Day: July 13, 2024
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX rocket failed for the first time in nearly a decade, leaving the company’s internet satellites in an orbit so low that they’re doomed to fall through the atmosphere and burn up.
The Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from California on Thursday night, carrying 20 Starlink satellites. Several minutes into the flight, the upper stage engine malfunctioned. SpaceX on Friday blamed a liquid oxygen leak.
The company said flight controllers managed to make contact with half of the satellites and attempted to boost them to a higher orbit using onboard ion thrusters. But with the low end of their orbit 135 kilometers above Earth — less than half what was intended — “our maximum available thrust is unlikely to be enough to successfully raise the satellites,” the company said via X.
SpaceX said the satellites will reenter the atmosphere and burn up. There was no mention of when they might come down. More than 6,000 orbiting Starlinks provide internet service to customers in some of the most remote corners of the world.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the problem must be fixed before Falcon rockets can fly again.
It was not known if or how the accident might impact SpaceX’s upcoming crew flights. A billionaire’s spaceflight is scheduled for July 31 from Florida with plans for the first private spacewalk, followed in mid-August by an astronaut flight to the International Space Station for NASA.
The tech entrepreneur who will lead the private flight, Jared Isaacman, said Friday that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has “an incredible track record” and as well as an emergency escape system.
The last launch failure occurred in 2015 during a space station cargo run. Another rocket exploded the following year during testing on the ground.
SpaceX’s Elon Musk said the high flight rate will make it easier to identify and correct the problem.
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Pamplona, Spain — Six people were hurt Sunday in Spain’s traditional annual San Fermin bull running festival, with one participant gored and five suffering bruising, local government sources said.
A 37-year-old Spanish man emerged from his goring with slight injuries, officials said.
The curtain went up on nine days of festivities Saturday as thousands of revelers dressed in white clothes and red scarves filled the city’s main square for the “chupinazo” — the firecracker that launches an event dating back to medieval times.
The run became world famous after being immortalized by U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway in his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.”
The festivities include concerts, religious processions and copious amounts of wine.
Each day at 8 a.m., hundreds of attendees launch themselves into a dangerous 850 meters (930 yards) race, seeking to outrun — or at least avoid — six heavy fighting bulls through the city center’s narrow streets.
During the intense “running of the bulls” — which lasts less than three minutes — the runners try to get as close as possible to the animals in their sprint to the Pamplona bullring, where bullfights are held in the afternoon.
This year’s edition saw the day of San Fermin fall on a Sunday, allowing a stronger turnout than when the saint’s day falls on a weekday.
Anyone aged 18 or above may participate.
Dozens of people are injured each year, although most are injuries resulting from falls or being stomped by animals. To date, 16 deaths have also been recorded since 1911, the last coming in 2009.
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BERLIN — Spain and England will play the European Championship final on Sunday in an imposing stadium with a dark history.
Built for the 1936 Olympic Games, Berlin’s Olympic stadium still bears the scars of World War II and contains relics from its Nazi past.
But the Olympiastadion, as it’s known in German, is also associated with the rebirth of a democratic Germany after the war. It hosted matches during the 1974 World Cup in what was then West Germany and again at the 2006 World Cup, 16 years after German reunification.
Hitler’s involvement
Adolf Hitler was personally involved in the design and construction of the 100,000-seat track-and-field stadium after the Nazis assumed power in 1933, two years after Germany had been awarded the 1936 Games.
Initially unenthused by the idea of hosting the Games, the Nazi dictator changed his mind after being convinced of their potential for propaganda.
Plans to remodel the existing national stadium were quickly scrapped in favor of constructing a whole new sports complex, the Reich Sports Field, on the same site. Werner March is credited as the architect of Olympiastadion.
Drawing inspiration from the Colosseum in Rome, the stadium was designed to impress. The Olympic Square in front of the main entrance is tapered, with flagpoles and lines of trees on either side heightening the sense of perspective. The idea was to increase the dramatic effect, raising visitors’ expectations and making them feel part of the event.
Up to 2,600 workers toiled on the Reich Sports Field at one stage to have it ready in time for the Games, which started August 1, 1936. The Nazi regime’s racist ideology deeply influenced the project as construction companies were told to only hire “complying, nonunion workers of German citizenship and Aryan race.”
A propaganda victory
Hitler watched from his stadium-balcony as Jesse Owens, a Black American athlete, won four gold medals to become the star of the Games, dealing a blow to Hitler’s notions of racial superiority.
However, the Games also delivered a propaganda victory for Nazi Germany. It won more medals than any other country and presented to the world a carefully crafted image of peace and tolerance that Hitler and his associates wanted to show. It was arguably the world’s first major case of “sportswashing.”
Olympiastadion was decked with hundreds of Nazi flags for the Games, and a swastika adorned one of the two towers holding the Olympic rings above the entrance. The swastika was removed in 1945.
Members of the Nazi paramilitary SA, commonly known as the Brownshirts, were ordered to stop their attacks against Jews during July and August 1936.
The Nazis were already pushing Jewish athletes out of German sports, and there were only two the Nazis considered half-Jewish who were allowed compete on the German team — fencer Helene Mayer and hockey player Rudi Ball.
“It was done to try and silence the critics a little bit,” said Ryan Balmer, a tour guide with degrees in modern history and literature who has lived in Berlin since 2008.
The Nazis also used the Reich Sports Field complex after the Olympics. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini visited in 1937, when he was welcomed by thousands of torch-carrying Nazis on the May Field behind the stadium. Up to 800,000 people reportedly took part.
Olympiastadion survives WWII
Olympiastadion and the Reich Sports Field were damaged in the war, although the stadium escaped relatively unscathed compared to the devastation wrought by Allied bombers in more central areas of Berlin. Many surviving buildings were reused with their Nazi iconography removed.
Olympiastadion fell in the British sector after the city was divided between the four victorious powers — the Soviet Union, the U.S., France and Britain. The British reopened the stadium in 1946 and maintained their military headquarters in the former Reich Sports Field until 1994.
Little was done to Olympiastadion after the war. It and the former the Reich Sports Field were given protected status in 1966, when Hitler’s balcony was shortened by 1 meter. The biggest renovations were made before Germany’s 2006 World Cup, when the stadium was crowned with a roof.
The stadium today
There are no attempts to hide the stadium’s Nazi past — modern-day Germany is adamant that the atrocities of the Nazi era should not be forgotten. Information signs in English and German are placed around the stadium to inform visitors about the site’s history.
While the swastikas have been removed, some Nazi relics remain. An eagle adorns a pillar beside what is now the training ground of Hertha Berlin, which plays its home games in the stadium. The old bell from the Bell Tower still displays a Nazi eagle and Olympic rings, but the swastika has been partially covered.
In a sign of Germany’s post-war rehabilitation, a large conference room in the stadium and a road running along the sports field’s southern perimeter have been named after Owens.
Visitors have mixed feelings about the stadium, which has a capacity of 71,000 during the European Championship. Many fans who attend matches at Olympiastadion are preoccupied with their respective teams’ fortunes and pay little attention to the information signs.
Balmer said the stadium could use “a more prominent reminder of how and why places like this were built.”
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NEW YORK — Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive sex therapist who became a pop icon, media star and best-selling author through her frank talk about once-taboo bedroom topics, has died. She was 96.
Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family, according to publicist and friend Pierre Lehu.
Westheimer never advocated risky sexual behavior. Instead, she encouraged an open dialogue on previously closeted issues that affected her audience of millions. Her one recurring theme was that there was nothing to be ashamed of.
“I still hold old-fashioned values, and I’m a bit of a square,” she told students at Michigan City High School in 2002. “Sex is a private art and a private matter. But still, it is a subject we must talk about.”
Westheimer’s giggly, German-accented voice, coupled with her 4-foot-7 frame, made her an unlikely looking — and sounding — outlet for “sexual literacy.” The contradiction was one of the keys to her success.
But it was her extensive knowledge and training, coupled with her humorous, nonjudgmental manner, that catapulted her local radio program, “Sexually Speaking,” into the national spotlight in the early 1980s. She had a nonjudgmental approach to what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their home.
Her radio success opened new doors, and in 1983 she wrote the first of more than 40 books: “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex,” demystifying sex with rationality and humor. There was even a board game, Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex.
She soon became a regular on the late-night television talk-show circuit, bringing her personality to the national stage. Her rise coincided with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when frank sexual talk became a necessity.
“If we could bring about talking about sexual activity the way we talk about diet — the way we talk about food — without it having this kind of connotation that there’s something not right about it, then we would be a step further. But we have to do it with good taste,” she told Johnny Carson in 1982.
She normalized the use of words such as “penis” and “vagina” on radio and TV, aided by her Jewish grandmotherly accent, which The Wall Street Journal once said was “a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse.” People magazine included her in their list of “The Most Intriguing People of the Century.”
Westheimer defended abortion rights, suggested older people have sex after a good night’s sleep and was an outspoken advocate of condom use. She believed in monogamy.
In the 1980s, she stood up for gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic and spoke out loudly for the LGBTQ community. She said she defended people deemed by some far-right Christians to be “subhuman” because of her own past.
Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1928, she was an only child. At 10, she was sent by her parents to Switzerland to escape Kristallnacht — the Nazis’ 1938 pogrom that served as a precursor to the Holocaust. She never saw her parents again; Westheimer believed they were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
At the age of 16, she moved to Palestine and joined the Haganah, the underground movement for Israeli independence. She was trained as a sniper, although she said she never shot at anyone.
Her legs were severely wounded when a bomb exploded in her dormitory, killing many of her friends. She said it was only through the work of a “superb” surgeon that she could walk and ski again.
She married her first husband, an Israeli soldier, in 1950, and they moved to Paris as she pursued an education. Although not a high school graduate, Westheimer was accepted into the Sorbonne to study psychology after passing an entrance exam.
The marriage ended in 1955; the next year, Westheimer went to New York with her new boyfriend, a Frenchman who became her second husband and father to her daughter, Miriam.
In 1961, after a second divorce, she finally met her life partner: Manfred Westheimer, a fellow refugee from Nazi Germany. The couple was married and had a son, Joel. They remained wed for 36 years until “Fred” — as she called him — died of heart failure in 1997.
After receiving her doctorate in education from Columbia University, she went on to teach at Lehman College in the Bronx. While there she developed a specialty — instructing professors how to teach sex education. It would eventually become the core of her curriculum.
“I soon realized that while I knew enough about education, I did not really know enough about sex,” she wrote in her 1987 autobiography. Westheimer then decided take classes with the renowned sex therapist, Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan.
It was there that she had discovered her calling. Soon, as she once said in a typically folksy comment, she was dispensing sexual advice “like good chicken soup.”
In 1984, her radio program was nationally syndicated. A year later, she debuted in her own television program, “The Dr. Ruth Show,” which went on to win an Ace Award for excellence in cable television.
She also wrote a nationally syndicated advice column and later appeared in a line of videos produced by Playboy, preaching the virtues of open sexual discourse and good sex. She even had her own board game, “Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex,” and a series of calendars.
Her rise was noteworthy for the culture of the time, in which then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration was hostile to Planned Parenthood and aligned with conservative voices.
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NEW DELHI — When the son of Asia’s richest man gets married, the celebrations are expected to be lavish. But the breathtaking scale of the festivities held for the youngest son of Indian business tycoon Mukesh Ambani has become the talk of the country.
Anant Ambani tied the knot with his fiancée, Radhika Merchant, Friday in Mumbai at a star-studded event where the guests included reality TV star, Kim Kardashian, actors Nick Jonas, Priyanka Chopra and John Cena, former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, as well as the who’s who of India from Bollywood stars and politicians to top businessmen.
The nuptials marked neither the start nor the end of the extravaganza. More parties are in store for the weekend. They will cap monthslong prewedding bashes where international pop stars Justin Bieber and Rihanna have performed, and India’s most popular actors have shaken a leg.
In India, where weddings have long been a display of status and wealth, the Ambani gala has surpassed anything the country has seen so far. For some it marked the arrival of Indian billionaires and their growing global clout. Others saw the glitzy celebrations as shining a light on the country’s growing wealth inequalities.
Mukesh Ambani’s wealth is estimated at $124 billion, according to Forbes. The family’s sprawling business empire, Reliance Industries, spans interests in petrochemicals and oil and gas to telecoms and retail.
“If you look at it, in the past, it was the great Indian maharajas who lived and celebrated on this scale. The maharajas of this new era in India are really the billionaires,” Harish Bijoor, a brand consultant, told VOA in a phone interview.
“When guests come from across continents, it shows not just that they know how to do it in style, but also the influence they command,” he added.
Declaring the wedding a public event, Mumbai police blocked key roads around the Ambani-owned Jio Convention Center where ceremonies began last Friday. Many offices in the busy business hub where it is situated declared work-from-home for their staff.
The celebrations have set off a social media frenzy, with millions of Indians transfixed by the events. They have closely scrutinized the grand, sequin-studded outfits and stunning jewelry that included outsized emeralds and diamonds worn by the Ambani family. There has been huge speculation around how much the parties cost. The wedding invitations were made of silver and gold, according to local media reports.
While the events were private, leaked videos have made the rounds on social media.
Reliance’s official Facebook page has also shared some video clips of dance performances and photographs of the events.
The list of VIP’s who have joined in the celebrations is long. In March, at a three-day prewedding event in Ambani’s ancestral hometown of Jamnagar, among the 1,200 guests were tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and a string of Bollywood stars. One hundred chefs whipped up some 500 dishes. Rihanna performed for the guests.
In May, the Ambanis went on a four-day European cruise on a chartered luxury ship that began in the Sicilian city of Palermo and ended in Rome. Videos showed performances on the liner by the Backstreet Boys, Pitbull and David Guetta and singer Katy Perry belting out numbers at a masquerade ball in Cannes.
In Indian living rooms, where cricket, Bollywood and politics usually hog the conversation, the Ambani wedding has become the hot topic of conversation, with opinion divided on whether the celebrations are too ostentatious or the billionaire family had the right to spend their money as they want in a country where the big fat Indian wedding is the norm for even the middle class.
India’s wedding industry is worth $130 billion, nearly double that of the United States, according to a report by Jefferies, a global investment firm.
“Why should the Ambanis make it a small affair? If they have the money, then why should they not splash on their wedding when the average Indian also does the same?” Bindu Sachthey, a New Delhi resident told VOA. “I don’t agree with people who criticize or troll them for this gala affair. I am enjoying having a peek into how the ultrarich celebrate.”
As the Ambani fortunes have grown in recent decades, the family has scaled up its lifestyle. Their Mumbai residence, built in 2010, is a 27-story private apartment building, with three helipads, a private movie theater and a hanging garden.
Some said the ostentatious celebrations made them uncomfortable in a country where millionaires and billionaires are multiplying as the economy grows, but the per capita annual income is still about $2,700.
India has 200 billionaires, worth around $1trillion in wealth, nearly a quarter of the country’s 2023 gross domestic product, according to Forbes.
“I am very ambivalent about these celebrations. I would rather Indian billionaires do more for philanthropy and use their wealth for society rather than spend in this manner,” said author Gurcharan Das, author and former top business executive told VOA.
“But if some of the influential and rich foreign guests who came here decide that this is the time to invest in a rising India, I would say brilliant, the wedding would have served a purpose.”
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MOUNT STORM, West Virginia — Down a long gravel road, tucked into the hills in West Virginia, is a low-slung building where researchers are extracting essential elements from an old coal mine that they hope will strengthen the nation’s energy future.
They aren’t mining the coal that powered the steel mills and locomotives that helped industrialize America — and that is blamed for contributing to global warming.
Rather, researchers are finding that groundwater pouring out of this and other abandoned coal mines contains the rare earth elements and other valuable metals that are vital to making everything from electric vehicle motors to rechargeable batteries to fighter jets smaller, lighter or more powerful.
The pilot project run by West Virginia University is now part of an intensifying worldwide race to develop a secure supply of the valuable metals and, with more federal funding, it could grow to a commercial scale enterprise.
“The ultimate irony is that the stuff that has created climate change is now a solution, if we’re smart about it,” said John Quigley, a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
The technology that has been piloted at this facility in West Virginia could also pioneer a way to clean up vast amounts of coal mine drainage that poisons waterways across Appalachia.
The project is one of the leading efforts by the federal government as it injects more money than ever into recovering rare earth elements to expand renewable energies and fight climate change by reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
For the U.S., which like the rest of the West is beholden to a Chinese-controlled supply of these valuable metals, the pursuit of rare earth elements is also a national security priority.
Those involved, meanwhile, hope their efforts can bring jobs in clean energy to dying coal towns and clean up entrenched coal pollution that has hung around for decades.
In Pennsylvania alone, drainage from coal piles and abandoned mines has turned waterways red from iron ore and turquoise from aluminum, killing life in more than 8,000 kilometers of streams. Federal statistics also show about 1,200 square kilometers of abandoned and unreclaimed coal mine lands host more than 200 million tons of coal waste.
The metals that chemists are working to extract from mine drainage here are lightweight, powerfully magnetized and have superior fluorescent and conductive properties.
One aim of the Department of Energy is to fund research that proves to private companies that the concepts are commercially viable and profitable enough for them to invest their own money.
Hundreds of millions of dollars from President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law is accelerating the effort.
Department officials hope that by the middle of the 2030s this infusion will have spawned full-fledged commercial enterprises.
The two most advanced projects funded by the department are the one in West Virginia treating mine drainage and another processing coal dug up by lignite mining in North Dakota.
The first could be an important source of a number of critical metals, such as yttrium, neodymium and gadolinium, used in catalysts and magnets. The latter could be a major source of germanium and gallium, used in semiconductors, LEDs, electrical transmission components, solar panels and electric vehicle motors.
Researchers at each site are designing a commercial-scale operation, based on their pilot projects, in hopes of landing a massive federal grant to build it out.
The alternative would be to develop new mines, disturb more land, get permits, hire workers, build roads and connect power supplies, tasks that take years.
“With acid mind drainage, that’s already done for you,” said Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the Water Research Institute at West Virginia University.
Ziemkiewicz began the mine drainage project almost a decade ago, helped by federal subsidies. He had envisioned it as a way to treat runoff, recover critical minerals and raise money for more mine cleanups in West Virginia.
But the Biden administration’s ambitious funding for clean energy and a domestic supply of critical minerals broadened that goal.
At the facility, drainage from a one-time coal mine — now closed and covered by a grassy slope — emerges from two pipes, and dumps about 3,028 liters per minute into a retention pond.
From there the water is routed through massive indoor pools and a series of large tanks that, with the help of lime to lower the acidity, separate out most of the silicate, iron and aluminum. That produces a pale powdery concentrate that is about 95% rare earth oxides, plus water clean enough to return to a nearby creek.
The Department of Energy is funding research on coal wastes in various states.
“There are literally billions of tons of coal ash and coal waste lying around, across the country. And so if we can go back in and remine those, there’s decades worth of materials there,” said Grant Bromhal, the acting director of the Department of Energy’s Division of Minerals Sustainability.
Not only coal, but old copper and phosphate mines also hold potential, Bromhal said.
The country won’t be able to recover metals from all of them right away, but technologies the department is helping develop can satisfy a substantial part of demand in the next 20 to 30 years, Bromhal said.
“So if we get into the tens of percents or 50%, I think that’s in the realm of possibility,” he said.
Other solutions to obtain more of these metals are retrieving them from discarded devices and shifting sourcing to friendly nations and away from geopolitical rivals or unstable countries, analysts say. For now, there is only a handful of critical or rare earth mineral mines in the United States, although many more are being proposed.
One final subsidy will be required from the federal government: buy the reclaimed metals at a price that guarantees a commercially viable operation, Ziemkiewicz said.
That way China can’t simply buy up the product or use its market dominance to drive down prices and scare away private investors, he said.
Quigley, a former environmental protection secretary of Pennsylvania and a one-time small-city mayor in coal country, hopes to see a facility like Ziemkiewicz’s come to the Jeddo mine tunnel system in northeastern Pennsylvania.
The Jeddo has defied decades of efforts to treat its flow, which drains a vast network of abandoned underground mines.
It is a massive source of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, producing an estimated 114,000 to 151,000 liters per minute.
Bringing the Little Nescopeck Creek back to life could put people to work cleaning up the stream and creating recreational opportunities from a newly revived waterway, Quigley said.
“This could mean a lot to coal communities, to a lot of people in the coal region,” Quigley said. “And to the country.”
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