with Keeping It Heel.

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A UNC version of the Air Jordan 6 is rumored to be releasing in 2022 - Keeping It Heel

Veteran-owned business opens new location in South Jordan – ABC 4

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SOUTH JORDAN, Utah (ABC4) A veteran-owned business celebrated the opening of its new business center in South Jordan.

The father-son team of Craig and Steve Rosenvall started Alpha Warranty Services to provide vehicle protection for dealerships here in Utah and across the country.

The South Jordan location at 1300 W and 11400 S features a full-size indoor basketball court, fitness center, game room, and a bowling alley. Their motto is A happy employee is a productive employee.

With more than 100 employees, the companys new building will also provide a workspace for other local companies.

If people dont have to travel as far to go to work, it improves the work-life balances, Mayor Dawn Ramsey said during the ribbon-cutting event on Tuesday.

Alpha Warranty hopes the new building will encourage businesses to continue fighting through hard times brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company was recently ranked one of the best to work for in Utah, offering an on-site gym, Lagoon and zoo days, tuition reimbursement, and remote working options.

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Veteran-owned business opens new location in South Jordan - ABC 4

H&M opening at Jordan Creek next week, and other additions to the mall are on the way – Des Moines Register

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H&M branding on the outside of Jordan Creek Town Center Tuesday, May 4, 2021.(Photo: Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Register)

Just one more week.

The long-awaited first metro Des Moines location of H&M will open June 10 at JordanCreek Town Center, mall general manager Randy Tennison confirms.

And in time for the holiday season, the fast-fashion store will be getting a neighbor that's also new to Des Moines:a Fabletics store showcasing theathleisure brand co-founded by Kate Hudson.

It's one of several measures aimed atrevitalizingthe western wing of the mall. Work is expected to begin this summer on a Von Maurstore that will fill the hole left when the Younkers store anchoring that end of the mall closed in 2018. ATempur-Pedic mattress storealso will be moving in by late fall.

The 25,000-square-foot, multi-level H&M location occupies what had been several storefronts just east of the old Younker's. Fabletics, meanwhile, will be the first retailer in three years to use a space on the lower level left vacantwhen Helzberg Diamonds moved to the second floor.

More: Waiting for the H&M to open at Jordan Creek? You won't have to much longer

Also on the lower level,Tempur-Pedic will take overspaceformerly occupied byFrancesca's andClarks.

"That wing has a lot going on," Tennison said.

Anticipation of a Des Moines metroH&M ramped up over the past year and a half as the Sweden-based chain celebrated its 20th year in the U.S. by opening hundreds of new stores. To the envy of central Iowa shoppers, they included one in Davenport and anotherin Coralville.

The October announcement that the metro would finally get its own location set off a social media celebration among local H&M fans eager for what they say is its stylishapparel and home decor at a hard-to-beat price.

Their enthusiasm is only growing as opening day nears.

"I used to live in Texas and was used to being around H&M," said Amanda Davis, 35, of Ankeny. "I love the price of their clothes, and for that price, the quality is good. I have pieces from them I bought seven to eightyears ago. I also love they have clothes for everyone, including kids."

More: Pop-up drive-in movie theater set to open at Valley West mall Sunday with 'Field of Dreams'

"I have had the opportunity to shop the H&Ms in Minneapolis and LAand I like the price point for a lot of basic pieces to add to a wardrobe," said Jen Palmer, 30, of Swan in Marion County, who comes to West Des Moines about once a month to shop at Jordan Creek."They have also branched into home goods, again at a very affordable price point."

Hudson's Fabletics is another store with a fan base. Founded in 2013 as an online, membership-based subscription service, it opened its first brick-and-mortar locations in fall 2015, launching six U.S. stores.

In March, the company announced plans to open 24 stores, expandingthe brand to 74 locations across the U.S.

Hannah Rodriguezcovers retailfor the Register. Reach her at herodriguez@registermedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @HRodriguez15.

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National Court of Spain Suspends John McAfee Extradition Hearing Bitcoin News – Bitcoin News

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The National Court in Spain has suspended the hearing destined to deal with the extradition request that John McAfee, the well known cryptocurrency influencer, has pending for its tax-related crimes in the U.S. The entrepreneur was apprehended in October last year in the El Prat Airport where he was going to take a flight. No new dates have been announced for the new hearing.

The National Court of Spain suspended the extradition hearing of John McAfee this week for tax evasion charges, as was reported by local media. The Court alleged that due to some mistakes in managing the case, the defense would not have been in its full capacity to effectively exert its function. Javier Villalba, the lawyer of John McAfee, had not been able to get the full file of the case before the hearing. John McAfee was apprehended last year in the El Prat airport before taking a flight.

Villalba criticized the way that the Spanish justice is dealing with McAfee criticizing his client was jailed without bail. He said McAfee was in bad shape due to his age (78 years), and being in a Spanish prison for nine months for tax-related crimes. Villalba argued against this, stating:

It is not a blood related crime or drug trafficking

McAfee, who is also known for being a cybersecurity pioneer, allegedly failed to file tax statements from 2014 to 2018 and faces a maximum penalty of five years per tax evasion charge and 1-year per failure to file taxes each year. The Court would be accepting the extradition request by three of the five charges attributed to McAfee. A date for a new hearing was not set.

However, this is not the first run-in that the cryptocurrency influencer has had with justice. McAfee himself stated in a Twitter post he was jailed in Spain for using a thong mask in August. He was also detained for driving under influence of controlled substances in Tennessee and was also detained for illegal entry in Guatemala.

McAfee was also arrested in the Dominican Republic for carrying guns and ammunition into the country. But more importantly, he was one of the primary suspects in a murder case in Belice, where one of his neighbors, with whom he argued often, was shot.

What do you think about the suspension of McAfees extradition hearing? Tell us in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

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National Court of Spain Suspends John McAfee Extradition Hearing Bitcoin News - Bitcoin News

Can virtual reality help the emotional well-being of older people? – Economic Times

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POMPANO BEACH: Terry Colli and three other residents of the John Knox Village senior community got a trip via computer to the International Space Station in the kickoff to a Stanford University study on whether virtual reality can improve the emotional well-being of older people.

Donning 1-pound (470-gram) headsets with video and sound, the four could imagine floating weightless with astronauts and get a 360-degree tour of the station. In other programs, residents can take virtual visits to Paris, Venice, Egypt or elsewhere around the globe; attend a car rally, skydive or go on a hike.

"I feel great. It is amazing. It is like you are really there," said Colli, 73, and a former spokesman for the Canadian embassy in Washington.

Virtual reality works by making what the person sees and hears track with what they are doing. In a VR trip to Paris, for example, a participant might turn to the left and see the Eiffel Tower with a musician playing in the foreground, and then turn right and find two people conversing. If the participant moves toward one, that sound increases while the other diminishes.

"There is a fair amount of previously published research by academic labs around the world that shows VR, when administered properly, can help reduce anxiety, improve mood, and reduce pain," said Jeremy Bailenson, the Stanford lab's founding director. "This particular study is focused on how using VR might reduce the residents' feelings of isolation from the outside world all the more important after the isolation we all faced during the pandemic."

During Tuesday's demonstration at the suburban Fort Lauderdale community, Colli, Anne Selby, 77; Mark Levey, 64; and Hugh Root, 92, moved their heads from left to right and up and down as they got individual tours of the space station.

"It really felt like you were traveling and not alone either. In some of the video, there are people," said Levey, a former federal government worker.

Selby, an artist, said that she felt a bit nauseated as she moved through the space station because it was so realistic, but that she was able to cope by taking deep breaths.

"Regardless of my age, I was right in the middle of it," she said.

Root, a retired insurance salesman, was blunt: "It blows my mind."

Chris Brickler, CEO of MyndVR, the Dallas company that provided the equipment, said volunteers will be screened to assure they are mentally suitable for using virtual reality and each attendant has an abort button if the person becomes overwhelmed by the experience. John Knox's residents include people and couples who live alone, in assisted living and with full-time nursing.

"As we age, we feel there is a disconnect sometimes that can happen when there is a lack of mobility," Brickler said. "We can't travel as much as we want, we can't connect with nature as much as we want, can't have connections with animals. All sorts of connections get lost and our four walls start shrinking in. What we have tried to do is create a platform where we can bring the world back."

Monica McAfee, John Knox's chief marketing and innovation officer, said the community's administrators believe VR helps residents it's been used on a limited basis there for three years but Stanford's study "will provide the empirical data." For example, she said, they want to know if VR can help residents with dementia who suffer from "sundowning" severe mood downswings that begin at dusk.

"Is this a way to redirect them to enjoy something?" she said.

Northern Ohio University associate philosophy professor Erica Neely, who studies the ethics of technology, said it's important that Stanford is getting fully informed consent, screening participants and making sure they aren't using VR alone, especially at first. She is not involved in the study.

"We definitely don't want anyone to get stuck in the experience if they become distressed and can't figure out how to turn it off," she said. "The fact that there is a companion/caretaker who can go with (the participant) is utter genius. ... The idea of 'Well, we don't necessarily have people with diminished capacities wandering around by themselves through physical space maybe we can do the same for virtual space' was a really good one."

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Can virtual reality help the emotional well-being of older people? - Economic Times

I lived on the tropical island where a British billionaires daughter-in-law allegedly killed a cop. Trust me, its no paradise – RT

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Damian Wilson

is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.

is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.

The policemans mysterious shooting, while he was with the woman on a moonlit dock late at night, shows even those living the life of luxury can lose it all in an instant. Im not surprised at this bizarre turn of events at all.

The strange circumstances surrounding the fatal late-night shooting of a police superintendent, allegedly by the daughter-in-law of a UK billionaire with whom he was watching the moon, have caught the imagination of people across the world, but on this beautiful tropical island, the bizarre and the brutal are never too far away.

As a former long-time resident of Ambergris Caye, a sun-soaked stretch of sand, mangroves and coconut palms in the Caribbean Sea 16 miles (25 kilometers) off the mainland of Belize, Central America, nothing that happens there would surprise me.

So, when I heard of Canadian businesswoman Jasmine Hartins arrest over the death of police superintendent Henry Jemmott, it was not a case of but that sorta thing never happens there. And even once the facts began to emerge that the 38-year-old was the partner of megabucks Tory party donor Lord Ashcrofts youngest son, Andrew, that she and the superintendent, 42, were enjoying the moonlight alone together on a dock at 1am after an evening of drinking together, that she was giving him a shoulder rub and accidentally shot him in the head with his own gun, that the dead man fell on her and so she pushed his body into the water it was still not that surprising.

After all, this is the place where, once, on a visit to a police station, I couldnt help but admire the flourishing marijuana plant on a windowsill. Where a local family used to buy chickens from the supermarket to feed a 15-foot-long (4.5-meter-long) crocodile that visited their front yard each evening watched by spectators, like me, sitting in golf carts. They might have lost two dogs to the insatiable beast, but no one messed with the kids at school. Unusual things elsewhere are commonplace on Ambergris Caye.

The incident marks the first murder of the year in San Pedro, the islands only town, which, since Covid-19 struck and lockdown was imposed, has seen a drop in crime, recording just one murder last year: the slaying of Marisela Gonzales, for which her husband, David, was later charged.

There were still plenty of other crimes, however, and even a bizarre case in which disciplinary action was meted out to a female San Pedro police officer who was caught on CCTV helping herself to a prisoners belongings.

There were two separate armed robberies in just one day in September; in November, there was the spectacular bonfire of more than 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of seized drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy tablets; a former San Pedro policeman was charged with rape of a minor; three fishermen were remanded in custody for an attempted kidnapping, burglary and wounding; and all this on top of the usual seizures of cash proceeds from drug-dealing, the items taken illegally from the offshore marine reserve, and the deportation of border-jumpers and US felons who regularly turn up in town looking to lay low.

Nevertheless, 2020 was quiet, particularly when compared with the year before, which saw a total of 12 murders on an island of just 15,000 citizens which was part of a 30% reduction in crime compared to 2018.

While the tourist brochures paint an alluring picture of No shoes? No shirt? No problem!, San Pedro is actually a hustling, traffic-choked Central American town. As on many Caribbean islands, once you stray from the bars, restaurants and colourful shops of the beachfront, what my Belizean friends call Second World poverty stares you straight in the face. Its an unsettling and stark contrast to the carefree, cocktail-enhanced, hammock-swinging hedonism the tourists enjoy.

Ambergris Caye is a well-known drop-off point for the drug cartels of South America on the way to Mexico and further north, and plenty of funny money and drugs washes around in the local economy, so it pays to stay alert.

Away from prying eyes, to the north of the caye, which extends around 28 miles towards the Yucatan Peninsula, criminals go about their business unmolested, trafficking drugs, smuggling contraband among the mangroves and even settling scores as the two bodies found in a shallow grave a few years ago would suggest.

Popular American singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett is a regular visitor to San Pedro, Hes currently building a Margaritaville resort named after his 1977 hit and aimed at enticing island dreamers from the US to invest in a condo in paradise and no doubt hell have plenty of takers.

Its the same idea that Jasmine Hartin and her partner Andrew Ashcroft had with the beachfront resort they run. But, unfortunately for them, their tropical dream has turned into a nightmare. A policeman is dead. The daughter-in-law of a rich, powerful man with extensive business interests in Belize is being held responsible, and the authorities are under intense scrutiny to ensure justice is not only done, but is seen to be done.

To holidaymakers, the Caribbean lifestyle is all about lazy days, wide smiles and sand between your toes, with a ready drink to hand. For those who live there all year round, alarming encounters with the darker side of life in the tropics are all too often unavoidable.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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I lived on the tropical island where a British billionaires daughter-in-law allegedly killed a cop. Trust me, its no paradise - RT

NASAs Mars Exploration Program

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Astrobiology is a relatively new field of study, where scientists from a variety of disciplines (astronomy, biology, geology, physics, etc.) work together to understand the potential for life to exist beyond Earth. However, the exploration of Mars has been intertwined with NASAs search for life from the beginning. The twin Viking landers of 1976 were NASAs first life detection mission, and although the results from the experiments failed to detect life in the Martian regolith, and resulted in a long period with fewer Mars missions, it was not the end of the fascination that the Astrobiology science community had for the red planet.

The field of Astrobiology saw a resurgence due to the controversy surrounding the possible fossil life in the ALH84001 meteorite, and from the outsized public response to this announcement, and subsequent interest from Congress and the White House, NASAs Astrobiology Program (https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ )and one of its major programs, the NASA Astrobiology Institute (https://nai.nasa.gov/ ) were formed.

Also at this time, NASAs Mars Exploration Program began to investigate Mars with an increasing focus on missions to the Red Planet. The Pathfinder mission and Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) were sent to Mars to Follow the Water, recognizing that liquid water is necessary for life to exist on Earth. After establishing that Mars once had significant amount of water on its surface, the Mars Science Laboratory (which includes the Curiosity rover) was sent to Mars to determine whether Mars had the right ingredients in the rocks to host life, signaling a shift to the next theme of Explore Habitability. MEP is now developing the Mars 2020 rover mission (https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mars2020/ ) to determine whether life may have left telltale signatures in the rocks on Marss surface, a further shift to the current science theme Seek the Signs of Life.

Finding fossils preserved from early Mars might tell us that life once flourished on this planet. We can search for evidence of cells preserved in rocks, or at a much smaller scale: compounds called biosignatures are molecular fossils, specific compounds that give some indication of the organisms that created them. However, over hundreds of millions of years these molecular fossils on Mars are subject to being destroyed or transformed to the point where they may no longer be recognized as biosignatures. Future missions must either find surface regions where erosion from wind-blown sand has recently exposed very ancient material, or alternately samples must be obtained from a shielded region beneath the surface. This latter approach is being taken by the ExoMars rover (http://exploration.esa.int/mars/48088-mission-overview/ ) under development where drilled samples taken from a depth of up to 2 meters will be analyzed.

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Mars, fourth planet in the solar system in order of distance from the Sun and seventh in size and mass. It is a periodically conspicuous reddish object in the night sky. Mars is designated by the symbol .

An especially serene view of Mars (Tharsis side), a composite of images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in April 1999. The northern polar cap and encircling dark dune field of Vastitas Borealis are visible at the top of the globe. White water-ice clouds surround the most prominent volcanic peaks, including Olympus Mons near the western limb, Alba Patera to its northeast, and the line of Tharsis volcanoes to the southeast. East of the Tharsis rise can be seen the enormous near-equatorial gash that marks the canyon system Valles Marineris.

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Sometimes called the Red Planet, Mars has long been associated with warfare and slaughter. It is named for the Roman god of war. As long as 3,000 years ago, Babylonian astronomer-astrologers called the planet Nergal for their god of death and pestilence. The planets two moons, Phobos (Greek: Fear) and Deimos (Terror), were named for two of the sons of Ares and Aphrodite (the counterparts of Mars and Venus, respectively, in Greek mythology).

In recent times Mars has intrigued people for more-substantial reasons than its baleful appearance. The planet is the second closest to Earth, after Venus, and it is usually easy to observe in the night sky because its orbit lies outside Earths. It is also the only planet whose solid surface and atmospheric phenomena can be seen in telescopes from Earth. Centuries of assiduous studies by earthbound observers, extended by spacecraft observations since the 1960s, have revealed that Mars is similar to Earth in many ways. Like Earth, Mars has clouds, winds, a roughly 24-hour day, seasonal weather patterns, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and other familiar features. There are intriguing clues that billions of years ago Mars was even more Earth-like than today, with a denser, warmer atmosphere and much more waterrivers, lakes, flood channels, and perhaps oceans. By all indications Mars is now a sterile frozen desert. However, close-up images of dark streaks on the slopes of some craters during Martian spring and summer suggest that at least small amounts of water may flow seasonally on the planets surface, and radar reflections from a possible lake under the south polar cap suggest that water may still exist as a liquid in protected areas below the surface. The presence of water on Mars is considered a critical issue because life as it is presently understood cannot exist without water. If microscopic life-forms ever did originate on Mars, there remains a chance, albeit a remote one, that they may yet survive in these hidden watery niches. In 1996 a team of scientists reported what they concluded to be evidence for ancient microbial life in a piece of meteorite that had come from Mars, but most scientists have disputed their interpretation.

Since at least the end of the 19th century, Mars has been considered the most hospitable place in the solar system beyond Earth both for indigenous life and for human exploration and habitation. At that time, speculation was rife that the so-called canals of Marscomplex systems of long, straight surface lines that very few astronomers had claimed to see in telescopic observationswere the creations of intelligent beings. Seasonal changes in the planets appearance, attributed to the spread and retreat of vegetation, added further to the purported evidence for biological activity. Although the canals later proved to be illusory and the seasonal changes geologic rather than biological, scientific and public interest in the possibility of Martian life and in exploration of the planet has not faded.

During the past century Mars has taken on a special place in popular culture. It has served as inspiration for generations of fiction writers from H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the heyday of the Martian canals to Ray Bradbury in the 1950s and Kim Stanley Robinson in the 90s. Mars has also been a central theme in radio, television, and film, perhaps the most notorious case being Orson Welless radio-play production of H.G. Wellss novel War of the Worlds, which convinced thousands of unwitting listeners on the evening of October 30, 1938, that beings from Mars were invading Earth. The planets mystique and many real mysteries remain a stimulus to both scientific inquiry and human imagination to this day.

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Mars, the red planet: Facts and information

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The red planet Mars, named for the Roman god of war, has long been an omen in the night sky. And in its own way, the planets rusty red surface tells a story of destruction. Billions of years ago, the fourth planet from the sun could have been mistaken for Earths smaller twin, with liquid water on its surfaceand maybe even life.

Now, the world is a cold, barren desert with few signs of liquid water. But after decades of study using orbiters, landers, and rovers, scientists have revealed Mars as a dynamic, windblown landscape that couldjust maybeharbor microbial life beneath its rusty surface even today.

With a radius of 2,106 miles, Mars is the seventh largest planet in our solar system and about half the diameter of Earth. Its surface gravity is 37.5 percent of Earths.

Mars 101

Recent NASA exploratory expeditions revealed some of the red planet's biggest mysteries. This video explains what makes it so different from Earth and what would happen if humans lived there.

Mars rotates on its axis every 24.6 Earth hours, defining the length of a Martian day, which is called a sol (short for solar day). Marss axis of rotation is tilted 25.2 degrees relative to the plane of the planets orbit around the sun, which helps give Mars seasons similar to those on Earth. Whichever hemisphere is tilted closer to the sun experiences spring and summer, while the hemisphere tilted away gets fall and winter. At two specific moments each yearcalled the equinoxesboth hemispheres receive equal illumination.

But for several reasons, seasons on Mars are different from those on Earth. For one, Mars is on average about 50 percent farther from the sun than Earth is, with an average orbital distance of 142 million miles. This means that it takes Mars longer to complete a single orbit, stretching out its year and the lengths of its seasons. On Mars, a year lasts 669.6 sols, or 687 Earth days, and an individual season can last up to 194 sols, or just over 199 Earth days.

The angle of Marss axis of rotation also changes much more often than Earth's, which has led to swings in the Martian climate on timescales of thousands to millions of years. In addition, Marss orbit is less circular than Earths, which means that its orbital velocity varies more over the course of a Martian year. This annual variation affects the timing of the red planets solstices and equinoxes. On Mars, the northern hemispheres spring and summer are longer than the fall and winter.

Theres another complicating factor: Mars has a far thinner atmosphere than Earth, which dramatically lessens how much heat the planet can trap near its surface. Surface temperatures on Mars can reach as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit and as low as -225 degrees Fahrenheit, but on average, its surface is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 138 degrees colder than Earths average temperature.

The primary driver of modern Martian geology is its atmosphere, which is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. By Earth standards, the air is preposterously thin; air pressure atop Mount Everest is about 50 times higher than it is at the Martian surface. Despite the thin air, Martian breezes can gust up to 60 miles an hour, kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and massive fields of alien sand dunes.

Once upon a time, though, wind and water flowed across the red planet. Robotic rovers have found clear evidence that billions of years ago, lakes and rivers of liquid water coursed across the red planets surface. This means that at some point in the distant past, Marss atmosphere was sufficiently dense and retained enough heat for water to remain liquid on the red planets surface. Not so today: Though water ice abounds under the Martian surface and in its polar ice caps, there are no large bodies of liquid water on the surface there today.

Mars also lacks an active plate tectonic system, the geologic engine that drives our active Earth, and is also missing a planetary magnetic field. The absence of this protective barrier makes it easier for the suns high-energy particles to strip away the red planets atmosphere, which may help explain why Marss atmosphere is now so thin. But in the ancient pastup until about 4.12 to 4.14 billion years agoMars seems to have had an inner dynamo powering a planet-wide magnetic field. What shut down the Martian dynamo? Scientists are still trying to figure out.

Like Earth and Venus, Mars has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes, but the red planets are by far the biggest and most dramatic. Olympus Mons, the solar systems largest volcano, towers some 16 miles above the Martian surface, making it three times taller than Everest. But the base of Olympus Mons is so widesome 374 miles acrossthat the volcanos average slope is only slightly steeper than a wheelchair ramp. The peak is so massive, it curves with the surface of Mars. If you stood at the outer edge of Olympus Mons, its summit would lie beyond the horizon.

Mars has not only the highest highs, but also some of the solar systems lowest lows. Southeast of Olympus Mons lies Valles Marineris, the red planets iconic canyon system. The gorges span about 2,500 miles and cut up to 4.3 miles into the red planets surface. The network of chasms is four times deeperand five times longerthan Earths Grand Canyon, and at its widest, its a staggering 200 miles across. The valleys get their name from Mariner 9, which became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet when it arrived at Mars in 1971.

About 4.5 billion years ago, Mars coalesced from the gaseous, dusty disk that surrounded our young sun. Over time, the red planets innards differentiated into a core, a mantle, and an outer crust thats an average of 40 miles thick.

Its core is likely made of iron and nickel, like Earths, but probably contains more sulfur than ours. The best available estimates suggest that the core is about 2,120 miles across, give or take 370 milesbut we dont know the specifics. NASAs InSight lander aims to unravel the mysteries of Marss interior by tracking how seismic waves move through the red planet.

Marss northern and southern hemispheres are wildly different from one another, to a degree unlike any other planet in the solar system. The planets northern hemisphere consists mostly of low-lying plains, and the crust there can be just 19 miles thick. The highlands of the southern hemisphere, however, are studded with many extinct volcanoes, and the crust there can get up to 62 miles thick.

What happened? Its possible that patterns of internal magma flow caused the difference, but some scientists think it's the result of Mars suffering one or several major impacts. One recent model suggests Mars got its two faces because an object the size of Earths moon slammed into Mars near its south pole.

Both hemispheres do have one thing in common: Theyre covered in the planets trademark dust, which gets its many shades of orange, red, and brown from iron rust.

At some point in the distant past, the red planet gained its two small and irregularly shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos. The two lumpy worlds, discovered in 1877, are named for the sons and chariot drivers of the god Mars in Roman mythology. How the moons formed remains unsolved. One possibility is that they formed in the asteroid belt and were captured by Marss gravity. But recent models instead suggest that they could have formed from the debris flung up from Mars after a huge impact long ago.

Deimos, the smaller of the two moons, orbits Mars every 30 hours and is less than 10 miles across. Its larger sibling Phobos bears many scars, including craters and deep grooves running across its surface. Scientists have long debated what caused the grooves on Phobos. Are they tracks left behind by boulders rolling across the surface after an ancient impact, or signs that Marss gravity is pulling the moon apart?

Either way, the moons future will be considerably less groovy. Each century, Phobos gets about six feet closer to Mars; in 50 million years or so, the moon is projected either to crash into the red planets surface or break into smithereens.

Since the 1960s, humans have robotically explored Mars more than any other planet beyond Earth. Currently, eight missions from the U.S., European Union, Russia, and India are actively orbiting Mars or roving across its surface. But getting safely to the red planet is no small feat. Of the 45 Mars missions launched since 1960, 26 have had some component fail to leave Earth, fall silent en route, miss orbit around Mars, burn up in the atmosphere, crash on the surface, or die prematurely.

More missions are on the horizon, including some designed to help search for Martian life. NASA is building its Mars 2020 rover to cache promising samples of Martian rock that a future mission would return to Earth. In 2020, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos plan to launch a rover named for chemist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was crucial to deciphering the structure of DNA. The rover will drill into Martian soil to hunt for signs of past and present life. Other countries are joining the fray, making space exploration more global in the process. In July 2020, the United Arab Emirates is slated to launch its Hope orbiter, which will study the Martian atmosphere.

Perhaps humans will one day join robots on the red planet. NASA has stated its goal to send humans back to the moon as a stepping-stone to Mars. Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, is building a massive vehicle called Starship in part to send humans to Mars. Will humans eventually build a scientific base on the Martian surface, like those that dot Antarctica? How will human activity affect the red planet or our searches for life there?

Time will tell. But no matter what, Mars will continue to occupy the human imagination, a glimmering red beacon in our skies and stories.

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Mars, the red planet: Facts and information

How NASA is hunting for signs of life on Mars – PBS NewsHour

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Perseverance, NASAs latest rover, landed on Mars in February with a mission to answer questions about the past and future of life on the Red Planet.

Over the course of that mission lasting nearly two years, or one Martian year the rover will conduct research using a range of instruments designed to probe the planets landscape for glimpses into its ancient past.

Researchers hope to gain a better sense of whether primordial life once existed on our celestial neighbor (and if so, where and when), and how technology may pave the way for astronauts to sustain their own lives during future voyages to its now-desolate surface.

In a few short months, the rover and its companions have achieved massive technological feats and uncovered a trove of meaningful data and fascinating photos. Perseverance has already overseen the successful demonstration of two pieces of experimental technology a small helicopter named Ingenuity and a toaster-sized contraption called MOXIE that converts Marss carbon dioxide-heavy atmosphere into oxygen.

The rover is stationed in Marss Jezero Crater, which researchers believe was home to a lake more than 3.5 billion years ago. Researchers back home have been rolling out software updates and checking out the highly autonomous vehicles accessories. Over the next few weeks, Perseverance will begin evaluating local geology in search of rock samples that may hold important clues.

Ultimately, the hope is that a future mission can pull off the complicated task of transporting a cache of those samples to Earth for further study. (That plan is still a proposal for now, and hasnt yet been signed off on by NASA.)

Its been an eventful first few months for Perseverance, its technological companions and the hundreds of researchers who monitor and operate them here on Earth. Heres a look at what they have accomplished, and whats next for the mission.

In NASAs Mars mission, MOXIE means more than spunk and determination it stands for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (in-situ means in place). In April, the pint-sized piece of tech achieved its goal of extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.

Pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and splitting it into carbon monoxide and oxygen, the device produced about 5 grams of oxygen, roughly enough for an astronaut to breathe for 10 minutes.

During the missions first year, MOXIE will perform that demonstration up to 10 times. The density of the planets atmosphere changes dramatically depending on factors like whether its night or day which significantly influences temperature as well as which season it is. Researchers aim to determine whether it will work in those varying conditions.

The basic idea is to produce oxygen during all seasons, during all times of day, and thats the plan, said Jeffrey Hoffman, a former astronaut and current deputy principal investigator of the MOXIE experiment.

An air pump pulls in carbon dioxide gas from the Martian atmosphere, which is then regulated and fed to the Solid OXide Electrolyzer (SOXE), where it is electrochemically split to produce pure oxygen. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If future generations of MOXIE ever accompany astronauts on trips to Mars, the machine will have to be equipped to run at all times the existing MOXIE must be turned on and allowed to heat up to about 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit ahead of each demonstration and automatically calibrate itself to safely convert atmosphere at any density.

One of the purposes of MOXIE is not just to demonstrate that it works, but to learn enough about the whole system so that we can actually help inform the design of a much larger scale autonomous oxygen producing system, which is the ultimate goal of this whole enterprise, Hoffman said.

A crew of six astronauts sustaining themselves on Mars for two or so years would need maybe a ton of oxygen, he added. The rocket theyd rely on to lift them off Mars and return them home would need about 25 to 30 times as much oxygen to fire up.

Sending all of that oxygen with any given mission would be a monumental and expensive feat. If you can produce the oxygen you need on Mars instead of lugging it there, youre way ahead of the game, Hoffman said.

The Ingenuity helicopter is the first remotely controlled aircraft to successfully take flight on a planet other than our own.

This mission makes a huge difference in showing its not just a dream, said Havard Grip, who serves as Ingenuitys chief pilot and flight control lead. This is reality.

Five test flights were planned for Ingenuity, each planned to be a little bit farther or faster than the one before it. The experiment was such a resounding success that Ingenuity keeps taking to the air.

During its sixth flight, an error occurred for the first time: One of images that Ingenuity regularly takes to orient itself was lost, meaning that each subsequent image had an inaccurate timestamp. That confused the helicopters system, Grip explained. It began trying to correct things that werent really errors, which impacted the algorithm thats used to keep Ingenuity stable and under control.

Fortunately, NASA engineers designed the helicopter to account for timing errors, so Ingenuity was able to complete a safe landing.

This obstacle, an unknown unknown challenge, as researchers sometimes put it, offered a kind of stress test, which Ingenuity passed handily.

We were extremely pleased with how everything has been performing up until this point, Grip said. And really that can be said for flight six, too, in many ways.

This black-and-white image was taken by the navigation camera aboard NASAs Ingenuity helicopter during its third flight, on April 25, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Plans for flight seven involve sending the helicopter around 350 feet south of where it now sits, and will be the second time Ingenuity will land at an airfield that it did not survey from the air during a previous flight, according to NASA. Researchers are confident that this location is relatively flat and has few surface obstructions based on images captured by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Ingenuitys performance so far has generated mountains of useful data, Grip said, especially regarding how the helicopter itself has behaved in real-life conditions on Mars. Much like MOXIE, that information will be invaluable when it comes to engineering future generations of comparable technology.

Grip emphasized that theres no expectation that anything Ingenuity does from here on out will help Perseverance achieve its goals, but any useful information it can offer is a kind of welcome bonus. He noted that aerial images Ingenuity snapped during a recent flight may be of interest to the researchers who work on Perseverance.

Ingenuitys time is expected to wrap up at some point this August, after which point it will be left behind. Until then, it will remain in the general vicinity of Perseverance, which serves as a kind of communication hub that connects it to researchers on Earth.

Regardless of what becomes of Ingenuity, the helicopter has already achieved an objectively impressive goal. We actually have an operating helicopter on Mars, and its doing its job fabulously, Grip said.

After many Martian days, called sols, of supporting these tech demonstrations and having its myriad tools and accessories meticulously evaluated by researchers back home, Perseverance is ready to kick off its own scientific journey.

The team on Earth has been transmitting software updates that enable crucial features, like improving the rovers navigation system so that its able to map and avoid any hazards that are in the way of its predetermined path.

Perseverance was built with very smart, very autonomous software, said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But rather than put all of its bells and whistles into action upon arrival, researchers instead took a more cautious approach that involved taking baby steps to make sure everything was working properly.

So far, the rover is looking good and is expected to collect its first samples in late June or early July, once researchers can confirm key capabilities, like its auto-navigation and final sampling systems, are in order.

Perseverance is expected to pick up four times as many samples as did Curiosity, NASAs previous rover. The rover is more advanced than its predecessor, which allows it to get more done in less time and with more autonomy.

We have to be faster. We have to be more efficient. We have to drive to locations much more quickly, Trosper said. So thats what these things are enabling us to do.

At the moment, Perseverance is residing in one of the oldest parts of the lake bed that Jezero Crater once housed a lucky accident resulting from the rover landing a bit off its intended target. Its possible that the rover never would have made it to this particularly aged spot otherwise, Trosper noted.

The ancient, exposed terrain, which lies to the east of a nearby sand dune field, may offer some of the oldest samples Perseverance gets on its mission.

When it comes to geological sampling, older is better because, Trosper explained, geology is just layers of information that tells you what happens over time. Samples from this location should help answer questions about the farthest reaches of Jezeros primordial past.

Being able to get samples from this very old part of the crater is really important to making the whole story fit together, she added. Its a significant piece of the puzzle.

Perseverance is equipped with tools that will allow researchers to examine the rocks it comes across and determine which ones are worth sampling. When faced with a rock of interest, Perseverances drill can use one bit to abrade, or gently shave down, part of its surface, and another to blow a puff of air that removes the resulting dust. The rovers remote science instruments can then determine the elemental composition of the rock itself, and what information it might hold.

Sedimentary rocks are particularly useful in the lakebed because theyre more likely to have captured evidence or biosignatures of ancient life, if any ever existed there.

Igneous rocks, according to NASA, act as geological clocks that can help researchers map a more precise timeline of how the local landscape formed billions of years ago.

For Trosper, Perseverances high-tech capabilities are just as exciting as the mysteries its set out to solve.

Obviously the science itself is phenomenal, because this is the best place on Mars to look for evidence of ancient microbial life, and were here, Trosper said. But the [rovers] autonomy is also one of the hallmarks of this mission that I really am excited about.

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China’s Mars rover spotted on the surface by orbiting spacecraft – CNET

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This before and after set of images shows the landing site of the Zhurong rover in Utopia Planitia on Mars. The rover is the smaller of the two dots in the upper right-hand corner.

There's a long tradition of orbiting spacecraft looking down on Mars and picking out the tiny machines on the surface below. The latest entry in this lineage comes from China's Tianwen-1 mission. The orbiter snapped a picture of the Zhurong rover and its lander on June 2.

The China National Space Administration shared a look at the landing zone in Utopia Planitia, a broad plains region, on Monday. China is only the second nation to operate a rover on Mars, after the US.

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The rover and lander can be seen as small specks near each other in the top right-hand side of the image. Zhurong is the lower of the two dots. The other notable spots are where parts of the landing system, including the parachute and heat shield, landed.

The Zhurong rover is the smaller dot just below the lander.

"The dark area surrounding the landing platform might be caused by the influence of the engine plume during landing," CNSA said in a statement. "The symmetrical bright stripes in the north-south direction of the landing platform might be from fine dust when the landing platform emptied the remaining fuel after landing."

Images from the Tianwen-1 mission -- which consists of the spacecraft, the lander and the rover -- have been few and far between. Most recently in late May, we saw some wheel tracks left by the rover's first moves across the dusty and rocky ground.

The solar-powered rover has been rolling since May 22 and has an expected life span of around three months. It's gathering images of the surface and studying the planet's subsurface as it looks for signs of ice below.

CNSA doesn't typically release as much information on its space exploits as we're used to seeing from agencies like NASA and the European Space Agency, so tidbits like the orbital images give us an enticing glimpse into the mission.

FollowCNET's 2021 Space Calendarto stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.

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SAVANNAH, Ga (WSAV) The Curiosity Rover captures pictures of the Martian skyline and atmosphere every day. However in late May, Curiosity captured rare clouds in the sky using its in color Mast camera. These types of clouds dont occur that often in the very thin and dry atmosphere. Most clouds are typically found at the Planets equator when Mar is farthest from the Sun.

Two Earth years ago, NASA scientists noticed clouds forming earlier than expected. They made sure Curiosity would be set up to start documenting these rare clouds as soon as they appeared in January. The Rover captured images of wispy clouds of ice crystals.

Most Martian clouds are no higher than about 37 miles in the sky and are made of water ice. These rare clouds are at higher altitudes, at colder temperatures, and are most likely made of frozen carbon dioxide.

The Curiosity team was able to pin point the height of the rare clouds by following the position of the sun in the sky and the color of the Noctilucent clouds. The high level clouds glowed brighter as the sun was high in the sky. As the sun began to drop below their altitude, the ice crystals would darken. This is one useful way they can determine how high the clouds are.

Another cool discovery NASA found by looking at these rare clouds is that they have a pastel shimmer to them when the sun is at certain positions. These are called Mother of Pearl clouds. They tend to have a light colorful shimmer like a pearl would have. The shimmer comes from the cloud particles growing at the same rate and growing to the same size.

NASA scientists were able to solve the mystery of what is creating a long stream of thin clouds coming from a now-existent volcano. Arsia Mons is south of the Martian equator. These mysterious clouds formed seasonally during spring and summer morning due to the combination of orographic lift of the existent volcanos height (12 miles tall) and meteorological conditions.

For comparison, Mount Everest is only about 5 1/2 miles tall. The spring and summer morning weather conditions plus the height also explains why the clouds would dissipate by midday. Much like how morning fog can form here on Earth but clear by midday.

The flowing cloud formation can stretch as long as 1,100 miles and around 93 miles wide. The Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera caught the formation on the Red Planet. The images from the camera showed the clouds forming every spring and summer morning.

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NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover heads south to search for Signs of Life in Jezero Crater’s Lakebed – Clarksville, TN Online – Clarksville Online

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Pasadena, CA On June 1st, NASAs Perseverance Mars rover kicked off the science phase of its mission by leaving the Octavia E. Butler landing site. Until recently, the rover has been undergoing systems tests, or commissioning, and supporting the Ingenuity Mars Helicopters month of flight tests.

During the first few weeks of this first science campaign, the mission team will drive to a low-lying scenic overlook from which the rover can survey some of the oldest geologic features in Jezero Crater, and theyll bring online the final capabilities of the rovers auto-navigation and sampling systems.

By the time Perseverance completed its commissioning phase on June 1st, the rover had already tested its oxygen-generating MOXIE instrument and conducted the technology demonstration flights of the Ingenuity helicopter. Its cameras had taken more than 75,000 images, and its microphones had recorded the first audio soundtracks of Mars.

We are putting the rovers commissioning phase as well as the landing site in our rearview mirror and hitting the road, said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance project manager at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Over the next several months, Perseverance will be exploring a 1.5-square-mile [4-square-kilometer] patch of the crater floor. It is from this location that the first samples from another planet will be collected for return to Earth by a future mission, Trosper stated.

The science goals of the mission are to study the Jezero region in order to understand the geology and past habitability of the environment in the area, and to search for signs of ancient microscopic life. The team will identify and collect the most compelling rock and sediment samples, which a future mission could retrieve and bring back to Earth for more detailed study.

Perseverance will also take measurements and test technologies to support the future human and robotic exploration of Mars.

This image looking west toward the Stah geologic unit on Mars was taken from the height of 33 feet (10 meters) by NASAs Ingenuity Mars helicopter during its sixth flight, on May 22, 2021. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Spanning hundreds of sols (or Martian days), this first science campaign will pursue all of the missions science goals as the rover explores two unique geologic units in which Jezeros deepest (and most ancient) layers of exposed bedrock and other intriguing geologic features can be found.

The first unit, called the Crater Floor Fractured Rough, is the crater-filled floor of Jezero. The adjacent unit, named Stah (meaning amidst the sand in the Navajo language), has its fair share of Mars bedrock but is also home to ridges, layered rocks, and sand dunes.

To do justice to both units in the time allotted, the team came up with the Martian version of an old auto club-style map, said JPLs Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist and co-lead, along with Vivian Sun, of this science campaign. We have our route planned, complete with optional turnoffs and labeled areas of interest and potential obstructions in our path.

Most of the challenges along the way are expected to come in the form of sand dunes located within the mitten-shaped Stah unit. To negotiate them, the rover team decided Perseverance will drive mostly either on the Crater Floor Fractured Rough or along the boundary line between it and Stah. When the occasion calls for it, Perseverance will perform a toe dip into the Stah unit, making a beeline for a specific area of interest.

The goal of the campaign is to establish what four locations in these units best tell the story of Jezero Craters early environment and geologic history. When the science team decides a location is just right, they will collect one or two samples.

This annotated image of Jezero Crater depicts the routes for Perseverances first science campaign (yellow hash marks) as well as its second (light-yellow hash marks). (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Starting with the Crater Floor Fractured Rough and Seitah geologic units allows us to start our exploration of Jezero at the very beginning, said Hand. This area was under at least 100 meters [328 feet] of water 3.8 billion years ago. We dont know what stories the rocks and layered outcrops will tell us, but were excited to get started.

The first science campaign will be complete when the rover returns to its landing site. At that point, Perseverance will have traveled between 1.6 and 3.1 miles (2.5 and 5 kilometers) and up to eight of Perseverances 43 sample tubes could be filled with Mars rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Next, Perseverance will travel north then west toward the location of its second science campaign: Jezeros delta region. The delta is the fan-shaped remains of the confluence of an ancient river and a lake within Jezero Crater. The location may be especially rich in carbonates minerals that, on Earth, can preserve fossilized signs of ancient life and can be associated with biological processes.

From Sojourner to Spirit and Opportunity to Curiosity to Perseverance, Matt has played key roles in the design, construction, and operations of every Mars rover NASA has ever built, said Trosper. And while the project is losing a great leader and trusted friend, we know Matt will continue making great things happen for the planetary science community.

A key objective for NASAs Perseverance Mars Rovers mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planets geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASAs Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

nasa.gov/perseverance

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NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover heads south to search for Signs of Life in Jezero Crater's Lakebed - Clarksville, TN Online - Clarksville Online

Sols 3142-3143: Workspace of the Imagination NASA’s Mars Exploration Program – NASA Mars Exploration

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This image was taken by Left Navigation Camera onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 3140. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Download image

Another successful long drive brought us to another wondrous workspace, filled with textures and structures the team could not wait to explore. The engineers made it possible to get the arm to two targets for MAHLI and APXS analyses. The first, Minzac, is a small area of bedrock relatively free of veins and nodules. The second, Terrasson Lavilledieu, which in France is home to The Garden of the Imagination (a contemporary public park designed to represent the history of gardens), is a patch of gray vein material opportunistically lying flat for easy arm access. This vein material was sufficiently interesting to the team that it will also be the subject of Mastcam multispectral and ChemCam passive observations at the target Videix. Videix and Terrasson Lavilledieu are in very close proximity on the vein target, unlike their counterparts in France.

ChemCam will shoot across a nodule and bedrock at the target Vayres, and Mastcam will get another multispectral observation at this same target. The mid- and farfield terrain was as interesting as our workspace, and garnered imaging attention from both Mastcam and ChemCam. Mastcam will acquire a small mosaic of Larzac, a three dimensional jumble of intersecting veins standing up above the bedrock, a ten-image mosaic of the foot of a ridge extending down from higher on Mount Sharp, and a larger mosaic stretching from the workspace along the starboard side of the rover. ChemCam will acquire a long distance RMI mosaic of a butte in the sulfate unit many kilometers up the road from our current position.

As we sit at our current workspace, as we drive to our next one, and after we arrive there, DAN will ping the ground beneath the back wheels of the rover, tracking the H signal within the subsurface. RAD and REMS run regularly throughout the plan, continuing to build their steady records of the radiation and weather conditions in Gale. Navcam will acquire dust devil and cloud movies on the first sol of the plan, and both Navcam and Mastcam will measure the amount of dust in the atmosphere with images on second sol of the plan.

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Sols 3142-3143: Workspace of the Imagination NASA's Mars Exploration Program - NASA Mars Exploration

Adam Mars-Jones He blinks and night is day: ‘Light Perpetual’ LRB 17 June 2021 – London Review of Books

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Light Perpetual starts with a description of a V2 about to explode on a Saturday in 1944. The tone is one of uneasy technological rapture: a thread-wide front of change propagating outward from the electric detonator, through the heavy mass of amatol. Francis Spufford has written about rockets before, in his non-fiction, engaging imaginatively with the Russian space race in Red Plenty and playing the V2 campaign at least partly for comedy in Backroom Boys, where he assessed the impact on morale of the V2 in Lowestoft. It was nil: thanks to the inaccuracy of the weapons sent against them, the people of Lowestoft had no idea they were targets.

Here the point of impact (target is exactly the wrong word for so approximate a missile) is a crowded Woolworths in South-East London. The place and time correspond with a particularly terrible missile strike on New Cross on 25 November 1944. The novel is a sort of counter-history, imagining that five of the children killed on that day escaped unharmed, and charting the lives that they might have gone on to lead. Although Spufford makes clear in his acknowledgments that the book is partly written in memory of the children who died in the New Cross attack, he also insists that Alec, Vern, Jo, Val and Ben are invented souls without real-life counterparts, just as Bexford the fictional London borough in which the novel is set is not New Cross.

The children are unprivileged rather than underprivileged and the narrative chronicles a range of opportunities for this socially homogenous group one that earlier generations could hardly have imagined. There is sociological truth to this, though theres also the sense of a writer trying to bring as much of the world as possible into a book that is remarkably ambitious for its size. The twin girls, Jo and Val, lead almost caricaturally contrasting lives, determined at least in part by their different reactions to growing up in a family without men. Jo savours her independence while Val is mesmerised and then entrapped by a masculinity that turns out to be almost purely toxic. Jo has a career as a backing singer for a British pop star who has made it big in the United States, an ex-lover with whom her connection is never quite broken. She doesnt have the push to turn herself into a solo artist, but enjoys the consolation prize of a little house with its own little crease in the hillside filled with the deep green shade of pines and succulents, bamboo and yucca: the California green that can make you forget the California brown all around it. Of all the books characters, Jo makes the most determined attempt to escape the pull of London, and it doesnt last. Val, meanwhile, never thinks of leaving, and acts as a sort of den mother to a group of racist thugs, some of them all too sincere in their belief in their mission and in her man, Mike, the only beautiful thing in her life, as well as being the cause of all the ugly ones.

To choose a group for its representative quality, its ordinariness, implies a recognition of individual limitation. But fiction chafes against ordinariness. Jo has the advantage an advantage in a novel at least of synaesthesia, with sounds bleeding into colours in her head: Under the bridge at the streets end a train rushes by: a scuffing of rust brown at the hushs edge, and then a long feathering liquid streak of purple across it. Theres no danger of Jo herself lacking colour. Ben, an outsider in the book partly by virtue of being the youngest, has his visual perceptions rendered with at least as much intensity. The first time he goes to a football match, aged seven, his gaze strays upwards:

With all this noisy air open round him Ben follows the brightness up, and up. He sees the London smoke is only a footstool. Above, the rain as it leaves mounts in a curving wall, immense, slate grey, slate purple. An anvil, pulling back. At the very top, it cauliflowers. It goes to bumps and lumps and smoothed-out tiny battlements too complicated for your eyes, but all crisp and clear.

Even in his first appearance, on the day of the V2 detonation that the book cancels, he is described as looking slightly mazed, as usual. He cant be more than two. His later history suggests a predisposition to obsessive thoughts and, as at the football match, he is always shifting his focus away from the world around him. He doesnt notice the goal that everyone else is cheering, dwelling instead on the point of gold the ball made when the sun caught it as it flew its an epiphany or a seizure or a bit of both. The conventions in play are similar to those in Updikes Rabbit books, where the protagonists lack of large-mindedness does not prevent Updike from imagining him largely, as Roger Sale put it in the New York Times, though they are stretched when very literary formulations are meant to be Bens unspoken words: Each tree stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summers discarded yellow petticoat. This seems too sharply eloquent, at a time when his thoughts are described as being wrapped in dustsheets, like furniture in an unused room.

As far as large-mindedness goes, Vern is a non-starter. Its not easy to find the sparkle in a life devoted to acquisitiveness and double-dealing, to amoral manoeuvres that are shrewd but not shrewd enough. Spufford gives Vern a perverse streak of sensitivity in one supremely aestheticised area. He has a responsiveness to opera that makes it hard, when he spots Maria Callas in a restaurant, to concentrate on tricking a footballer into accepting liability for any debts his latest enterprise runs up. Out of the chrysalis of the usual him has crept this damp-winged other Vern, who only wants to stare even if the footballer, following Verns eyes, can see only a skinny, foreign-looking woman in her forties.

This aspect of Verns character is introduced early enough to substantiate later scenes, when for instance he stages a lavish banquet for himself on the lawn at Glyndebourne, the waiter cooking an omelette aux fines herbes over a silver spirit lamp, its blue flame almost invisible in the June sunlight, the aroma of chervil and butter advertising the success of the outer Vern, while the inner one waits for the rapture of curtain up. At other times he is called on to channel abstract thought, a cool examination of his own instinctive recoil from the old houses he specialises in renovating and selling on:

Chewed up by time, used up by time, in a funny way contaminated by time, as if all the lives lived in this heavy rookery for humans, first the posh ones with the wigs and ball dresses, then all the ever poorer clerks and labourers and flotsam from around the world, with their coughing children, and their meals cooked on gas rings in dirty corners, have made it impossible for there ever to be a fresh start here, a new beginning, there being so much living and dying already ingrained here, stuck to surfaces like grease, laid down in scungy thicknesses.

He even contemplates the idea that these buildings will still be standing when we are removed as mortal rubbish. The sense that Vern is a pint pot having a quart of insight poured into it is inseparable from the way this unspectacularly ambitious book works as a whole, as it seeks not only to track five individuals across two-thirds of a century but to sketch their city on a grander time scale. At one point, driving past Eltham on the A20, listening to Joan Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor on his cars sound system, what Vern sees comes close to a rival aria:

The 1930s semis with their triangular raised eyebrows; the Edwardian schools and the brutalist ones; the corner shops now selling lentils and fenugreek; the railway arches filled with little garages; everywhere the plane trees, the sycamores, the horse chestnuts, so wet now they stand like pulpy chandeliers, dribbling and drooling, filtering the light away so the pavements are dim beneath.

Some writers who started their careers with non-fiction are drawn to the freedom the novel offers, and this must in some way be true of Spufford, but the spirit of scrupulousness in his research carries over, deepening invention rather than confining it. Readers of his first novel, Golden Hill, could almost believe they understood the intricacies of 18th-century American monetary practice, unless called on to explain it themselves. He has admitted to a tiny slip in that book, the mention of liquorice as a confection rather than a medicinal root before the apothecary George Dunhill had the idea of adding sugar to it. A chance encounter on my part with an episode of the Antiques Roadshow suggests that a characters having trouble sleeping thanks to a loose spring is also (undamagingly) anachronistic for 1745.

Readers of Light Perpetual can get precise and unfussy answers to any number of questions. Who is responsible for Mikes version of power dressing? Val, the friend of British nationalists, of course.

There arent enough members of the white races vanguard for the uniforms to come from a factory. They have to be home-made. The blue BM crossed-circle came as a machine-embroidered patch, but she was the one who had to get it to work on a khaki shirt, who had to make the jacket and the armband, to improvise the Sam Browne belt He got photographed in it for his membership card, and now it hangs in the wardrobe in a dry-cleaning bag.

What makes of car would be driven by the first, semi-bohemian wave of gentrifiers in South-East London? Elderly green Saab, mossy Audi, silver Volvo estate missing a hubcap. What is the music like on the Assemblies of Salvation circuit of evangelical churches? Gospel settings of old hymns, and a touch of Highlife for those nostalgic for Ibadan, and new worship songs from the sacred (but still funky) end of soul. What sources of funding could an enterprising head teacher hope to tap in the first decade of this millennium? SEAL money, EiC money, EMAG money, LIG money, NDC money, NRF money. Nowhere does the virtue of compression become the vice of density or cross the line into knottiness of texture.

The paths of characters who were close as children hardly cross in later life. As a result, the single episode in which a main character intervenes in the life of another has an almost allegorical quality, something Spufford is unlikely to want if he did, he would have indulged the trope more freely. Alecs father was in the print, and Alec follows him into the business. In one lovely, lucid pageSpuffordhymns the compositors trade. Alec joyfully immerses himself in the physicality of work, held in a womb of mechanical noise, to be monitored with some spare fraction of a busy mind, because a variation or blockage in it could be a sign that Mama Linotype is about to squirt molten metal at your legs. By 1979, Alec is on strike. It turns out that he has committed his life to an obsolete technology. Now he must acquire some domestic skills while his wife, Sandra, goes out to work. Theres a knock on the door, and he recognises Vern, who is also at a low ebb, in search of any council tenant ill, old or lonely who can be persuaded to sell. With discounts available for council house buyers, at last theres a government thats on his side the same government that is busy crushing unions like Alecs. A chance remark of Alecs alerts Vern to the gentrifying trend on Bexford Rise. This is news to Vern, but hes not the type to waste time. The reader is offered a tableau: Opportunism superseding Principle.

The outward-facing aspect of the novel extends to the way its characters pay attention to people outside their own social groups. I remember Angela Carter saying that she warmed to any novel (I think she mentioned Maureen Duffys Capital) whose characters used public transport it made a nice change. Late in life, Alec makes vivid mental notes on his fellow passengers while travelling on the tube (Square-faced pasty white boy, with swags of beard at the corners of his jaw, like a playing-card kings). At the same age Jo, riding a 54 bus, observes white girls whose thongs show above the back of their low-rise jeans (God, what a stupid fashion) and black boys with heads shaved into cryptic sigils, getting on and off in obedience to the invisible frontiers of their postcode wars. Her favourite place on a bus has always been at the front of the top deck, enjoying that stilt-walkers sway, that giraffe-riders ungainly perch above the street. Alec imagines the future London he wont live to see, its green porcelain architecture borrowed from H.G. Wellss Time Machine a book he has never forgotten. Or the towers a kilometre high from which it will be possible to see the Channel gleaming in the sun. Or the shrunken half-drowned settlement ringed by steaming paddies. In the section describing Jos bus ride, Spufford inserts a complementary vision of the citys distant past: Bexford, Lewisham, Woolwich: permanent-sounding names for gravel beds left behind by the rivers random swinging this way and that across a basin of clay between hills, for millions of years during which there were no names, no city, no humans. Here is a speculation that cant easily be given to one of the novels characters, and so it appears as a paragraph within brackets, extraterritorial.

The initial set-up of Light Perpetual, with five figures, three male and two female, silhouetted against catastrophe, suggests an inverted version of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilders critical and popular triumph of 1927. Wilder also began and ended his novel with the death of a group: five characters fall into a ravine when a fictional bridge in Peru collapses on 20 July 1714. This dramatic beginning allows Wilder to investigate the event under the symmetrical chapter headings of Perhaps an Accident and Perhaps an Intention. The early announcement of serious intention licenses him to explore playful and comic tones without fear of seeming trivial. Like the lead weights sewn into curtain hems, it makes sure the material hangs properly.

The framing device in Light Perpetual doesnt have so much to offer. Its a strange commemoration of the children who died in the New Cross Woolworths that unwrites the original disaster. The conceit of those non-deaths, announced and immediately annulled, seems to be a way of symbolically starting from zero, wiping the board clean. The novel could have followed any group of children over the same period and had as much to say about the sights, smells, sounds and social economy of a city in flux. It isnt a necessary or even an efficient way of enabling the reader to enter the narrative.

The book is structured in separate chronological sections, starting in 1949 and proceeding in leaps of fifteen years. They are announced by headings that use t to represent the time of the explosion (t + 5, t + 20 and so on), but the time scheme is arbitrary. A choice has been made to excise vast tracts of time so that what remains can be modelled with superlative fullness. Each of Updikes Rabbit novels concentrated on a single period, and Richard Ford did something similar in the sequence that began with The Sportswriter, meaning that no event need be skipped. Alec, dancing with his ex-wife, may feel that fifteen years are nothing, but fifteen years in these pages is long enough to contain a long prison sentence, subsequent rehabilitation and eventually the training required to answer phones as a Samaritan. Its long enough for a mod to become a skinhead, for a teaching career to begin and end. Its long enough for a black woman seen by her family as a QC in the making to become an MP in reality. For one of the characters, dying in a hospice, able to control the dosage of his morphine pump, time blurs and moves in jumps. People come and are suddenly gone, he blinks and night has become day or day become night. We wake to a changed world without any memory of having left it. Vicky is seriously ill with bulimia? We had no idea. Her grandfather Alec is shocked too, not having seen her for a while, but readers havent encountered Vicky since she was a toddler. When Jo refers to a toe-stubbing trip over times doorstep she is talking about a technical problem in synchronising a recording, but the phrase could be taken as a description of how the novel itself unfolds. A gap of fifteen years between sections seems to set the mesh of the net too wide.

In Seven Up!, Michael Apted chose a group of seven-year-olds and returned to his interview subjects at intervals of seven years. In 20 Sites n Years, a different sort of documentary project, Tom Phillips set out in 1973 to take pictures of twenty London streets on (roughly) the same day every year, at the same time of day and from the same position. There is only incidental human presence in the images, and at first the succession of years gives an impression of changelessness, but then there are sudden leaps, and even in the absence of drastic transformation there are nuances to be extracted, as Phillips describes: Although a quiet side street (or perhaps because of that) it seems to get dug up more frequently than any other: changes in the post-operative tar show where the latest incision has been made.

The human eye allows us to see a succession of still images projected at the appropriate speed as moving pictures. Readers of fiction have much more flexibility to generate an illusion of continuity, but at a certain point it breaks down. In his most recent novels, The Strangers Child and The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst introduced long gaps into the narrative in a way that requires the readers relationship with the story to be renegotiated almost from scratch (the new time period tends to bring with it new points of view, further testing the relationship). The obvious choice of fictional genre to combine coherence and a long, interrupted timespan is that undemanding form the family saga, and although it would be slightly mad to urge such a thing on writers as sophisticated and accomplished as Hollinghurst and Spufford, their solutions pose problems of their own. In Proust and Anthony Powell, the shock of character as it develops over time is situated within an immense continuity. Even so there can be a limit to what is plausible. Not every reader is convinced by the last incarnation of Powells Widmerpool, or by the transformation of Prousts Bloch or Gilberte. They would be still less persuasive if they werent part of an apparently seamless whole.

If time isnt continuous, it becomes barely recognisable. In Robert Coovers great story Going for a Beer, barely a thousand words long, the continuousness is deceptive, belonging to language and not to the experience language claims to represent. He finds himself sitting in the neighbourhood bar drinking a beer, it starts,

at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps hell have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. There is a young woman sitting not far from him who is not exactly good-looking but good-looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is. Did he finish his beer? Cant remember. What really matters is: Did he enjoy his orgasm? Or even have one?

The reading brain smooths out the first slip forward in time, but they just keep coming until they cant be ignored. The effect is both rich and desolating, whether you read the story as a realistic account of the damage done to memory through alcohol, or as a wild exaggeration of inhabiting the consequences of decisions you dont quite remember making. Spufford refers to something similar in Light Perpetual when Alec, attending a family wedding, thinks of marriage as an exceptional event on precisely this basis, the astonishment of standing on the magic pivot, the trampoline of transformation, where your life is being changed and for once you know it.

In the weakest part of the novel, Ben is in his late thirties and working as a bus conductor. He is prey to obsessive thoughts (specifically, images of cannibalistic barbecue) that leave him barely able to function. Images of dripping fat and bubbling skin fill his mind, and the page fills up with the words charred ribs, first in italics and then full caps. This is new: in the 1964 episode Ben was a voluntary patient in a mental hospital, dosed up on Largactil and grateful for it, escaping awareness of an unnamed Trouble. In 1979 his misery can be blurred in the evening by dope, but must be endured during the day, and the episode ends with a one-phrase paragraph: So many days like this.

Its precisely this dailiness thats been removed from Light Perpetual, and fifteen yearliness cant take its place. Apteds seven-year gaps meant the series couldnt offer dailiness, but it did give a sense of how intractable, how chronic, things like class position and mental illness could be. When Ben next appears, in 1994, his demons have been exorcised. He is a new man, redeemed by love and faith; although his transformation is tenderly described, it seems unreal. The conjurors wand that abolishes fifteen years at a go cant also restore the magic continuity of time.

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Adam Mars-Jones He blinks and night is day: 'Light Perpetual' LRB 17 June 2021 - London Review of Books

Full-Length Trailer: The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill – ChristianityToday.com

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When Mars Hill Church was planted in Seattle in 1996, few would have imagined where it would lead. But in the next 18 years, it would become one of the largest, fastest-growing, and most influential churches in the United States. Controversy plagued the church, though, due in no small part to the lightning-rod personality at its helm: Mark Driscoll.

By 2014, the church had grown to 15,000 people in 15 locations. But before the year was over, the church collapsed. On January 1, 2015, Mars Hill was gone.

Hosted by Mike Cosper, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill explores the inside story of this church, its charismatic leader, and the conflicts and troubles that brought about its end. Youll hear from insiders and experts, tracing the threads of this story to so many others that shape the church today.

Listen to the trailer and subscribe today. The full series launches on June 22.

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Full-Length Trailer: The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill - ChristianityToday.com