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Photo: JOE RAEDLE/Getty Images via AFP By Joey Roulette, RNZ Two NASA astronauts who flew to the International Space Station in June aboard Boeing's faulty Starliner capsule will need to return to Earth on a SpaceX vehicle early next year, NASA chief Bill Nelson said on Saturday, deeming issues with Starliner's propulsion system too risky to carry its first crew home. The agency's decision, tapping Boeing's top space rival to return the astronauts, is one of NASA's most consequential in years. Boeing had hoped its Starliner test mission would redeem the troubled program after years of development problems and over US$1.6 billion in budget overruns since 2016. Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both former military test pilots, became the first crew to ride Starliner...

Emergency services outside the synagogue in La Grande-Motte following the explosion. Photo: AFP / Pascal Guyot A policeman was injured when a blazing car exploded in the car park of a synagogue in the southern French town of La Grande-Motte on Saturday, officials said, calling the incident a terrorist attack and saying security at Jewish institutions would be stepped up. Police were hunting for a suspect and the anti-terrorism prosecutor's office was in charge of the investigation, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said. "This is an antisemitic attack. Once more, our Jewish compatriots are targeted," Attal said on X. "We won't give up. In the face of antisemitism, in the face of violence, we will never allow ourselves to be intimidated," he added. France, like other countries in Europe, has ...

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for two deadly bomb attacks on coptic Christian churches in Egypt Photo: 123.rf By Nazih Osseiran, Reuters Days after a deadly Islamic State (IS) attack on a Russian concert hall in March, a man clad in military fatigues and a helmet appeared in an online video, celebrating the assault in which more than 140 people were killed. "The Islamic State delivered a strong blow to Russia with a bloody attack, the fiercest that hit it in years," the man said in Arabic, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, an organisation that tracks and analyses such online content. But the man in the video, which the Thomson Reuters Foundation was not able to view independently, was not real - he was created using artificial intelligence, according to SITE and other...

Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. Photo: Simon Wheatley After years of trying to throw their sound "50 miles down the road", Irish post-punk rockers Fontaines D.C. have crashed through a new sonic frontier on their fourth album Romance. Guitarist Conor Curley told Music 101's Charlotte Ryan that taking time off for the first time ever led the band into a more fluid and collaborative process. "We all put our heads together to work on Romance so that was cool," he said. The songwriting process was all about "trying to gather and arrange emotions to be as effective as possible", he said. "Always having a song that I'm writing in my head gives me a certain kind of sanity." Before Fontaines D.C's success, Curley and his bandmates had to get jobs and go back to their "old life" when not ...

Emergency services off the coast of Sicily after a superyacht sank in a storm. Photo: AFP An Italian prosecutor has opened a manslaughter investigation into the deaths of British tech magnate Mike Lynch and six other people who were killed when a luxury yacht sank off Sicily this week. The public prosecutor's office of Termini Imerese, headed by Ambrogio Cartosio, announced the investigation, saying the probe was not aimed at any individual person. Lynch's 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, was also among those who died when the family's 56 metre-long boat, the Bayesian, capsized during a fierce, pre-dawn storm on Monday off Porticello, near Palermo. Fifteen people survived, including Lynch's wife, whose company owned the Bayesian, and the yacht's captain. The captain, New Zealander James Cu...

Thomas Matthew Crooks shot former US president Donald Trump in the ear at a rally in July. Photo: AFP / HANDOUT The gunman who tried to assassinate former United States president Donald Trump had encrypted messaging accounts on platforms based in New Zealand, an investigation has shown. Republican representative Michael Waltz, a member of a congressional taskforce investigating the assassination attempt carried out by 19-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, revealed the link to media this week. Waltz said Crooks used encrypted messaging accounts on various platforms located in Belgium, New Zealand and Germany. According to the New York Post, the "overseas accounts" piqued Waltz's suspicion immediately. "Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a health care aide need encrypted platforms not even ba...