US billionaire space tourist Charles Simonyi and two Russian cosmonauts floated into the international space station early yesterday, sharing back slaps, hugs and smiles with the station's three crew members.
More than two days and several thousand kilometers after blasting off from the Baikonur cosmodrome, the cramped Soyuz capsule carrying Simonyi, Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov docked automatically at 11:10pm.
The three travelers opened the air locks and entered the station about 90 minutes later, to the applause of Russian and US officials and visitors at Russian Mission Control -- including lifestyle maven Martha Stewart.
Stewart is a friend of Simonyi, a US software programmer who shelled out US$25 million to make the journey to the station and become the world's fifth paying private space traveler.
A video linkup at Korolyov, on the outskirts of Moscow, showed the station's now six inhabitants joyfully greeting one another before receiving congratulations and well-wishes from Earth.
"How did the launch look?" Simonyi asked spectators at Mission Control.
"The launch was beautiful, Charles," Stewart told Simonyi. "I just want to say that we are happy for the safe and beautiful trip and I want you to know that we all think that you are a true pioneer."
"Martha, it is really an honor to be here on this outpost," Simonyi said.
Simonyi, who is Hungarian born, then turned upside down -- to the amusement of spectators -- and shared greetings in Hungarian with his brother, Tomas.
While Yurchikhin and Kotov were at the beginning of a six-month stint on the station, Simonyi is to return to Earth on April 20, along with Russian Mikhail Tyurin and Miguel Lopez-Alegria of the US, both of whom have been on the station since last September.
The US' Sunita Williams will remain on board with Yurchikhin and Kotov.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS