While most Americans who travel more than 50 miles from home to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday this year will drive, about 3.7 million of the 48.7 million U.S. travelers AAA expects for the holiday period will fly to their destinations.
This year’s holiday traveler can expect to pay about 21% more for round-trip airfare. According to AAA, the average ticket price this year is $205 on the top 40 domestic routes.
Hotel rooms rated Three Diamonds by AAA will cost an average of $155 per night, flat compared with last year. Two Diamond-rated rooms will go for an average of $123 per night, up 4% year over year. Daily rental car rates average $52, down 13% from Thanksgiving 2015.
Here’s a list of AAA’s top 10 holiday period travel destinations:
Las Vegas, Nevada
San Francisco, California
San Diego, California
Orlando, Florida
New York City, New York
New Orleans, Louisiana
Anaheim, California
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Seattle, Washington
Interestingly, at least half the cities on that list are popular tourism destinations for the rest of the year as well: Las Vegas, Orlando, New Orleans, Anaheim (Disneyland) and Fort Lauderdale.
AAA’s projections are based on economic forecasting and research by IHS Markit. The London-based business information provider teamed with AAA in 2009 to jointly analyze travel trends during major holidays. AAA has been reporting on holiday travel trends for more than two decades.
Brexit: Leaked memo suggests UK government has no strategy
A document said to be leaked from the Cabinet Office says that the UK's plans for leaving the EU might not be agreed for another six months. Divisions in Prime Minister Theresa May's government were blamed for the delay.
Titled "Brexit Update," the memo, obtained by "The Times" and cited by the BBC on Tuesday, said government departments were working on more than 500 Brexit-related projects and might require an additional 30,000 civil servants.
According to the document, the government had failed to reach a common Brexit strategy due to ministerial divisions. Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, Trade Minister Liam Fox and Brexit Minister David Davis are said to be on one side, while Finance Minister Philip Hammond and Business Minister Greg Clark are reportedly on the other.
Dated November 7, the memo also criticizes Prime Minister Thersea May for her tendency of "drawing
UK Prime Minister Theresa May is reportedly facing divisions within her government
in decisions and details to settle the matter herself."
May's office said it did not recognize the claims made in the memo, however.
"This is not a government report and we don't recognize the claims made in it," a spokesman for May's office said. "We are focused on getting on with the job of delivering Brexit and making a success of it."
As well as highlighting government divisions, the memo also claims that "major players" in industry were also likely to "point a gun at government's head" to secure post-Brexit assurances. This follows carmaker Nissan publicly requesting clarity from the government regarding Brexit and then subsequently committing to major investment in the UK's northeast, without divulging what Downing Street had said to quell its concerns.
Parliament to vote on Brexit
News of the leaked memo on Tuesday was just the latest chapter of pandemonium in the UK's impending departure from the EU.
The ruling sparked fears among Brexit supporters that triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and consequently beginning the process to leave the EU could be delayed beyond the March date promised by Prime Minister May. Experts have also said that the High Court verdict could allow lawmakers to soften the government's approach to negotiations. Without explicitly stating her strategy or approach for the talks, May has hinted more than once that she would not compromise on the issue of border control, but has also said she would like to retain as much access to the European Single Market as possible.
Now faced with a parliamentary vote, May has sought to reassure EU leaders, telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that she believed the government's appeal would win in Britain's Supreme Court - removing the need for parliamentary approval.
German police have carried out sweeping raids across 10 states in a probe against an Islamic group suspected of propagating hate and inciting 140 youths to fight alongside jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
Source:
AFP
The group called The True Religion (Die wahre Religion) is now also banned, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.
"Across the country, jihadist Islamists came together in this group named The True Religion," he said.
"Under the pretext of promoting Islam, under the pretext of supposedly harmless distribution of translated versions of the Koran that took place in pedestrian zones, hate messages were propagated and young people radicalised," added the interior minister.
De Maiziere noted that after participating in the Koran distribution campaign organised by the group, "140 young people travelled to Syria and Iraq where they joined the fight with terrorist groups".
The raids, which targeted around 200 homes and sites in 10 states including North Rhine-Westphalia in the west, Hamburg in the north and Baden-Wuerttemberg in the southwest, began at dawn.
Police officers stand in front of the Al-Taqwa Mosque during a search in Hamburg, Germany, 15 November 2016. (AAP)
Experts say the German translation of the Koran distributed by the group is a particularly strict version from the original Arabic text.
Tuesday's ban is the biggest such prohibition in Germany targeting Islamist groups after another organisation called "The Caliphate State" was outlawed in 2001.
De Maiziere stressed that Tuesday's action is not targeted against the general distribution of translated Korans, but against those who "abuse religion and who use it as a pretext to spread extremist ideology and to back terrorist organisations".
"The 140 departures by the group's activists speak for themselves," the minister said.
According to figures released in May by intelligence services, 820 people have left Germany for Syria and Iraq.
Almost a third have returned and 140 were killed while abroad, while around 420 are still in Syria or Iraq.
Germany has so far been spared large-scale attacks.
But it was shaken by two assaults claimed by IS and carried out by asylum seekers -- an axe rampage on a train in Wuerzburg that injured five, and a suicide bombing in Ansbach in which 15 people were hurt.
Police said last month they had foiled an alleged plot by a Syrian refugee to bomb one of Berlin's airports.
Authorities last week also announced the arrest of five men suspected of recruiting fighters for the Islamic State group.
A graph charting the depth of the Hellas depression at different points. Photo / Joseph Levy / NASA
It was 2009 when Joseph Levy began poring over images from the surface of the Martian planet. He was fascinated by what he found.
There, in high-resolution photographs beamed back to Earth by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was what Dr Levy describes as the "bullseye".
He was looking deep into the eyes of two craters - known as the Hellas depression and the Galaxias Fossae depression. Others had looked before but nobody saw what he saw.
Last week, Dr Levy and a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, went deep inside the craters for the first time.
They produced detailed 3D measurements to determine with reasonable certainty that if life ever existed on the Red Planet, it existed here.
'IT'S A ROUGH, FRACTURED SURFACE'
Dr Levy, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute of Geophysics, led the project. His findings were this month published in Icarus, the International Journal of Solar System Studies.
He told news.com.au his research points to a "good candidate site for evidence of past life ... provided you could get a rover or an astronaut down into (the craters) safely."
The two sites are well-known. The depressions are both several kilometres across and several hundred metres deep.
For scale, Dr Levy asks that you forgive his Donald Trump reference: "If you put Trump Tower in Chicago at the bottom of the North Hellas depression, only the top 3m would poke out above the plains." Trump Tower is 423m tall.
"It's a rough, fractured surface with lots of ridges and tumbled blocks," he says.
"That roughness is what made the sites initially interesting, but is also makes them difficult to get into."
There's another reason they're interesting to scientists. Despite being formed by different means - an impact event is believed to have formed one crater and volcanic activity the other - they likely host all the ingredients for habitability, including heat, nutrients and water.
Dr Levy explains:
"This project got started when we noticed the first 'bullseye' depressions in the North Hellas site. The Galaxias depression had been known about for several years before, but this is the point where we started thinking that there might be many such cracked depressions on Mars that could tell us about interactions between meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, and ice.
"The key finding (published this month) is that both depressions appear to be places where large amounts of subsurface ice were removed. The potential combination of heat, meltwater, volcanic gases, and geological weathering products makes these kinds depressions potential habitable zones for past Martian life."
Dr Levy says the Hellas depression lacks the surrounding debris associated with an impact and has a fracture pattern that would indicate ice has melted there. He says the sites are "two of about half a dozen" such structures on Mars.
'LIFE MUST BE LURKING SOMEWHERE'
The Hellas depression could fit a skyscraper inside it. Photo / Joseph Levy / NASA
It's not the first time water was discovered on Mars, but it helps further the idea that conditions exist that are conducive to life. If not in these craters, somewhere.
In September last year, NASA announced the discovery of flowing water. Again, it was the Reconnaissance Orbiter providing the evidence.
Director of planetary science at NASA, Jim Green, said the discovery was "very important".
"Our rover's finding a lot more humidity in the air than we ever imagined. As we inject the soils, they're moist, they're hydrated, full of water," he said at a highly-anticipated press conference.
"These discoveries are very important, but only part of the hydrological cycle on Mars that we are just now beginning to understand. What we are going to announce today is Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past.
"Today, we are going to announce that under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars."
Dr Levy says the research is a breakthrough for "one of the most fundamental goals of exploration" - finding evidence of past or present life on another world.
"Mars is a great candidate for that search because it has vast areas (much more than Earth) of ancient terrain that formed about the same time that life was beginning to leave evidence of its presence on Earth," he said.
"Finding evidence for past life preserved near the surface would raise the distinct possibility that some organisms could be present deep in the Martian subsurface, similar to the organisms that live deep within Earth's crust.
"As we find more and more habitable locations on Mars - presently habitable, or showing signs of being capable of supporting life in the past - it starts to lead us to the conclusions that life must be lurking somewhere on the planet."
'WE MUST BECOME 'MULTI-PLANET' SPECIES'
Finding life on Mars is one thing. Moving there is another. A number of projects are already under way with the aim of colonising the Red Planet.
There's Mars One, a mission aiming to leave Earth by 2026, and SpaceX, an Elon Musk-led project planning on delivering more than a million people to Mars.
Dr Levy says not only should Earthlings attempts to travel to Mars, they must.
"I think it's imperative for the survival of humans to become a multi-planet species," he told news.com.au.
"I'm not fully convinced that anything short of a major international undertaking or a global strategic conflict on par with the Cold War would provide the motivation needed to get humans to set foot on Mars.
"But I would love to be surprised by start-ups like Mars One or SpaceX. I think human space exploration is one of the most compelling stories imaginable, and would hope that it captures folks' attention and willingness to support exploration.
"If a reality TV series is what it would take to get Mars One off the ground, I imagine folks would tune in. After all, some of the most exciting, heroic-era expeditions to Antarctica were basically funded by the promise of lecture tours, product-placement in photographs, and potential book deals."
Researchers from Brown University and Mouth Holyoke College participated in Dr Levy's study.
