James' World 2

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The system was continuing to dump rain in coastal areas between Orange and San Diego Counties and was spreading inland into southeastern California and southern Nevada.

The storm pulled in a band of moisture known as an atmospheric river, bringing rain to Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties overnight and spreading into Los Angeles County by Saturday morning.

By early Saturday afternoon, some locations in the mountains of Santa Barbara County had recorded more than eight inches since Thursday. Downtown Santa Barbara had received more than four inches.

As of noon, downtown Los Angeles had recorded nearly two inches of rain since Friday — more than double the average monthly total of 0.78 inch for the entire month of November.

The storm system moving through the region and a second system arriving on its heels in Northern California on Sunday have churned up seas and brought big waves to beaches.

At Garrapata State Beach along the Big Sur coastline, a father and his 5-year-old daughter were swept out on Friday by waves estimated to be between 15 to 20 feet high.

The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the father was later found dead and said that the child was missing.

And a 71-year-old man in Sutter County, near Sacramento, died after his vehicle was swept away by floodwaters, according to Sierra Pedley, a spokeswoman with the Sutter County Sheriff’s Office.

Todd Hall, a forecaster with the National Weather Service, said that the rate at which the rain was falling on Saturday was impressive. The burn scar from the Palisades fire received 0.5 inch of rain in 15 minutes on Saturday morning, a rate at which a debris flow could occur.

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A car crushed by a fallen tree in Altadena, Calif., on Saturday, after a powerful storm moved through the region. Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

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This week, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced that the homecoming for three of its astronauts was delayed after a piece of space junk struck the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft that was intended to ferry them back to Earth from China’s Tiangong space station. While the agency continues to investigate the extent of the damage, independent experts say the incident is a clear sign that the danger of proliferating orbital debris is only going to grow.

Although this is the first known time a return to Earth has been affected by debris, scientists have long warned that the rising amount of space junk makes such disruptions inevitable.

“It was only a matter of time before this happened,” says research analyst Lauren Kahn of Georgetown University.

Space junk is essentially all the human-made objects floating in space that are no longer useful. As orbital launches and other space activities have increased, so have the fragments produced by collisions, accidental breakups, spent rocket stages, and more. In Earth orbit, debris can drift through space for decades, gradually descending because of atmospheric drag before finally experiencing a fiery reentry. The result, Kahn says, is that parts of Earth’s orbital environment are rife with hazardous objects that can collide with vital space infrastructure.

A recent analysis, co-authored by Kahn, tracked 34,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimeters that were cataloged from 1958 to mid-April 2025. The researchers found that 73 percent of all tracked debris in orbit today can be traced back to just 20 major sources—from launches by China, the U.S., and Russia.

According to NASA, as of today, there are more than 45,000 human-made objects orbiting Earth. Some of them could cause severe damage to space stations and satellites, endangering the global space economy floating above us, which is currently valued at more than $600 billion.

While objects larger than 10 cm can be found and tracked, the real danger comes from harder-to-see debris that can be as small as a bullet and travel at more than 27,000 kilometers per hour. “Those are the scary ones,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “They are time bombs in orbit.”

Although the CMSA has not revealed more details about the object that may have hit the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft, McDowell says that even a small piece could be dangerous if it struck a key system.

Still, the astronauts are expected to be safe, McDowell says, because China has another spacecraft docked to the space station and ready to retrieve them if they cannot return on the Shenzhou 20 craft.

A Cascade of Collisions

The greatest fear among space scientists is that debris could trigger a chain reaction of satellite collisions, creating even more junk, a nightmare scenario known as the Kessler syndrome.

In recent years, astronomers tracking space junk have focused on low-Earth orbit (LEO), where human space missions operate alongside communication and observation satellites. According to the analysis co-authored by Kahn, most space

debris—more than 83 percent of tracked objects, as of April 2025—is in LEO.

Right now, there are about 13,000 active satellites orbiting Earth, about 10 times more than there were a decade ago. Because of that, McDowell says, satellites often must move out of the way to avoid crashing into other satellites or debris. These movements, called avoidance maneuvers, already happen tens of thousands of times every year. The number of maneuvers grows much faster than the number of satellites because more satellites mean more chances to cross paths. If satellites increase 10-fold, maneuvers could rise a 100-fold, making orbital traffic far more difficult to manage safely.

Even as this risk rises rapidly, there are still plans for launching mega constellations of tiny satellites akin to those that are already orbiting as part of SpaceX’s Starlink system, along with a newly emerging push for orbital data centers such as Nvidia’s Starcloud. “There’s no limit right now on how many satellites you can launch,” McDowell says.

Two problems are especially worrying, says Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Colorado-based nonprofit Secure World Foundation: there is currently no way to clean up space debris, and there is very little international coordination to prevent further debris-creating collisions, especially between the U.S and China.

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Threats of retribution and revenge seem to be everywhere in our public discourse. They may play well in some arenas, but when it comes to protecting kids from sexual abuse, they can backfire — badly.

As an emergency physician who works in a children’s hospital, I provide medical care to pediatric patients who are brought to the emergency room because they experienced sexual abuse. Statistically, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys are sexually abused during childhood. Researchers have documented many reasons why children may not readily disclose abuse, such as guilt, shame, feeling that they are at fault, fear for their safety, or concern that no one will believe them.

There’s another barrier to disclosure that has been largely overlooked by parents and professionals alike, one that I’ve repeatedly encountered in my conversations with children and adolescents: Young people are less likely to disclose sexual abuse if they are taught that their loved one will retaliate with violence.

Here is the scenario that I see far too often: A teenager, statistically female, presents to the emergency department after being sexually assaulted. When I ask her if her parents know about what happened, she begs me not to tell a particular person, typically her father, because “he told me that if this ever happened, he would kill the person who did that to me.”

That teenager might decide not to disclose the abuse to protect her father from the perceived consequences he might face if he retaliated against the perpetrator of her abuse. She may consider whether she would rather suffer in silence and risk being raped again or risk losing her father if he were to get hurt, killed, or arrested while pursuing the person who abused her.

Instead of vowing retribution, we should assure our children that we will always love them, no matter what happens, and that they should feel safe talking with us about anything and everything.

To be clear, this is not just about fathers and daughters; I have seen people of all ages and genders struggle with these impossible calculations. Further complicating the matter, more than 80% of perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse are known to the victim and may even be part of their family. Countless kids have told me they were afraid to say anything because they did not want one member of their family, whom they love and trust, to be harmed while going after the family member who had abused them.

Sometimes, children are so scared about how an adult might react that they fail to report the abuse — and are repeatedly raped — for years before finally being brought in for emergency care. In these cases, the abuse is often discovered by someone like a teacher or counselor, and the child’s parents still do not know about the abuse.

Parents and loved ones might think they are helping their kids feel safer by threatening retribution. Some might even think that promising to take matters into their own hands is helpful. Perhaps they know that fewer than 3% of rapists ever receive a felony conviction.

While our justice system clearly needs reform, how we talk with our kids about sexual violence also needs attention. When parents and other loved ones tell their children and teenagers that they would take matters into their own hands, they are adding to their child’s burden, not easing it. Even if these threats are not intended to be taken literally, kids often take them at face value anyway.

After seeing the harm that this messaging can cause to kids who face abuse, I have come to believe that these types of statements are misguided. Threatening to retaliate against someone who hurts their child allows an adult to have the illusion of control without doing the difficult work of considering what kind of help might truly be needed from them if the child were to experience sexual abuse.

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As an emergency physician in a children’s hospital, I’ve treated kids who have suffered in silence, without telling their parents, far too often.

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“Nothing announced yet, but soon to be,” Jerry Inzerillo, chief executive of the Diriyah development and a longtime friend of President Trump, said in an interview. He said it was “just a matter of time” before the Trump Organization sealed a deal.

Saudi officials toured the Diriyah development with Mr. Trump during the president’s official state visit in May, with the goal of piquing his interest in the project, Mr. Inzerillo said.

“It turned out to be a good stroke of luck and maybe a little bit clever of us to say, ‘OK, let’s appeal to him as a developer’ — and he loved it,” Mr. Inzerillo said.

Next week, Prince Mohammed is expected to make his first visit to the United States in seven years. He hopes to sign a mutual defense agreement with Washington and potentially advance a deal to transfer American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.

That sets up a scenario in which Mr. Trump discusses matters of national security with a foreign leader who is also a key figure in a potential business deal with the president’s family.

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