The central star forming the Southern Ring Nebula is dying, emitting the "messy" red dust that forms its titular rings, and researchers now understand the phenomenon visible through a high-powered telescope is caused by multiple stars, not just one.
A team of 70 researchers found there were two or more "unseen" stars that created the circular shapes around the nebula.
A nebula, as described by NASA, is a term for a cloud of dust and gas in space formed from the explosion of a dying star.
The team behind the research, led by Orsola De Marco of Macquarie University in Sydney, analyzed 10 of NASA's James Webb Telescope images and existing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory.
"With Webb, it’s like we were handed a microscope to examine the universe," De Marco said in NASA's press release."There is so much detail in its images. We approached our analysis much like forensic scientists to rebuild the scene. "
The Southern Ring Nebula is aging, which is why researchers are interested in how it was created and what is happening. The processes of the dying star created red gas forming the nebula, making for what researchers call a "messy death."
"We think all that gas and dust we see thrown all over the place must have come from that one star, but it was tossed in very specific directions by the companion stars," Joel Kastner, a team member from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, said in NASA's press release.
The team was able to pinpoint the mass of stars that created the nebula, which shows the central star was nearly three times bigger than the sun at the time. After it started shedding layers of gas and dust, which happens as stars age, the team was able to see how many stars created the shapes of the Southern Ring Nebula.
"Knowing the initial mass is a critical piece of evidence that helped the team reconstruct the scene and project how the shapes in this nebula may have been created," the NASA website reads.
The team believes the central star interacted with one or two small companion stars which spread out the dusty red gas seen circling around.
By understanding how the nebula got its rings, researchers can apply the evidence to other systems in deep space answering questions on how stars are created and why the dust forms circles.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra speaks to reporters while she waits for the arrival of President Joe Biden at media day of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, September 14, 2022.
Rebecca Cook | Reuters
Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading Tuesday.
General Motors — The automaker's stock surged more than 7% after the company cruised past analyst estimates on the top and bottom lines for its fourth quarter. The company reported an adjusted $2.12 per share on $43.11 billion in revenue. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv were looking for $1.69 in earnings per share on $40.65 billion in revenue. The outperformance came despite profit margins narrowing year over year. GM also said it expected earnings to fall in 2023, but that guidance was still above analyst estimates.
Caterpillar — Shares fell about 3% after Caterpillar reported a 29% earnings decline. The construction machinery and equipment maker said higher manufacturing costs and foreign currency effects weighed on its quarterly results.
Paramount — Shares of the entertainment giant shed 1% after a downgrade to underperform from neutral by Macquarie, which cited its exposure to advertising. CNBC reported Monday that the company will integrate Showtime's streaming service into its main streaming platform, Paramount+.
A.O. Smith — Shares skyrocketed 9.6% after the manufacturing company reported earnings of $0.86 per share, beating consensus estimates. The company has beat EPS estimates three times over the last four quarters.
McDonald's — Shares dipped 2.60% after McDonald's reported its latest quarterly results. Although the fast food company's earnings and revenue beat expectations, management cautioned that rising cost pressures are likely to continue in 2023.
UPS — Shares of United Parcel Service gained 4% after shipping and transportation giant posted earnings of $3.62 a share, slightly ahead of the $3.59 expected by analysts surveyed by Refinitiv. UPS also raised its dividend and sanctioned a new $5 billion stock repurchase plan.
PulteGroup — Shares of the homebuilder soared 9% in midday trading after the company reported better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings. The company reported $3.63 in adjusted earnings per share on $5.17 billion of revenue, and its homebuilding gross margin rose year over year.
International Paper — Shares of the packaging and paper products company rallied more than 8% after reporting fourth-quarter adjusted operating earnings of 87 cents per diluted share, exceeding StreetAccount's estimate of 69 cents per diluted share. International Paper also gave fiscal year 2023 guidance of $2.8 billion compared to the $2.4 billion expected.
Pentair — Shares of Pentair surged 6.7% after the water treatment company reported earnings that topped Wall Street estimates for earnings and revenue. The company also gave solid forward guidance for earnings for the full year 2023.
A new report documents systemic discrimination in how the I.R.S. selects taxpayers to be audited, with implications for a debate on the agency’s funding.
WASHINGTON — Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.
The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.
Instead, the findings document discrimination in the computer algorithms the agency uses to determine who is selected for an audit, according to the study by economists from Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago and the Treasury Department.
Some of that discrimination appears to be rooted in decisions that I.R.S. officials made over the last decade as they sought to maintain tax enforcement in the face of budget cuts, by relying on automated systems to select returns for audit.
Those decisions have produced an approach that disproportionately flags tax returns with potential errors in the claiming of certain tax credits, like the earned-income tax credit, which supplements low-income workers’ incomes in an effort to alleviate poverty. Those tax returns are more often selected for audits, regardless of how much in owed taxes the agency might recover.
The result is audit rates of Black Americans that are between three and five times the rate of other taxpayers, even when comparing that group to other taxpayers who also claim the E.I.T.C.
The I.R.S. does not detail how it selects returns for audit. But the researchers were able to isolate several apparent explanations for why Black taxpayers are targeted so much more frequently. One is complexity: It is much harder for the agency to audit returns that include business income, because that process requires expertise from individual auditors. Such returns appear to be audited less often than returns from otherwise similar taxpayers who do not report income from a business.
Black taxpayers are far less likely than others to report business income. And Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.
In effect, the researchers suggest that the I.R.S. has focused on audits that are easier to conduct and as a result, finds itself disproportionately auditing a historically disadvantaged group rather than other taxpayers, including high net-worth individuals.
“What the I.R.S. chooses to focus on when it conducts audits can either undercut or complement our progressive tax system,” said Daniel Ho, an author of the study who is the faculty director of Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab, known as RegLab, where the study originated.
Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
The I.R.S. could instead program its algorithms to target audits toward more complicated returns with higher potential dollar value to the government if an audit found errors. In that case, the discrimination in the system would vanish, the authors concluded.
“Historically, there has been this idea that if federal agencies and other policymakers don’t have access to data on race and don’t explicitly take race into account when making policy decisions and allocating resources, the resulting outcome can’t be structurally biased,” said Evelyn Smith, an author of the paper who is a University of Michigan economics graduate student and visiting fellow at Stanford’s RegLab.
One lesson from the study, she said, “is that absolutely is not true.”
On his first day in office, President Biden signed a series of executive orders seeking to advance racial equity in the federal government and the nation. One of them included a directive to the White House budget office to “study methods for assessing whether agency policies and actions create or exacerbate barriers to full and equal participation by all eligible individuals.”
That order inspired researchers at the RegLab, which uses machine learning and other advanced techniques to help governments improve policies. It eventually yielded the study, which the authors will present publicly on Tuesday. It was conducted by Stanford researchers including Ms. Smith, Mr. Ho and Hadi Elzayn, along with Thomas Hertz and Robin Fisher of the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis, Arun Ramesh of the University of Chicago and Jacob Goldin of Chicago and Treasury.
The group wanted to use machine learning to improve the federal auditing process, and they wanted to know if that process was infused with racial bias. But they couldn’t easily observe it, because the I.R.S. does not ask taxpayers to declare their race on tax forms, or otherwise track race in any way.
President Biden signed an executive order to “study methods for assessing whether agency policies and actions create or exacerbate barriers to full and equal participation by all eligible individuals.”Doug Mills/The New York Times
Instead, the researchers built a way to essentially fill in the blanks on taxpayer race, through a partnership with Treasury that gave them access to 148 million tax returns and 780,000 audits, primarily from 2014, but ranging from 2010 to 2018.
They used taxpayer names — first and last — and the census demographics of their neighborhoods to effectively guess the race of any given filer. Then they examined those results in a small sample of returns from taxpayers who had reported their race elsewhere, on state election forms, in order to be confident that their estimates were correct.
The eventual findings were stark and surprising, the authors said. They saw an immediate correlation between the racial composition of neighborhoods and the audit rates in those areas — vivid signs of significantly higher audit rates for Black taxpayers.
Black Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. They are more likely than whites to claim the E.I.T.C. The authors wondered if that prevalence in claiming the credit might explain why Black taxpayers face more audits, because IRS data show the agency audits people who claim the E.I.T.C. at higher rates than other taxpayers.
But as the research progressed, the authors found the share of Black Americans claiming the E.I.T.C. only explained a small part of the audit differences. Instead, more than three-quarters of the disparity stems from how much more often Black taxpayers who claim the credit are audited, compared to E.I.T.C. claimants who are not Black.
Treasury officials are aware of the findings. The department started an advisory committee last fall to help it focus on disparities faced by Americans of color. This month, researchers from the department published an analysis of racial disparities in the tax code. It found a wide range of tax advantages that largely help higher-income Americans, like the mortgage interest deduction and preferential tax rates for investment income, disproportionately benefit white taxpayers.
Department officials are in the process of increasing tax enforcement on high earners and corporations that do not pay what they owe, using money from a sprawling climate, health and tax bill Mr. Biden signed into law last summer.
Asked about the study this week, a Treasury spokeswoman pointed to a letter that the deputy Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, wrote last fall to the I.R.S. commissioner on those enforcement efforts, which in effect prioritized cracking down on groups of high-income taxpayers.
“Historic challenges and underfunding have led to audit rates for those at the top of the distribution decreasing more than the correspondence audits of those at the bottom in the last decade, which should change,” Mr. Adeyemo wrote.
'More people should lose their jobs': Parents call for accountability at school where teacher was a shot
Nearly a month after a 6-year-old allegedly shot his teacher inside a classroom, students a Richneck Elementary are returning to class and navigating new safety protocols. CNN's Brian Todd reports.
A rare string of sensational crimes in Placentia has stoked fear in the community, says the mayor, who has issued a plea for a more robust police presence.
"Things are changing within the community, and it's not for the better," Mayor Keith Pearson told CBC News.
But RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Jolene Garland said there are no vacancies in the Placentia-Whitbourne detachment.
With the recent surge in incidents, Garland said "it's certainly not surprising this would be very alarming to people within the community."
"We are well equipped to deal with the crimes that are occurring."
Garland said it's not surprising that residents are alarmed by the recent incidents — which included an advisory for residents in some areas of the town to stay inside their homes — but she described them as a "spike."
"At this point in time it doesn't seem to be a trend, as opposed to a spike in calls for service at that given time," said Garland.
There's an RCMP detachment in Placentia, but the mayor says help often comes from the detachment in Whitbourne, more than 40 kilometres away.
"A lot can happen in an hour, because that's what the response time is right now," said Pearson.
Garland said some detachments in the province are short-staffed and there is a recruiting campaign underway to try to bolster the force's ranks. But that's not the case in Placentia, she said.
Mayor fielding calls from concerned citizens
Placentia is a town of more than 3,300 residents, located in Placentia Bay, some 120 kilometres southwest of St. John's. The town is mostly likely to make headlines for its connections to the Port of Argentia, its unique lift bridge, or its rich history as a battleground between the British and French as both sides vied for control of the fishery in the 18th century.
But instead of championing the economic opportunities in this town, Pearson is spending much of his time fielding calls from concerned residents.
"Talk to parents who got small kids who now can't let their kids out to play because they're afraid. Talk to seniors who feel like they gotta close their curtains in the middle of the day. These are stories I'm hearing," said Pearson.
There was a heavy police presence in Placentia on Dec. 23-24 following a violent home invasion and subsequent pursuit. One man was shot during the home invasion. (Submitted photo/Name withheld by CBC)
The fear factor escalated just before Christmas after heavily armed police officers swarmed several neighbourhoods in the town, responding to a violent home invasion.
Police say two men forced their way into a residence, armed with a gun and a baseball bat. The man and woman inside the residence were assaulted, and the man was shot.
The alleged home invaders were arrested separately the next day, with one of the men captured by an emergency response team after he barricaded himself in a home.
Both men face charges of attempted murder and aggravated assault, along with other alleged offences.
The shooting and subsequent manhunt, featuring police in military-style fatigues and assault rifles, and a large tactical vehicle, was one of a series of high-profile incidents in the town, said Pearson.
I've never in my nine years as a municipal leader, either as mayor or deputy mayor, fielded as many calls as I have with regards to fear and anxiety.- Keith Pearson
"I've never in my nine years as a municipal leader, either as mayor or deputy mayor, fielded as many calls as I have with regards to fear and anxiety," said Pearson.
The past 12 months have seen Placentia transformed from a quiet town where people rarely locked their doors, said the mayor, into a place where some residents are fortifying their homes with added security and lights.
Concerned about reprisals
CBC News spoke last week with a Placentia woman who was the victim of a home invasion last year and a married couple who used a kitchen chair earlier this month to prevent a man from breaking down their front door.
CBC News has agreed not to identify the victims, who expressed a deep fear that speaking out would only invite more trouble.
"It was the most horrific, terrifying experience of my life, and I'll never be the same as a result," said the woman, who barricaded herself in a bedroom last winter after a man smashed his way into her home and ransacked the upper level.
"It was like a movie. You hear the crescendo of the music and the footsteps and the door knob turns. 'I have a gun.' Three times it was said to me. 'I have a gun and I will use it.'"
Placentia Mayor Keith Pearson is raising the alarm over public safety in his town following a string of violent incidents, and is calling for an increased police presence. (Terry Roberts/CBC)
The intruder, Sherlock Jonathan Stacey, was eventually arrested, and convicted, but the homeowner is still living in fear.
"So now I got every kind of security system, every kind of light. I'm like a demented, crazy little woman at two o'clock in the morning, peeking out the blinds to see if there's somebody on the street."
Earlier this month, a couple was disturbed in the pre-dawn hours by a loud banging. When the homeowners went to investigate, they discovered a man trying to kick in their front door and shouting threats at them. The desperate homeowners jammed a kitchen chair against the door, and waited for an hour for police officers to arrive.
Once again, Sherlock Jonathan Stacey — back in Placentia after serving time for the earlier home invasion — is the alleged offender. Stacey was arrested and faces a long list of charges, including unlawful possession of a firearm.
When someone's safety is as risk, and there's a call for assistance, Garland said officers will respond "as soon as is possible." But factors such as the location of the officers and road conditions can affect response times, she said.
The mayor, meanwhile, blames the deteriorating situation on an escalation in the local drug scene, and the migration of people with known criminal backgrounds, like Stacey, to the town.
"There's a feeling that it's not what it used to be," he said.
Premier 'prepared to invest' in policing
Town leaders have brought their concerns to public safety minister John Hogan and the RCMP. The mayor says there are also plans to hold a public meeting.
Meanwhile, Pearson said he was encouraged by a comment made by Premier Andrew Furey during an interview with VOCM on Jan. 18.
When asked about crime and policing in the province, the premier said his government would be "prepared to invest" in enhanced policing services.
"I certainly will be one of the ones that will reach out and put up our hand and say, 'You know, we'd love to have some more policing here.' It would certainly help the quality lives of our residents," said Pearson.
Gautam Adani, chairman of Adani Group, speaks during the Forbes CEO Summit in Singapore, on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022. India needs fossil fuels to serve large populations and getting rid of all fossil fuels instantly would not work for the nation, Adani said. Photographer: Edwin Koo/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of most of the Adani Group companies continued to see sharp losses for a third consecutive trading session as the company attempted to rebut short seller firm Hindenburg's report, which accused the conglomerate of stock manipulation and an "accounting fraud scheme."
Adani Enterprises pared some of its earlier gains and closed 4.76% higher in Monday's session. That surge, amid a sell-off for most other Adani affiliates, came after the group published a lengthy response of more than 400 pages to Hindenburg's report over the weekend. It said that it will exercise its rights to "pursue remedies" to protect its investors "before all appropriate authorities."
Adani Enterprises' stock price remains more than 25% lower in the month-to-date, Refinitiv data showed. It proceeded with a secondary share sale worth $2.5 billion, which was overshadowed by a rout that wiped out a total of $48 billion as of last week's close.
His net worth fell $27.9 billion year-to-date, the index showed. It peaked at $150 billion on Sept. 20, 2022, before falling to to $92.7 billion as of last week's close, according to the index.
Despite small gains seen in Adani Enterprises, other affiliates of the Adani Group continued to plunge.
India's Nifty 50 Index traded 0.25% higher on Monday and hovered at the lowest since mid-October 2022.
'Attack on India'
Adani Group said Hindenburg's allegations were a "calculated attack on India, independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and growth story and ambition of India," in the response it released over the weekend.
The group's chief financial officer Jugeshinder Singh said in an interview with CNBC-TV18, an affiliate of CNBC, that the value of Adani Enterprises has not changed "simply because" of share price volatility, adding it instead lies in its "ability to incubate new businesses."
He added that he is confident Adani Enterprises' follow-on public offering will be fully subscribed, calling Hindenburg's report "simply a lie" and the timing of the report "malicious."
Hindenburg on Monday morning described the group's response "bloated" and claimed it "ignores every key allegation" against the conglomerate that it raised.
"Fraud cannot be obfuscated by nationalism of a bloated response that ignores every key allegation we raised," the short seller titled its response to Adani Group.
NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone. Can it properly be called grieving if the person who died is someone I never met? Probably not. But when I remember that John Prine will never write another song, it feels exactly like grief.
In any life, loss piles on loss in all its manifestations, and I find myself thinking often of the last lines of “Elegy for Jane,” Theodore Roethke’s poem about a student killed when she was thrown from a horse: “Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: / I, with no rights in this matter, / Neither father nor lover.”
Why, when we grieve, can it feel so urgent to make others understand the depth of our loss, even when we have no rights in the matter? I think it must be because people so often fail to honor grief at all. We talk of “processing” loss, of reckoning with it and moving on, as though bright life could not possibly include an unvanquishable darkness. Our culture persists in treating mourning as an unpleasant process we are obliged to endure while waiting for real life to restore itself.
But God help anyone who appears to move on too quickly, or too slowly, for the grief police will be coming for them. They may be accused of giving their late spouse’s clothes away too soon, or of mourning excessively a relationship that seems too far down the grief ladder to justify such a response. People have opinions about how others should manage loss.
Just before my mother died, I heard her say to a stranger, “My husband died nine years ago, and every night I tell God I’m ready to see him again.” Four days later, she got her wish.
I’m in no hurry to join my beloved dead, but like my mother before me, I am spending more and more of my days in their company. As my father was dying, and taking so long to die, I feared that the memories of his brutal last years would overwhelm four decades of happy times. I worried that the father who followed me into my own old age would be the fretful, pain-wracked old man and not the loving optimist who had always been my surest source of strength in an indifferent world.
It didn’t turn out that way. Next month he will have been gone for 20 years, but he is as real to me today as he was on any day of the 41 years we shared on this side of the veil.
I read a newspaper article reporting that NASA will be dismantling the Saturn rocket that rises above the Alabama welcome center on I-65 South, and I remember the model Saturn rocket, taller than my 10-year-old self, that Dad and I built together from chicken wire and papier-mâché. I hear a Cole Porter song on the radio, and I remember my parents dancing in the living room. I see a blue jay perched in the pine tree just outside our family room, and I recall how often I was told that “blue jay” is the first bird I learned to call by name. There were so many blue jays in so many pine trees back in those days when I was still a cherished late-born child, and my parents were still explaining the world to me.
It’s the same with all my lost beloveds. Reminders take every possible form — the feel of pine needles underfoot, the scent of a passing woman’s perfume, the tail end of a song on a coffee shop radio, a letter tumbling out of a long-unopened book, the taste of boiled peanuts, salty and warm. The reminders loop between past and present, between one lost loved one and another, a buzzing sweep of sensations and memories and time. I keep searching for the right metaphor to convey what I mean. Is it like a braid? A web? A shroud?
Finally the word comes to me: It’s a conversation. Every day, all day long, everyone I’ve ever loved is gathered around the same table, talking.
Ten years on, I rarely dream about my mother anymore, but in the dreams where she does appear, it’s the same as before — the ordinariness of life, the rush of relief I feel, her blithe unawareness of my suffering. I walk in the door, and there she is, there they all are, no happier to see me than they would be if I’d only walked in from another room in the same house. In my dreams, as in my waking life, the dead are still here, still talking to me.
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For three months, the disappearance of Hu Xinyu gripped China.
The whereabouts of the 15-year-old, who vanished from a boarding school in southern Jiangxi province in October, was for months among the most discussed topics on the Chinese internet.
It prompted numerous questions, speculation and round after round of exhaustive police searches – including one joined by thousands of residents earlier this month.
Then, on Sunday – more than 100 days after Hu went missing – local police said Hu’s body had been found in the woods near his school.
The discovery was made by a member of the public on Thursday. The body was wearing clothes matching those Hu wore when he went missing, prompting police to summon his family and their lawyer to the scene.
DNA tests later confirmed the body to be Hu, police in Shangrao city said in a statement.
A voice recorder found near the body had been sent for analysis, the statement said.
But rather than bring closure, the discovery has only raised more questions as to the circumstances surrounding his death.
Hu’s death was the top trending topic on China’s Twitter-like Weibo on Monday, with several hashtags raking up hundreds of millions of views.
Many comments questioned why the extensive police searches – complete with sniffer dogs, drones and thermal imaging equipment – failed to discover the body in an area so close to the school.
The woodland where Hu was found is only five minutes’ walk from the school, separated by a campus wall about two meters high, China National Radio reported.
An autopsy has been conducted, but the results have not been released, according to The Paper, a state-run news website.
It is not rare for children and teenagers to go missing in China, but the disappearance of Hu is one of the most high-profile cases in recent years. According to the Zhongmin Social Assistance Institute, a Beijing-based nonprofit, a million people went missing in China in 2020 – an average of 2,739 per day.
On Chinese social media, some questioned why, in a country known for its ubiquitous security cameras and high-tech surveillance, a 15-year-old boy could seemingly disappear without a trace.
This screengrab from surveillance camera footage shows Hu Xinyu walking down a hallway in his dormitory.
Courstesy Hu Xinyu's family
Hu had just started studying at the Zhiyuan High School, a private boarding school Yanshan county where he was admitted with a scholarship in September, when he suddenly vanished.
He was last seen on security camera footage walking down a hallway in his dormitory at dusk on October 14, about 15 minutes before an evening studying session was due to start in the classroom, according to police.
Hu disappeared somewhere between the dormitory and the teaching building, in an area that was not covered by security cameras, state media reported.
Hu’s family was notified by the school of Hu’s disappearance about six hours later, the family said in a missing person notice. Hu left his smart watch and cash in the dorm, carrying with him only a digital voice recorder and a school card used to pay for meals on campus, according to the notice.
Hu’s parents could not be reached by cellphone on Monday.
As the investigations and searches failed to lead to any progress, baseless speculation swirled online, underscoring the deep-rooted public distrust in local authorities.
In response, police released a detailed statement on January 7 making clear they had found no evidence that Hu was murdered, or had been involved in an accident inside the school. Hu likely left campus on his own, the police said.
The statement also detailed extensive police search efforts, covering nearly 40 hectares of woodland near the school, 200 kilometers of river, 22 kilometers of rail tracks, and 72 ponds and 3 reservoirs.
The search continued after January 7, involving thousands of people, including local residents who volunteered to join, state media reported at the time.
On Sunday, the website of People’s Daily, the flagship Communist Party mouthpiece, published an opinion piece calling for local authorities to address public concerns, including why they had failed to find Hu’s body in more than 100 days.
It also called for the public to remain patient for the official results.
“The Hu Xinyu incident has attracted the attention of the whole country. No one dares to fake anything, and no one can fake it,” the article said. “If there is any mistake, the consequences will be disastrous.”
Help is there if you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters. In the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.
But the tennis and K-pop worlds collided on Roger Federer’s Instagram, of all places, as he posted a picture of himself with the K-pop stars Blackpink in Paris.
“My kids said this was a definite IG post,” the 20-time grand slam winner commented and as his likes ticked well above one million, it appears they were right.
Blackpink – made up of four members, Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé – is one of the biggest bands in the world, boasting more YouTube subscribers than any other music artist and an army of fans known as “Blinks” – a portmanteau of “black” and “pink.”
“blink????” current world No. 7 Coco Gauff commented on Federer’s photo while Denis Shapovalov, who reached the third round at this year’s Australian Open commented: “Hahaha yessss,” alongside a sunglasses emoji.
Federer, who retired from competitive tennis in September, posted the photo exactly five years after he defeated Marin Cilic in the men’s Australian Open final – his 20th and last grand slam title.
Black Pink was named the 2022 Entertainer of the Year by Time magazine.
Christopher Polk/Penske Media/Getty Images
Since retiring, Federer has spent more time in the world of fashion, posting pictures on Instagram from Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday.
In March, he will join Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour to co-chair the 2023 Met Gala alongside singer Dua Lipa and actors Penélope Cruz and Michaela Coel.
Meg Kinnard, Holly Ramer And Jill Colvin, The Associated Press Published Saturday, January 28, 2023 8:21AM EST Last Updated Saturday, January 28, 2023 7:34PM EST
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Former President Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 White House bid with stops Saturday in New Hampshire and South Carolina, events in early-voting states marking the first campaign appearances since announcing his latest run more than two months ago.
“Together we will complete the unfinished business of making America great again,” Trump said at an evening event in Columbia to introduce his South Carolina leadership team.
Trump and his allies hope the events in states with enormous power in selecting the nominee will offer a show of force behind the former president after a sluggish start to his campaign that left many questioning his commitment to running again.
“They said, `He's not doing rallies, he's not campaigning. Maybe he's lost that step,”' Trump said at the New Hampshire GOP's annual meeting in Salem, his first event.
But, he told the audience of party leaders, “I'm more angry now and I'm more committed now than I ever was.” In South Carolina, he further dismissed the speculation by saying that ”we have huge rallies planned, bigger than ever before.“
While Trump has spent the months since he announced largely ensconced in his Florida club and at his nearby golf course, his aides insist they have been busy behind the scenes. His campaign opened a headquarters in Palm Beach, Florida, and has been hiring staff. And in recent weeks, backers have been reaching out to political operatives and elected officials to secure support for Trump at a critical point when other Republicans are preparing their own expected challenges.
In New Hampshire, Trump promoted his campaign agenda, including immigration and crime, and said his policies would be the opposite of President Joe Biden's. He cited the Democrats' move to change the election calendar, costing New Hampshire its leadoff primary spot, and accused Biden, a fifth-place finisher in New Hampshire in 2020, of “disgracefully trashing this beloved political tradition.”
“I hope you're going to remember that during the general election,” Trump told party members. Trump himself twice won the primary, but lost the state each time to Democrats.
Later in South Carolina, Trump said he planned to keep the state's presidential primary as the “first in the South” and called it “a very important state.”
In his speech, he hurtled from criticism of Biden and Democrats to disparaging comments about transgender people, mockery of people promoting the use of electric stoves and electric cars, and reminiscing about efforts while serving as president to increase oil production, strike trade deals and crack down on migration at the U.S-Mexico border.
While Trump remains the only declared 2024 presidential candidate, potential challengers, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, are expected to get their campaigns underway in the coming months.
After his South Carolina speech, Trump told The Associated Press in an interview that it would be “a great act of disloyalty” if DeSantis opposed him in the primary and took credit for the governor's initial election.
“If he runs, that's fine. I'm way up in the polls,” Trump said. “He's going to have to do what he wants to do, but he may run. I do think it would be a great act of disloyalty because, you know, I got him in. He had no chance. His political life was over.”
He said he hasn't spoken to DeSantis in a long time.
Gov. Henry McMaster, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and several members of the state's congressional delegation attended Trump's event at the Statehouse.
Trump's team has struggled to line up support from South Carolina lawmakers, even some who eagerly backed him before. Some have said that more than a year out from primary balloting is too early to make endorsements or that they are waiting to see who else enters the race. Others have said it is time for the party to move past Trump to a new generation of leadership.
South Carolina House Speaker Murrell Smith was among the legislative leaders awaiting Trump's arrival, although he said he was there not to make a formal endorsement but to welcome the former president to the state in his role as speaker.
Otherwise, dozens of supporters crammed into the ceremonial lobby between the state House and Senate, competing with reporters and camera crews for space among marble-topped tables and a life-sized bronze statue of former Vice President John C. Calhoun.
Dave Wilson, president of conservative Christian nonprofit Palmetto Family, said some conservative voters may have concerns about Trump's recent comments that Republicans who opposed abortion without exceptions had cost the party in the November elections.
“It gives pause to some folks within the conservative ranks of the Republican Party as to whether or not we need the process to work itself out,” said Wilson, whose group hosted Pence for a speech in 2021.
But Gerri McDaniel, who worked on Trump's 2016 campaign, rejected the idea that voters were ready to move on from the former president. “Some of the media keep saying he's losing his support. No, he's not,” she said. “It's only going to be greater than it was before because there are so many people who are angry about what's happening in Washington.”
The South Carolina event was in some ways off-brand for a onetime reality television star who typically favors big rallies and has tried to cultivate an outsider image. Rallies are expensive, and Trump added new financial challenges when he decided to begin his campaign in November - far earlier than many had urged. That leaves him subject to strict fundraising regulations and bars him from using his well-funded leadership political action committee to pay for such events, which can cost several million dollars.
Trump's campaign, in its early stages, has already drawn controversy, most particularly when he had dinner with Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who had made a series of antisemitic comments. Trump also was widely mocked for selling a series of digital trading cards that pictured him as a superhero, a cowboy and an astronaut, among others.
He is the subject of a series of criminal investigations, including one into the discovery of hundreds of documents with classified markings at his Florida club and whether he obstructed justice by refusing to return them, as well as state and federal examinations of his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden.
Still, early polling shows he's a favorite to win his party's nomination.
“The gun is fired, and the campaign season has started,” said Stephen Stepanek, outgoing chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party. Trump announced that Stepanek will serve as senior adviser for his campaign in the state.
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Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina, and Colvin from New York. Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.
