Bad weather on Monday forced SpaceX to postpone the latest launch of its massive prototype Starship rocket, key to founder Elon Musk’s dreams of colonizing Mars and NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon.The tenth test flight, which could now happen as soon as Tuesday, comes at a time of heightened scrutiny for the world’s most powerful launch vehicle following a string of explosive failures that have begun raising doubts about its viability.Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall, the stainless steel behemoth was set to lift off from the company’s Starbase in southern Texas in a window that opened at 6:30 pm local time (2330 GMT).It was the second delay in two days after a ground-system leak, a relatively routine issue in spaceflight, scuppered an attempt on Sunday.The mission aims to put the upper stage — also known as “Starship” or simply “ship” and eventually intended to carry crew and cargo — through structural stress testing as it flies halfway around the world before splashing down in the Indian Ocean.SpaceX will also try out new heat-shield materials and attempt to deploy mock Starlink satellites as cargo. Unlike recent attempts, the “Super Heavy” booster will not be caught by the launch tower’s giant “chopstick” arms but instead aim for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.The company’s aggressive “fail fast, learn fast” approach has been credited with giving it a commanding lead in space launches through its Falcon rocket family.Its Dragon capsules are the only American spacecraft ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station, while Starlink has become a geopolitical asset.But concern is mounting over whether these successes will translate to Starship, a rocket unlike any before it. The upper stage has exploded in all three 2025 test flights.Two scattered debris over Caribbean islands, while the third broke apart after reaching space. In June, another upper stage blew up during a ground “static fire” test.- ‘Spacefaring civilization’ -Appearing on the webcast on Monday, Musk was characteristically bullish, reiterating his vision of Mars as a lifeboat for humanity should disaster strike on Earth.But he added that beyond safeguarding survival, there are also more uplifting motives: “A future where we are a spacefaring civilization is infinitely more exciting than one where we are not,” he said.Even if the tenth flight succeeds, formidable hurdles lie ahead.”There are thousands of engineering challenges left for both the ship and the booster, but perhaps the single biggest is developing a fully reusable orbital heat shield,” said Musk, sporting a “Nuke Mars” T-shirt.The slogan is a nod to the idea of detonating nuclear bombs over the Red Planet’s ice caps to release greenhouse gases and make it more Earth-like.Another key obstacle is proving that Starships can be refueled in orbit with super-cooled propellant — an unprecedented feat, but one that is essential for the rocket to carry out deep-space missions.Delays to Starship could ripple through NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the Moon by mid-2027 using a modified version of Starship as the landing vehicle.

Neighbors, volunteers and parents escorted children to the first day of the new school year across Washington on Monday, vowing to protect students from Donald Trump’s deportation drive.At one elementary school in the US capital, crowds blew whistles, shook tambourines and cheered children on their way to class, ready to fend off any law enforcement action and to support a neighborhood with a high Latino population.Throughout the city, chaperone groups, carpools and patrols were organized over fears that immigration agents, who have stepped up arrests and sweeps, could target school campuses.Resident Helena Bonde, 36, showed up at the elementary school in her wheelchair to support immigrant families who she says have been terrorized by raids, with some neighbors afraid to go to the grocery store.”Nobody’s trying to arrest a disabled white woman right now, so I just figured I’ll be wherever I can be,” Bonde told AFP.”Everybody really just wanted to help out in a way that could feel concrete and useful and help make our local families feel a little safer.”The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said it would not target Washington schools on Monday.But it has not ruled out activity on school campuses to conduct welfare checks on undocumented and unaccompanied children that the Trump administration says need to be rescued from sex trafficking and forced labor rings.On Monday “you are not going to see ICE officers doing a raid or a sweep,” ICE chief Todd Lyons told NBC News last week.”But our goal… is finding those 300,000 undocumented children and those minors that came here through the last administration.”- ‘It’s about how you look’ -Selene, a Mexican-American community organizer, admitted that the thought of not sending her daughter to school crossed her mind because even Latino families residing in the United States legally have been targeted and detained.”This is not about status. It’s about how you look, right? If you look Latino on the street, you’re a target, unfortunately,” Selene, who declined to give her last name, told AFP.In the end, encouraged by her neighbors, Selene walked her daughter to school and urged others to do the same.”The community is here for you, don’t be afraid, and we’re going to keep up the great work. We’re going to keep helping our community members. Our kids who come to school need to feel safe, and we can do that together,” she said.Others, however, were too frightened.Blanca, a middle-aged immigrant from El Salvador who stood near the school entrance with a sign that read “Every day is an opportunity” in English and in Spanish, said some families had kept their children home, at least temporarily, out of fear of being deported.”Because they are scared,” Blanca, who declined to give her last name for safety reasons, told AFP. “We are scared to go out. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us. We’re not safe.”- Compulsory education -According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, the US capital was home to about 25,000 undocumented migrants in 2023.While city schools do not collect citizenship information on students, a 2022 Washington Post report quoted a DC council member as estimating that there are from 3,000 to 4,000 undocumented students in Washington schools. In California, home to the largest immigrant population in the United States, ICE raids that began after Trump’s return to the White House in January have caused a spike in student absences, according to the National Education Association. Jeffrey Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers, cited a landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that established that states cannot prevent undocumented children from attending public schools.”What they’re doing, this is inhumane. This is trying to put fear into these communities,” Freitas told AFP.”Education is compulsory for every student in the United States. That’s what we have to go by.”Lora Ries, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, confirmed that “kids are, no matter what their immigration status, under the Supreme Court decision, able to go to public schools, so they are not at risk.”But, she added, “If someone is here illegally, then they should get right with the law.”

US President Donald Trump said Monday he hoped to meet again with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, possibly this year, as he held White House talks with South Korea’s dovish new leader that got off awkwardly.Hours before President Lee Jae Myung arrived for his long-planned first visit to the White House, Trump took to social media to denounce what he said was a “Purge or Revolution” in South Korea, apparently over raids that involved churches.Forty minutes into an Oval Office meeting in which Lee profusely praised Trump, the US leader dismissed his own sharply worded rebuke, saying, “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding” as “there is a rumor going around.”Trump said he believed he was on the same page on North Korea as Lee, a progressive who supports diplomacy over confrontation.Trump, who met Kim Jong Un three times in his first term, hailed his relationship with the young totalitarian and said he knew him “better than anybody, almost, other than his sister.””Someday I’ll see him. I look forward to seeing him. He was very good with me,” Trump told reporters, saying he hoped the talks would take place this year.Trump once said that he and Kim “fell in love” during their meetings, which reduced tensions but failed to produce a lasting agreement.But Kim has since been emboldened by the war in Ukraine, securing critical support from Russia after sending thousands of North Korean troops to fight.North Korea has dug in and refused any talk of ending its nuclear weapons program.- ‘Trump Tower’ in Pyongyang -Lee, a former labor rights lawyer who has criticized the US military in the past, immediately flattered his host and said Trump has made the United States “not a keeper of peace, but a maker of peace.””I look forward to your meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un and construction of Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf” there, Lee told him.He even cited propaganda from North Korea that denounced South Korea by noting that Pyongyang said the relationship with Trump was better.Kim “will be waiting for you,” Lee told him.In a speech after his meeting, Lee warned that North Korea could soon produce 10 to 20 nuclear weapons per year as well as a missile that can hit the United States — despite pressure and sanctions.”The hard fact is that the number of nuclear weapons that North Korea possesses has increased over the past three to four years,” Lee said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.He highlighted his overtures to the North such as stopping the blaring of anti-Kim messages over loudspeakers on the military frontier.Lee was elected in June after the impeachment of the more hawkish Yoon Suk Yeol, who was removed from office after briefly imposing martial law.The raids denounced by Trump likely referred in part to investigations surrounding Yoon’s conservative allies.- Seeking to buy base -Korean Air announced after the talks that it would buy more than 100 aircraft from US manufacturer Boeing, as Trump presses allies hard for business. Trump, who frequently accuses European allies of freeloading off the United States, made clear he would seek greater compensation by South Korea over the 28,500 US troops in the country.He suggested the United States could seek to take over base land, an idea likely to enrage Lee’s brethren on the South Korean left.”We spent a lot of money building a fort, and there was a contribution made by South Korea, but I would like to see if we could get rid of the lease and get ownership of the land where we have a massive military base,” Trump said.He also spoke bluntly about one of South Korea’s most delicate issues: so-called “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery during Japan’s 1910-1945 rule.The South Korean left has historically been outspoken about Japan’s legacy, although Lee visited Tokyo on his way to Washington, a highly symbolic stop praised by Trump.Japan had agreed to compensate comfort women but the deal was criticized by survivors who questioned Tokyo’s sincerity.

Perplexity AI on Monday said it will begin paying out millions of dollars to media outlets as part of a new model for sharing search revenue with publishers.The company’s media partners will soon get paid when their work is used by Perplexity’s browser or AI assistant to satisfy queries or requests, according to the San Francisco-based startup.”We’re compensating publishers in the model that’s right for the AI age,” the Perplexity team said in a blog post.The payouts will be administered via a subscription service to be rolled out in the coming months, dubbed Comet Plus, which the startup described as a program that ensures publishers and journalists benefit from new business models enabled by AI.A $42.5 million pool of money has been set aside to share with publishers and is expected to grow over time, according to Perplexity.”As the web has evolved beyond information to include knowledge, action, and opportunities, excellent content from publishers and journalists matters even more,” the Perplexity team said.The company will charge a $5 monthly subscription for Comet Plus, which will be an added perk for those who already pay for premium versions of Perplexity.Perplexity is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups, whose AI-powered search engine is often mentioned as a potential disruptor to Google.But the company has been targeted with lawsuits by media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, claiming the startup unfairly profits from their work.One suit accuses Perplexity of illegally copying and reproducing copyrighted content from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post to power its AI-driven “answer engine.”A revenue-sharing model by Perplexity would be a peace offering to publishers and bolster its defenses against accusations of free-riding on their work.Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity’s tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information.And unlike a classic search engine, Perplexity provides ready-made answers on its webpage, making it unnecessary for users to click through to the source website.Google, meanwhile, has built powerful AI into its search engine and offers AI-generated summaries with query results.After a lawsuit by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in October, Perplexity criticized the “adversarial posture” of many media as “shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating.”They “prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll,” it said at the time.”We should all be working together to offer people amazing new tools and build genuinely pie-expanding businesses.”

Maurice Tempelsman, a renowned diamond merchant and long-time companion of former US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died in New York, his family said. He was 95.His death at a Manhattan hospital on Saturday was caused by complications from a fall, his son Leon told US media.Tempelsman was as well known for his late-in-life friendship with Jackie O, as tabloids called her, as he was for his entanglements with authoritarian African leaders over the diamond trade. Tempelsman handled Onassis’s finances after the death of her second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, from whom she inherited $26 million. The two were often seen together in New York’s Central Park. Tempelsman, who was with Jackie Onassis from the early 1980s until she died in 1994, and lawyer Alexander Forger were co-executors of her will.In it, she left Belgium-born Tempelsman “my Greek alabaster head of a woman.”In 1984 he acquired New York-based diamond jewelers Lazare Kaplan, propelling him onto New York’s business and social scene, and quickly becoming one of the world’s premier diamond merchants.But it was his entanglements with various African autocrats, including Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, that led to him becoming something of a back-channel intermediary between the US and the continent, the Washington Post reported.Lazare Kaplan had stakes in various mines in Africa as well as investments in major diamond operations on the continent, the paper said.Tempelsman had opened a diamond-trading office in Kinshasa, the capital of then-Zaire and now-Democratic Republic of Congo, as early as 1960 and became an “intimate friend” of dictator Mobutu, according to author Crawford Young.Tempelsman sued the author of a book and its publisher for claiming that he was “close to the CIA,” AFP archives show, with the French judge ruling in 1984 that the allegation was not itself defamatory.The French court ruling reported by AFP said he was awarded a symbolic one franc, the country’s currency at the time, for invasion of privacy.In later life, Tempelsman supported various charitable causes including the Elton John AIDS Foundation.