Month: November 2022

It will be the second permanently inhabited space outpost, after the Nasa-led International Space Station from which China was excluded in 2011.

The fresh crew will live on the station for six months, taking over from three colleagues who arrived in June.

There will be a week-long handover period, in part to trial the station’s ability to house six astronauts.

The new crew lifted off on Tuesday in the Shenzhou-15 spacecraft or “Divine Vessel” from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert in north-west China.

It is the last of 11 missions required to assemble the station that is expected to operate for around a decade and run experiments in near-zero gravity.

The outgoing crew is expected to return to Earth early next month.

A spokesperson for the China Manned Space Administration said the new crew would focus on installing equipment and facilities around the space station. Construction is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

China’s space programme has previously landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon, and it was the third country to put humans in orbit.

Dr Christian Feichtinger, executive director of the International Astronautical Federation, told Chinese state television channel CCTV he thought “the world is actually watching” China’s growing space capabilities.

The mission has offered Chinese citizens a chance to celebrate, as the country faces ongoing Covid lockdowns and protests. “Long live the motherland!” many wrote on social media.

The Shenzhou-15 team is led by 57-year-old Fei Junlong who previously commanded the Shenzhou-6 mission in 2005. It is his first time in space since then.

Over the next decade of the Tiangong’s operation, it is expected China will launch two crewed missions to the station each year.

China has opened the selection process for astronauts for future missions to applicants from the “special administrative regions” of Macau and Hong Kong, who have previously been excluded.

Vandana Makwana, 15, can’t hold back tears as she speaks about her father Mahesh, who died on 30 October when a footbridge collapsed in the western Indian state of Gujarat, plunging hundreds of people into a river.

Vandana’s father and two brothers were among the 135 people killed in the tragedy – most of the victims were women and children.

The bridge – built in the 19th Century – was a popular tourist spot in Gujarat’s Morbi district and had reopened just days before the collapse after repairs.

After the tragedy, Morbi municipality officials said that Oreva, the private firm contracted with maintaining the bridge, had not been issued a safety certificate before reopening it. They also claimed that they were unaware that the bridge was open to the public, though thousands of people had been visiting the spot.

At the site of the accident, police personnel take turns to guard the scrap metal left after the collapse – pieces of broken cables, aluminium flooring sheets, bolts – night and day. This debris is now part of the evidence for the police investigation.

There is no memorial at the site, nothing to mark that on a Sunday evening a month ago, the lives of hundreds of people were changed forever in a flash of a second.

But for the families of the victims, the anger and anguish remain.

Vandana’s grandfather, Vashram Makwana, asks why the police haven’t taken any action yet against senior officials.

“How could the bridge be operated without their knowledge?” he asks.

PK Jadeja, the deputy superintendent of Morbi police, told BBC Gujarati that he couldn’t comment on the “senior officials” being questioned in the “case at this stage”.

The state government suspended the Morbi municipality chief days after the tragedy.

A day after the accident, police arrested nine people, including Oreva staff, ticket collectors and security guards at the bridge. They are in judicial custody after their bail plea was rejected.

But no senior Oreva official, including owner Jaysukhbhai Patel, has been named in the case or questioned so far. In fact, Mr Patel – who was filmed praising the quality of the repair work at the time of the bridge’s reopening – has not been seen in public since the incident.

The Morbi district court and the Gujarat High Court are hearing separate cases on the incident.

According to a forensic report submitted by prosecutors in a local court, the rusted cables that were supporting the bridge had not been changed during repairs. While the bridge’s capacity was around 100 people at a time, more than 3,000 tickets had been sold on the day of the accident.

The Gujarat High Court has sharply criticised the Morbi municipality and asked the government to explain in detail the action taken against officials who should have overseen the condition of the bridge.

It has also asked the government to provide more compensation to the victims, saying it was “abysmally on the lower side”.

It’s an order that may provide some comfort to Mahesh Manvadariya and his wife Bintu. They now take care of their nephew, five-year-old Jiyansh, who lost both his parents at Morbi.

Mr Manvadariya says he wants to educate Jiyansh well but that the monthly allowance given to children orphaned by the tragedy – 3,000 rupees ($36; £30) – is inadequate. He now hopes the government will increase the compensation.

Bintu cries as she speaks about trying to answer Jiyansh’s questions about where his parents have gone.

“We have told him that his parents have gone to meet his grandmother and they have become stars now.”

The historic motion follows a damning report which said his actions were “corrosive of trust in government”.

It marks the first time a former prime minister has been censured by the House of Representatives.

Mr Morrison has defended appointing himself to several ministries, calling the censure “retribution” by opponents.

In August, it emerged that Mr Morrison had become joint minister for health, finance, treasury, home affairs and resources in the two years before he lost power in May.

Most ministers were unaware they were sharing portfolios with Mr Morrison and he has been widely criticised, including by close colleagues.

Mr Morrison – now a backbench MP – has said the decisions were made amid the “extraordinary times” of the pandemic.

An investigation found his appointments were legal, and that he used his extra powers only once – to overrule a minister in a matter unrelated to the pandemic.

But it ruled Mr Morrison “fundamentally undermined” responsible government. Another inquiry found that most of his appointments had “little if any connection to the pandemic”.

The Albanese government has already promised new laws that would require any similar appointments to be publicly disclosed in future.

But Mr Albanese said the parliament also had a duty to condemn his predecessor’s actions.

They put Australia on a “slippery slope” away from “precious” democracy, he said on Wednesday.

“The public didn’t know something it was entitled to know… that undermined the functioning of this parliament, that undermined our democratic institutions.”

Mr Morrison told parliament that with hindsight he believed his decisions had been “unnecessary” and he’d given them “insufficient consideration”.

“None of us can claim to be infallible in such circumstances, and I do not,” he said.

But he stopped short of an apology, and argued the censure was about “political intimidation” and “retribution”.

Most of his centre-right coalition colleagues supported that view, but one MP, Bridget Archer, said she didn’t accept Mr Morrison’s explanation of his actions and supported the censure.

“And I’m deeply disappointed by the lack of genuine apology, or more importantly, understanding of the impact of these decisions,” she said in parliament.

Former Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews – one of the colleagues who unknowingly shared a portfolio with Mr Morrison – also abstained from the vote.

A censure is the parliament’s way of formally expressing disapproval in an MP. Such motions are rare and largely symbolic, but they can have political consequences.

Richard Drax’s ancestors were pioneers of the sugar and slave trades in the Caribbean about 400 years ago.

The MP is facing demands to pay Barbados for harm caused by slavery at an estate he inherited in the country.

Now Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations is also examining the case for pressing Mr Drax for damages.

Mr Drax said he did not wish to comment on the reparations claims.

The case came to the attention of the Jamaican council after British newspaper reports suggested the government of Barbados was planning to demand reparations from Mr Drax.

It is thought to be the first time a government has urged a family to pay compensation for the role of their forbearers in the slave trade.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, millions of Africans were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic by Europeans and Americans as a labour force to work, especially on plantations.

Members of the Drax family were among the earliest English colonists to establish sugar plantations built on slave labour in Barbados and Jamaica in the Caribbean.

A member of the Drax family received compensation when the slave trade was abolished by the British Parliament in 1833. Records show John Sawbridge Erle-Drax was awarded £4,293 12s 6d – worth £3m today – for 189 slaves.

Mr Drax has previously said his family’s slave-trading past was “deeply, deeply regrettable”, but “no one can be held responsible today for what happened many hundreds of years ago”.

The 617-acre Drax Hall plantation in Barbados was passed down the family line until the MP inherited the estate, where sugar cane is still grown, from his father in 2017.

For years, reparations campaigners have been calling on Mr Drax to donate the property to Barbadians, but he has not done so.

The BBC has been told the South Dorset MP recently visited Barbados, where he had a meeting with its prime minister, Mia Mottley.

A different branch of the Drax family founded a plantation in Jamaica in the 17th century. William Drax established the estate but it was later sold to different owners.

Men and women “were brutalised in Jamaica” under the Drax name, said Verene Shepherd, director of the Centre for Reparation Research at The University of the West Indies.

The professor of social history said families who can trace their inheritance to slavery should be held accountable, “whether they want to say they’re responsible or not”.

She said “insofar as [Richard Drax’s] lineage is connected to William Drax” and “inheritance was passed down along the line – whether from Jamaica or Barbados – then I think we should also join Barbados in pressing a case for reparations”.

She said the National Council on Reparations investigate “where that money from Jamaica went”.Verene Shepherd says men and women “were brutalised in Jamaica” under the Drax name

The council examines the past injustices suffered by victims of slavery and advises the Jamaican government on what form compensation should take.

Its chairwoman, Laleta Davis-Mattis, said she would convene a meeting to discuss the case for claiming reparations from Mr Drax.

She said the council needed to review the link between Mr Drax’s family and slavery in Jamaica “to make a substantive judgement and recommendation”.

Matthew Parker, who researched the family’s history for his book, The Sugar Barons, said there was an ancestral connection between Richard Drax and the Drax plantation owners in Jamaica.

The author said there was a debate about the legitimacy of reparations claims over injustices suffered centuries ago.

“The extreme example is: shouldn’t the Italians be paying [the UK] for the Roman invasion?” he said.

Mr Parker said targeting individuals for reparations was a departure from the approach up until now, which has been to put claims to governments.

Caribbean countries have sought slavery reparations from European governments for several years with limited success. Descendants of slaves have also brought lawsuits against companies for their involvement in the trade, with few wins.

The case against Mr Drax is undoubtedly a tough one, said Martyn Day, the founder of law firm Leigh Day.

In 2012, Mr Day won compensation for hundreds of Kenyans tortured by the British colonial government in the 1950s.

“That was a tough case but we won it,” he said. “It’s a high hurdle to get any case going which is hundreds of years old.”

He said any serious case would have to establish that Mr Drax had benefited from the assets and wealth his forefathers had gained in the slave trade.

Mr Day said the most likely route to win compensation would be in a British court.