The Times - UK (2020-11-14)

52 2GM Saturday November 14 2020 | the times

Wo r l d

5

W

hen it came to

naming the space

capsule to which

they will today

entrust their lives,

the astronauts of Nasa’s historic

Crew-1 mission chose carefully,

pondering the weight of the world’s

turmoil as they deliberated.

They came up with Resilience,

noting the backdrop of political

division, a deadly pandemic and the

challenges that yet lie ahead as the

Resilience set to rocket above US politics in a ‘mission for everyone’

US space agency and its

international partners kick the

gateway to space open wider than

ever to prepare for humanity’s next

giant leaps to the Moon and Mars.

“Resilience is power to recover,

will to restore — and we strive to

survive,” Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese

astronaut who is part of the four-

strong crew, said. “Our mission is

for everyone.”

In the launch from the Kennedy

Space Centre in Florida, scheduled

for 7.49pm local time if weather

conditions permit, SpaceX’s Crew

Dragon capsule will be hurled into

orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

for its first operational mission.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, will

be absent from the control room,

having tested positive for the

coronavirus. A tracing programme

was under way yesterday to identify

colleagues who may also

have been exposed. The

astronauts have been in

quarantine.

Newly certified by

the Federal Aviation

Administration after a

crewed test flight of a

separate Crew Dragon,

named Endeavour, landed

in August, it is a triumph

of Nasa’s commercial

crew programme (CCP).

Founded in 2010 during

President Obama’s

administration, the

CCP set a goal of

providing safe, reliable

and cost-effective access

to low Earth orbit through

partnerships with private

industry and, in 2014, awarded

contracts to SpaceX and

Boeing.

The symbolism of an

Obama-founded project

launching just as Donald

Trump’s presidency sputters

and fizzles is not lost on those

irritated by the latter’s

insistence over the past four

years on appropriating Nasa,

historically a refuge from

partisan politics, for self-

aggrandisement. In June, when

the first Crew Dragon

launched safely, he claimed

sole credit, ignoring the

decade of bold groundwork

that led up to it.

The final straw came with

the Trump campaign’s

release in June of a video

advertisement in which he violated

federal guidelines that bar the use of

astronauts for advertising purposes.

The ad was withdrawn after Karen

Nyberg, an astronaut married to one

of Demo-2’s crew, said it was

“political propaganda”.

The astronauts due to launch

today — who include Shannon

Walker, an accomplished female

Nasa veteran, and Vic Glover, the

first black astronaut to serve on the

International Space Station as long-

term crew — have a motto: “All for

one, Crew-1 for all.”

The mission’s commander, Mike

Hopkins, said: “It’s been a difficult

year for everyone and we feel that if

the name of our vehicle can create a

little hope, a little inspiration, a

smile on people’s faces, that’s what

we really want.”

Jacqui

Goddard

MIAMI

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is due

to launch the four-person

Crew-1 mission tonight

Fame’s so tiring Maxine, a corgi who travels round in owner Bryan Reisberg’s backpack, has her own social media accounts

It was not the trail of bodies but a drink

splashed on the windscreen reducing

visibility that eventually brought Alek

Minassian’s rampage to an end, the

Canadian mass killer told police.

Mowing down pedestrians on a busy

Toronto pavement in a rented van for

1½ miles, the 25-year-old had killed ten

people and wounded 16. The final stage

of his plan, to be shot dead by the police,

backfired when an officer arrested him

after a tense stand-off.

Two years on, Minassian is standing

trial, giving the involuntarily celibate,

or “incel”, movement its day in court. In

the intervening years, experts say, that

online group — comprised of indig-

nant, sexually frustrated men — has in-

creased and become more hostile.

“Minassian is the first perpetrator of

BRYAN REISBERG/SWNS

Killer’s trial exposes cult of angry virgins

mass violence connected to misogynist

incel ideology who didn’t die,” Alex Di-

Branco, founder of the Institute for Re-

search on Male Supremacism and a

PhD candidate at Yale University, said.

“So we haven’t had the opportunity

previously to see somebody prosecuted

for this cause.”

Minassian, now 28, admits having

carried out the killings but has raised a

defence of not criminally responsible to

ten charges of murder and 16 of

attempted murder. The trial, before on-

ly a judge, began this week.

Inceldom can be traced to the

misogynistic “pick-up artistry” move-

ment, whose leaders taught seduction

techniques, Ashley Mattheis, a re-

searcher at the University of North

Carolina, said. By 2007, those who felt

they would never succeed in forming

relationships had splintered off,

co-opting the term incel from an

inclusive blog to support lonely people.

Today the movement intersects with

far-right extremism and other forms of

male supremacy and uses online

message-boards.“While they share the

same kind of ideal about what mascu-

linity should be — the buff, strong dude

with money that chicks want — their

relationship to it is failure. Incels race to

the bottom,” Ms Mattheis said. Their

rules stipulate: “If someone touched

your mouth with her mouth voluntarily

you are not an incel.”

While most are unlikely to become

violent, a small nihilistic coterie call for

the violent overthrow of the “Stacys”,

meaning shallow women, and “Chads”,

the men they date. “They link that to

some very strange social, economic

ideas about redistributing women,” Ms

Mattheis said.

Chief among them was Elliot Rodger,

a 22-year-old who killed six people at

the University of California, Santa Bar-

bara, in 2014 and left a manifesto.

Minassian, who had communicated

with Rodger online, wrote on social

media on the morning of his own attack

that the “incel rebellion” had begun,

adding: “All hail the Supreme Gentle-

man Elliot Rodger!”

In a police interview, Minassian said

he had been laughed at by girls at a

Halloween party in 2013. “I was angry

that they would give their love and

attention to obnoxious brutes,” he said,

a familiar incel refrain. “I feel like I ac-

complished my mission,” he said after

the attack, adding that he hoped to “in-

spire future masses”.

He joined the Canadian army in 2017

but left after 16 days of basic training,

and was introduced to incel ideology at

college. Eight of his ten victims were

women, ranging in age from 22 to 94.

As many as 50 people have been

killed in incel-related violence in North

America since 2014. In May, Canadian

police brought incel-related terror

charges for the first time against a 17-

year-old, following a deadly machete

attack on a Toronto massage parlour.

Ms DiBranco said that extreme mi-

sogynist forums were becoming “more

extreme and are growing faster”.

A recent Swedish report found that

one incel website had 57,000 unique

visitors a month in late 2019. “It’s a con-

cern and it’s a threat,” Ms Mattheis said,

“and it should be taken seriously.”

Ten people died in

Alek Minassian’s

Toronto rampage

Cocaine bust:

drugs found in

breast implants

Colombia

Stephen Gibbs Sao Paulo

A police raid on a drug cartel in

Colombia has uncovered a new method

for trafficking drugs: filling breast

implants with liquid cocaine.

A gang based in the city of Cali,

known locally as The Surgeons,

allegedly recruited local women with

promises of jobs in Spain before forcing

them to undergo illegal operations,

often in hotel rooms, to implant the

drug in their breasts.

Among those detained was a

specialist surgeon in a Cali hospital. A

raid in the city of Medellin led to the

detention of a well-known local doctor.

According to the police, the women

were sent on flights to Madrid, where

the cocaine was removed in another

backstreet procedure. All those arres-

ted are being held pending investiga-

tions.

The liquid drug had also been hidden

in several women’s calves in a pro-

cedure that in cosmetic surgery is

designed to make legs more shapely.

Last year a woman was detained at El

Dorado airport in Bogota after the

authorities noticed she was limping. It

was discovered that she had nearly a

kilogram of liquid cocaine implanted in

her leg between the skin and muscle.

Town hopes

radar will keep

bears at bay

Charlie Mitchell

Erin Greene was walking home from a

Halloween party in Churchill, a town in

the Canadian Arctic, when she saw a

polar bear barrelling towards her.

Ms Greene, 30, tried to run but it

grabbed her and ripped her scalp. She

would almost certainly have died but

for Bill Ayotte, 69, who came out in his

pyjamas and took up a shovel in her

defence. He lost an ear in the fight.

Seven years on the town is working

on a “bear radar” to ensure that such a

confrontation does not happen again.

Adapted from military surveillance

technology, the “Beardar” will use

artificial intelligence to distinguish

bears from other animals or vehicles. It

is being tested by the conservation

charity Polar Bears International.

Radar units, which have spent

months studying images of polar bears

to distinguish them from caribou or

wolverines, will sit outside the town

scanning the tundra. They will alert

conservation officers to any bear

approaching and it will be scared off

with helicopters and blank rounds.

For almost half the year humans and

polar bears live side by side in Churchill,

Manitoba but as climate change forces

the bears to spend more time on land,

scientists fear more confrontations.

.

Canada

Charlie Mitchell Ottawa