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Article content A Saskatchewan legislature member says his transgender children were targeted in an election campaign promise about school change rooms and he wants an apology from Premier Scott Moe. Opposition NDP member Jared Clarke told the legislative assembly this week his daughters were subjects of a complaint for using a girls’ change room at a southeast Saskatchewan school. “The premier put a target on the backs of my two 12-year-old kids,” Clarke said in the house. He said a news article of the complaint was published Oct. 16 and later that day a photo of his family was shared on social media linking them to the article. The next day at a campaign stop in Regina, Moe was asked about the complaint and announced he would ban “biological boys” from using girls change rooms at schools if his Saskatchewan Party won the Oct. 28 election. Moe had touted the proposal as his first order of business, but it was not in his party’s campaign platform. “He held a press conference to stoke fear and outrage about two kids at an elementary school, while my children’s picture was circulating on social media, identifying them, while unimaginable hate was raging down on my family,” Clarke told the assembly. “The premier owes my children an apology. He owes all transgender people in this province, especially kids, an apology for how he has made them feel so unsafe over the last year.” Moe’s office said in an emailed statement the premier and former Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill at no point identified the children. “The premier and his campaign consistently stated that, ’the identity of individual minors should never be part of any political debate,” the email said. “We will work with school divisions to ensure that there is a policy in place that supports each and every student.” Moe told reporters a week after the Saskatchewan Party was re-elected the ban would no longer be a legislative priority. Clarke asked if it would be acceptable for the children of other legislature members to be used as political fodder. “What do you think would be going through a 12-year-old’s mind when they hear the premier of their province targeting them?” he told the assembly. He said it wasn’t easy when his children came out as transgender, and that he and his wife had to do a lot of learning, reading, talking and thinking. “As a parent of a transgender child, you are presented with a stark choice: to outright reject the feelings and words of your child when they tell you who they are or to choose to embrace your child and love them with all your heart,” he said. “My wife and I decided to love our kids with all our hearts. “Transgender kids are not scary. Transgender people are not scary. They are not people that we should be afraid of. They are people who deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and love.” He said his kids are kind and smart, and they play sports and music. They are also fond of Taylor Swift and airplanes. “They have the incredible strength to live as their authentic selves.” Clarke said it’s the second time the Saskatchewan Party government has gone after transgender kids. Last year, the province passed a law using the notwithstanding clause to require parental consent when children under 16 want to change their names or pronouns at school. “I don’t expect everyone to understand the journey that we have been on as a family, but I hope that my words today can be heard by those who have an open heart and a willingness to learn about the different lived experience than perhaps their own,” he said. “I hope something good can come from this terrible experience.” The Regina Leader-Post has created an Afternoon Headlines newsletter that can be delivered daily to your inbox so you are up to date with the most vital news of the day. Click here to subscribe. With some online platforms blocking access to the journalism upon which you depend, our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark leaderpost.com and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed. Click here to subscribe.
NHL-worst Blackhawks fire Richardson as coachCornerstone Christian Academy, a Sugar Land-based Christian school, announced it will welcome its inaugural freshman class in 2025. The science, technology, engineering and math-focused school previously served preschool through eighth grade, but is expanding its student base to high school with a freshman class beginning in fall 2025, according to a Dec. 2 news release. The details Cornerstone Christian Academy, the only STEM-certified school in Fort Bend County, opened in 2003 and is located at 2140 First Colony Blvd., Sugar Land. The school will use its existing campus to accommodate the new freshman class, Julee Chang, director of advancement, marketing and communications for Cornerstone Christian Academy, said in an email. The campus will also welcome Joshua Gettys as its new high school principal, according to the release. "We are honored to have Mr. Gettys join the Cornerstone Christian Academy family," Head of School Eric Nicholie said in the release. "His extensive experience, passion for Christian education, relational capacity and dedication to fostering a culture of excellence make him an exceptional leader for our high school program." What else School officials also announced a new $315,000 playground, which opened Nov. 18. The new playground features equipment designed to enhance physical activities in kids, according to the release. Chang said the playground is for preschool through elementary school and is already being enjoyed by students.
Exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's definition of home is shiftingNEW YORK (AP) — Shortly before he was to be flogged and imprisoned for eight years, Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran. His weekslong journey would take him from Tehran, through rural Iranian villages, on foot across a mountainous borderland and ultimately to Hamburg, Germany. As arduous and dangerous as the trip was, Rasoulof’s travels had an added wrinkle: He was trying to finish a movie at the same time. A week after arriving in Germany, Rasoulof would premiere his film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” at the Cannes Film Festival in France. As he fled, Rasoulof was preoccupied with the movie’s edit, which was being carried out in Germany. “I remember when I was sitting in the car that was driving me to the border,” Rasoulof says. “I had my laptop and I was taking notes and sending them to my editor. The two friends who were taking me kept saying, ‘Put that thing away for a second.’” In Cannes, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” won a special jury prize and Rasoulof was celebrated with a 13-minute standing ovation. The movie has since been hailed as one of the best of the year, and arguably its most daring. Rasoulof made “Sacred Fig” clandestinely in Iran, directing scenes from a separate location to avoid raising suspicions. (The opening titles read: “When there is no way, a way must be made.”) Its story — a devastating family drama set during the 2022 protests that engulfed Iran — would surely only add to Rasoulof’s prison sentence. So after all of this, how is he feeling? When he recently met with The Associated Press for an interview, Rasoulof shrugged. “Ordinary,” he says. Rasoulof, 52, has a more gentle, bemused presence than some of his films would suggest. But how could Rasoulof, after what he’s lived through this year, feel anything like ordinary? “I still haven’t grasped the meaning of exile,” he explains. “I think it will take some time. The feeling of that void has not hit me yet, and I think it may never come.” Rasoulof has been busy traveling from film festival to film festival. In September, he and his 24-year-old daughter attended the Telluride festival in Colorado. Many more such stops were to come. Since fleeing Iran, Rasoulof has effectively been immersed in the world he’s long known: cinema. “Maybe I am living in the world of cinema, and maybe that’s why things are so familiar,” he agrees. “Maybe that’s why I don’t feel I’m in exile.” “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” currently playing in theaters, is the Oscar submission from Rasoulof’s adoptive home, Germany. He’s settled in with his family, grateful for how the country has welcomed him. Speaking through an interpreter, Rasoulof grants that he’ll probably always mentally have a bag packed, ready to return to Iran should the chance ever come. But what “home” constitutes has changed for him. “I might be able to change this concept of home for myself,” he says. “I walk on the streets here and I see people of different colors and forms from all over the place, and they all call this place home. So there’s always the chance that one can build something new.” How oppressive politics can infiltrate the home is central to “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” It concerns a family of four: Iman (Missagh Zareh), a lawyer newly appointed to the Revolutionary Court in Tehran; his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and their two daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). Iman is proud of his high position, but, when the government crackdown on protesters following the death of Mahsa Amini accelerates, his daughters are increasingly at odds with him. After Iman's gun goes missing, his wife and daughters turn into suspects. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” populated with real cellphone videos from the protests, plays out as an excruciating microcosm of Iranian society. “It wasn’t like I put those videos in. They just came in,” says Rasoulof. “The reality is that it was through those videos I realized what happened. When the Woman, Life, Freedom movement occurred, I was in prison.” Rasoulof has spent several spells in Tehran’s Evin Prison. In 2010, he was arrested on set for filming without a permit. In 2022, he was jailed for seven months after pursuing the release of another of Iran’s most prominent filmmakers, Jafar Panahi. Panahi, who secretly made the film “No Bears,” was only released in 2023 after commencing a hunger strike. “My windows at home opened to the hills that have the Evin prison in them,” says Rasoulof. “I knew behind those walls many of my friends were sitting.” Rasoulof, inspired by the courage of the younger generation, resolved to pour the same spirit into “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” Although it wasn’t until Rasoulof’s appeal of his sentence failed that he resolved to flee, he grants that deciding to make “Sacred Fig” essentially sealed his fate. “Making this film was part of that decision,” he says. “Although I had made up my mind earlier, because it was such a bitter decision, I was denying it and delaying it, waiting for a miracle to allow me to stay.” “I would open the fridge to make sure there was nothing there that would go bad,” he adds. “It was a strange circumstance.” For the film's actors and crew members, signing up for the movie meant also becoming co-conspirators. Everyone knew the risks. And, like Rasoulof, many of them have since left Iran. Rostami and Maleki also now live in Germany. Asked if his collaborators are all currently safe, Rasoulof responds: “No one is safe from the Islamic Republic.” In his new life, Rasoulof is experiencing freedoms he never had in Iran. His films, for example, are widely available outside his native country but not in Iran. His prize-winning 2020 drama “There Is No Evil,” about capital punishment in Iran, is banned — though, ironically, Rasoulof’s prison guards enjoyed watching it with him from a flash drive. “I haven’t seen many of my films on a big screen, especially my last film,” he says. “I really want to see ‘There Is No Evil’ on a big screen. A festival in Portugal has promised to take me to see my own film.” The name of Rasoulof’s film comes from his memory of an ancient fig tree he once visited on an island in the south of Iran. It’s a tree that, with apparent metaphorical meaning for the Iranian government, spreads its seeds onto other trees, killing them and growing in their place. Rasoulof pulls out his phone to share a photo of his apartment in Tehran. Outside a large window, you can see the walls of Evin running along a craggy hillside. Inside are many houseplants. “This is my home,” he says. “I have a lot of plants. I really miss my plants. I have a neighbor who takes care of them for me. I actually have a fig tree at home.” Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
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Best glimpse ever into icy planetesimals of the early solar system December 19, 2024 University of Central Florida New studies offer a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the region of the giant planets between Jupiter and Saturn, becoming centaurs. TNOs are small bodies, or 'planetesimals,' orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. They never accreted into planets, and serve as pristine time capsules, preserving crucial evidence of the molecular processes and planetary migrations that shaped the solar system billions of years ago. These solar system objects are like icy asteroids and have orbits comparable to or larger than Neptune's orbit. Prior to the new UCF-led study, TNOs were known to be a diverse population based on their orbital properties and surface colors, but the molecular composition of these objects remained poorly understood. For decades, this lack of detailed knowledge hindered interpretation of their color and dynamical diversity. Now, the new results unlock the long-standing question of the interpretation of color diversity by providing compositional information. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN Email New studies led by researchers at the University of Central Florida offer for the first time a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the region of the giant planets between Jupiter and Saturn, becoming centaurs. TNOs are small bodies, or 'planetesimals,' orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. They never accreted into planets, and serve as pristine time capsules, preserving crucial evidence of the molecular processes and planetary migrations that shaped the solar system billions of years ago. These solar system objects are like icy asteroids and have orbits comparable to or larger than Neptune's orbit. Prior to the new UCF-led study, TNOs were known to be a diverse population based on their orbital properties and surface colors, but the molecular composition of these objects remained poorly understood. For decades, this lack of detailed knowledge hindered interpretation of their color and dynamical diversity. Now, the new results unlock the long-standing question of the interpretation of color diversity by providing compositional information. "With this new research, a more-complete picture of the diversity is presented and the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together," says Noemí Pinilla-Alonso, the study's lead author. "For the very first time, we have identified the specific molecules responsible for the remarkable diversity of spectra, colors and albedo observed in trans-Neptunian objects," Pinilla-Alonso says. "These molecules -- like water ice, carbon dioxide, methanol and complex organics -- give us a direct connection between the spectral features of TNOs and their chemical compositions." Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the researchers found that TNOs can be categorized into three distinct compositional groups, shaped by ice retention lines that existed in the era when the solar system formed billions of years ago. These lines are identified as regions where temperatures were cold enough for specific ices to form and survive within the protoplanetary disk. These regions, defined by their distance from the sun, mark key points in the early solar system's temperature gradient and offer a direct link between the formation conditions of planetesimals and their present-day compositions. Rosario Brunetto, the paper's second author and a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique researcher at the Institute d'Astrophysique Spatiale (Université Paris-Saclay), says the results are the first clear connection between formation of planetesimals in the protoplanetary disk and their later evolution. The work sheds light on how today's observed spectral and dynamical distributions emerged in a planetary system that's shaped by complex dynamical evolution, he says. "The compositional groups of TNOs are not evenly distributed among objects with similar orbits," Brunetto says. "For instance, cold classicals, which formed in the outermost regions of the protoplanetary disk, belong exclusively to a class dominated by methanol and complex organics. In contrast, TNOs on orbits linked to the Oort cloud, which originated closer to the giant planets, are all part of the spectral group characterized by water ice and silicates." Brittany Harvison, a UCF physics doctoral student who worked on the project while studying under Pinilla-Alonso, says the three groups defined by their surface compositions exhibit qualities hinting at the protoplanetary disk's compositional structure. "This supports our understanding of the available material that helped form outer solar system bodies such as the gas giants and their moons or Pluto and the other inhabitants of the trans-Neptunian region," she says. In a complementary study of centaurs published in the same volume of Nature Astronomy , the researchers found unique spectral signatures, different from TNOs, that reveal the presence of dusty regolith mantles on their surfaces. This finding about centaurs, which are TNOs that have shifted their orbits into the region of the giant planets after a close gravitational encounter with Neptune, helps illuminate how TNOs become centaurs as they warm up when getting closer to the sun and sometimes develop comet-like tails. Their work revealed that all observed centaur surfaces showed special characteristics when compared with the surfaces of TNOs, suggesting modifications occurred as a consequence of their journey into the inner solar system. Among the three classes of TNO surface types, two -- Bowl and Cliff -- were observed in the centaur population, both of which are poor in volatile ices, Pinilla-Alonso says. However, in centaurs, these surfaces show a distinguishing feature: they are covered by a layer of dusty regolith intermixed with the ice, she says. "Intriguingly, we identify a new surface class, nonexistent among TNOs, resembling ice poor surfaces in the inner solar system, cometary nuclei and active asteroids," she says. Javier Licandro, senior researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC, Tenerife, Spain) and lead author of the centaur's work says the spectral diversity observed in centaurs is broader than expected, suggesting that existing models of their thermal and chemical evolution may need refinement. For instance, the variety of organic signatures and the degree of irradiation effects observed were not fully anticipated, Licandro says. "The diversity detected in the centaurs populations in terms of water, dust, and complex organics suggests varied origins in the TNO population and different evolutionary stages, highlighting that centaurs are not a homogenous group but rather dynamic and transitional objects" Licandro says. "The effects of thermal evolution observed in the surface composition of centaurs are key to establishing the relationship between TNOs and other small bodies populations, such as the irregular satellites of the giant planets and their Trojan asteroids." Study co-author Charles Schambeau, a planetary scientist with UCF's Florida Space Institute (FSI) who specializes in studying centaurs and comets, emphasized the importance of the observations and that some centaurs can be classified into the same categories as the DiSCo-observed TNOs. "This is pretty profound because when a TNO transitions into a centaur, it experiences a warmer environment where surface ices and materials are changed," Schambeau says. "Apparently, though, in some cases the surface changes are minimal, allowing individual centaurs to be linked to their parent TNO population. The TNO versus centaur spectral types are different, but similar enough to be linked." How the Research Was Performed The studies are part of the Discovering the Surface Composition of the trans-Neptunian Objects, (DiSCo) project, led by Pinilla-Alonso, to uncover the molecular composition of TNOs. Pinilla-Alonso is now a distinguished professor with the Institute of Space Science and Technology in Asturias at the Universidad de Oviedo and performed the work as a planetary scientist with FSI. For the studies, the researchers used the JWST, launched almost three years ago, that provided unprecedented views of the molecular diversity of the surfaces of the TNOs and centaurs through near-infrared observations, overcoming the limitations of terrestrial observations and other available instruments. For the TNOs study, the researchers measured the spectra of 54 TNOs using the JWST, capturing detailed light patterns of these objects. By analyzing these high-sensitivity spectra, the researchers could identify specific molecules on their surface. Using clustering techniques, the TNOs were categorized into three distinct groups based on their surface compositions. The groups were nicknamed "Bowl," "Double-dip" and "Cliff" due to the shapes of their light absorption patterns. They found that: For the centaurs study, the researchers observed and analyzed the reflectance spectra of five centaurs (52872 Okyrhoe, 3253226 Thereus, 136204, 250112 and 310071). This allowed them to identify the surface compositions of the centaurs, revealing considerable diversity among the observed sample. They found that Thereus and 2003 WL7 belong to the Bowl-type, while 2002 KY14 belongs to the Cliff-type. The remaining two centaurs, Okyrhoe and 2010 KR59, did not fit into any existing spectral classes and were categorized as "Shallow-type" due to their unique spectra. This newly defined group is characterized by a high concentration of primitive, comet-like dust and little to no volatile ices. Previous Research and Next Steps Pinilla-Alonso says that previous DiSCo research revealed the presence of carbon oxides widespread on the surfaces of TNOs, which was a significant discovery. "Now, we build on that finding by offering a more comprehensive understanding of TNO surfaces" she says. "One of the big realizations is that water ice, previously thought to be the most abundant surface ice, is not as prevalent as we once assumed. Instead, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) -- a gas at Earth's temperature -- and other carbon oxides, such as the super volatile carbon monoxide (CO), are found in a larger number of bodies." The new study's findings are only the beginning, Harvison says. "Now that we have general information about the identified compositional groups, we have much more to explore and discover," she says. "As a community, we can start exploring the specifics of what produced the groups as we see them today." The research was supported by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Story Source: Materials provided by University of Central Florida . Original written by Robert Wells. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Journal Reference : Cite This Page :
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