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Beere also stated that the alleged shooter came to campus for a “specific reason”, though he declined to elaborate. He emphasized Beam’s community presence, saying Beam was “open to helping everybody in our community”.

According to a reporter for the Citizen news outlet who attended a Wednesday meeting at Laney’s downtown campus, Beam used that gathering to express his unease about current security measures. Beam urged officials to reinstate armed security guards, citing past thefts at the field house, where he worked daily.

Beam had described how stolen items were never recovered, and no suspects were identified by the college’s security contractor. He also questioned a recent idea to arm six guards, asking whether it would sufficiently address the problem.

The district had reportedly previously ended its partnership with the Alameda county sheriff’s office five years earlier and shifted to an unarmed security force, according to the Mercury News.

The 66-year-old coach was shot Thursday at Laney College and died the following day. The shooting was the latest incident in an epidemic of gun violence afflicting school and college campuses across the US.

Tributes and expressions of grief have since poured in from both professional and high school sports communities following Beam’s death.

Beam’s coaching career began with a dominant run at Skyline High, where he led the team to 15 Oakland Athletic League titles from the 1980s through the early 2000s. He later achieved similar success at Laney College before stepping away from coaching last year to focus on his duties as athletic director. His influence reached a national audience after Netflix highlighted Laney’s football career in its 2020 season of Last Chance U.

At this unsettling time

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In his first presidency, Donald Trump called journalists the enemy; a year on from his second victory, it’s clear that this time around, he’s treating us like one. 

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John Beam during football practice at Skyline high school in Oakland, California, on 5 October 2000. Photograph: Kendra Luck/AP

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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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A blast of frigid air will plunge into the central U.S. and move eastward over the next few days, potentially breaking records in a notably early cold snap. The most extreme cold will occur around November 10.

The event will be particularly notable in the southeastern U.S., where daytime and nighttime low temperatures may break records that have been held for decades, including some that have been in place for more than a century. All told, half the residents of the contiguous U.S. could experience temperatures below freezing, according to calculations by the New York Times.

The freezing temperatures may surprise many, given that swaths of the nation are currently relatively warm, with daily highs above average—parts of central Texas are even expected to crack 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) on Friday, says Ashton Robinson Cook, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.

But cold air is currently brewing over Canada. Simultaneously, a mass of low-pressure air is developing over the Great Lakes. Because air swirls counterclockwise around low-pressure systems, Cook says, the alignment will sweep frigid air deep into the central U.S. next Sunday and, from there, into the southeastern states next Monday and Tuesday.

Predominantly, the system will only affect temperatures, but parts of the Great Lakes region may see a few inches of snow. Cook notes that the precipitation forecast is still subject to change, however.

Because severe low temperatures will be concentrated in the Southeast, Floridians will need to beware of a notable regional hazard: cold-shocked iguanas that fall out of trees after losing blood flow, which can begin at temperatures as high as 50 degrees F (10 degrees C). Any such animals should be left alone, experts note, as they might not take kindly to rescue attempts once they warm up again.

Fortunately, the blast of frigid air will dissipate quickly, with temperatures rising throughout the southern and southeastern U.S. by next Wednesday. “The silver lining with this impending cold snap is that it should be relatively brief,” Cook says. “But it could be pretty intense.”

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If someone so much as says “my boyf–” on social media, they’re muted. There’s nothing I hate more than following someone for fun, only for their content to become “my boyfriend”-ified suddenly. This is probably because, for so long, it felt like we were living in what one of my favorite Substackers calls Boyfriend Land: a world where women’s online identities centered around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed. Women were rewarded for their ability to find and keep a man, with elevated social status and praise. It became even more suffocating when this could be leveraged on social media for engagement and, if you were serious enough, financial gain.

However, more recently, there’s been a pronounced shift in the way people showcase their relationships online: far from fully hard-launching romantic partners, straight women are opting for subtler signs—a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone’s head. On the more confusing end, you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures, or entire professionally edited videos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all shots. Women are obscuring their partner’s face when they post, as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.

So, what gives? Are people embarrassed by their boyfriends now? Or is something more complicated going on? To me, it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner, but also not appear so boyfriend-obsessed that they come across as quite culturally loser-ish. “They want the prize and celebration of partnership, but understand the norminess of it,” says Zoé Samudzi, writer and activist. In other words, in an era of widespread heterofatalism, women don’t want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered.

But it’s not all about image. When I did a callout on Instagram, plenty of women told me that they were, in fact, superstitious. Some feared the “evil eye,” a belief that their happy relationships would spark a jealousy so strong in other people that it could end the relationship. Others were concerned about their relationship ending, and then being stuck with the posts. “I was in a relationship for 12 years and never once posted him or talked about him online. We broke up recently, and I don’t think I will ever post a man,” says Nikki, 38. “Even though I am a romantic, I still feel like men will embarrass you even 12 years in, so claiming them feels so lame.”

But there was an overwhelming sense, from single and partnered women alike, that regardless of the relationship, being with a man was an almost guilty thing to do. On the Delusional Diaries podcast, fronted by two New York-based influencers, Halley and Jaz, they discuss whether having a boyfriend is “lame” now. “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” read a top comment. “Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right,” read another with thousands of likes. In essence, “having a boyfriend typically takes hits on a woman’s aura,” as one commenter claimed. Funnily enough, both of these hosts have partners, which is something I often see online. Even partnered women will lament men and heterosexuality—partly in solidarity with other women, but also because it is now fundamentally uncool to be a boyfriend-girl.

It’s not just in these women’s imaginations—audiences are icked out by seeing too much boyfriend content, myself included, it seems (as indicated by my liberal use of the mute button). When author and British Vogue contributor Stephanie Yeboah hard-launched her boyfriend on social media, she lost hundreds of followers. “Even if we were still together, I wouldn’t post them here. There is something cringey and embarrassing about constantly posting your partner these days,” she tells me, adding that, “there is part of me that would also feel guilty for sharing my partner constantly—especially when we know the dating landscape is really bad at the moment. I wouldn’t want to be boastful.”

Sophie Milner, a content creator, also experienced people unfollowing her when she shared a romantic relationship. “This summer, a boy took me to Sicily. I posted about it on my subscribers section, and people replied saying things like, ‘please don’t get a boyfriend!’” She admits that her content perhaps becomes less exciting when she is in a relationship. “Being single gives you this ultimate freedom to say and do what you want. It is absolutely not every woman, but I do notice that we can become more beige and watered-down online when in a relationship—myself included.”

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Photo: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

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The lack of reliable information is a challenge for officials at the Federal Reserve, who were already struggling to interpret conflicting economic signals and were divided about how to respond. Policymakers will almost certainly head into their next meeting, on Dec. 9 and Dec. 10, without much of the data that they would usually use to inform their interest rate decisions.

Financial markets have stumbled in recent days as investors have grown nervous that the central bank won’t lower interest rates next month as expected — in part because policymakers won’t have the data they need to convince them that a cut is prudent.

Fed policymakers aren’t the only ones flying blind. State and local leaders rely on economic data to make budget decisions. Corporate executives rely on it when deciding whether to hire, where to invest, and how to set prices. Investors need it to accurately price government bonds.

Some economists also worry that the shutdown has done longer-term damage to a statistical system already strained by shrinking budgets and staff turnover.

President Trump fired the head of the B.L.S. in August after a disappointing jobs report. The agency is being run on a temporary basis by William Wiatrowski, the deputy commissioner, who is respected inside and outside the government. But roughly a third of senior leadership positions at the bureau are vacant, and it has already cut back some data collection because of staff shortages.

William Beach, who led the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the first Trump administration, said he worried that some agency employees simply would not return after the shutdown.

“You don’t know who’s quit, who’s retired, who’s taken another job,” Mr. Beach said.

Long Delays, Permanent Gaps

Other than the September jobs report, it remains unclear exactly when the data releases will resume, and how long the delays will last. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and other federal statistical agencies are expected to release updated schedules for the delayed reports over the next few days.

The Census Bureau said on Friday that it would release its delayed reports on construction spending and international trade on Nov. 17 and Nov. 19.

The B.L.S. will be able to release the September jobs report quickly because it was originally scheduled to be released on Oct. 3 and was nearly complete when the government shut down. Some other data from September may also be relatively easy to produce.

But figuring out what was happening in the economy during the period of the shutdown itself could be more challenging. To calculate the Consumer Price Index each month, for example, government workers visit hundreds of businesses around the country to check the prices of thousands of individual items. That data is almost impossible to collect after the fact, as government price checkers can’t realistically visit stores and ask how much a bag of flour cost a month earlier.

White House officials in recent weeks have said they didn’t expect the B.L.S. to publish an October price index at all.

October jobs data is also in question. Monthly payroll figures are based on a survey of employers, which, in theory, should still be available; businesses presumably have records of how many employees they have had in a given period.

But to calculate the unemployment rate and other closely watched labor market measures, the government conducts a monthly survey of households, in which it asks detailed questions about people’s activity in a specific week: Were they working? If so, for how many hours? If not, why not? Were they looking for work, or caring for family, or in school? Many people are unlikely to remember weeks later.

“You can’t really ask households detailed questions about their labor market experience six weeks ago,” said Jed Kolko, an economist who oversaw economic statistics at the Commerce Department during the Biden administration.

Even if the government could run the survey late, there are practical considerations. The November employment survey is meant to begin next week. Any delay would jeopardize the next jobs report as well.

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Economists, policymakers, and investors will need to wait weeks for a more up-to-date picture of critical topics like inflation, spending, and the labor market. Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

As children, many of us are taught that being “good” means being obedient: doing what we’re told by parents, teachers and authority figures. But that conditioning can make it incredibly difficult to speak up when we know something is wrong, whether that means correcting a mishandled coffee order or standing up against injustice. How can we learn to overcome these instincts when it really counts?

My guest today is Sunita Sah, a professor of management and organizations at Cornell University and the author of Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes. She thinks we could all stand to be a little more defiant, and she’s here to tell us why.

Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.

Sunita Sah: It’s wonderful to be here.

Feltman: So tell us a bit about your background. You know, what led you to studying defiance?

Sah: Ah, so this probably started way back in my childhood because as a child, I was really known for being an obedient daughter and student. And I remember asking my dad when I was quite young, “What does my name mean?” And he told me that Sunita means “good” in Sanskrit, and I mainly lived up to that: I was obedient at home. I was agreeable at school. I did all of my homework. I went to school on time. I even got my hair cut the way my parents wanted me to.

And these were the messages that I received, not just from parents but from teachers and the community: to be good. And what does that really mean? It means to do as you’re told, to obey, to be obedient, to be compliant. And I really internalized a lot of those messages, and I think they’re often messages that we give to children. You know, we like it when they’re obedient, and then we call that as being really good.

And I ended up studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, which was really due to expectations. And while I was there, I did an intercalated degree in psychology, and I became fascinated by Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority and why we go to the extent of that amount of compliance and obedience even when we’re causing harm, maybe even killing another person, with sort of dangerous electric shocks.

So that fascinated me, but I went back, and I finished my medical degree, and I worked as a junior doctor, and then I did some consulting work for the pharmaceutical industry. And during that time I became fascinated in how industry and the medical profession interact with each other, how they influence each other, how that affects physicians, and then how that trickles down to sort of decisions patients are making.

And I wanted to study all of this in more depth, and so I was doing an executive M.B.A. at London Business School, and I talked to a few professors there. They said if you wanna look at ethical dilemmas, I have to go to the U.S. So I traveled to the U.S., and I did a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, and that got me down the track of really being able to spend my time researching and studying this and teaching about why people take bad advice.

So at first I looked in medicine, then the finance industry got interested, then the criminal justice industry, and then basically, in all interpersonal interactions we have, I found this pattern of compliance everywhere.

Feltman: And for listeners who might need a little refresher, could you remind us what the Milgram experiments found?

Sah: So Stanley Milgram, he conducted his experiments in the early 1960s because he wanted to really investigate whether the Nazi refrain, “I was just following orders,” was a psychological reality or not. So he set up an experiment that basically was positioned as a learning or memory experiment, and whether people would learn better if they were—received some kind of punishment, which were electric shocks.

So we had people come in, and they met someone who was actually an actor, and they were told that this person would be the learner, and they would be strapped into something like—that looked like an electric chair that was gonna give them some electric shocks.

Then the participant was led to another room, and they were told that they were the teacher, and they were sat in front of a machine that had different levers on it, which were labeled with different voltages. And the lower voltages, it started at 15 volts, and it went up in 15-volt increments, all the way up to 450 volts, which was labeled “XXX.” And in advance, people, psychiatrists, predicted less than 1 percent would go up to 450 volts.

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Tara Moore/Getty Images; Illustration composite by Scientific American

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