NASA named the first nine astronauts who will fly to space on Boeing and SpaceX vehicles in 2019 on Friday – a mix of novices and veterans who are tasked with restoring America’s ability to send humans into orbit.

These pioneering flights to the International Space Station aboard commercially built crew capsules will be the first leaving US soil to put people into orbit since the iconic space shuttle program ended in 2011.

For the past seven years, NASA astronauts have hitched rides to the orbiting outpost on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft – at a cost of some $80 million a seat.

"This is a big deal for our country and we want America to know that we are back, that we are flying American astronauts on American rockets from American soil," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said as he unveiled the crew members in Houston, Texas.

An unmanned Boeing flight test is scheduled for later this year, with the first crew on board in mid-2019, NASA said.

For SpaceX, a demonstration flight with no passengers is set for November 2018, and the first manned flight set for April 2019.

Those named for the crew test flights for Boeing’s Starliner include NASA shuttle veterans Eric Boe and Christopher Ferguson, along with Nicole Aunapu Mann, a naval aviator who was named a NASA astronaut in 2013 and will be making her first flight to space.

"It is going to be a proud moment for America," Mann said.

US President Donald Trumpalso praised the news while giving himself a pat on the back: "NASA, which is making a BIG comeback under the Trump Administration, has just named 9 astronauts for Boeing and Spacex space flights," he tweeted.

"We have the greatest facilities in the world and we are now letting the private sector pay to use them," Trump said. "Exciting things happening."

"Space Force!" he added, referencing a sixth branch of the military he has called for that would focus on defending US interests.

SpaceX’s first crew tests will be manned by shuttle veterans Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley.

After that, the companies move on to actual missions.

NASA "has contracted six missions, with as many as four astronauts per mission, for each company," the agency said.

On board Starliner’s first mission will be NASA veteran Sunita Williams, a retired Navy captain and experienced space shuttle astronaut, and Josh Cassada, a Navy pilot making his first flight to space.

SpaceX’s first crew will include naval aviator Victor Glover, also a novice to spaceflight, and shuttle veteran Michael Hopkins.

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More astronauts will be announced to join the crews at a later date, NASA said.

NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 as part of its commercial crew program, aimed at helping private industry build spaceships to reach low-Earth orbit.

"The goal is to have safe, reliable and cost-effective access to and from the International Space Station and foster commercial access to other potential low-Earth orbit destinations," NASA said.

The US space agency, meanwhile, is working on building rockets and spacecraft that could allow humans to return to the Moon in the coming decade.

Both Boeing and SpaceX are slightly behind schedule when it comes to their crew vehicles.

The first manned flights were initially supposed to take place in 2018.

Five people on board a small airplane were killed when it crashed in the car park of a Southern California shopping centre.

The twin-engine Cessna was heading to the airport southeast of Los Angeles when it came down and struck an unoccupied parked car in the lot of a Staples store and a CVS pharmacy, Orange County Fire Authority said. There was no fire and nobody on the ground was hurt.

Photos from the scene showed the plane upright but on its belly and the car damaged. Several roads surrounding the shopping center and the South Coast Plaza mall across the street were closed.

Ella Pham, 20, and her boyfriend were walking in the car park on Sunday when they saw the crash, she told the Los Angeles Times.

"We looked up to see the plane falling nose first," she told the Times. "We really didn’t think it was a plane at first due to no crashing noise, but as soon as we saw people running from across the street we went to go check it out. It was so heartbreaking just seeing the plane crumbled into pieces."

The pilot of the Cessna 414 declared an emergency before crashing about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from John Wayne Airport, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Arlene Salac said.

The plane is registered to the San Francisco-based real estate company Category III, according to an FAA database. A phone call to the company was not immediately returned Sunday.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the cause of the crash, Salac said. 

The French wing of British pest control and hygiene giant Rentokil Initial has been ordered to pay a former employee €60,000 (£53,000) because it failed to respect his “right to disconnect” from his phone and computer outside office hours.

The ruling is believed to be the first of its kind since a 2016 law on the right to switch off such electronic devices became effective on January 1 last year in response to the modern-day scourge of compulsive out-of-hours email and message checking.

In its decision dated July 12, France’s Court de Cassation, its Supreme Court, found it unfair for the unnamed ex-employee, a former South West regional director of the company in France, to have to “permanently leave his telephone on…to respond to requests from his subordinates or customers” in case of any problems while not at work.

The ex-employee, dubbed Mr Y, was fired in 2011 and took his ex-employer to the worker’s tribunal, asking for compensation for the extra hours "on call".

The company did not consider that the ex-director was officially on call while not in the office after hours or on holidays and weekends because there was no stipulation that he needed to remain close to his home to field calls and deal with emergency business.

However, the court ruled that given that his number was provided as one of the directors to call should problems arise, that amounted to him being “on call”, and that he should be paid for his time.

Under the so-called El Khomri law, named after a former French labour minister, companies are obliged to negotiate with employees to agree on their rights to switch off and ways they can reduce the intrusion of work into their private lives.

If a deal cannot be reached, the company must publish a charter that makes explicit the demands on employees out-of-hours, as well as their rights.

The French measure was intended as a response to the so-called "always-on" work culture that has led to a surge in usually unpaid overtime, and in some cases burnout, while also giving employees flexibility to work from outside the office.

Even before the 2016 bill, French law recognised a contractual right to disconnect for employees working from home. With the new law, however, the right to disconnect has been expanded to all employees who use digital and telecommunication tools in their professional life.

Legal expert Sylvain Niel said that the simple fact of being “connected” outside work hours was enough to be considered “on call”.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling reminds companies that a violation of rest time via a compulsory duty, even digital, is tantamount to being on call and must be compensated,” he told Le Figaro.

Lawyers for the ex-employee declined to comment and a Rentokil representative did not returned calls.

A recent study published by French research group Eleas showed that more than a third of French workers used their devices to do work out of hours every day. Around 60 per cent of workers were in favour of the new law.

Renowned for its 35-hour working week and long holidays, France’s decision to limit being contacted on electronic devices sparked considerable mockery abroad.

However, recent studies suggest that French workers actually put in more hours a year than their supposedly more industrious German counterparts, for example, and their hourly productivity rate is among the world’s highest.

The debate over the right to disconnect is by no means just French. 

Some large groups such as Volkswagen and Daimler in Germany have already implemented measures to curtail out-of-hours messaging. These include cutting email connections in the evening and weekends or even destroying emails automatically that are sent to employees while they are on holiday.

A Tokyo medical school systematically cut women applicant’s entrance exam scores for years to keep them out and boost the numbers of male doctors, Japanese media said on Thursday.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made creating a society "where women can shine" a priority, but women still face an uphill battle in employment and hurdles returning to work after having children, despite Japan’s falling birthrate.

The exam score alterations were discovered in an internal investigation of a graft allegation that emerged this spring over entrance procedures for Tokyo Medical University, the Yomiuri Shimbun daily said.

From 2011, it said, the university began cutting the scores of female applicants to keep the number of women students at about 30 percent, after the number of successful women entrants jumped in 2010.

The paper quoted university sources as saying the action was prompted by a "strong sense at the school" that many women quit medicine after graduating to get married and have children.

Tokyo Medical University spokesman Fumio Azuma said an internal investigation had already begun after allegations this spring of bribery involving the medical school admission of the son of a senior official of the education ministry.

"Of course, we will ask them to include this in their investigations," he said, adding that the results of both investigations could come as early as this month.

Social media erupted in anger at the reports, with some posters demanding more steps to ensure equality while others said similar things were happening everywhere.

"It feels as if the earth’s crumbling under my feet," wrote one. "Who are you kidding with ‘Women should play an active role’?"

Another said, "Women are told they have to give birth; if they don’t, they’re mocked as being ‘unproductive’, but then again, just the possibility that they might give birth is used to cut their scores. What’s a woman supposed to do?"

At least 34 people are reported to have died in a fresh outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including one healthcare worker, the World Health Organization says, as officials scramble to contain the deadly virus in the restive eastern part of the country.

As of August 6, 43 Ebola cases have been reported primarily in North Kivu province, an area that has been beleaguered by decades of violence, with an additional 33 suspected cases currently undergoing laboratory tests.

It is the tenth Ebola outbreak in the country, and news of the most recent cases came just days after the previous outbreak in the DRC was declared over on July 24, in which 33 people also died.

While there is no evidence yet that confirms the recent outbreaks are related, a connection can’t yet be ruled out, said World Health Organization spokesperson Tarik Jašarević.

FAQ | Ebola

The conditions in the area of the new outbreak are extremely challenging. Several armed militia groups have been fighting for control of mineral-rich North Kivu for years, a conflict that forced 1.7 million people to flee their homes in 2017. In December, at least 15 United Nations peacekeepers from Tanzania were killed in the region.

Today than one million displaced people live in the area, with residents and traders routinely moving across local borders with Rwanda and Uganda.

All of this makes for a logistical nightmare for the people trying to trace the movement of one of the world’s most ruthless viruses.

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In the DRC’s last outbreak in western Equateur province, there were also “massive logistical constraints,” says Mr Jašarević.

But workers were still able to travel hundreds of miles by motorbike to trace people who had come into contact with the virus, a vital part of its containment. In North Kivu, however, the same work may have to do be done with armed escorts when traveling outside cities.

“The prolonged humanitarian crisis and deterioration of the security situation is expected to hinder response to this outbreak,” says Mr Jašarević.

Médecins Sans Frontières, which has played a key role in the Ebola virus outbreaks that were first identified in 2014, says it has responded to the most recent outbreak.

“We have teams on site, currently setting up treatment centres and supporting the existing local health facilities in infection prevention and control, in order to help limit the possible spread of the disease and ensure continuity of care for the general population,” an MSF press officer in Johannesburg said on Monday.

After the virus was identified in Equateur in May, an experimental vaccine manufactured by the American pharmaceutical giant Merck was used early in the outbreak. It may have contributed to the outbreak’s quick containment and relatively low death rate. Between 2014 and 2016, more than 11,300 people died from the virus in West Africa.

There are still 3,200 doses of the vaccine that are currently be stored in the capital Kinshasa, and WHO says it can mobilize 300,000 more doses at short notice if required. The government has to approve the vaccine’s distribution by WHO before it can be given to people.

Health workers are now rushing to set up a cold chain to start vaccinating people in eastern part of the country on Wednesday, the DRC’s health ministry has said.

But the biggest constraint, says Mr Jašarević of WHO, will be “security and access issues and that ability to really determine the contacts of contacts of contacts.”

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Argentina’s senators have voted against legalising abortion, bucking the global trend and dashing the hopes of womens’ rights activists in the homeland of Pope Francis.

After a 15-hour session in the senate, watched on giant screens by campaigners on both sides camped outside, the motion was defeated 38 to 31. Women in the senate were equally split on the issue, with 14 female senators voting to legalise, and 14 voting to continue with the current prohibition.

Under Argentine law abortion is only permitted in the case of rape, a threat to the mother’s life or if the foetus is disabled.
 

The bill had sought to legalise abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and would have seen Argentina join Uruguay and Cuba as the only countries in Latin America to fully decriminalise abortion.  It is also legal in Mexico City. 

Only in the Central American trio of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua does it remain totally banned – last year the constitutional court in Chile, the last country to ban abortion in all cases, upheld a new law which would accept abortion under the same conditions as in Argentina.

Mauricio Macri, the Argentine president, praised "a mature parliamentary debate."

"The debate will continue," he said, adding that he was introducing policies to increase sex education in schools and widen access to contraceptives.

Politicians have to wait a year before they can reintroduce another bill.

The vote comes as a deep disappointment to womens’ rights activists, who celebrated in June when the lower house of congress voted narrowly to approve the bill, with 129 votes in favour and 125 against.

Convincing the more conservative senate, however, was always going to be challenging.   

Opponents of the bill gathered on Wednesday night at a "Mass for Life" at the Metropolitan Cathedral, the church of Pope Francis during his tenure as the archbishop of Buenos Aires.

"It’s not about religious beliefs but about a humanitarian reason," said Cardinal Mario Poli, the archbishop of Buenos Aires. 

"Caring for life is the first human right and the duty of the state."

Inside the senate, Cristina Kirchner, the former president, invoked Evita as she urged her fellow senators to support the reform, saying: “This problem is not going to go away.”

But she failed to convince her colleagues, and fireworks and shouts of joy erupted among anti-abortion activists as the result was announced on Thursday night. 

Pro-choice campaigners, many decked in the green scarves that had come to symbolise their movement, were downcast, and small pockets of violence broke out, with stones thrown at riot police, who attempted to disperse the crowd with tear gas and water cannons.

Miguel Angel Pichetto, an opposition leader in the senate, said pro-abortion campaigners would not be giving up.

"The future does not belong to the ‘No’ campaigners,” he said. 

“Sooner rather than later, women will have the decision they need, sooner rather than later we will win this debate."

Abortion laws around the world

Mariela Belski, Amnesty International’s executive director for Argentina, said the senate had “decided to agree on a system which forces women, girls and others who can become pregnant to undergo clandestine and unsafe abortions."

An estimated 500,000 illegal, secret abortions are carried out every year in Argentina, resulting in around 100 deaths.

"The Argentine lawmakers chose today to turn their backs on hundreds of thousands of women and girls who have been fighting for their sexual and reproductive rights," she said. 

The vote in Argentina followed a referendum in Ireland in May, which saw the legalisation of abortion in one of Europe’s last remaining holdouts.

Abortion is still banned in Andorra, Malta and San Marino, and only allowed if necessary to save a mother’s life in Poland, Liechtenstein and Monaco.  

Russian hackers have attacked a Swiss lab that analysed Novichok nerve agent samples from the Salisbury, according to local media. 

The state-run Spiez laboratory near Bern was targeted by hackers believed to be linked to the Russian government ahead of a conference of chemical and biological warfare experts in September, the mass-market Swiss newspaper Blick reported.

After Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury in March, the Swiss laboratory confirmed the British finding that they had fallen victim to the Soviet-developed military-grade nerve agent Novichok. 

British authorities have alleged Russia is behind the attack, a charge Moscow denies.  

Having created a fake email address to mimic the Spiez lab, the perpetrators sent a Word document to conference participants with malware embedded inside of it, the Federal Office for Civil Protection told the newspaper. 

“Someone has posed as the Spiez laboratory. We immediately informed the conference invitees that the document was not ours, and pointed out the danger,” Kurt Münger of the office said. 

It was not clear if any participants had opened the document and been infected, but Mr Münger said the lab had “not registered any outflow of data”.

The Moscow-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab found that the hackers had Russian language skills, according to the report. 

The Spiez lab confirmed that Sandworm, a group of hackers widely believed to be linked to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, was suspected.

The German publication Spiegel previously reported that Sandworm attacked two German public broadcasters along with the Swiss lab in June. 

Cybersecurity experts have accused Sandworm of knocking out Ukrainian power grids in 2016.  

Swiss intelligence has fingered the Russian government for previous cyberattacks on organisations in the country, including the International Olympic Committee and IT companies. 

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed in April that the Spiez lab had found the Western-made BZ nerve agent in the Salisbury samples, but the Swiss facility responded on Twitter that there was no doubt that the substance used was Novichok.

The Department of Homeland Security said this month that the GRU military intelligence agency had infiltrated power plants across the United States.

The Spiez lab focuses on chemical, biological and nuclear warfare and is part of the country’s civil defence network.