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BENGALURU: An Indian spacecraft landed on the moon on Wednesday, the space agency said, in a mission seen as crucial to lunar exploration and India’s standing as a space power, just days after a similar Russian lander crashed.
For India, the successful landing marks its emergence as a space power as the government looks to spur investment in private space launches and related satellite-based businesses.
People across the country were glued to television screens and said prayers as the spacecraft approached the surface.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the lunar south pole, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said. This was India’s second attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon and comes less than a week after Russia’s Luna-25 mission failed.
Chandrayaan means “moon vehicle” in Hindi and Sanskrit. In 2019, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 mission successfully deployed an orbiter but its lander crashed.
On Wednesday, ISRO said it was all set to activate the automatic landing sequence of the spacecraft, triggering the algorithm that will take over once it reaches the designated position and help it land.
The Chandrayaan-3 is expected to remain functional for two weeks, running a series of experiments including a spectrometer analysis of the mineral composition of the lunar surface.
“Landing on the south pole (of the moon) would actually allow India to explore if there is water ice on the moon. And this is very important for cumulative data and science on the geology of the moon,” said Carla Filotico, a partner and managing director at consultancy SpaceTec Partners.
A few hours before the scheduled landing, the mood was upbeat at the spacecraft command center on the outskirts of Bengaluru as ISRO officials and scientists hunched over massive screens monitoring the lander.
Anticipation before the landing was feverish, with banner headlines across Indian newspapers and news channels running countdowns to the landing.
Prayers were held at places of worship across the country, and schoolchildren waved the Indian tricolor as they waited for live screenings of the landing.
Children gathered on the banks of the Ganga river, considered holy by Hindus, to pray for a safe landing, and mosques in several places offered prayers.
At a Sikh temple, known as a gurduwara, in the capital New Delhi, Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri also offered prayers for Chandrayaan.
“Not just economic, but India is achieving scientific and technological progress as well,” Puri told reporters.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched the landing from South Africa, where he is attending the BRICS summit.
Rough terrain makes a south pole landing difficult, and a first landing is historic. The region’s ice could supply fuel, oxygen and drinking water for future missions.
For India, a successful moon landing marks its emergence as a space power as Modi’s government looks to spur investment in private space launches and related satellite-based businesses.
MOSCOW: Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed as a passenger on a private jet which crashed on Wednesday evening north of Moscow with no survivors, the Russian authorities said.
There was no confirmation that Prigozhin was physically on board and Reuters could not immediately confirm that he was on the aircraft, which crashed north of Moscow.
“An investigation has been launched into an Embraer plane crash that occurred tonight in the Tver region. According to the passenger list, the name and surname of Yevgeny Prigozhin is among them,” Rosaviatsia, Russia’s aviation agency, was cited as saying by the state TASS news agency.
Russia’s emergency situations ministry said in a statement that a private Embraer Legacy aircraft traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg had crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino in the Tver Region.
It said that 10 people had been on board, including three crew members. According to preliminary information, everyone on board had been killed, it said.
Prigozhin, 62, spearheaded a mutiny against Russia’s top army brass on June 23-24 which President Vladimir Putin said could have tipped Russia into civil war.
The mutiny was ended by negotiations and an apparent Kremlin deal which saw Prigozhin agree to relocate to neighboring Belarus. But he had appeared to move freely inside Russia after the deal nonetheless.
Prigozhin, who had sought to topple Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, on Monday posted a video address which he suggested was shot in Africa.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to be the biggest target of his Republican rivals for the 2024 US presidential nomination at Wednesday’s first primary debate, after front-runner Donald Trump opted to skip the event.
DeSantis is among eight Republican hopefuls set to be on stage at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee with one glaring exception. The former president, who holds a strong lead in opinion polls, instead sat for a pre-recorded interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, due to air at 9 p.m. ET (0100 GMT) just as the debate begins, potentially siphoning off viewers.
With Trump absent, Republican candidates including tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamay and US Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who have enjoyed a bump in some state and national polls in recent weeks, will be looking to displace DeSantis as the most plausible Trump alternative.
“He’s going to be a punching bag,” said Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and former senior aide to US Senator Rand Paul. “DeSantis is considered a wounded candidate going the wrong way.”
DeSantis, for his part, will be looking to draw a line under a slow but steady slide in the polls this summer. Aides and allies view the debate as a high-stakes opportunity to shift the narrative away from turmoil that has gripped his campaign in recent weeks, including a significant staffing shake-up, and to introduce the governor to millions of voters who have yet to tune into the primary process.
“From the campaign’s perspective, he’s going to be center stage. Everyone on stage is going to be shooting at him,” said one person close to DeSantis, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal campaign dynamics. “He doesn’t need a knockout blow, but he’s got to take advantage of the opportunity of all this airtime.”
Martha MacCallum, a Fox News host who will moderate the debate alongside colleague Bret Baier, indicated in an interview with Vanity Fair last week that they will press the candidates to address Trump’s four criminal indictments.
The candidates are also expected to use the debate to attack China, which most have described as the United States’ top economic and geopolitical foe. Former UN Ambassador and presidential candidate Nikki Haley said in an interview with The Washington Post published on Wednesday that she would send troops to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by China.
The debate will be held one day before Trump plans to surrender in Atlanta in connection with his indictment in Georgia on charges he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former close Trump adviser turned vocal critic, will likely amplify his attacks on the former president. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and former Vice President Mike Pence, who broke with his former boss after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, may also take shots at Trump.
But Jeanette Hoffman, a Republican political consultant, said the other candidates will likely refrain from criticizing Trump for fear of upsetting his supporters, whose votes they will need to win the Republican nomination. Polls show that most Republicans view the criminal charges against Trump as politically motivated, making the topic a tricky one to navigate for his rivals.
“He’s still in the room because every Republican primary candidate is going to have to take a position on the former president and his legal troubles,” Hoffman said. “It’s a bit of a Catch-22 for some candidates. They don’t want Trump to be the candidate but they also can’t be the one to take him out.”
The expected eight participants include Scott, Ramaswamy, and Haley in addition to DeSantis, Christie, Hutchinson and Pence.
It was unclear whether North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum would be able to stand for the debate, after he injured his leg playing basketball, spokesperson Lance Trover said.
In the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll released this month, Trump held 47 percent of the Republican vote nationally, with DeSantis dropping six percentage points from July to 13 percent. None of the other candidates have broken out of single digits.
Both Darling and Hoffman said they saw the potential for Ramaswamy, a skilled orator who has climbed into the third spot in several national polls, to gain ground. Ramaswamy’s policy positions are mostly deeply conservative and he has been a staunch supporter of Trump.
The DeSantis campaign is anticipating particularly harsh broadsides from Ramaswamy and Christie, a person close to the governor said.
Christopher Wlezien, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the electoral impact of debates, said he was skeptical that any contender would achieve a breakout moment on Wednesday.
“My expectations were low for big changes to begin with and it’s even more so because Trump is not there,” he said.
MOSCOW: Air defenses thwarted a new attack on Moscow on Wednesday as Ukraine launched another wave of drone strikes on the Russian capital.
No one was hurt in Moscow but three people were killed in a separate drone attack on a village in Belgorodnear the Ukrainian border. The regional governor said one drone hit a sanatorium and another was shot down. Two people died at the scene and doctors were unable to save the life of a third person.
The attack on Moscow once again forced the capital’s airports to briefly suspend flights as a precaution. The Defense Ministry said air defense forces had shot down two drones over the Moscow region’s Mozhaisky and Khimki districts. A third drone was jammed, lost control and hit a high-rise building under construction in the Moscow City business district. Glass panes on three floors of the building were damaged.
The latest attack was the sixth on the Russian capital and the third on the business district, where some state institutions have been concentrated since May, when drones targeted the Kremlin itself.
A Russian military expert told Arab News the drone attacks were “an act of desperation due to the failures of the Ukrainian armed forces on the battlefield.”
“The widely advertised counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army has choked and Kiev needs to demonstrate at least something to its Western allies so that they continue to generously finance and arm the Ukrainian regime,” said Konstantin Sivkov, a retired colonel and vice-president of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences.
“Ukraine is increasingly resorting to terrorist methods of warfare, such as attacks by kamikaze drones on peaceful cities, not only in the depths of Russia, but also in those regions that Kiev considers occupied.”
Elsewhere, Ukraine destroyed a Russian S-400 anti-aircraft defense system on the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry published a video of a massive explosion with a huge column of smoke billowing into the sky. “This is a painful blow to the occupiers’ air defense system,” it said.
Pro-war Russian military bloggers said the attack highlighted flaws in the country’s defense capacities.“Again, the question arises of why Ukrainian boats come so close to the shores of Crimea,” said the influential Rybar Telegram channel, which has 1.2 million followers. “We need a systematic defeat of the entire Ukrainian fleet, and this requires changes in the organization of the Russian Navy.”
Another channel, Voenny Osvedomitel, said the attack raised “fair questions about the quality of air defense coverage in one of the most ‘missile-prone’ regions of Russia.”
RIYADH: Secretary-General of the Muslim World League and Chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars Dr. Mohammed bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa met with a group of senior scholars and muftis from the Horn of Africa, in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
During the meeting, which came within the framework of Al-Issa’s official visit to Ethiopia, he stressed the importance of adhering to Islamic values and promoting joint Islamic action, noting the pivotal role that scholars play in promoting coexistence and mutual respect among diverse peoples.
Al-Issa highlighted in a public meeting in the presence of the president of the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council, Sheikh Haji Ibrahim, the importance of strengthening Islamic work with the national system, including humanitarian work that presents a true picture of Islam.
During his visit, the MWL chief was briefed on the efforts and programs of a number of local and international humanitarian organizations that are partnered with the league. They provide support and care to large segments of refugees, the displaced and the needy. He reaffirmed the commitment of the league to supporting their charitable work and humanitarian programs.
Al-Issa also praised charity and association workers and wished them success.