World

American aerospace giant Boeing’s Starliner capsule was heading for the International Space Station Thursday, in a critical uncrewed test flight that followed years of failures and false starts.

The spacecraft encountered some propulsion troubles early in its journey, with two thrusters responsible for orbital maneuvering failing for unclear reasons — but NASA officials said the mission remained on track.

The Orbital Test Flight 2 (OFT-2) mission blasted off at 6:54 pm Eastern Time (2254 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the spaceship fixed atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

Its success is key to repairing Boeing’s frayed reputation after the first bid, back in 2019, failed to dock with the ISS due to software bugs — one that led to it burning too much fuel to reach its destination, and another that could have destroyed the vehicle during re-entry. 

A second try was scheduled in August of last year, but Starliner was rolled back from the launchpad to address sticky valves that weren’t opening as they should, and the capsule was eventually sent back to the factory for fixes.

At a post-launch press conference, senior NASA official Steve Sitch said: “Overall, the spacecraft is doing really well,” but he also flagged two anomalies that engineers were now working to understand.

The first was that two out of 12 orbital maneuvering and attitude control (OMAC) thrusters located on Starliner’s aft side had initially fired but then shut down, forcing a third to take up their slack.

The second issue was that a device known as a sublimator responsible for cooling the spacecraft was initially slow to get started.

NASA is looking to certify Starliner as a second “taxi” service for its astronauts to the space station — a role that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has provided since succeeding in a test mission for its Dragon capsule in 2020.

– Seeking redemption –

Both companies were awarded fixed-price contracts — $4.2 billion to Boeing, and $2.6 billion to SpaceX — in 2014, shortly after the end of the Space Shuttle program, during a time when the United States was left reliant on Russian Soyuz rockets for rides to the orbital outpost. 

Boeing, with its hundred-year history, was considered by many as the sure shot, while then-upstart SpaceX was less proven. 

In reality, it was SpaceX that rocketed ahead, and recently sent its fourth routine crew to the research platform — while Boeing’s development delays have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

Starliner should dock with the ISS about 24 hours after launch, and deliver more than 500 pounds (226 kilograms) of cargo, including food and provisions such as clothes and sleeping bags for the current crew on the station.

Its sole passenger is a mannequin named Rosie the Rocketeer — a play on the World War II campaign icon Rosie the Riveter — whose job is to collect flight data with her sensors in order to learn what human astronauts would experience.

“We are a little jealous of Rosie,” said NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, who is expected to be among the first crew selected for a manned demonstration mission should OFT-2 succeed.

The gumdrop-shaped capsule will spend about five to ten days in space, then undock and return to Earth, using giant parachutes to land in the desert of the western United States. 

NASA sees a second provider to low Earth orbit as a vital backup, should SpaceX encounter problems. 

“It’s a really critical step for us and moving towards having two routinely flying crewed vehicles who can bring our crew to and from ISS,” Dana Weigel, deputy program manager for the ISS, told reporters this week. 

The man narrowly tipped to become Australia’s next prime minister predicted a “close” outcome in Saturday’s vote, as he barnstormed the country in an eleventh-hour bid to defend a shrinking lead. 

“We knew that this election was going to be close,” said Anthony Albanese, admitting his Labor Party still had a “mountain to climb” to end nine years of conservative government.

More than 17 million Australians are registered to vote in an election that could bring an end to decades of stalling on climate change and a less pugilistic style of leadership.

“I have given absolutely everything. I have got nothing left in the tank,” Albanese said, embarking on a last-minute four-state blitz.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who defied the polls three years ago in what he termed a “miracle” election, is pounding out the same message that worked last time: Labor cannot be trusted on the economy.

He has characterised Albanese as a “loose unit” because of his high profile gaffes, notably forgetting the national jobless rate when quizzed by reporters.

– ‘Not up to the job’ –

“This is the sort of stuff that prime ministers need to know,” Morrison said in an interview Friday.

“We have seen that he is not up to the job and it’s bigger than him.”

The prime minister boasted of new data showing Australia’s unemployment rate fell to a 48-year low of 3.9 percent in April as an “extraordinary achievement” that showed his plan was working.

Both sides are trying to woo voters fretting about the rising cost of living, with annual inflation shooting up to 5.1 percent and wages failing to keep up in real terms.

In a country scarred by ever-fiercer floods, fires and droughts, Labor is promising to do more to help the environment.

Morrison has resisted calls to cut carbon emissions faster by 2030 and supports mining and burning coal into the distant future to support the economy.

In wealthy suburban areas, many voters are being wooed by a band of more than 20 independent candidates, mostly women, offering conservative policies coupled with strong action on climate change.

Albanese has also promised strong action on corruption — after Morrison failed to deliver a promised federal anti-corruption watchdog. 

He has branded Morrison’s administration the “least open, least fair dinkum government in Australian political history.”

– Covid-19 voting fix –

In the final days before the vote, Morrison’s economic warnings appear to have whittled down the polling lead enjoyed by Labor. 

But all surveys still show Morrison’s coalition lagging behind.

An Ipsos poll released late Thursday gave Labor a 53-47 percent lead over the coalition on a two-party preferred basis. An Essential survey released the previous day indicated a narrower Labor lead of 48-46 percent.

Registered voters are required by law to cast a ballot to avoid a Aus$20 (US$14) fine.

But in the first Australian federal vote since Covid-19 spread across the world, election officials rushed through a last-minute change in the rules to allow more infected people to cast a vote by telephone.

Besides the economy, the six-week election campaign has focused heavily on trust.

Morrison’s honesty has been questioned by his own ministers and even French President Emmanuel Macron, who felt deceived by Australia’s decision to abandon a lucrative French submarine contract.

– ‘Bulldozer’ –

Morrison has admitted he can be a “bulldozer”, saying: “I know there are things that are going to have to change with the way I do things.”

Albanese, in turn, has been criticised for a stumbling performance when questioned on the details of policy by reporters.

The election campaign has also delivered lighter moments.

Three days before the vote, Morrison barrelled into a young boy, sending both crashing to the ground during a friendly children’s football game in Tasmania.

The following day, Australia’s employment minister, Stuart Robert, appeared to deflect blame for the incident from the prime minister: “There was a high five afterwards, so it was just an error from both of them,” he said.

She was the Princess Diana of the 19th century. An impossibly glamorous Austro-Hungarian empress whose star-crossed love life and tragic end entranced the public.

Now two movies and two new series — including one being made for Netflix — are set to reignite the fascination with Empress Elisabeth, who was popularly known as “Sisi”.

The first of the films, “Corsage”, premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday while the series, “Sisi” — which covers her early life and turbulent marriage to Emperor Franz-Joseph — is streaming in Germany on RTL+.

It has already raised eyebrows there with its frank depiction of the young empress’ sexuality while garnering favourable reviews from critics.

The series’ Swiss-American star Dominique Devenport told AFP that part of the upsurge in interest in Sisi is a desire “to find more female narratives”.

She may have been one of the most famous women of the 19th century, but Devenport said Sisi’s life was “full of extremes, full of pain”.

Married to Franz-Joseph when she was just 16, Sisi chafed against the rituals and strictures of life at the stiff and stuffy Habsburg court.

Devenport said the questions she asks of herself in the series are ones many young people today can relate to: “How can I stay myself; what decisions do I make, how do I keep up with what is expected from me?”

The rival Netflix series, “The Empress”, is still in production, with release slated for later this year.

– A royal star –

Historian Martina Winkelhofer said Sisi was “one of the first very famous women in Europe”.

“You have to consider that she came into Austrian history at the beginning of mass media,” she said.

The advent of photography turbocharged her fame — “suddenly you had the wife of an emperor who you could really see.”

With the current thirst for stories with strong female characters, it was no surprise that Sisi’s story would be revisited, Winkelhofer argued.

Sisi was also obsessed with her own image, and her figure.

In the elegant 19th century Hermes Villa on the outskirts of Vienna where the empress spent some of her later years, curator Michaela Lindinger pointed to the exercise equipment which Sisi used in an effort “to keep young really until her last day”.

Vicky Krieps, the acclaimed Luxembourg-born actress who made her breakthrough opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread”, plays this later Sisi in “Corsage”, withdrawing from her husband and from life at court.

In Sisi’s bedroom, a gloomy statue entitled “Melancholia” is a sign of the sadness that overcame her after the suicide of her son and heir to the throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, in 1889.

Just under 10 years later, she herself died at the age of 60, assassinated by an Italian anarchist.

– Enduring fairy tale –

Traditionally, however, it has been the fairy tale aspect of Sisi’s life that has drawn attention and made sites like Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Palace among Austria’s most popular attractions.

Sisi has become a representation of Habsburg glamour far beyond Austria’s borders, and is a particular cult figure in China.

Indeed, Andreas Gutzeit, the showrunner of the series “Sisi”, said he got the idea to revisit the story after watching the trilogy of 1950s films in which the empress was portrayed by Vienna-born actress Romy Schneider, whose life was also a high-octane mix of glamour and tragedy.

Gutzeit said the RTL+ series has already been sold to several countries in eastern Europe and as far afield as Brazil.

The many different facets of the empress’ life mean that “in each period, you have your own Sisi”, insisted historian Winkelhofer.

Over the ages her image has moved from a focus on her physical beauty to her use of charm, to more modern depictions of her as a more assertive and empowered proto-feminist figure.

“You can discover a new woman in each lifetime,” Winkelhofer said.

Elias Chebbi inspected a beehive in a field in Tunisia, minutes after a buzz on his phone warned him of a potential problem.

The 39-year-old beekeeper opened a flap in the hive to reveal a low-cost, locally made sensor dedicated to measuring key environmental variables. An app on his phone then warns him if action needs to be taken.

“Thanks to this, I can relax,” he said. “It tells me remotely everything that’s happening.”

Chebbi has two of the sensors, entirely produced in Tunisia by the only company of its kind in North Africa.

He periodically places one in each of the 100 or so hives he keeps, on a grassy hillside an hour’s drive from the capital Tunis.

The devices, each costing under 300 Tunisian dinars (around 92 euros), send live updates on temperature, humidity and the weight of the hive to a central computer.

It then analyses the data and helps him react quickly to potential problems — as well as selecting the most resilient, productive queens for breeding.

That is a major asset as bee colonies face multiple threats, including climate change and increasingly common collapses of entire hives.

– Key role of bees –

Chebbi remembers being stung by a sudden heatwave in 2013, before he started using the system, when he lost around a quarter of his hives.

“I had big losses, 26 hives, because of humidity and the sudden change in temperature,” he said.

But since he started using the SmartBee system — developed in 2020 by a group of young Tunisian engineering graduates — his losses have dropped dramatically, to under 10 percent of his hives in a given year.

He has also boosted his honey production by 30-40 percent.

Today, Khaled Bouchoucha, 34-year-old CEO of manufacturer Beekeeper Tech, says the sensors gather “a huge amount of information on the bees’ yield and the threats they face”. 

The gadgets “gather reliable data in real time, so beekeepers can make good decisions and avoid collapse of their hives”, he said.

This data is then fed wirelessly to the company’s cloud computing system, which analyses it to identify potential problems.

If it does, it sends a warning to the beekeeper to intervene — by cooling overheating hives, adding insulation to those that are dangerously cold, or providing sugar solution to those whose weight shows that they have not produced enough honey to survive the winter.

Beekeeper Tech has sold over 1,000 of the systems, mostly in Tunisia and neighbouring countries.

Bouchoucha says customers are swarming to the app and the firm’s workers are preparing another 1,500 orders for customers in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and even New Zealand.

– Boosting food security –

Bee populations around the world are facing disaster from overuse of pesticides, mites and temperature extremes due to climate change.

That also spells catastrophe for humans, as we depend on pollination by bees for over a quarter of all the food we consume. 

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, three quarters of the world’s main crops depend on pollinators — but the insects are in decline worldwide, mostly due to human activities.

Beekeeping itself is also a vital livelihood for many.

In Tunisia, with its population of 11 million, the sector employs some 13,000 people and produces some 2,800 tonnes of honey every year, according to its agricultural union.

The FAO marks a World Bee Day every year on May 20 to raise awareness about “the essential role bees and other pollinators play in keeping people and the planet healthy.”

The SmartBee app offers more than an early warning system.

The data it collects also tells beekeepers about the health and productivity of each hive, its resistance to changes in climate.

Mnaouer Djemali, chief scientific officer at the National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia and a co-founder of Beekeeper Tech, said data from the hives “enables us to measure the profitability of each queen” and to select the best for breeding.

“That can help us boost our food security and sovereignty,” he said. “We are sorely in need of that in a world full of diseases and wars.”

The leaders of Japan, India, Australia and the United States meet in Tokyo next week seeking common ground on countering China, despite differences over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The loosely organised “Quad” grouping is united by its desire for a counterweight to China’s expanding economic, military and technological influence.

But it is divided on Ukraine, with India the only member not to have explicitly criticised or imposed sanctions on Moscow, instead increasing its imports of Russian oil.

Many observers are convinced that Beijing is eyeing the international response to the war in Ukraine as it considers its options for “reunifying” Taiwan with the mainland.

Quad leaders “will be talking about ways they can increase deterrence and military cooperation” concerning China, said Robert Dujarric, co-director of Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University.

The May 24 forum “will show Beijing that they are working together to contain, to deter, against China,” he told AFP.

US President Joe Biden will be in Japan for the first time since taking office and is expected to use bilateral talks with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to hammer home concerns about Beijing.

Reports suggest the pair will issue a joint statement warning they are ready to “respond” to actions by China that undermine regional stability.

But the tone of any Quad statement is likely to be softer, echoing past calls for a “free and open Indo-Pacific” and warnings against “unilateral” moves in the region — without directly naming China.

The mood is already tense, and the entire summit could yet be overshadowed by North Korea, which is believed to be preparing fresh missile launches or even a nuclear test.

Elsewhere, Japan has regularly raised concern about increasing Chinese patrols around disputed islands and there is growing talk about how the United States and allies should respond to threats to Taiwan.

– ‘Not a negative message’ –

Japan’s foreign minister this week held his first talks with his Chinese counterpart in six months, calling on Beijing to play “a responsible role” internationally and warning that public opinion in Japan is “extremely severe to China.”

Beijing’s rhetoric has been sharp, with warnings that reports “the US and Japan would join forces against China” were “clouding the air.”

China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi also explicitly put Washington on notice over Taiwan, saying if it “goes further and further down the wrong road, it will certainly lead the situation to a dangerous point.”

Washington has appeared to be trying to tamp down tensions, with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan insisting Biden’s focus was “not a negative message and it’s not targeted at any one country.”

Biden and Kishida, along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the winner of Australia’s May 21 elections, are seeking to find common ground on economic cooperation, including fixing supply chain disruptions and securing semiconductor supplies.

The United States will unveil its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a new economic grouping seen as a bid by Washington to build supply chains without China.

It comes after Washington under then-president Donald Trump abruptly pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that groups countries surrounding China.

But behind the common front will be lingering differences with India on Ukraine.

“The difference of attitudes over the Ukraine war have prompted a question in the minds of the United States and Europe as to whether India is a nation that shares the same values,” said Michito Tsuruoka, an associate professor at Keio University who studies defence issues and European politics.

“The Quad started as a security framework, but now we are seeing more of an economic agenda” partly due to difficulties with India on defence subjects, he added.

And the summit is unlikely to change that, said Jitendra Nath Mishra, a former ambassador and adjunct professor at O.P. Jindal Global University.

Washington and its allies “have shown understanding of India’s need to protect its strategic and military ties with Russia to develop China-facing capabilities,” he said.

“Pressurising India does not advance the West’s need to build a coalition to counter an aggressive China.”

hih-burs/sah/oho

It’s no mystery why Jordanian Lina Fayyad has been nicknamed “Fierce Savage” — watching as she lands successive blows in the cage, it’s clear she is poised to take mixed martial arts by storm.

With her long maroon hair and small frame, she cuts an unusual figure in the world of MMA, and perhaps even more so within the country and region from which she hails, where women are virtual strangers to the sport.

“At the beginning, I heard a lot of criticism that continues until today,” the 33-year-old told AFP from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where she is undergoing and overseeing training boot camps.

“When someone sets their sights on a goal, nothing will stop them from achieving it.”

In a region where social and cultural restrictions often bar women from pursuing sports professionally, Fayyad’s journey has not been straightforward.

“There were a lot of obstacles that stood in my way: injuries, criticism — I would get kicked out of sports clubs because I’m a girl and men refused to participate in training with me,” she said.

“It used to bother me at first but now I don’t care.”

– Jordan’s only female fighter –

Encouraged by her father, a boxer, Fayyad entered the world of martial arts at the tender age of 10, then practised taekwondo starting at 12, before moving on to a roster of other sports.

“I earned three gold medals in kickboxing in the Arab championships and a gold medal in Muay Thai world championships,” she said.

She shifted to MMA in 2017, and has since won two of the three fights she has taken part in.

But aside from her drive for competition — which is high — Fayyad is compelled by the need to send a message to her fellow countrywomen.

“I am the only woman who practises MMA in Jordan,” she said. “I get a lot of nice comments from women and they are really encouraged when they see me.

“I feel like I am somehow responsible because I want to prove that Arab women can reach their goals,” she continued.

“If I had listened to criticism and become a housewife, I would not be happy. I want to make use of the advantages God gave me to achieve more.”

In a training hall in the Cypriot capital Nicosia, Fayyad prepares for her next fight in June — provided she recovers from recent fractures in both her feet.

But as with other obstacles, she doesn’t let her injuries get in the way.

“I will stop when I get old,” she said — but by “stop”, she means she will simply shift to a more age-appropriate sport, like jiujitsu.

“I often hear that I’m a ‘fierce savage’ in the cage, and it’s true, I’m not afraid. The nickname represents me.”