Ex-air force captain Ed Dwight, passed over by Nasa in 1961, now oldest person to reach edge of space with Jeff Bezo’s space firm

Sixty-one years since he was selected but ultimately passed over to become the first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight finally reached space in a Blue Origin rocket – and set a different record.

At 10.37am on Sunday, Jeff Bezos’s space company launched its NS-25 mission from west Texas, marking Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight since 2022 when its New Shepard rocket was grounded due to a mid-flight failure.

On board were six crew members, including Dwight, a retired US air force captain who at 90 years old now becomes the oldest person to reach the edge of space.

In 1961, Dwight was chosen by President John F Kennedy to train as an astronaut at the Aerospace Research Pilot School, but was ultimately not selected for the Nasa Astronaut Corps.

Republican senator’s comments come as he is considered among Trump’s top candidates for vice-president

The Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio said on Sunday he would not commit to accepting the 2024 presidential election results, insisting that “if it’s unfair” his party will “go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws”.

Rubio’s statements on Meet the Press come as he is considered among former president Donald Trump’s top candidates for vice-president. Trump has continuously said falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.

Those claims spurred the 6 January 2021 insurrection, during which participants stormed the Capitol building as lawmakers were in the midst of certifying the election results. Trump is facing a variety of charges related to alleged election meddling.

• Ukrainian drones hit Novorossiysk port, causing a fire and power outages, reports say.
• The attack follows heightened defenses at the port after previous Ukrainian strikes on Crimea.
• Novorossiysk is vital for Russia's oil exports and naval operations in the Black Sea.

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The Russian port of Novorossiysk, which has become an important base for the Black Sea Fleet after repeated attacks on its traditional base in Crimea, has been targeted by Ukrainian drones.

This attacks follows previous reports by the UK Ministry of Defence indicating that Russia has been bolstering defenses at the Novorossiysk port to protect its Black Sea Fleet from potential Ukrainian attacks.

Severe flooding caused by heavy rainfall has inundated Voeren and Liège in Belgium, as well as parts of France and Germany.

The municipality of Voeren in Limburg has been severely impacted by heavy rainfall, causing extensive flooding in the area. Streets are submerged, houses inundated, and the local disaster plan has been enacted to manage the emergency.

"This is worse than in 2021," stated Mayor Joris Gaens, referring to the devastating floods that hit Voeren and the province of Liège three years ago. Emergency shelters have been set up for those affected.

The mission, known as NS-25, sent six people on a brief trip to suborbital space today (May 19).

Blue Origin's nearly two-year human spaceflight drought is over.

Jeff Bezos' aerospace company launched its NS-25 mission today (May 19), sending six people — including the United States' first-ever Black astronaut candidate — on a brief trip to suborbital space aboard its New Shepard rocket-capsule combo.

It was Blue Origin's first space tourism launch since August 2022. That previous mission went well, but the company's next flight, an uncrewed research jaunt that launched a month later, did not: New Shepard suffered a serious anomaly, causing the destruction of the first-stage booster. (The capsule landed safely under parachutes.)

New Shepard was grounded for more than a year while Blue Origin investigated the September 2022 accident, which the company eventually traced to a thermo-structural failure in the nozzle of the rocket's single engine. The vehicle returned to action this past December on an uncrewed flight and is now fully back, with another human mission under its belt.

Iranian police have arrested more than 260 people, including three European citizens, on suspicion of spreading satanism, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Friday.

The report said the suspects were arrested on Thursday night in Shahryar County, west of the capital of Tehran, for “spreading the culture of satanism and nudity.” It did not elaborate.

It was not clear how such a large number of arrests were made in one night — if the suspects were in one location, at some gathering or party, or not.

Gatherings where unrelated men and women are seen together are illegal in Iran and considered a sin under Islamic law.

China and Cambodia will deploy their ships near the Gulf of Thailand for the naval section of their biggest ever "Golden Dragon" military drills.

Two Chinese warships docked at a commercial port in Cambodia on Sunday as the two countries stage joint military drills.

The two warships — Jingangshan amphibious warfare ship and Qijiguang training ship — arrived at Cambodia's Sihanoukville port. The commercial port is north of the Ream naval base, where two other Chinese corvettes have been docked for the last five months.

On Thursday, China and Cambodia initiated a 15-day-long military drill involving 760 Chinese military personnel along with around 1,300 Cambodians and 11 Cambodian vessels. The naval portion of the exercises is set be held near the Gulf of Thailand next week.

The annual maneuvers, known as Golden Dragon exercises, were first held in December 2016. This year's event is the second after a three-year hiatus over the COVID-19 pandemic, and the largest to date.

A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi suffered a “hard landing” on Sunday, Iranian state media reported, without immediately elaborating.

Raisi was traveling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. State TV said the incident happened near Jolfa, a city on the border with the nation of Azerbaijan, some 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran.

Traveling with Raisi were Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province and other officials, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. One local government official used the word “crash” to describe the incident, but he acknowledged to an Iranian newspaper that he had yet to reach the site himself.

Neither IRNA nor state TV offered any information on Raisi’s condition.

A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi suffered a “hard landing” on Sunday, Iranian state television reported, without immediately elaborating.

Raisi was traveling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. State TV said the incident happened near Jolfa, a city on the border with the nation of Azerbaijan, some 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran.

Rescuers were attempting to reach the site, state TV said, but had been hampered by poor weather condition in the area. There had been heavy rain reported with some wind.

When consulted by EL PAÍS, activists, members of the Federal Police and local journalists confirm that it’s impossible to enter or leave Frontera Comalapa or Chicomuselo

When consulted by EL PAÍS, activists, members of the Federal Police and local journalists confirm that it’s impossible to enter or leave Frontera Comalapa or Chicomuselo, two municipalities in the state of Chiapas. They also point out that moving around has become extremely difficult in recent months, as violence and clashes in both municipalities have worsened. Last Monday, a confrontation in the area between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) left 11 people dead.

“At least since 2021, the residents of these towns [have been kept] as hostages. The people we’ve been able to speak with tell us that these criminal structures control their electricity, telecommunications and even their food, because by having key access roads closed, businesses are running out of supplies,” explains Dora Roblero, director of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, known in the region as Frayba. “The Aurrera supermarket in Frontera Comalapa closed because it could no longer get access to food. Therefore, the population has to look for another place to find groceries. [This search for food] has to be done when the roads are open… and this only happens when the criminal groups decide to do so,” she adds.

Governing Georgian Dream party can still force the controversial legislation through parliament.

The Georgian government’s plans to brand Western-funded NGOs, media outlets and campaign groups as “foreign agents” were rejected by the country’s president on Saturday, but the ruling party vows to pass them into law despite widespread public protests and international outcry.

Speaking at a press conference in the capital of Tbilisi on Saturday, President Salome Zurabishvili confirmed she had vetoed the bill — which was awaiting her signature after being passed in parliament earlier this week. Critics say the proposals, which would apply to organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad, are similar to ones used by the Kremlin to quash dissent in Russia.

“This law is, in its essence, in its spirit, a Russian law, which contradicts our constitution and all European standards, and is an obstacle to the European path,” Zurabishvili said.

In Ireland's capital, Dublin, tent cities set up by migrants who lack temporary protected status are repeatedly cleared. The situation has been aggravated by Ireland's housing crisis and anti-migrant laws in Britain.

The center of Dublin glitters with architectural showpieces, the offices of global corporations. But there are increasingly tents at the base of the glass facades. Some of these belong to people excluded from housing, a scarcity across Ireland and simply unaffordable for many people in the booming capital. The housing crisis is the dominant topic in Ireland right now. When he took office as taoiseach, or Ireland's head of government, in April, Simon Harris promised to provide 250,000 new homes by the end of the decade.

The second group of people sleeping in tents constitute the second-hottest topic in the Irish republic. More and more migrants are arriving here, to this island in northwestern Europe, and its capacity to accommodate them is at its limits — not least because of the housing crisis. The situation has been aggravated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war, 100,000 Ukrainian refugees have registered in Ireland. An EU-wide agreement means they do not have to apply for asylum first.

Ireland's government openly admits that it is unable to provide all asylum-seekers with accommodation while their applications are processed. According to the government, as of May 14, 1,780 male applicants were as yet unhoused.

Alice Stewart, a veteran political adviser and CNN political commentator who worked on several GOP presidential campaigns, has died. She was 58.

Law enforcement officials told CNN that Stewart’s body was found outdoors in the Belle View neighborhood in northern Virginia early Saturday morning. No foul play is suspected, and officers believe a medical emergency occurred.

As a slew of Republicans went to the hush-money trial to show their fealty to their boss, the president tried to rise above it

Donald Trump last week turned his New York fraud trial into a political circus and a platform for his election campaign while Joe Biden struggled to persuade voters that they’re wrong about the economy.

Trump engineered a parade of leading Republicans to demonstrate their allegiance outside the courthouse in downtown Manhattan even as his trial laid bare the swamp that is the former US president’s professional and personal life.

Meanwhile, Biden has spent the trial trying to get Americans to pay attention to his claim to have done much more for the economy than Trump ever managed, even though polls show many voters do not believe it.

Trump has been obliged to sit in silence through his trial for allegedly falsifying business records to claim that $130,000 in hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, after she claimed to have had sex with the then businessman a decade earlier, were legal expenses. A gag order has forced Trump to curb his natural inclination to attack the judge, the judge’s family, the prosecutor and the leading witness against him, his former lawyer Michael Cohen.

But Trump worked his way around the order, while demonstrating the strength of his grip on the Republican party, by summoning a parade of Washington politicians to stand in front of the court and say what he could not.

Ex-New York mayor last of 17 defendants to be served in plot to overturn Donald Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden in 2020

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani  is the last of 17 defendants to be served an indictment in Arizona’s fake-elector case for his role in an attempt to overturn former president Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, the Arizona attorney general said.

Kris Mayes posted the news regarding the Trump-aligned lawyer on her X account late Friday.

“The final defendant was served moments ago. @RudyGiuliani nobody is above the law,” Mayes wrote.

The attorney general’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, said in an email to the Associated Press on Saturday that Giuliani faces the same charges as the other defendants, including conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges.

Proposed restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights have proven far harder for politicans at home and abroad to unite against than the government’s “foreign agent” bill.

“No racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia,” reads a sign in a small vegan café in the center of the Georgian capital, an EU flag pinned across the counter.

“The other day, I was looking at a picture I took in 2013 with my friends who are queer activists, and I realized 90 percent of them have now left for other European countries,” said Atina Bregvadze, a feminist campaigner in Tbilisi, for whom the café is one of just a few remaining welcoming places.

At the same time, outside, thousands of parents, children and priests clad in black robes were gathering in the streets for a rally to celebrate “Family Purity Day,” the public holiday declared by the government to rival Friday’s International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT).

Now, many in Georgia’s LGBTQ+ community fear their small country is running out of space to accommodate both of these very different worlds.

Republican Glenn Youngkin also vetoed bills related to maintaining access to contraception, saying they were ‘not ready’

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has vetoed two bills that would have stripped tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that has opposed the removal of statues of southern state generals during the US civil war and other markers of the southern states’ attempt to secede from the Union in defense of slavery.

The Republican governor vetoed several measures, including those related to maintaining access to contraception, saying in a statement they were “not ready to become law”.

The rejected Confederacy-related bill would have removed tax exemptions for real estate and personal property owned by several Confederacy heritage groups, including United Daughters organisations the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and Stonewall Jackson Memorial.

Mar-Jac Poultry has denied it knowingly hired minors for its Jasper, Alabama, plant, and also argued some workers were doing jobs that are not banned by federal rules.

Four minors as young as 16 were allegedly discovered working overnight at an Alabama slaughterhouse owned by the same firm that was found directly responsible for the death of a 16-year-old Mississippi worker last summer, the U.S. Labor Department said in federal court filings.

The company, Mar-Jac Poultry, has denied that it knowingly hired minors for its Jasper, Alabama, facility, saying the workers had verified IDs that gave ages older than 17, and has also argued that some of the workers were performing jobs that are not prohibited by federal regulations.

The Labor Department is seeking a temporary restraining order against Mar-Jac as part of the ongoing legal dispute. Agency officials declined to comment, citing their investigation.

The Labor Department has said that most slaughterhouse work is too dangerous for minors and is prohibited by federal regulations. Under the Biden administration, the department has taken action against companies for employing minors to clean, use or work near dangerous machinery. A chicken trade group to which Mar-Jac belongs says it has "zero tolerance" for employing minors, and a major meat industry trade group also stated recently that no minors should be working in slaughterhouses.

Police were able to rescue child, who is in hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, before house caught fire with father still in it

A six-month-old baby is currently hospitalized after a man allegedly shot the infant several times during an armed home standoff in Surprise, Arizona, about 30 miles north-west of Phoenix.

At about 3am on Friday, the father of the child allegedly broke into the home where the child and mother lived, according to Surprise police. The child’s father did not live in the house, police said, adding that the man held the mother and child hostage for several hours before the mother managed to escape.

According to police, the mother contacted a construction crew and requested that they call 911. They added that she had minor injuries and it remains unclear how she managed to escape.

PFAS chemicals present in air, rain, atmosphere and water in basin, which holds nearly 95% of US freshwater

Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” are ubiquitous in the Great Lakes basin’s air, rain, atmosphere and water, new peer-reviewed research shows.

The first-of-its-kind, comprehensive picture of PFAS levels for the basin, which holds nearly 95% of the nation’s freshwater, also reveals that precipitation is probably a major contributor to the lakes’ contamination.

“We didn’t think the air and rain were significant sources of PFAS in the Great Lakes’ environment, but it’s not something that has been studied that much,” said Marta Venier, a co-author with Indiana University.

PFAS are a class of 15,000 chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. The chemicals are linked to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, decreased immunity, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.