Mika Stojsavljevic, who turned 16 last week, won the US Open girls’ singles title, while 17-year-old Mimi Xu and 18-year-old Charlie Robertson reached the last four in New York.
Henry Searle, 18, who won the Wimbledon boys’ singles in 2023, and 15-year-old Hannah Klugman, winner of the prestigious Orange Bowl junior championships last year, have continued making strides.
“Success in junior tennis is definitely a strong indicator of long-term potential but, of course, it is no guarantee,” said Iain Bates, the LTA’s head of women’s tennis.
“Seeing younger players reaching the back end of junior Slams is a sign of the health of the pathway.”
Coronation Street’s longstanding character Gail has bid farewell to Weatherfield after 50 years on the cobbles.
In her final episode, broadcast on Christmas Day, viewers saw Gail marry Jesse Chadwick, played by John Thomson.
Actress Helen Worth has played the character through thick and thin since 1974. The ITV soap announced in June that she would depart with “a major storyline for the Platt family”.
The 73-year-old actress has said she felt “truly blessed” about her long Corrie career.
Dozens of people have died after a passenger plane crashed with 69 people on board in Kazakhstan, local officials say.
Kazakh authorities said 38 people were killed in the crash, while the remainder survived.
Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 caught fire as it attempted to make an emergency landing near the Kazakh city of Aktau.
The plane was en route to Grozny in Russiabut it was diverted due to fog, the airline told the BBC.
Footage shows the aircraft heading towards the ground at high speed with its landing gear down, before bursting into flames as it lands.
The airline said the plane “made an emergency landing” about 3km (1.9 miles) from Aktau.
It took off from the Azerbaijani capital Baku at 03:55 GMT on Wednesday, and crashed around 06:28, data from flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed.
Unconfirmed reports from Russian media said the aircraft might have collided with a flock of birds before crashing.
Azerbaijan Airlines said flights between Baku and the Russian cities of Grozny and Makhachkala would be cancelled while an investigation into the incident was completed.
Those on board were mostly Azerbaijani nationals, but there were also some passengers from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
A woman who was travelling to spend the holidays with her children in Chechnya, of which Grozny is the capital, died in the crash. One mother, travelling with medical tests for her sick child, is still missing.
A young woman shared her heartache with the BBC’s Azerbaijani service as she desperately tried to find out what happened to her father, who was on the flight.
She explained that her father had been travelling with his son, who survived the crash. The son managed to contact his sister, but there was still no news of their father.
Unverified video footage showed survivors crawling out of the wreckage, some with visible injuries.
Both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have launched investigations into the incident. Embraer told the BBC it was “ready to assist all relevant authorities”.
The BBC has contacted Azerbaijan Airlines for comment.
Embraer, a Brazilian manufacturer, is a smaller rival to Boeing and Airbus, and has a strong safety record.
Michael Jeffries, the former longtime CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, may have dementia, and a competency hearing is needed to determine if he can face sex charges, his attorneys claim.
Defense lawyers for Jeffries said in court papers unsealed Monday in federal court in Central Islip on Long Island that a neuropsychologist who examined Jeffries in October concluded he likely has dementia with behavioral disturbance, Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
Jeffries, 80, is free on $10 million bond after pleading not guilty in October to federal sex trafficking and interstate prostitution charges. The former CEO was arrested that same month on charges of sex trafficking and engaging in interstate prostitution, with prosecutors claiming Jeffries leveraged his position as CEO to lure young men into sex by suggesting they could model for the fashion company,
The lawyers wrote that the neuropsychologist concluded that cognitive impairments, including impaired memory, diminished attention, processing speed slowness, and ease of confusion means Jeffries would not be capable of assisting his attorneys.
In a joint letter to the judge, defense lawyers and prosecutors suggested that experts who have evaluated Jeffries testify at a two-day competency hearing in June so that a ruling on competency can follow. A spokesperson for prosecutors said Tuesday that the office would have no further comment.
Jeffries arrest came after a 2023 lawsuit filed by an actor that alleged the former CEO ran a sex trafficking operation that targeted aspiring male models. In the current case, prosecutors say Jeffries, his romantic partner and a third man lured men into drug-fueled sex parties in the Hamptons, on Long Island, by dangling the promise of modeling for the retailer’s ads.
Jeffries left Abercrombie in 2014 after more than two decades leading the clothing retailer once famous for its preppy, all-American aesthetic and marketing with shirtless male models.
In an indictment unveiled in October, prosecutors alleged that 15 accusers were induced by “force, fraud and coercion” to engage in sex parties from 2008 to 2015 in New York City and the Hamptons, the wealthy summertime resort on Long Island where Jeffries has a home, as well as at hotels in England, France, Italy, Morocco and St. Barts.
Prosecutors say the men were sometimes directed to wear costumes, use sex toys and endure painful erection-inducing penile injections.
Fast ice near the shoreline in McMurdo Sound is seen here in December 1990. Among other roles, such ice protects continental ice from ocean waves and provides an important staging ground for research. Credit: Michael Van Woert/NOAA, Public Domain
Sea ice that has persisted for at least 15 days and is held fast to the shoreline is called “fast ice.” Around Antarctica, fast ice protects continental ice from ocean waves, creates unique ecological habitats for everything from zooplankton to penguins, and provides an important staging ground for research.
The conditions that form thick, strong, fast ice have historically been difficult to measure. Satellite observations allow for powerful analysis of other aspects of Antarctic sea ice cover, such as extent, but they’re not well suited to assessing the thickness of fast ice.
In the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, researchers provide a historical record of fast ice thickness in McMurdo Sound, off the coast of Antarctica, from 1986 to 2022 and describe environmental variables that correlate with fast ice thickness.
The results could inform scientists as to when they can traverse fast ice safely, and they shed light on how climate change may affect ecosystems that fast ice supports.
The researchers based their work on a variety of information. Manual measurements through drill holes along with coincident records of internal ice temperatures and ocean temperatures let the researchers measure the thickness of the fast ice and infer the ocean heat flux acting on the ice from below.
The thickness of McMurdo Sound’s fast ice was remarkably stable on a decadal basis, the researchers found, with no obvious trend toward thicker or thinner ice over the 37 years they studied.
On an interannual basis, however, ice thickness varied by up to 0.7 of a meter. The researchers also confirmed earlier findings that different climate drivers work on different timescales: Global climate influences fast ice formation on a decadal timescale, whereas monthly and seasonal weather fluctuations influence year-to-year variations.
Three factors in particular led to thicker fast ice, the team observed: lower air temperatures, winds blowing from the south, and decreased “storminess” (a measurement of temperature and pressure) during the winter months. Long stretches of cold days without storms but with winds from the south made for the thickest fast ice.
More information:
Maren Elisabeth Richter et al, The Interannual Variability of Antarctic Fast‐Ice Thickness in McMurdo Sound and Connections to Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2023JC020134
This story is republished courtesy of Eos, hosted by the American Geophysical Union. Read the original story here.
Citation:
Decades of observations uncover secrets of Antarctic fast ice (2024, December 23)
retrieved 25 December 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-12-decades-uncover-secrets-antarctic-fast.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
