Two-and-a-half years after its first failed attempt, the world’s largest aerospace manufacturer scores in a roundtrip mission to the International Space Station. Plus, the European Space Agency expects continued diplomacy aboard the ISS. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Day: May 26, 2022
Ray Liotta, the actor best known for playing mobster Henry Hill in “Goodfellas” and baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson in “Field of Dreams,” has died. He was 67.
A source at the Dominican Republic’s National Forensic Science Institute who was not authorized to speak to the media confirmed the death of Ray Liotta and said his body was taken to the Cristo Redentor morgue. The Hollywood Reporter and NBC News cited representatives for Liotta who said he died in his sleep Wednesday night. He was in the Dominican Republic to film a new movie.
The Newark, New Jersey, native was born in 1954 and adopted at age six months out of an orphanage by a township clerk and an auto parts owner. Though he mostly grew up playing sports, including baseball, during his senior year of high school, the drama teacher at the school asked him if he wanted to be in a play, which he agreed to on a lark. And it stuck: He’d go on to study acting at the University of Miami. After graduation, he got his first big break on the soap opera “Another World.”
Liotta’s first big film role was in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” as Melanie Griffith’s character’s hotheaded ex-convict husband Ray. The turn earned him a Golden Globe nomination. A few years later, he would get the memorable role of the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson in “Field of Dreams.”
His most iconic role, as real life mobster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” came shortly after. He, and Scorsese, had to fight for it though, with multiple auditions and pleas to the studio to cast the still relative unknown.
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British prosecutors said Thursday they have charged actor Kevin Spacey with four counts of sexual assault against three men.
The Crown Prosecution Service said Spacey “has also been charged with causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”
The alleged incidents took place in London between March 2005 and August 2008, and one in western England in April 2013. The alleged victims are now in their 30s and 40s.
Rosemary Ainslie, head of the service’s Special Crime Division, said the charges follow a review of evidence gathered by London’s Metropolitan Police.
Spacey, a 62-year-old double Academy Award winner, was questioned by British police in 2019 about claims by several men that he had assaulted them. The former “House of Cards” star ran London’s Old Vic Theatre between 2004 and 2015.
Spacey won a best supporting actor Academy Award for the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects” and a lead actor Oscar for the 1999 movie “American Beauty.”
His celebrated career came to an abrupt halt in 2017 when actor Anthony Rapp accused the star of assaulting him at a party in the 1980s, when Rapp was a teenager. Spacey denies the allegations.
The charges were announced as Spacey was testifying in a courtroom in New York City in the civil lawsuit filed by Rapp. He was on the witness stand Thursday and not immediately available for comment.
A criminal case brought against him, an indecent assault and battery charge stemming from the alleged groping of an 18-year-old man at a Nantucket resort, was dismissed by Massachusetts prosecutors in 2019.
Heat waves like the ones roasting South Asia this year don’t just sap people’s strength. They drain people’s finances in ways that are not always obvious.
It’s one of the ways climate change is weighing on the economy and making poor people poorer.
“These effects are global, they are pronounced, and they are persistent,” said Teevrat Garg, an economist at the University of California-San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
South Asia is especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change-driven heat waves. But temperature extremes are becoming more common worldwide as the planet warms.
- Too hot to work
March and April were the hottest or near-hottest months on record across South Asia.
Climate change made this heat wave about 100 times more likely, according to the U.K. Met Office.
The heat has been brutal for farmers, construction workers and anyone who has to work outside. That’s about half the workforce in South Asia.
“Wage laborers like us work despite the heat,” Indian construction worker Kushilal Mandal told Agence France-Presse in April. “We won’t be able to eat if we don’t work.”
At these temperatures, heatstroke and even death are real risks.
Many work sites shut down early. But that means lost wages.
The U.N. International Labor Organization says that in 2030, hours lost to heat worldwide will be the equivalent of losing at least 80 million full-time jobs.
- Lower earnings for outdoor work
It doesn’t take a full work stoppage to hurt workers’ wages. People just can’t do as much when it’s hot.
In a study Garg co-authored, workers in Indonesia in a hot, sunny environment were 8% less productive than those in a shady environment that was about 3 degrees cooler. Doubling wages did not increase productivity.
“It’s not about workers feeling icky or lazy or just like, ‘I don’t want to work because it’s hot,’ ” Garg said. “It’s that heat is representing binding constraints on workers’ ability to do their job.”
- Factory slowdowns
Heat affects workers even if they are not exerting themselves. High temperatures slow down factory workers, too.
“We think of manufacturing as a thing that occurs inside. But inside doesn’t mean protected from heat. It doesn’t mean air conditioning,” said World Bank economist Patrick Behrer.
Studies as far back as 1915 show factory workers paid by the piece earn less at higher temperatures. Even call center workers get less done in hot conditions.
“It’s harder for you to pay attention. It’s harder for you to focus. You get tired more easily,” Behrer said. “All of those things feed through to reductions in productivity.”
- Workplace injuries
More than wages can be at risk.
“Because you’re paying less attention to what you’re doing or you’re more tired, you’re much more likely to injure yourself,” Behrer said.
On very hot days, workers are about 10% more likely to be injured on the job than on a cool day, Behrer and colleagues found in a study.
That could mean lost wages for the day, or it could be more serious. “If you get hurt on the job, that can be a permanent change in your life,” Behrer said.
- Poverty traps
Poorer areas are more vulnerable to the impacts of rising temperatures than wealthier areas, researchers have found. Workers tend to be in industries that are more exposed to heat. And poor people often can’t afford air conditioning. These inequalities are expected to worsen with global warming.
High temperatures also lower crop yields, which lower household incomes in largely agrarian economies such as those of South Asia.
The effects can be passed on to children in these rural households. Garg and colleagues found that students score lower on math and reading tests the year after a hot year, perhaps because their families had less money to spend on education, or even on food or health.
Adaptation
Societies can adapt to hotter temperatures. Factories, for example, can buy air conditioning.
But that’s money they won’t spend on better equipment or hiring more workers, Garg noted.
“Adaptation is not free. It’s expensive. It’s costly,” he said. “And in general we find that the poorer you are, the more expensive it is.”
Social safety net programs can help. Garg and colleagues, for example, conducted a study focused on a safety net program in India that supplemented income in rural areas. Since heat waves did not affect farm households’ budgets as much, the effect of heat on students’ test scores was smaller.
With heat waves becoming more common, demand for safety-net programs is growing.
“Countries are already paying for climate change,” Garg said, “because the demand on social protection is rapidly increasing as we get more and more hot days.”
“When we think about climate investments, [typically] we’re thinking about seawalls and green energy. And all of that’s quite important. But … safety net [programs] are going to play a huge role for low- and middle-income populations,” he said.
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