Author: TheGuardian

It was 1969. The last year for President Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the moon and return him safely “before this decade is out”. NASA was not sure it could be done in time. There were, perhaps, going to be only three opportunities before the deadline expired. On 6 January the head of the astronaut office at NASA, Deke Slayton, called the crew of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins – into his office in Houston, Texas, and told them that their mission, set for July, might involve a lunar landing. A...

A coalition of environmental groups and newly elected Democrats in Michigan are seeking to shut a controversial pipeline through the Great Lakes they say represents a major environmental threat and is being run by a company with a long record of mismanagement, poor safety habits and deception. Canadian oil giant Enbridge wants to replace an aging pipeline called Line 5 that cuts through the Great Lakes, which hold more than 90% of the nation’s freshwater. It transports about 540,000 barrels of oil and liquid natural gas daily in 4.4 miles of pipelines that are exposed on the lake floor...

Every day Carol Ruiz wakes up at 3:30 am and goes to an airline catering service at Newark airport, where she helps prepare the food carts that flight attendants push up and down the aisle. She organizes the napkins, creamers, sugar and cups that go on the beverage cart, cleans the glasses and silverware, and diligently tracks the champagne that goes on the carts for first class passengers. At the end of her 40-hour week she takes home $345. The average airline CEO makes that amount in about 20 minutes. Last year, while Carol was undergoing treatment for cancer,...

Secret database listed 59 advocates and journalists tied to the migrant caravan, according to leaked documents. Photojournalist Ariana Drehsler was stopped for a secondary screening three separate times in one week while crossing the US-Mexico border to cover the migrant caravan in Tijuana this winter – unaware that the journey she had taken countless times before was suddenly more complicated because her name was logged in a secret government database. That database, part of something called Operation Secure Line, listed 59 advocates and journalists tied to the migrant caravan, according to leaked documents obtained by local news station NBC...

The 16-year-old’s lone protest last summer has morphed into a powerful global movement challenging politicians to act. Greta Thunberg is hopeful the student climate strike on March 15 can bring about positive change, as young people in more and more countries join the protest movement she started last summer as a lone campaigner outside the Swedish parliament. The 16-year-old welcomed the huge mobilization planned in the UK, with demonstrations by tens of thousands of school and university students in Australia, Belgium, Germany, the United States, Japan, and more than a dozen other countries. “I think enough people have realized...

“Everybody wants to communicate and express their opinions, and I think human beings are created that way by nature, and people that allow themselves to do it, there’s some kind of therapeutic value for that.” – Mark Bryan, artist Trump supporters long ago decided to discount, dismiss, disbelieve, indulge, ignore, endorse, excuse or otherwise rationalize his appalling behavior. Evidence of sexual harassment, misogyny, bigotry and lying were all fully apparent when they put him in the White House. Back then 81% of white evangelicals voted for the man who had five children from three different women – imagine for...