Former monarch Juan Carlos I of Spain has been in the United Arab Emirates since he left his country amid a growing financial scandal, the Spanish royal household said Monday, resolving a two-week mystery and reining in speculation over the ex-king’s whereabouts.

The Spanish government and Royal House officials have been tight-lipped about Juan Carlos’ location since Aug. 3, when he published a letter to his son, King Felipe VI, that said he was moving outside Spain due to the “public repercussions of certain episodes of my past private life.”

At 82, the former king is the target of official investigations in Spain and Switzerland into possible financial wrongdoing.

Conservative Spanish newspaper ABC had published a photo of Juan Carlos stepping out of a plane at an airport in Abu Dhabi. But without any official confirmation, Spanish media had placed him in places as far afield as the Dominican Republic, Portugal, Switzerland or New Zealand.

Ending the swirl of speculation, a Royal House spokesman said Monday that Juan Carlos had asked to convey that he had traveled to UAE on Aug. 3.

“That’s where he currently remains,” the official, who wasn’t authorized to be quoted in media reports, told The Associated Press.

The spokesman declined to say if the UAE, a federation of seven sheikdoms on the Arabian Peninsula, would be Juan Carlos’ permanent residence.

UAE authorities have not responded to repeated questions regarding Juan Carlos’ stay in the country.

Juan Carlos facilitated Spain’s transition to democratic rule in the 1970’s, when the heir of the Bourbon dynasty replaced former Gen. Francisco Franco as the country’s head of state. He reigned for nearly four decades while Spain modernized and joined the European Union.

But criticism grew as his luxurious life and corruption scandals tarnishing members of the royal family offered a striking contrast with the suffering of Spaniards during the global financial crisis.

In 2014, Juan Carlos abdicated the throne that then went to Felipe, who has taken steps to shield the monarchy from the scandals.

Felipe VI has not publicly spoken about his father’s departure earlier this month. On Monday, he and Queen Letizia were scheduled to pay a visit to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. The royal couple and their two daughters are currently vacationing on a nearby island.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whose monarchy-supporting Socialist Party is in a coalition government with the pro-republic, far-left Unidas Podemos (United We Can), has praised the Royal House’s decision to take distance from the former king.

Spain’s king has a mostly ceremonial role. Executive power lies with the elected parliamentary government.

Despite relocating outside of Spain, Juan Carlos has pledged via his lawyer to make himself available to prosecutors in Spain. Their investigation, which is in early stages, is looking into whether the former monarch received millions of dollars in kickbacks from Saudi Arabia during the construction of a high-speed railway there by a Spanish consortium.

A separate Swiss judicial probe is looking into millions of euros (dollars) that were allegedly given to Juan Carlos by Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah and allegedly transformed by Juan Carlos to a former companion.

Source: AP

Facebook Inc on Wednesday took down a post by U.S. President Donald Trump, which the company said violated its rules against sharing misinformation about the coronavirus.

The post contained a video clip, from an interview with Fox & Friends earlier in the day, in which Trump claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19.

“This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19, which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation,” a Facebook spokesman said.

A tweet containing the video that was posted by the Trump campaign’s @TeamTrump account and shared by the president was also later hidden by Twitter Inc for breaking its COVID-19 misinformation rules.

A Twitter spokesman said the @TeamTrump account owner would be required to remove the tweet before they could tweet again.

The Trump campaign accused the companies of bias against the president, saying Trump had stated a fact. “Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth,” said Courtney Parella, a spokeswoman with the campaign.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that while adults make up most of the known COVID-19 cases to date, some children and infants have been sick with the disease and they can also transmit it to others.

An analysis by the World Health Organization of 6 million infections between Feb. 24 and July 12 found that the share of children aged 5-14 years was about 4.6%.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. During a briefing at the White House, Trump repeated his claim that the virus had little impact on children.

“Children handle it very well,” he told reporters. “If you look at the numbers, in terms of mortality, fatalities … for children under a certain age … their immune systems are very very strong and very powerful. They seem to be able to handle it very well and that’s according to every statistical claim.”

It was the first time Facebook had removed a Trump post for coronavirus misinformation, the company’s spokesman said.

It also appeared to be the first reported instance of the social media company taking down a post from the president for breaching its misinformation rules.

Twitter has taken down a post retweeted by Trump pointing to a misleading viral video about the coronavirus, but left up clips of the president suggesting scientists should investigate using light or disinfectant on patients.

Twitter said those remarks expressed a wish for treatment, rather than a literal call for action.

It also left up a March post from Tesla Inc’s outspoken CEO Elon Musk stating that “kids are essentially immune” from the virus.

Facebook has taken heat from lawmakers and its own employees in recent months for not taking action on inflammatory posts by Trump.

The company has previously removed ads from Trump’s election campaign for breaking misinformation rules, in that case around a national census.

It also took down both Trump posts and campaign ads that showed a red inverted triangle, a symbol the Nazis used to identify political prisoners, for violating its policy against organized hate.

Source: REUTERS

France and the Netherlands are gearing up for stricter mask-wearing rules to fight the coronavirus as the global death toll from the pandemic neared 700,000.

Paris, Toulouse and other cities announced that the wearing of masks would be compulsory in particularly busy streets and squares. People already have to wear them inside most private businesses and all public buildings.

A scientific committee advising the French government warned that the country could lose control of its spread “at any time.”

In the Netherlands, the same mask-wearing measure will be applied in Rotterdam and the famous red-light district of Amsterdam from Wednesday.

And Ireland postponed the reopening of pubs and other nightspots on the advice of scientists, concerned about rising infections.

In other developments, the Philippines placed millions of people back under lockdown. And the hunt for an effective treatment continued with the United States launching trials of an antibody treatment for COVID-19.

Philippines resumes lockdown

Millions of people in the Philippines were ordered to stay home Tuesday in a bid to contain the rising rate of infections, and relieve pressure on overwhelmed hospitals.

More than 27 million people on the main island of Luzon, including the capital Manila, went back into a partial lockdown.

People have been told to stay home unless going out to buy essential goods, for exercise or for work, after the number of recorded infections surged past 100,000.

But with only 24 hours’ notice of the shutdown, many people were stranded in Manila, unable to get back to their hometowns after public transport and domestic flights were halted.

More than 18 million people worldwide have been infected with the virus since it first emerged in China late last year.

The worst hit country, the United States, had added 1,300 new deaths as of Tuesday evening, bringing its toll to nearly 156,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. The caseload grew by 53,847 to nearly 4.8 million, it said.

Far from slowing down, the latest figures show that the rate of infection is accelerating.

Brazil is driving a surge in Latin America and the Caribbean, where infections passed five million on Monday.

South America’s largest country has recorded more than 2.75 million cases, and nearly 95,000 deaths, nearly half the region’s 203,800 deaths.

US announces clinical trials

The world’s hope of ending the current cycle of outbreaks and lockdowns rests on finding a treatment.

The United States announced Tuesday it had begun late-stage clinical trials into a drug they hope will be an antibody against the coronavirus.

The Phase 3 trial will initially enroll some 300 volunteers around the world who have been hospitalized with mild to moderate COVID-19 with fewer than 13 days of symptoms.

On Monday, Russia said it aimed to launch mass production of a vaccine in September and turn out “several million” doses per month by next year.

In response, the World Health Organization on Tuesday urged Russia to follow the established guidelines for producing safe and effective vaccines.

Just a day earlier, the agency’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on countries to focus on basic suppression measures, such as contact tracing, maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask.

“There’s no silver bullet at the moment — and there might never be,” he warned.

‘Extraordinarily widespread’

Despite the grim numbers in America, President Donald Trump adopted a resolutely optimistic tone.

“We’re seeing indications that our strong mitigation efforts are working very well, actually, especially to protect those who are most at risk,” he said during a White House press conference addressing the pandemic.

In a morning tweet, he lashed out at his coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx after she warned the virus was “extraordinarily widespread” in the US.

Trump — angered by what he sees as overly pessimistic media coverage of his much-criticized handling of the epidemic — accused her of giving in to pressure to sound negative about the new surge.

“Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!” Trump wrote on Twitter Monday. 

Despite rising infection numbers in Europe, some countries are pushing ahead with plans to reopen schools and finding ways to keep their battered tourism sectors functioning.

Angry Nadal withdraws from US Open

Fears over the virus led defending champion Rafael Nadal to announce on Tuesday that he will not play the US Open, which is due to start in New York on August 31.

“The situation is very complicated worldwide, the COVID-19 cases are increasing, it looks like we still don’t have control of it.” Nadal said on Twitter.

“This is a decision I never wanted to take… for the time being I rather not travel.”

Women’s world number one Ashleigh Barty withdrew from the tournament last week citing “significant risks” from COVID-19.

(AFP)

Rescuers worked through the night into Wednesday after two enormous explosions ripped through Beirut’s port, killing at least 78 people and injuring thousands, as they wrecked buildings across the Lebanese capital.

The second blast sent an enormous orange fireball into the sky, immediately followed by a tornado-like shockwave that flattened the port and shattered windows across the city.

The explosions — which were heard in Nicosia, 240 kilometres (150 miles) away in Cyprus — were logged by seismologists, registering as the equivalent of a 3.3-magnitude earthquake.

Bloodied, dazed and wounded people stumbled among the debris, glass shards and burning buildings in central Beirut.

Around 4,000 people were hurt by the blasts, with injuries recorded right across the city.

Lebanon is already reeling from an economic crisis that has left more than half of the population in poverty. The situation has been worsened in recent months by the coronavirus pandemic.

Prime Minister Hassan Diab said 2,750 tonnes of the agricultural fertiliser ammonium nitrate that had been stored for years in a portside warehouse had blown up, sparking “a disaster in every sense of the word”.

“What happened today will not pass without accountability,” said Diab. “Those responsible for this catastrophe will pay the price.”

General Security chief Abbas Ibrahim said the material had been confiscated years earlier and stored in the warehouse, just minutes from Beirut’s shopping and nightlife districts.

A soldier at the port, where relatives of the missing scrambled for news of their loved ones, told AFP: “It’s a catastrophe inside. There are corpses on the ground. Ambulances are still lifting the dead.”

A woman in her twenties stood screaming at security forces, asking about the fate of her brother, a port employee.

“His name is Jad, his eyes are green,” she pleaded, to no avail as officers refused her entry.

“It was like an atomic bomb,” said Makrouhie Yerganian, a retired schoolteacher in her mid-70s who has lived near the port for decades.

“I’ve experienced everything, but nothing like this before,” even during the country’s 1975-1990 civil war, she said.

“All the buildings around here have collapsed.”

AFP correspondents across the city saw shop and apartment windows blown out and streets covered with broken glass.

Photos posted online showed damage to the inside of Beirut airport’s terminal, nine kilometres from the explosion.

Hospitals already struggling with the country’s coronavirus outbreak were overwhelmed by the influx of wounded people and the country’s Red Cross called for urgent blood donations.

– ‘We saw the mushroom’ –

As the national defence council declared Beirut a disaster zone, Diab appealed to Lebanon’s allies to “stand by” the country and “help us treat these deep wounds”.

President Michel Aoun declared three days of mourning, and announced he would release 100 billion lira ($66 million) of emergency funds.

Condolences poured in from across the world with Gulf nations, the United States and even Lebanon’s arch foe Israel offering to send aid. France also promised to send assistance.

AFP video footage showed areas of near-complete devastation, with cars flipped onto their roofs, warehouses flattened and survivors drenched from head to toe in their own blood.

“We heard an explosion, then we saw the mushroom,” said a Beirut resident who witnessed the second deafening explosion from her balcony in the city’s Mansourieh district.

“The force of the blast threw us backwards into the apartment.”

An AFP correspondent at the scene minutes after said every shop in the Hamra commercial district had been damaged, with entire storefronts destroyed and many cars wrecked.

A huge blaze sent up black smoke from the port area, as helicopters dumped water on burning buildings.

A ship moored off the port was on fire, and the blasts also damaged a vessel deployed with United Nations peacekeeping force UNIFIL and injured some of its personnel.

– ‘Like an earthquake’ –

Hundreds shared their shock and grief on social media.

“Buildings are shaking,” tweeted one resident, while another wrote: “An enormous, deafening explosion just engulfed Beirut. Heard it from miles away.”

Online footage from a Lebanese newspaper office showed blown-out windows, scattered furniture and demolished interior panelling.

The explosions hit a country already reeling from its worst economic crisis in decades.

The local currency has plunged, and businesses have shuttered en masse, as poverty and unemployment have soared at an alarming rate.

Charity Save the Children said “the incident could not have occurred at a worse time”.

Source: AFP

In a fiery eulogy for longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis on Thursday, former President Barack Obama took a series of thinly veiled shots at the actions of his successor that he said tore at the legacy of the Black civil rights icon being laid to rest.

The funeral for Lewis, who played an instrumental role in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, came on the same day Republican President Donald Trump suggested the Nov. 3 election could be delayed. Trump has also waged a war against mail-in ballots, a tactic critics say is aimed at suppressing votes.

“We no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot,” Obama said in the eulogy, referring to one way Black people were once disqualified at the ballot box.

“But even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”

Obama also referred to reported moves to undermine “the postal service in the run-up to an election that could be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”

Obama, joined at the funeral by two fellow former presidents, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, spoke of Lewis’s rise from humble beginnings on a Troy, Alabama, farm to become a leader of the 1960s struggle for equal rights for Black Americans. Ultimately, the man known as the “conscience of Congress” never gave up his drive to make “good trouble” in the cause of justice, Obama said.

Obama and others spoke or sang in front of his casket draped in the American flag at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. King, who was assassinated in 1968, had been a mentor to Lewis.

Lewis, who was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, died on July 17 at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. His death came at a time of reckoning across the United States over racial injustice ignited by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

Obama – a Democrat who was the nation’s first black president and who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 – argued that the man whose sharecropping parents “picked someone else’s cotton” now should be counted among the Founding Fathers.

“America was built by John Lewis. He as much as anyone in our history brought our country closer to its highest ideals,” the Democratic former president said.

In his speech, Bush remembered joining Lewis in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the watershed 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “The story that began in Troy isn’t ending here today, nor is the work.”

The funeral capped a week of memorial services.

Lewis’s coffin was escorted across the bridge on Sunday, decades after his beating there drew a national spotlight to the struggle for racial equality, including suppression of the Black vote in the South. And on Monday his casket was taken to the U.S. Capitol in Washington where it lay in state through Tuesday.

Eric Terrell, 65, of Atlanta, sat outside the church in his wheelchair, in the heat and thick air of an Atlanta summer morning, waiting to get a glimpse of former Presidents Clinton and Bush, but especially Obama. He was camped out before 6:30 a.m. so he could bow his head as Lewis’s funeral procession rolled by.

And he held his homemade sign until his arms got tired. It read, “Get your ass out and vote.”

“He put his life on the line in Selma so we could vote,” said Terrell, who is Black. “So we better do it,” he said before joining the throng of onlookers outside the church watching the services on a Jumbotron.

In an essay written shortly before his death and published in the New York Times on Thursday, Lewis called on the younger generation to get into “good trouble,” using perhaps his most famous utterance about the importance of challenging inequality.

“In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way,” he wrote, before invoking a famous line from King: “Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”

(AFP)

The US military said on Wednesday it would move its headquarters out of Stuttgart, Germany to Belgium, as it outlined broader plans to shift around 12,000 US troops out of Germany on orders from President Donald Trump.

Trump announced plans last month to cut the number of US troops in Germany to 25,000, faulting the close US ally for failing to meet NATO’s defence spending target and accusing it of taking advantage of America on trade.

Of the 34,500 US military personnel in Germany, some 6,400 will be sent home while nearly 5,600 others will be moved to other NATO countries, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper announced Wednesday.

A key aim of the rotation is to reinforce NATO’s southeastern flank near the Black Sea, Esper said.

Some could also go to Poland and the Baltic states if Warsaw follows through on an agreement already sketched out by the two sides, Esper said.

US officials said some of the moves will begin in months and would likely send air and ground forces to countries that already have an American troop presence.

Shift to Poland

The announcement is closely tied to the plan to increase the US troop presence in Poland, a shift long-desired by Warsaw and Polish President Andrzej Duda.

The moves are expected to cost “billions” of dollars, according to US officials, and require construction at bases in the US to accommodate the additional forces. The officials said that in the future other troops would rotate in and out of Europe.

Members of Trump’s own political party have criticised the troop move as a gift to Russia and a threat to US national security. Twenty-two Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee fired back with a letter to Trump saying a reduced US commitment to Europe’s defence would encourage Russian aggression and opportunism.

It’s also unclear if the plan would survive if Trump is not re-elected in November.

A message to Russia

Germany is a hub for US operations in the Middle East and Africa. The decision to keep nearly half the forces in Europe is a clear move by the Pentagon to assuage allies by avoiding the complete withdrawal of 10,000 troops out of the region. And by spreading forces into the East, it sends a message to Russia that the US is not reducing its commitment to the region and remains ready to protect Eastern Europe from any Moscow aggression.

Shifting forces out of Germany had long been rumoured and is in line with Pentagon efforts to put more troops in the Indo-Pacific. But Trump’s comments indicated the move was tied more directly to his anger over Germany’s failure to meet NATO defence spending goals.

Trump has branded Germany “delinquent” for failing to meet a NATO goal set in 2014 for members to halt budget cuts and move toward spending at least two percent of gross national product on defence by 2024. And he asserted that the Germans had long shortchanged the United States on trade and defence, declaring that “until they pay” more for their own defence, he will reduce US troops.

At a White House event last month with Duda, Trump said that some of the troops from Germany would go to Poland and some would go to “other places”.

Under an agreement announced last year, the US already said it was sending about 1,000 more troops to Poland, and progress is being made, officials said, to lay the groundwork for those moves. Based on that agreement, the US will add a division headquarters, a combat training centre, an unmanned aircraft squadron and structure to support an Army brigade that could rotate in and out of the country.

Overall, the US has about 47,000 troops and civilian personnel in Germany, spread out across a number of bases, headquarters and smaller installations. Most of the 35,000 on active duty are in a handful of larger Army and Air Force bases including Ramstein Air Base, a hub in the region. There also are 2,600 National Guard and Reserve forces in Germany, and almost 12,000 civilians working for the services or the Defense Department.

Several NATO defence ministers had expressed concern about the decision to pull thousands of troops out of Germany, particularly since Trump has talked repeatedly about bringing troops home and getting the US out of “endless wars”.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and REUTERS)

A bridge over a lake in Arizona partially collapsed on Wednesday after a freight train derailed and caught fire.

The incident happened just before 6:30 a.m. local time in Tempe, located east of Phoenix. The Tempe Police Department said on Twitter that officers and the Tempe Fire Department were on the scene of a train derailment and “large fire” over Tempe Town Lake.

“Several roads are restricted near Tempe Town Lake and west of downtown Tempe,” the department said. “Please avoid the area.”

Fire and smoke could be seen along the length of the train bridge, including a portion that collapsed in a park area.

Aerial images from FOX10 showed the fire continuing to burn as first responders arrived at the scene.

It’s not clear what the train was carrying, but lumber could be seen in the water below.

Camille Kimball, who was riding her bike under the bridge before it collapsed, told CBS 5 the noise of the train got extremely loud and as she came off the bridge.

“I turned around to look and got the fright of my life,” she told the television station. “Now there’s fire pouring into the lake from the middle of the bridge. … It’ looks like a scene from hell, truly. A scene from hell. … The flames are intense and the sky is filled with black smoke.”

It’s not yet known if any injuries have been reported due to the derailment and subsequent fire.

Valley Metro, who operates the light rail system in the Phoenix area, said due to the incident involving the freight train, Valley Metro trains were prevented from crossing the Tempe Town Lake Bridge.

Buses were being arranged to transport passengers through the area.

Source: Fox News

Senate Republicans on Monday proposed a $1 trillion coronavirus aid package hammered out with the White House, paving the way for talks with Democrats on how to help Americans as expanded unemployment benefits for millions of workers expire this week.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the proposal a “tailored and targeted” plan focused on getting children back to school and employees back to work and protecting corporations from lawsuits, while slashing the expiring supplemental unemployment benefits of $600 a week by two-thirds.

The plan sparked immediate opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats decried it as too limited compared to their $3 trillion proposal that passed the House of Representatives in May, while some Republicans called it too expensive.

McConnell said the package would include direct $1,200 payments to Americans, as well as incentives for the manufacture of personal protective equipment in the United States, rather than China.

It also includes $190 billion for loans to help small businesses, and $100 billion for loans to businesses that operate seasonally or in low-income areas.

Republicans want to reduce the expanded unemployment benefit from the current $600 per week, which is in addition to state unemployment payments and expires on Friday, to $200 in addition to state unemployment.

After two months, states would pay unemployed people a total of 70% of their previous wages, but only to a maximum of $500 per week, less than half of what many workers have been getting.

The supplemental unemployment has been a financial lifeline for laid-off workers and a key support for consumer spending. The extra funds – exceeding the former wages of some workers – have been a sticking point for many Republicans, who say they encourage Americans to stay home rather than go back to work.

Democrats, in turn, have decried the Republican delay in writing more legislation as confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases passed the 4 million mark. The pandemic has killed roughly 150,000 people in the United States.

Liability protections and defence spending

The Democratic-led House in May passed its $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill known as the “HEROES Act,” but the Republican-led Senate refused to consider it.

McConnell on Monday called the House bill a “socialist manifesto” and urged Democrats to work with Republicans on their plan, called the “HEALS Act.”

“We have one foot in the pandemic and one foot in the recovery,” McConnell said. “The American people need more help. They need it to be comprehensive, and they need it to be carefully tailored to this crossroads.”

The proposal included “strong legal liability protection” for corporations, a top Republican priority.

It includes nearly $30 billion for the military and defense industry, in addition to nearly $760 billion already enacted for defense this year – including more than $10 billion in previous coronavirus relief bills.

Immediate opposition from some of McConnell’s fellow Republicans, as well as from Democrats, signaled a tough round of negotiations ahead.

“The answer to these challenges will not simply be shoveling cash out of Washington. The answer to these challenges will be getting people back to work,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz told reporters.

Some Republicans had complained about the high price tag. The federal government has already spent $3.7 trillion to cushion the economic blow from pandemic-forced shutdowns.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said the Republican plan did too little, too slowly, to help Americans facing joblessness and eviction. “The Republican plan is weak tea, when our problems need a much stronger brew,” Schumer said.

He said many states had warned they would have a hard time implementing unemployment changes. Many Americans waited weeks for previous coronavirus benefits, as outmoded state computer systems adjusted.

Democrats had warned they would oppose a Republican proposal to protect businesses and schools from liability lawsuits as they reopen with the coronavirus pandemic still raging.

The Republican proposal also includes measures not directly related to the COVID-19 outbreak, including $1.8 billion for construction of a new FBI headquarters in Washington, something championed by President Donald Trump, who owns a hotel across the street from the current building.

(REUTERS)

China launched its most ambitious Mars mission ever on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet.

The Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from a launch site on Hainan Island.

It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday. And the U.S. is aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, next week.

China’s tandem spacecraft — with both an orbiter and a rover — will take seven months to reach Mars, like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “quest for heavenly truth,” will look for underground water, if it’s present, as well as evidence of possible ancient life.

This isn’t China’s first attempt at Mars. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth’s orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.

This time, China is going at it alone. It also is fast-tracking, launching an orbiter and rover on the same mission instead of stringing them out.

China’s secretive space program has developed rapidly in recent decades. Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut in 2003, and last year, Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft from any country to land on the far side of the moon.

Joining elite club

Conquering Mars would put China in an elite club.

“There is a whole lot of prestige riding on this,” said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese aerospace programs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. Only the U.S. has successfully landed a spacecraft on Martian soil, doing it eight times since 1976. NASA’s InSight and Curiosity rovers still operate today. Six other spacecraft are exploring Mars from orbit: three American, two European and one from India.

Unlike the two other Mars missions launching this month, China has tightly controlled information about the program — even withholding any name for its rover. National security concerns led the U.S. to curb cooperation between NASA and China’s space program.

In an article published earlier this month in Nature Astronomy, mission chief engineer Wan Weixing said Tianwen-1 would slip into orbit around Mars in February and look for a landing site on Utopia Planitia — a plain where NASA has detected possible evidence of underground ice. Wan died in May from cancer.

The landing would then be attempted in April or May, according to the article. If all goes well, the 240-kilogram (530-pound) golf cart-sized, solar-powered rover is expected to operate for about three months, and the orbiter for two years.

Though small compared to America’s hulking, car-sized 1,025-kilogram (2,260-pound) Perseverance, it’s almost twice as big as the two rovers China has sent to the moon in 2013 and 2019. Perseverance is expected to operate for at least two years.

Mars-launching season every 26 months

This Mars-launching season — which occurs every 26 months when Earth and Mars are at their closest — is especially busy.

The UAE spacecraft Amal, or Hope, which will orbit Mars but not land, is the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. NASA’s Perseverance rover is up next.

“At no other time in our history have we seen anything like what is unfolding with these three unique missions to Mars. Each of them is a science and engineering marvel,” the Space Foundation’s chief executive officer Thomas Zelibor said in an online panel discussion earlier this week.

China’s road to Mars hit a few bumps: A Long March-5 rocket, nicknamed “Fat 5” because of its bulky shape, failed to launch earlier this year. The coronavirus pandemic forced scientists to work from home. In March, when instruments needed to be transported from Beijing to Shanghai, three team members drove 12 hours to deliver them.

While China is joining the U.S., Russia and Europe in creating a satellite-based global navigation system, experts say it isn’t trying to overtake the U.S. lead in space exploration.

Instead, Cheng of the Heritage Foundation said China is in a “slow race” with Japan and India to establish itself as Asia’s space power.

Source: AP

US President Donald Trump has urged Americans to wear masks, warning that the coronavirus pandemic in the United States may “get worse before it gets better.”

In what seems to be a shift in rhetoric and tone, Trump encouraged Americans on Tuesday to use face coverings if they cannot maintain social distance.

“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better – something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is,” he told reporters in his first press briefing in months focused on the outbreak.

“We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask, get a mask. Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect. And we need everything we can get,” he added.

He also asked young people to avoid going to crowded bars, but noted that that the virus would disappear at some point.

“We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful. We have developed it as we go along,” he claimed.

The president, who himself was not wearing a mask at the briefing, also said he was getting used to masks and that would wear one in groups or when on an elevator.

“I will use it, gladly,” said the president, who has previously disparaged masks as unsanitary. “Anything that potentially can help … is a good thing.”

This comes as the Republican president’s aides have reportedly pressed him to adopt a more measured approach amid an ongoing spike in the virus infections across the country.

So far, more than 4,028,700 have tested positive and over 144,900 died across the country.

Meanwhile, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told CNN that Trump’s new embrace of mask-wearing indicated that he was realizing his mistakes in dealing with the virus.

“This is not a hoax – it is a pandemic that has gotten worse before it will get better because of his inaction, and in fact clearly it is the Trump virus,” Pelosi said.

Trump has been under fire for publicly downplaying the threat of the pandemic  and his handling of the worsening COVID-19 crisis which has killed more than 143,000 people in the United States and crippled the country’s economy.

On Monday, hundreds of scientists from the US National Academy of Sciences had rebuked Trump’s “denigration of scientific expertise” over coronavirus response and other affronts.

In an unusual move by the scientific community, more than 1,200 members of the National Academy of Sciences signed an open letter seeking to “restore science-based policy in government,” The Guardian reported.

Source: Presstv