Syrian Christians call for greater protections after Christmas tree burned
Scores of Syrian Christians protested in the capital Damascus on Tuesday, demanding greater protections for their religious minority after a Christmas tree was set on fire in the city of Hama a day earlier.
Many of the insurgents who now rule Syria are jihadis, although Ahmad al-Sharaa, the leader of the main rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has renounced longtime ties to al-Qaeda and spent years depicting himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
It remains unclear who set the Christmas tree on fire on Monday, an act that was condemned by a representative of HTS who visited the town and addressed the community.
“This act was committed by people who are not Syrian, and they will be punished beyond your expectations,” the representative said in a video widely shared on social media.
“The Christmas tree will be fully restored by this evening.”
On Tuesday, protesters marched through the streets of Bab Touma, a neighbourhood in Damascus, shouting slogans against foreign fighters and carrying large wooden crosses.
“We demand that Syria be for all Syrians. We want a voice in the future of our country,” said Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II of the Syriac Orthodox Church as he addressed the crowd in a church courtyard, assuring them of Christians’ rights in Syria.
Since HTS led a swift offensive that overthrew former president Bashar al-Assad earlier this month, Syria’s minority communities have been on edge, uncertain of how they will be treated under the emerging rebel-led government.
“We are here to demand a democratic and free government for one people and one nation,” another protester said. “We stand united — Muslims and Christians. No to sectarianism.”
Published at Tue, 24 Dec 2024 16:45:37 +0000
NASA probe expected to make history with closest approach to the sun
A NASA spacecraft may have made history, flying closer to the sun than any object sent before.
The Parker Solar Probe had been on course to fly around 6.1 million kilometres from the surface of the sun on Tuesday at 6:53 a.m. ET.
“[It’s] travelling incredibly fast that it would be so fast that it would be roughly about 17 seconds to travel between Toronto and Vancouver,” Yeimy Rivera, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told CBC News Network.
Rivera said the probe got about 9.86 solar radii from the sun. For comparison, Earth’s distance is roughly 215 solar radii from the sun.
“So we’re incredibly excited to get some data and analyze the data,” said Rivera, who is part of the science team for the probe.
But NASA will be out of contact with the probe for a few days, meaning it won’t know if it survived its pass by the sun until Dec. 27, when Parker is set to transfer another beacon tone to confirm its health, NASA said on its website.
“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory” Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at APL, said on the NASA website.
“We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun.”
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the sun. Since then, it has flown straight through the sun’s corona — the outer atmosphere visible during a total solar eclipse.
Its purpose is to trace the flow of energy, to study the heating of the solar corona and to explore what accelerates the solar wind.
Quirks and Quarks7:37A NASA probe is going to touch the Sun for Christmas
Parker planned to get more than seven times closer to the sun than previous spacecraft, hitting speeds of 690,000 km/h at closest approach.
Its instruments are protected from the sun by a 11.43-centimetre carbon-composite shield, which can withstand temperatures reaching nearly 1,377 C.
It’ll continue circling the sun at this distance until at least September.
Scientists hope to better understand why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the sun’s surface and what drives the solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles constantly blasting away from the sun.
“So all of that is incredibly important for aspect of space weather that affects us directly,” Rivera said. “And also for understanding other stars as well. So how they operate and how their space weather and planets are influenced by their star.”
Published at Tue, 24 Dec 2024 14:43:24 +0000
