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Captain Kirk — aka William Shatner — finally made it into space, part of the new wave of civilian travelers sponsored by names like Bezos, Musk and Branson who are slipping the surly bonds of Earth 10 years after NASA’s shuttle program ended. But there are big differences. What does entrepreneurial space travel have in common with its more nation-focused counterpart, and what are the contrasts? How are corporate space jaunts changing the face of the trip? The coverage reflects on the story and her own experiences. MARCIA DUNN, AP aerospace writer since 1990: This year it was surreal to see ordinary people being escorted to the launch pad to blast into space. I mean, I’ve seen the astronauts, the professionals, the cosmonauts — I’ve been to Baikonur to see…

A critical vulnerability in a widely used software tool — one quickly exploited in the online game Minecraft — is rapidly emerging as a major threat to organizations around the world. “The internet’s on fire right now,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. “People are scrambling to patch,” he said, “and all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it.” He said that in the 12 hours since the bug’s existence was disclosed that it had been “fully weaponized,” meaning malefactors had developed and distributed tools to exploit it. The flaw may be the worst computer vulnerability discovered in years. It was uncovered in a utility that’s ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across industry and government. Unless it is fixed, it…

The Biden administration released an ambitious federal strategy to build 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles across the country and bring down the cost of electric cars with the goal of transforming the U.S. auto industry. “The future of transportation in our nation and around the world is electric,”Vice President Kamala Harris said at an EV charging facility in suburban Maryland. The $1 trillion infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed last month authorizes a nationwide network of charging stations and sets aside $5 billion for states to build them, including $63 million for Maryland. The law also provides an additional $2.5 billion for local grants to support charging stations in rural areas and in disadvantaged communities. Biden’s $2 trillion social and environmental policy bill, now pending in the Senate, includes…

A few days after reports surfaced that Tesla allows drivers to play video games on dashboard touch screens while vehicles are moving, Mercedes-Benz has issued a U.S. recall for a similar issue. The German automaker said in documents posted by U.S. regulators that the issue affected 227 vehicles and already has been fixed by updating an internal computer server. But the fact that Mercedes did the recall over concerns about distracted driving, and Tesla has not, raised questions about whether federal auto safety standards are being applied equally by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “MB is following the regulatory rules as they are supposed to — in sharp contrast to what we’ve been seeing from Tesla,” said Philip Koopman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon…

Calling him a “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman,”Time magazine has named Tesla CEO Elon Musk as its Person of the Year for 2021. Musk, who is also the founder and CEO space exploration company SpaceX, recently passed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s wealthiest person as the rising price of Tesla pushed his net worth to around $300 billion. He owns about 17% of Tesla’s stock, which sold for almost $1,000 each this week. Time cited the breadth of Musk’s endeavors, from his founding of SpaceX in 2002, to his hand in the creation of the alternative energy company SolarCity in addition to Tesla, the most valuable car company in the world. The magazine emphasizes that its annual acknowledgement is not an award, but rather, “recognition of the…

Spider-Man movies have come in such flurries over the last two decades that you could almost tell time by them. Who needs the long centuries of the Triassic, Jurassic and the Cretaceous, when, in the span of just one generation you can have the Tobey epoch, the Garfield era and the Tomozoic? The franchise’s constant (and contractual) regenerative velocity has by now become a familiar punchline. But in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” the distinct, if cluttered, time zones of Marvel’s webslinger overlap and collide in ways that are often entertaining and likely to be satisfying to fans, even if they still lack quite the Spidey sense tingle they’re designed to provide an overdose of. This movie is like two Spider-Man jabs and a booster all in one. In its retrospective…

The European Union’s ambitious plan to update its pioneering internet rules gained momentum Tuesday after a key committee passed measures requiring technology companies to better police content and lawmakers prepared to vote on regulations to rein in Big Tech. The 27-nation bloc has for the past year been drafting a sweeping overhaul of regulations for digital companies, aimed at making sure tech giants like Google and Facebook, now renamed Meta, treat rivals fairly and protect users on their platforms. The rules, which have been the subject of fierce lobbying from the tech industry, look set for approval from lawmakers, though they still face tough negotiations next year with EU bodies. The regulations, and similar ones in the United Kingdom to curb harmful online content, show Europe’s role as a pacesetter…

Heads up, future space travelers: No more commercial astronaut wings will be awarded from the Federal Aviation Administration after this year. The FAA said it’s clipping its astronaut wings because too many people are now launching into space and it’s getting out of the astronaut designation business entirely. The news comes one day ahead of Blue Origin’s planned liftoff from West Texas with former NFL player and TV celebrity Michael Strahan. He and his five fellow passengers will still be eligible for wings since the FAA isn’t ending its longstanding program until Jan. 1. NASA’s astronauts also have nothing to worry about going forward — they’ll still get their pins from the space agency. All 15 people who rocketed into space for the first time this year on private U.S.…

As Apple continues to expand its music service and offer consumers more functionality than ever, the company’s Apple Music Voice Plan, which rolls out with iOS 15.2, sets a precedent for content consumption. It sees Apple pivot to a future that’s both seamless and screenless. INTRODUCING THE APPLE MUSIC VOICE PLAN Earlier in the year, alongside the rollout of the third-generation AirPods, Apple announced its plans to launch a new Apple Music product, called its Voice Plan. The company called its new subscription tier for Apple Music as a service that was “built around the power of Siri,” offering users the chance to access all of the songs they know and love but in a new way. The Apple Music Voice Plan allows subscribers - who pay $4.99 per month…

Every year experts put their heads together to determine the very best new vehicles on sale. Spread across nine categories, the Top Rated Awards are given to the cars, trucks and SUVs that rank at the top of their class according to vehicle testing program. That means each winner has been tested and thoroughly evaluated over many miles of real-world use. There isn’t enough space here to cover all nine winners, so we’ve highlighted a new first-time winner for 2022, three returning champions from last year’s awards, plus a brand-new Editors’ Choice award for a vehicle that exceeded our expectations and delivered something genuinely new. The vehicles are listed in ascending order by manufacturer’s suggested retail price and include destination charges. TOP RATED SEDAN: 2022 HONDA CIVIC Starting MSRP: $22,915…

The banking industry appears to have overdone it on overdraft fees. After decades of raking in billions of dollars from mostly poor Americans short of cash in their accounts, the biggest banks — under pressure from lawmakers and regulators — are slowly decreasing their reliance on the widely unpopular practice. A number of large banks have taken steps this year that would reduce the amount they take in from overdraft fees, which they charge when customers make payments or withdrawals in excess of their account balance. Capital One, the nation’s sixth-largest bank, announced last week that it would end all overdraft fees next year. Other banks have made it harder for customers to trigger an overdraft fee. Still, it’s unlikely the financial services industry will entirely wean itself off such…

KEYS Alicia Keys R&B icon Alicia Keys’ eighth studio album KEYS is actually a double album – with the first half, “Originals”, harking back to her classic soulful sound and the second half, “Unlocked”, rearranging bits and pieces of these compositions to infuse them with a hip-hop twist. FIVE FACTS: 1. “There’s two sides to every story, and there’s two sides to every song on KEYS,” Keys explained in a promotional video announcing the album. 2. The “Unlocked” side of the album is co-produced by Mike WiLL Made-It. 3. This side includes the previously-released single “LALA (Unlocked)”, featuring rapper Swae Lee. 4. Keys performed this song at the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards in September. 5. June 2021 marked the 20th anniversary of Keys’ debut album Songs In A Minor.…

You know you’re in deep doodoo when that planet-destroying comet on a collision course with Earth isn’t your biggest problem. Your biggest problem: You’re the scientist who discovered the darned thing but nobody has the patience or the bandwidth or the political will to believe it. And it’s coming. In six months. That’s a fact. That the comet is a stand-in for climate change is hardly a secret going into “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s exceedingly watchable, funny and star-studded yet somewhat chaotic satire. For one thing, its star is Leonardo DiCaprio, for whom climate change awareness is a passion. What becomes clear soon enough is that the film is also about the pandemic, and vaccine resistance, and the tendency in American society for issues that have nothing to do…

British antitrust regulators are opening an investigation into Microsoft’s $16 billion acquisition of speech recognition company Nuance in the latest sign they’re tightening scrutiny of big technology deals. The Competition and Markets Authority said in a brief statement this week that it’s looking into the purchase because of concerns that it could result in a “substantial lessening of competition” in the U.K. market. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. declined to comment. The company said in April that it was buying Nuance Communications Inc., a pioneer in voice-based artificial intelligence technology. Nuance was instrumental in helping power Apple’s digital assistant Siri but later shifted to focus on health care with widely used medical dictation and transcription tools. The transaction, which was expected to close this year, would be Microsoft’s second-largest deal, following…

A NASA spacecraft has officially “touched” the sun, plunging through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona. Scientists announced the news during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The Parker Solar Probe actually flew through the corona in April during the spacecraft’s eighth close approach to the sun. Scientists said it took a few months to get the data back and then several more months to confirm. “Fascinatingly exciting,” said project scientist Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University. Launched in 2018, Parker was 8 million miles (13 million kilometers) from the center of the sun when it first crossed the jagged, uneven boundary between the solar atmosphere and outgoing solar wind. The spacecraft dipped in and out of the corona at least three times, each a smooth transition,…

The company working to build a mine in southeast Nebraska to extract a rare element used to make steel lighter and stronger said that it may also be able to produce some of the key ingredients needed to make the powerful magnets used in electric vehicles and other high-tech products. NioCorp Developments released a new report this week that shows those rare earth elements are present throughout the deposit it plans to mine if it can raise roughly $1 billion to build the project about 80 miles (128.75 kilometers) south of Omaha near the town of Elk Creek. Being able to produce those sought-after elements along with the niobium, scandium and titanium NioCorp plans to mine would make the project more attractive to investors, but the company won’t know for…

Harley-Davidson will take its electric motorcycle division public through a blank-check company, valuing the enterprise that has been part of the Harley for 10 years at $1.77 billion. The news gave a jolt to long-suffering shares of Harley-Davidson, which jumped 14% at the opening bell Monday. Under the agreement, the special purpose acquisition company AEA-Bridges Impact Corp. will buy Harley-Davidson’s LiveWire and make it the first publicly traded electric motorcycle company in the U.S. next year. LiveWire has been part of the Milwaukee motorcycle maker for 10 years and became a separate unit in 2019. Harley-Davidson Chairman and CEO Jochen Zeitz will hold the same positions at LiveWire for up to two years after the deal closes. LiveWire’s stock is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange under…

Under Chair Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve is poised this week to execute a sharp turn toward tighter interest-rate policies with inflation accelerating and unemployment falling faster than expected. On Wednesday, the Fed will likely announce that it will reduce its monthly bond purchases at twice the rate that Powell had outlined just six weeks ago. Those bond purchases are intended to lower longer-term rates, so winding them down more quickly — likely by early spring — will lessen some of the economic aid the Fed supplied after the pandemic erupted last year. Fed officials are also expected to forecast that they will raise their benchmark short-term rate, which has been pegged near zero since March 2020, two or three times next year. Rate hikes would, in turn, increase a…

Don’t Breathe 2 A nine-year-old Northern Irish boy, Buddy (Jude Hill), finds himself and his working-class family – including his father “Pa” (Jamie Dornan), who works overseas in England – caught up in the tumultuous political climate of late-1960s Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. FIVE FACTS: 1. The story told in the script was inspired by the childhood of the film’s writer and director Kenneth Branagh. 2. Branagh was himself born in Belfast, as were cast members Dornan, Ciarán Hinds and Josie Walker. 3. In the film, Hinds plays Buddy’s grandfather “Pop”, while Walker portrays Aunt Violet. 4. Meanwhile, Colin Morgan, who plays Billy Clanton, is here reuniting with Dornan after the two appeared together in the TV series The Fall. 5. Belfast native Van Morrison contributed eight of…

California regulators proposed reducing the discounts people who install home solar panels and storage systems get on their energy bills, meaning it will take more time — a decade — to recoup the costs of installation. California’s wildly successful 26-year-old program to get more people to put solar panels on their homes has been at the center of a fierce debate between the state’s major utilities and the solar industry and the California Public Utilities Commission’s proposed reforms have been highly anticipated. Current incentives allow residential solar customers to sell whatever energy they don’t use back to power companies at the retail rate for power, usually resulting in a big discount on their energy bills. Power companies say the savings are now so great that solar customers no longer pay…

A new European Union plan to improve conditions for the growing number of gig economy workers could mean millions more of them are classified as employees entitled to benefits, the latest setback for digital platforms that rely on independent contractors to deliver food and offer rides. The draft rules outlined aim to clarify the labor status of people employed by app-based companies like ride-hailing service Uber and food delivery business Deliveroo and would add oversight for the algorithms they use to manage workers. Gig economy workers and platforms have fallen between the cracks of existing employment legislation, and the measures being considered by the 27-nation bloc, which would take years to come into force, are aimed at clearing up those gray areas. App-based gig work platforms have boomed in the…