AFP

The leader and four members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia who joined the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol go on trial Tuesday for the rare charge of sedition.

Stewart Rhodes, the eyepatch-wearing former soldier and Yale Law School graduate who plotted a military-style assault on the Capitol, and his followers are charged with taking up weapons against the United States in an effort to keep Donald Trump in the White House despite his election defeat.

The sedition charge is the toughest yet in the prosecutions of hundreds who took part in the January 6 rebellion, which aimed to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election, and brings up to 20 years in prison.

Rhodes and eight Oath Keeper members in total have been charged with sedition; four of the eight will go on trial beginning November 29.

Rhodes and his followers conspired “to oppose by force the law transfer of presidential power,” the charges say.

At Rhodes’ direction “they coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington DC (and) equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical gear” for the attack, it said.

“We aren’t getting through this without civil war,” Rhodes told the Oath Keepers in a group chat weeks before the uprising, according to the indictment.

If Biden became president, he said, “It will be a bloody and desperate fight… That can’t be avoided.”

– Rarely used charge –

The nine Oath Keepers will be the first of some 870 charged in the Capitol attack to go on trial for seditious conspiracy.  

The majority have been charged with illegally entering the Capitol, illegally disrupting a session of the legislature — the confirmation of Biden as president-elect — and assault on law enforcement officers. 

The sedition charge is very rarely used by US prosecutors. The last time a conviction was obtained on the charge was against Ramzi Yousef, the planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The charge of seditious conspiracy was used in that case in the absence of a domestic terrorism law, and was used to highlight Yousef’s intent to damage the US government.

In the January 6 case, the charge is being used against members of armed militia groups who took part and allegedly coordinated among themselves to lead the attack.

Members of the Proud Boys, another key player on January 6, were also charged with seditious conspiracy in June, but their case has not gone to court yet.

– Insurrection Act defense –

The Oath Keepers was launched in the early 2000s by Rhodes to bring together people, mostly former military, who believed the government was becoming repressive and that the time would come to rise up in an armed revolt.

The trial will focus on allegations that they planned a violent attack on January 6, positioning a stockpile of weapons at a hotel just a few miles (kilometers) from the Capitol, and moved together in a military-style “stack” formation to break through police lines and into the Capitol.

The FBI has collected communications between the group members and has photos and videos of their actions that day.

The group’s lawyers suggest they will defend themselves by saying they understood that Trump would invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act on that day and deputize the militias to lawfully prevent Biden from being confirmed as president.

That claim has raised expectations that the trial could reveal more about links between the Capitol attack and members of Trump’s administration or his personal advisors.

The first days of the trial will focus on jury selection, picking a panel of a dozen out of 120 candidates.

Cuba declared an emergency alert in multiple provinces Monday as fast-approaching Hurricane Ian strengthened rapidly, with Florida also ramping up preparations ahead of a likely hit.

Some 50,000 people in Cuba’s western Pinar del Rio province moved to safer locations, 6,000 of them to state-run shelters and the rest to the homes of relatives and friends, local authorities said.

The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned Ian was intensifying and could pass over western Cuba late Monday and early Tuesday.

“Maximum sustained winds are near 100 miles per hour (155 kilometers per hour) with higher gusts,” it said, making Ian a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

“Rapid strengthening is expected during the next day or so,” the NHC added.

– ‘Huge storm surge’ expected –

In Florida, the city of Tampa was under a hurricane watch, and Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in all 67 counties as officials scrambled to prepare for the storm’s forecast landing on Wednesday or Thursday.

Ian “will bring heavy rains, strong winds, flash flooding, storm surge, along with isolated tornado activity along Florida’s Gulf Coast,” DeSantis said at a press conference in Tallahassee on Monday.

He warned people to prepare for power cuts.

“Even if the eye of the storm doesn’t hit your region, you’re going to have really significant winds, it’s going to knock over trees, it’s going to cause interruptions,” DeSantis said, warning of likely flooding.

The governor urged residents to stock up on food, water, medicine and fuel, and he activated 7,000 National Guard members to help with the effort.

Authorities in several Florida municipalities, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, started distributing free sandbags to residents to help protect their homes from the risk of flooding.

President Joe Biden approved emergency aid to 24 counties in Florida through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

NASA said it was rolling back its massive Moon rocket into its storage hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida due to the hurricane.

– Fiona’s wake –

The Caribbean and parts of eastern Canada are still counting the cost of powerful storm Fiona, which tore through last week, claiming several lives.

When it arrived in eastern Canada, the storm packed intense winds of 80 miles per hour, bringing torrential rain and waves of up to 40 feet (12 meters).

Three people are believed to have died when Fiona barreled into Canada’s Atlantic provinces as a post-tropical cyclone early Saturday.

Prince Edward Island authorities confirmed the death of one person, while officials in Newfoundland said they found the body of a 73-year-old woman believed to have been swept from her home. She was apparently sheltering in her basement when waves broke through.

A third person has been reported missing in Nova Scotia — one of the hardest-hit provinces — and is presumed dead

“The devastation is immense,” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston told reporters. “The magnitude of the storm is incredible.”

Storm surges swept at least 20 homes into the sea in the town of Channel-Port aux Basques, on the southwestern tip of Newfoundland.

Around 200 residents had been evacuated before the storm hit.

“Some people have lost everything, and I mean everything,” Mayor Brian Button told CBC News.

Bullseye: A NASA spaceship on Monday struck an asteroid seven million miles away in order to deflect its orbit, succeeding in a historic test of humanity’s ability to prevent a celestial object from devastating life on Earth.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor hit its target, the space rock Dimorphos, at 7:14 pm Eastern Time (2314 GMT), 10 months after blasting off from California on its pioneering mission.

“We’re embarking on a new era, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous hazardous asteroid impact,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division.

Dimorphos — a 530-foot (160-meter) asteroid roughly comparable in size to an Egyptian pyramid — orbits a half-mile long big brother called Didymos. Never seen before, the “moonlet” appeared as a speck of light around an hour before the collision.

Its egg-like shape and craggy, boulder-dotted surface finally came into clear view in the last few minutes, as DART raced toward it at roughly 14,500 miles (23,500 kilometers) per hour.

NASA scientists and engineers erupted in applause as the screen froze on a final image, indicating that signal had been lost and impact had taken place.

To be sure, the pair of asteroids pose no threat to our planet as they loop the Sun every two of our years.

But NASA has deemed the experiment important to carry out before an actual need is discovered.

By striking Dimorphos head on, NASA hopes to push it into a smaller orbit, shaving 10 minutes off the time it takes to encircle Didymos, which is currently 11 hours and 55 minutes. 

Ground telescopes — which can’t see the asteroid system directly but can detect a shift in patterns of light coming from it — should provide a definitive orbital period in the coming days and weeks. 

The proof-of-concept has made a reality of what has before only been attempted in science fiction — notably in films such as “Armageddon” and “Don’t Look Up.” 

– Astronomy community abuzz –

Minutes after impact, a toaster-sized satellite called LICIACube, which already separated from DART a few weeks ago, was expected to make a close pass of the site to capture images of the collision and the ejecta — the pulverized rock thrown off by the strike.

LICIACube’s pictures will be sent back in the next weeks and months. 

Also watching the event: an array of telescopes, both on Earth and in space — including the recently operational James Webb — which might be able to see a brightening cloud of dust.

The mission has set the global astronomy community abuzz, with more than three dozen ground telescopes participating, including optical, radio and radar. 

“There’s a lot of them, and it’s incredibly exciting to have lost count,” said DART mission planetary astronomer Christina Thomas.

Finally, a full picture of what the system looks like will be revealed when a European Space Agency mission four years down the line called Hera arrives to survey Dimorphos’ surface and measure its mass, which scientists can currently only guess at.

– ‘Earthlings can sleep better’ –

Very few of the billions of asteroids and comets in our solar system are considered potentially hazardous to our planet, and none are expected in the next hundred years or so. 

But wait long enough, and it will happen.

We know that from the geological record — for example, the six-mile wide Chicxulub asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago, plunging the world into a long winter that led to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs along with 75 percent of all species.

An asteroid the size of Dimorphos, by contrast, would only cause a regional impact, such as devastating a city, albeit with greater force than any nuclear bomb in history.

How much momentum DART imparts on Dimorphos will depend on whether the asteroid is solid rock, or more like a “rubbish pile” of boulders bound by mutual gravity — a property that’s not yet known.

If it had missed, NASA would have another shot in two years’ time, with the spaceship containing just enough fuel for another pass.

But its success marks the first step towards a world capable of defending itself from a future existential threat.

“I think Earthlings can sleep better, definitely I will,” said DART mission systems engineer Elena Adams.