US Business

South Korea’s first lunar orbiter successfully launched on a year-long mission to observe the Moon, Seoul said Friday, with the payload including a new disruption-tolerant network for sending data from space.

Danuri — a portmanteau of the Korean words for “Moon” and “enjoy” — was on a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida by Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX. It aims to reach the Moon by mid-December.

“South Korea’s first lunar orbiter ‘Danuri’ left for space at 8:08 am on August 5, 2022,” Seoul’s science ministry said in a tweet, sharing a video of the rocket blasting off trailing a huge column of smoke and flames.

“Danuri will be the first step towards the Moon and the farther universe,” it said, apparently referring to the country’s ambitious space program, which includes plans for a Moon mission by 2030.

SpaceX tweeted that the launch had been a success.

“Deployment of KPLO confirmed,” it said, referring to Danuri using an acronym of its official name, the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter.

During its mission, Danuri will use six different instruments, including a highly sensitive camera provided by NASA, to conduct research, including investigating the lunar surface to identify potential landing sites.

One of the instruments will evaluate disruption-tolerant, network-based space communications, which, according to South Korea’s science ministry, is a world first.

– BTS in space –

Danuri will also try to develop a wireless Internet environment to link satellites or exploration spacecraft, they added.

The lunar orbiter will stream K-pop sensation BTS’ song “Dynamite” to test this wireless network.

Another instrument, ShadowCam, will record images of the permanently shaded regions around the poles of the Moon where no sunlight can reach.

Scientists also hope that Danuri will find hidden sources of water and ice in areas of the Moon, including the permanently dark and cold regions near the poles.

“This is a very significant milestone in the history of Korean space exploration,” said Lee Sang-ryool, head of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, in a video shown before the launch.

“Danuri is just the beginning, and if we are more determined and committed to technology development for space travel, we will be able to reach Mars, asteroids, and so on in the near future.”

South Korean scientists say Danuri — which took seven years to build — will pave the way for the nation’s more ambitious goal of landing on the Moon by 2030. 

“South Korea will become the seventh country in the world to have launched an unmanned probe to the Moon,” an official at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute told AFP.

“We hope to continue contributing to the global understanding of the Moon with what Danuri is set to find out.”

– Lunar ambitions –

Danuri was launched by a private company — SpaceX — but South Korea recently became one of a handful of countries to successfully launch a one-tonne payload using their own rockets.

In June, the country’s homegrown three-stage rocket nicknamed Nuri — a decade in development at a cost of 2 trillion won ($1.5 billion) — launched successfully and put a satellite into orbit, on its second attempt after a failure last October.

That launch — coupled with Danuri’s launch Friday — helps bring South Korea ever closer to achieving its space ambitions.

In Asia, China, Japan and India all have advanced space programmes — and the South’s nuclear-armed neighbour North Korea has also demonstrated satellite launch capability.

Ballistic missiles and space rockets use similar technology and Pyongyang put a 300-kilogram (660-pound) satellite into orbit in 2012 in what Washington condemned as a disguised missile test.

Embattled Chinese property giant Evergrande has cancelled a contract to build a football stadium in a southern city in return for 5.52 billion yuan ($818 million), it said in a filing.

The real estate behemoth has been involved in restructuring negotiations after racking up $300 billion in liabilities in the wake of  Beijing’s crackdown on excessive debt and rampant speculation in the property sector.

Last week, the company failed to meet a self-imposed deadline to publish a preliminary restructuring proposal, although it said it has made positive progress.

In a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange late Thursday, Evergrande said “the group’s liquidity issue has adversely affected the development of and construction on the land” in Guangzhou.

Evergrande entered a contract with the city’s authorities in 2020 for use of the land, designated for sports and industrial purposes.

The contract allowed for commercial and sports uses of the land for 40 years, as well as other business uses for 50 years, the filing said.

Evergrande had started construction, including the building of the Guangzhou Evergrande Football Stadium, which was set to have at least 80,000 seats, it said.

The latest refund will enter a project escrow account designated by the government and will be used to settle debts relating to the deal, Evergrande said.

“It is expected that the group will record a loss of approximately 1.255 billion” yuan over the total book value of the land along with buildings, structures and other items at the site after deducting the refund, Evergrande said.

Evergrande, one of China’s biggest developers, has scrambled to offload assets in recent months, with chairman Hui Ka Yan paying off some of its debts using his personal wealth.

It has also found a potential buyer for its Hong Kong headquarters, according to earlier media reports.

Its troubles are emblematic of the problems rippling across China’s massive property sector, with smaller companies also defaulting on loans and others struggling to raise cash.

Cash-strapped developers have increasingly struggled to deliver projects on time, sparking mortgage boycotts from angry homebuyers in many cities.

Dozens of rescuers battled Thursday to free 10 workers trapped in a flooded coal mine in northern Mexico, where desperate relatives waited for news more than 24 hours after a cave-in.

As night fell again in Coahuila state, family members cried and comforted each other while hopes of finding survivors dimmed with each passing hour.

“What we want is for them to retrieve the bodies,” Angelica Montelongo said with a sad and tired look, before summoning up new hope that her brother Jaime would be rescued.

“But hey, God willing, right? You have to have faith that they’re alive,” she said.

Soldiers, emergency workers and rescue dogs were deployed to the mine in Agujita in the municipality of Sabinas after the latest disaster to strike Mexico’s main coal-producing region.

“What I want with all my soul is that we rescue the miners,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters in Mexico City.

“We must not lose faith. We must not lose hope,” he added.

Five miners managed to escape alive after the cave-in Wednesday and were taken to hospital, civil defense national coordinator Laura Velazquez said, adding that two had been discharged.

“Time is crucial here,” she said.

Authorities said the mine’s three shafts descended 60 meters (200 feet) and the floodwater inside was 34 meters deep.

“It’s complicated,” Velazquez said.

But the authorities were making progress and pumping out water “to rescue the miners as soon as possible,” she added.

– ‘Not much hope’ –

Around 230 army and other government personnel were sent to the site, about 1,130 kilometers (700 miles) north of Mexico City, the defense ministry said.

Several pumps were being used to tackle the flooding, but Lopez Obrador urged the national water agency to send more equipment.

“Unfortunately, there’s not much hope,” Jose Luis Amaya, whose cousin was among those trapped, told Milenio TV.

Experts and relatives painted a picture of a precarious profession fraught with risks extracting coal from the mines with lax safety standards.

“There’s always job insecurity… and danger,” said Blasa Maribel Navarro, whose cousin Sergio Cruz has mined coal for several years to support his two daughters.

Navarro said she was still hopeful of seeing him alive “because we trust in God.”

Crudely constructed mines like the one that collapsed lack concrete reinforcements to protect workers from a cave-in, engineering expert Guillermo Iglesias said.

The miners “dig a shaft two meters in circumference and keep digging until they reach a small layer of coal,” he told local radio.

The only thing supporting the surrounding earth is usually a large plastic tube through which the workers enter, he added.

Coahuila’s state government said the miners had been carrying out excavation work when they hit an adjoining area full of water, causing the shaft to collapse and flood.

Coahuila has seen a series of fatal mining accidents over the years.

Last year, seven miners died when they were trapped in the region.

The worst accident was an explosion that claimed 65 lives at the Pasta de Conchos mine in 2006.

Only two bodies were rescued after that tragedy and the families have repeatedly urged the Mexican authorities to recover them.

Twitter on Thursday said the notion Elon Musk was “hoodwinked” into inking a $44 billion buyout deal defies reason and the facts.

In a filing, Twitter rejected counter claims made by Musk as he fights to walk away from the deal he inked in April to buy the San Francisco-based company.

“According to Musk, he – the billionaire founder of multiple companies, advised by Wall Street bankers and lawyers – was hoodwinked by Twitter into signing a $44 billion merger agreement,” Twitter said.

“That story is as implausible and contrary to fact as it sounds.”

Musk last week filed a countersuit along with a legal defense against Twitter’s claim that the billionaire is contractually bound to complete the takeover deal.

“The counterclaims are a made-for-litigation tale that is contradicted by the evidence and common sense,” Twitter argued in the filing.

A five-day trial that will consider Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk has been scheduled for October 17.

The Tesla boss wooed Twitter’s board with a $54.20 per-share offer, but then in July announced he was ending their agreement because the firm had misled him regarding its tally of fake and spam accounts.

Twitter, whose stock price closed at $41.06 on Thursday, has stuck by its estimates that less than 5 percent of the activity on the platform is due to software “bots” rather than people.

Twitter told the court that Musk’s claim that the false account figure tops 10 percent is “untenable.”

The company also disputed Musk’s assertion that he has the right to walk away from the deal if Twitter’s bot count is found to be wrong since he didn’t ask anything about bots when he made the buyout offer.

“Musk forwent all due diligence – giving Twitter twenty-four hours to accept his take-it-or-leave-it offer before he would present it directly to Twitter’s stockholders,” the filing said.

The company accused Musk of contriving a story to escape a merger agreement that he no longer found attractive.

“Twitter has complied in every respect with the merger agreement,” the company said in the filing made to Chancery Court in the state of Delaware.

“Musk’s counterclaims, based as they are on distortion, misrepresentation, and outright deception, change nothing.”

The social media platform has urged shareholders to endorse the deal, setting a vote on the merger for September 13.

“We are committed to closing the merger on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk,” Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal and board chairman Bret Taylor said in a letter to investors.

Billions of dollars are at stake, but so is the future of Twitter, which Musk has said should allow any legal speech — an absolutist position that has sparked fears the network could be used to incite violence.

Jurors in a San Francisco court on Thursday began mulling the fate of a former Twitter worker accused of taking bribes from Saudi Arabia to help unmask its critics on the platform.

Prosecutors said Ahmad Abouammo sold Twitter user information for cash and an expensive watch some seven years ago, while his defense team contended that he did nothing more than accept gifts from free-spending Saudis for simply doing his client management job.

“The evidence shows that, for a price and thinking no one was watching, the defendant sold his position to an insider of the crown prince,” US prosecutor Colin Sampson said in final remarks to the jury.

Defense attorney Angela Chuang countered that while there certainly appeared to be a conspiracy some 7 years ago to get revealing information about Saudi critics from Twitter, prosecutors failed to prove Abouammo was part of it.

“It’s abundantly clear that the people the government really wants are not here, because they messed up,” Chuang told jurors.

Chuang conceded that Abouammo did violate Twitter employee rules by not telling the San Francisco-based company that he had received $100,000 in cash and a watch valued at more than $40,000 from someone close to the Saudi crown prince.

However, she downplayed the significance of the gift, saying it amounted to “pocket change” in Saudi culture known for generosity and lavish presents.

– Trust traded for cash? –

Abouammo was arrested in Seattle in November of 2019 on a slew of charges including being an illegal agent of a foreign government.

Prosecutors accused Abouammo and fellow Twitter employee Ali Alzabarah of being enlisted by Saudi officials between late 2014 and early the following year to get private information on accounts firing off posts critical of the regime.

The then-Twitter workers could use their credentials to glean email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and other private data to identify people behind anonymous accounts, prosecutors said.

“The evidence you heard is that the defendant, who had a great deal of trust given to him by Twitter, sold his access to officials of Saudi Arabia,” Sampson said.

Abouammo quit Twitter in 2015 and took a job at e-commerce titan Amazon in Seattle, where he lives, according to court documents.

Alzabarah, a Saudi national, is being sought on a charge of failing to register in the United States as an agent of a foreign government as required by United States law, according to an FBI statement.

Chuang told jurors that prosecutors were trying to punish Abouammo for Alzabarah’s actions.

“As much as the government wishes that was Mr. Alzabarah sitting at the table right now, it is not,” Chuang told jurors.

“And that is on them, they let Mr. Alzabarah flee the country while he was under FBI surveillance.”

European stocks pushed slightly higher on Thursday as the Bank of England delivered its biggest interest rate hike in 27 years, while Wall Street equities were mixed ahead of key US jobs data.

Although economists had anticipated the 0.50-percentage point rise, the UK central bank also grimly predicted the country would suffer a lengthy recession later in the year.

The rate hike mirrored aggressive monetary policy from the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank last month, as the world races to cool red-hot inflation that has been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Wall Street stocks finished mixed with the Dow and S&P 500 modestly lower, while the Nasdaq pushed higher. 

The choppy session comes ahead of Friday’s monthly employment report, expected to show US job growth slowed to just 250,000 jobs, while unemployment held steady at 3.6 percent.

The data will inform the Federal Reserve’s plans ahead of its September 21 meeting, which is keeping investors on guard.

“Wall Street has heard enough from the Fed to know that we are stuck in wait-and-see mode for the next 48 days,” said Oanda’s Edward Moya.

The dollar — which has risen over the last year — declined ahead of the jobs data.

Oil prices fell again in the wake of the OPEC+ decision to slightly raise production, with the main US contract dropping back to levels not seen since before the war in Ukraine sent crude prices soaring.

Most Asian indices tracked the Wall Street rally the previous session fueled by healthy economic and earnings data, despite lingering concerns following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan that provoked an angry response from China.

Beijing has suspended a limited amount of cross-strait shipping, and on Thursday began its largest-ever military exercises encircling Taiwan that are expected to last for days.

Soon after, Taiwan’s defense ministry said it was “preparing for war without seeking war”.

Taipei stocks fell again on worries that the Chinese maneuvers would hit shipping lanes and flights into Taiwan.

– Key figures at around 2045 GMT –

New York – Dow: DOWN 0.3 percent at 32,726.82 (close)

New York – S&P 500: DOWN 0.1 percent at 4,151.94 (close)

New York – Nasdaq: UP 0.4 percent at 12,720.58 (close)

London – FTSE 100: FLAT at 7,448.06 (close)

Frankfurt – DAX: UP 0.6 percent at 13,662.68 (close)

Paris – CAC 40: UP 0.6 percent at 6,513.39 (close) 

EURO STOXX 50: UP 0.6 percent at 3,754.60 (close)

Tokyo – Nikkei 225: UP 0.7 percent at 27,932.20 (close)

Hong Kong – Hang Seng Index: UP 2.1 percent at 20,174.04 (close)

Shanghai – Composite: UP 0.8 percent at 3,189.04 (close)

Euro/dollar: UP at $1.0248 from $1.0166 Wednesday

Pound/dollar: UP at $1.2166 from $1.2149

Euro/pound: UP at 84.21 pence from 83.63 pence

Dollar/yen: DOWN at 132.95 yen from 133.86 yen

Brent North Sea crude: DOWN 2.7 percent at $94.12 per barrel

West Texas Intermediate: DOWN 2.3 percent at $88.54 per barrel

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