SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.

Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship’s breakup in space, which occurred shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX livestream of the mission showed.

The failure comes just more than a month after the company’s seventh Starship flight also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, indicating serious setbacks for a program Musk has sought to speed up this year.

The proposed expansion of a Quebec landfill that accepts hazardous waste from the United States has ignited a turf war between the Quebec provincial government and local leaders, who say they oppose putting US trash into a local peat bog.

Local leaders are protesting against the move – saying the province is capitulating to a US company in the midst of a tariff war between Canada and the United States.

For a year, the Montreal suburb of Blainville has been refusing to sell a piece of city-owned forest land to facilitate the expansion of Stablex, a US-owned company that treats and stores hazardous waste, including 33,000 tons exported from the US in 2023. Tech billionaire Bill Gates is listed as a stakeholder in the company.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/40148109

Are you fucking kidding me...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26422918

LOL. I hope this passes. So hilarious that Donnie fucked around and is finding out!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/33912874

Over the last three years, the head of a small charter school network that serves fewer than 1,000 students has taken home up to $870,000 annually, a startling amount that appears to be the highest for any public school superintendent in the state and among the top in the nation.

Valere Public Schools Superintendent Salvador Cavazos’ compensation to run three campuses in Austin, Corpus Christi and Brownsville exceeds the less than $450,000 that New York City’s chancellor makes to run the largest school system in the country.

But Cavazos’ salary looks far more modest in publicly posted records that are supposed to provide transparency to taxpayers. That’s because Valere excludes most of his bonuses from its reports to the state and on its own website, instead only sharing his base pay of about $300,000.

Artist: Cheshirrr | pixiv | twitter | danbooru

Full quality: .jpg 1 MB (1200 × 1802)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26440529

The Polish President visited NATO's headquarters on Thursday at the invitation of Secretary General Mark Rutte.

The US state department is preparing to shut down a number of consulates that are mainly in western Europe in the coming months and looking to reduce its workforce globally, multiple US officials said on Thursday.

The state department is also looking into potentially merging a number of its expert bureaus at its headquarters in Washington that are working in areas such as human rights, refugees, global criminal justice, women’s issues and efforts to counter human trafficking, the officials said.

Reuters reported last month that US missions around the world had been asked to look into reducing US and locally employed staff by at least 10% as Donald Trump and his billionaire aide Elon Musk have unleashed an unprecedented cost-cutting effort across the US federal workforce.

President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet in person on Thursday to deliver a message: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk.