DHAKA: Student demonstrators who ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina have rejected calls from Bangladesh’s two main political parties for quick elections and are considering creating their own party to sustain their movement, according to interviews with four protest leaders.
Their hope: to avoid a repeat of the last 15 years, in which Hasina ruled the country of some 170 million people with an iron fist.
In June, a handful of student leaders – most in their early-to-mid 20s — began organizing demonstrations against a law reserving coveted government jobs for certain segments of the population.
Within two months, Hasina’s government was swept away by an upswell of popular anger at the brutality of its crackdown on anti-quota protesters. At least 300 people were killed in the single largest bout of violence since Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.
The movement was hailed as a Gen Z revolution, spurred by young Bangladeshis’ anger at years of jobless growth, allegations of kleptocracy, and shrinking civil liberties.
An interim government headed by Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus — which includes two student leaders in senior positions — now runs the country.
For most of the past three decades, Bangladesh has been governed either by Hasina’s Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party of her rival Khaleda Zia, both of whom are in their 70s.
Student leaders have discussed forming a political party to end the duopoly, said Mahfuj Alam, who chairs a committee tasked with liaising between the government and social groups such as teachers and activists.
A decision would be made in about a month, the 26-year-old law student told Reuters, adding that protest leaders wanted to consult widely with citizens before deciding on a platform.
Details of the students’ plans for their movement’s political future have not previously been reported.
“People are really tired of the two political parties. They have trust in us,” he said, at the gates of Dhaka University’s Arts Faculty.
After the story was published, Alam said on Facebook his statement to Reuters “had come out wrong” and that the students’ main focus was to maintain the spirit of the mass uprising and to consolidate the government.
“We are not thinking about political organizations right now,” he said in the Facebook post, adding that the priority was broad reform of the political system. “Everyone will know what the political structure will be at the appropriate time.”
Tahmid Chowdhury, another student coordinator who helped bring down Hasina, said there was a “high chance” they would form a political party. They were still working out their program, though he said it would be rooted in secularism and free speech.
“We don’t have any other plan that could break the binary without forming a party,” said the 24-year-old graduate student in world religion.
The student leaders in interim government have not specified what policies they intend to pursue, beyond sweeping institutional changes — such as reforming the electoral commission handpicked by Hasina — to avoid another spell of authoritarian rule.
“The spirit of the movement was to create a new Bangladesh, one where no fascist or autocrat can return,” said Nahid Islam, 26, a key protest organizer who sits in Yunus’ cabinet. “To ensure that, we need structural reforms, which will definitely take some time.”
The government is not considering calls from the Awami League and BNP to hold fresh polls as early as fall, said Islam, who holds the telecommunications portfolio.
The regime change has forced out the chief justice, the central bank governor and the police chief who oversaw the crackdown on the students, among other officials.
A spokesperson for Yunus, who has said he is not keen on holding elected office, did not return a request for comment. Touhid Hossain, a career diplomat serving as Yunus’ de facto foreign minister, told Reuters the students had not discussed their political plans with the technocrats.
But he added: “the political scenario is going to change because we have basically excluded the young generation from politics.”
Yunus, an 84-year-old economist whose microcredit programs helped lift millions globally out of poverty, wields moral authority but there are doubts over what his administration can achieve.
“We are totally in uncharted waters, both legally and politically,” said Shahdeen Malik, a constitutional expert. “The powers of this interim government are not defined because there is no constitutional provision.”
Reuters interviewed more than 30 people, including key student leaders, Hasina’s son and adviser Sajeeb Wazed, opposition politicians and army officers to assess the divisions left in the wake of the protests and the prospects for the new government.
Hasina, whose son said she hopes to return to Bangladesh, couldn’t be reached for comment.
“The political parties are not going anywhere. You cannot wipe us out,” Wazed told Reuters from the United States, where he lives. “Sooner or later, either the Awami League or the BNP will be back in power. Without our help, without our supporters, you are not going to be able to bring stability to Bangladesh.”
COLLABORATORS
On July 19, as Hasina’s supporters and police battled student demonstrators, authorities detained three of the movement’s most important leaders: Islam, Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Mojumder.
Mojumder told Reuters that he was sedated and beaten by law enforcement. The treatment, he said, solidified his view that Hasina had to go.
The new police chief Mainul Islam did not respond to Reuters’ questions for this story.
Previous protests had fizzled when leaders were detained but this time demonstrations raged on. Expecting to be arrested, the core of about two dozen coordinators had formed a structure in which they were supported by layers of other student-activists, said Islam, a veteran of previous protests.
Missteps by Hasina, meanwhile, fueled public anger against her.
While the students had protested for more than a month, they were largely limited to public university campuses. Then, on July 14, Hasina held a news conference.
Half an hour in, she half-smilingly referred to the demonstrators as “razakars.” The pejorative describes people who collaborated with Pakistan during the 1971 war, which she contrasted with descendants of freedom fighters for whom many government jobs would be reserved.
The comment ignited furious mass protests.
At Dhaka University, male demonstrators were joined by female students who broke out of their five halls of residences, whose gates are locked in the evenings, said Umama Fatema, 25, a female student coordinator.
The next day, the Awami League’s student wing moved to suppress demonstrations and clashes erupted, with sticks, iron rods and stones for weapons.
’STOP THE VIOLENCE’
The escalation in violence that week expanded the demonstrations from public campuses to private institutions, said Nayeem Abedin, a 22-year-old coordinator at the private East-West University. “We had a responsibility to come out to the street for our brothers,” he said.
Students at such institutions typically come from Bangladesh’s middle class that expanded rapidly during the robust economic growth that Hasina oversaw over much of her term.
“It felt like a turning point,” said Islam. “Private university students joined in, and unexpectedly, so did many parents.”
At least 114 people were killed by the end of that week, with hundreds more hurt. The scale of the crackdown shocked even some in the Awami League elite.
“I also told my mother: ‘no, we need to immediately tell Chhatra League not to attack, stop the violence,’” said Wazed, without providing further details. “We suspended the police officers that shot at students.”
At least two officers were suspended in early August after a video depicting the killing of a student went viral online. The student leaders plan to prosecute police and paramilitary accused of abuse.
On July 21, Bangladesh’s Supreme Court, whose judges were effectively appointed by Hasina, ruled that 93 percent of state jobs should be open to competition, meeting a key demand of the students. The demonstrations continued to grow.
Hasina declared an indefinite curfew on Aug. 4, a day after at least 91 people were killed. The army told the prime minister that evening it would not enforce the lockdown.
“The army chief didn’t want more bloodshed,” said one serving officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to media. “People from all walks of life were joining.”
The next day, as crowds marched to her official residence, Hasina fled to India.
Bangladesh student protesters eye new party to cement their revolution
https://arab.news/4x9sv
Bangladesh student protesters eye new party to cement their revolution
- In June, a handful of student leaders began demonstrations against a law reserving coveted government jobs for certain segments of population
- Within two months, Hasina’s government was swept away by an upswell of popular anger at the brutality of its crackdown on anti-quota protesters
Hundreds gather on Seattle beach to remember American activist killed by Israeli military
On Wednesday night, hundreds of people traveled to the same beach in grief, love and anger to mourn her. Eygi was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers last Friday in the occupied West Bank, where she had gone to protest and bear witness to Palestinian suffering.
“I can't imagine what she felt like in her last moments, lying alone under the olive trees,” one of her friends, Kelsie Nabass, told the crowd at the vigil. “What did she think of? And did she know all of us would show up here tonight, for her?”
Eygi, who also held Turkish citizenship, was killed while demonstrating against settlements in the West Bank. A witness who was there, Israeli protester Jonathan Pollak, said she posed no threat to Israeli forces and that the shooting came during a moment of calm, following clashes between stone-throwing protesters and Israeli troops firing tear gas and bullets.
The Israeli military said Eygi was likely shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by its soldiers, drawing criticism from American officials, including President Joe Biden, who said he was “outraged and deeply saddened” her killing.
“There must be full accountability,” Biden said in a statement released Wednesday. “And Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”
The deaths of American citizens in the West Bank have drawn international attention, such as the fatal shooting of a prominent Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022 in the Jenin refugee camp. The deaths of Palestinians who do not have dual nationality rarely receive the same scrutiny.
Eygi's family has demanded an independent investigation.
As the sun set, turning the sky on the horizon a pale orange, friends recalled Eygi as open, engaging, funny and devoted. The crowd spilled beyond a large rectangle of small black, red, green and white Palestinian flags staked in the sand to mark the venue for the vigil.
Many attendees wore traditional checked scarves — keffiyehs — in support of the Palestinian cause and carried photographs of Eygi in her graduation cap. They laid roses, sunflowers or carnations at a memorial where battery-operated candles spelled out her name in the sand.
Several described becoming fast friends with her last spring during the occupied “Liberated Zone” protest against the Israel-Hamas war at the University of Washington. Yoseph Ghazal said she introduced herself as “Baklava,” a name she sometimes used on messaging apps, reflective of her love of the sweet Mediterranean dessert.
Eygi, who attended Seattle schools and graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology this year, helped negotiate with the administration on behalf of the protesters at the encampment, which was part of a broader campus movement against the Gaza war.
“She felt so strongly and loved humanity, loved people, loved life so much that she just wanted to help as many as she could,” Juliette Majid, 26, now a doctoral student at North Carolina State University, said in an interview. “She had such a drive for justice.”
Eygi’s uncle told a Turkish television station that she had kept her trip a secret from at least some of her family, blocking relatives from her social media posts. Turkish officials have said they are working to repatriate her body for burial, per the family’s wishes.
Turkey’s foreign ministry says all measures related to bringing the body of Eygi, “who was “intentionally” killed by Israeli soldiers, to Turkey have been completed and she is expected to arrive on Friday. She will be buried in Turkey. It said the case is being followed by the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv and consulate in Jerusalem.
Sue Han, a 26-year-old law student at the University of Washington, only knew Eygi for a few months after meeting her at the university encampment, but they quickly became close, laughing and blasting music in Eygi's beat-up green Subaru. Eygi would pick Han up at the airport after her travels. Most recently, Eygi greeted her with a plastic baggie full of sliced apples and perfectly ripe strawberries.
Han saw Eygi before she left. Eygi was feeling scared and selfish for leaving her loved ones to go to the West Bank with the activist group International Solidarity Movement; Han said she couldn't imagine anyone more selfless.
Eygi loved to connect people, bringing disparate friends together for coffee to see how they mixed, Han said. The same was true when she would bring people together on the beach, and it was true of the vigil, too.
“I was looking around at everybody sharing stories about Aysenur, sharing tears and hugs, and this is exactly what she would have wanted,” Han said. “These new relationships all sharing Aysenur as the starting seed — it's the legacy she would have wanted.”
Thailand’s new PM outlines policies to parliament as consumer mood drops
- Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra highlights signature plan for a ‘digital wallet’ handout of 10,000 baht to 50 million people
- The scheme has been criticized by economists and former central bank governors as fiscally irresponsible, which the government rejects
BANGKOK: Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra on Thursday outlined her government’s policy agenda to parliament, headlined by plans to give away 450 billion baht ($13.4 billion) in handouts to jumpstart Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy.
Political newcomer Paetongtarn’s cabinet was sworn in this month, after parliament elected her Thailand’s youngest premier following the shock removal of predecessor Srettha Thavisin by a court decision.
The polices largely continue ally Srettha’s agenda and that of their populist Pheu Thai party, including debt restructuring and legalizing casinos to draw in investment and more tourists.
Paetongtarn told parliament her government was facing challenges, including structural economic problems, and said the government would act with urgency to stimulate growth.
“If there are no financial and fiscal measures to support economic growth, it is expected that the country’s economic growth rate will not exceed 3 percent per year,” she said.
That would result in the public debt level approaching the ceiling of 70 percent to gross domestic product (GDP) in 2027, she said. Public debt stood at 63.74 percent of GDP at the end of July.
“Therefore, it is a great challenge that the government must urgently restore the country’s economy to quickly grow strongly again,” Paetongtarn said.
While she highlighted the signature plan for a ‘digital wallet’ handout of 10,000 baht ($300) to 50 million people, some of which Paetongtarn has previously said will be given in cash, there were no updates on how or when it would be rolled out.
The government had said this week it would distribute 145 billion baht ($4.2 billion) of the program to support vulnerable groups later this month.
The scheme has been criticized by economists and former central bank governors as fiscally irresponsible, which the government rejects. It has struggled to find sources of funding.
The government insists the policy is necessary to energize the economy, which the central bank expects to grow 2.6 percent this year, up from 1.9 percent in 2023 but far adrift of most regional peers.
Consumer confidence dropped for a sixth straight month to a 13-month low in August, a survey showed on Thursday.
Paetongtarn, 38, made her debut appearance in parliament as Thailand’s second female prime minister. She is the fourth member of her family to hold the top job.
Among those was her father, the billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s most influential and divisive politician over the past two decades, who has backed the stimulus plan and is a key figure behind her Pheu Thai party.
Starmer to say UK’s national health service needs ‘major surgery’
- His speech in central London follows the publication of a 142-page investigation which found that the health of Britons had deteriorated over the past 15 years
LONDON: Prime Minister Keir Starmer will warn Thursday that Britain’s state-run National Health Service must “reform or die” after an independent report said the venerated institution was in a “critical condition.”
Starmer, whose Labour party was elected by a landslide in July, will promise “the biggest reimagining” of the NHS since it was founded 76 years ago.
His speech in central London follows the publication of a 142-page investigation which found that the health of Britons had deteriorated over the past 15 years.
The report’s author, Ara Darzi, an unaffiliated Lord in parliament’s upper chamber, said the NHS had fallen into “disrepair” due to a lack of investment, top-down reorganization and the coronavirus pandemic.
“What we need is the courage to deliver long-term reform — major surgery not sticking plaster solutions,” Starmer was due to say, according to excerpts of his speech released to reporters.
“The NHS is at a fork in the road, and we have a choice about how it should meet these rising demands.
“Raise taxes on working people to meet the ever-higher costs of aging population — or reform to secure its future.
“We know working people can’t afford to pay more, so it’s reform or die,” Starmer was expected to say.
Health minister Wes Streeting told Sky News there would be “three big shifts” — moving certain services from hospitals to the community, fully switching from analog to digital and “giving staff the tools to do the job, so that we tackle that productivity challenge.”
He said the government would not “do as the Conservatives did, which is just pour more money into a broken model, and fail to reform.”
Labour dumped the Conservatives out of power on July 4 in part on a pledge to “fix” the NHS, accusing the Tories of having “broken” it during their 14 years in power.
Darzi’s report notes that the NHS is seeing a surge in patients suffering multiple long-term illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
It says the UK has higher cancer rates than other countries and is lagging behind in its treatment of major conditions.
It also notes that waiting lists have swelled to 7.6 million and that a tenth of patients at accident and emergency wards now wait 12 hours or more before being seen.
Darzi said that he was “shocked” by what he discovered but added that the NHS’s vital signs “remain strong.”
Starmer was expected to outline the three areas of reform for a 10-year plan to “turn around the NHS,” whose universal model is a source of British pride, despite its shortcomings in meeting demand.
Just over a year ago, his Tory predecessor Rishi Sunak announced a 15-year drive to recruit more than 300,000 staff to deal with a chronic shortage of doctors and nurses.
At the time, it was estimated that the NHS would have a staff shortfall of 360,000 by 2037 because of an aging population, a lack of domestically trained health workers and difficulties recruiting and retaining staff, in part because of new visa rules.
“The challenge is clear before us; the change could amount to the biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth,” the prime minister was set to say.
Starmer, whose mother was an NHS nurse, has spent much of his first two months in power blaming the Tories for leaving Labour a dire inheritance in sectors ranging from health to the economy and prisons.
The Conservatives, whose leader Sunak is the son of an NHS doctor and a pharmacist, accuse him of exaggerating the country’s problems as a way of laying the groundwork for future tax increases.
Ukraine businesses hire more women and teens as labor shortages bite
- Companies hire more women and young people to fill gaps
- War and mobilization have hollowed out workforce
KYIV: After spending years in what she described as “boring, sedentary” roles in the offices of several Ukrainian companies, Liliia Shulha landed her dream job as a truck driver with Ukraine’s leading retailer, Fozzy Group.
“I always dreamed about big cars. Instead of (playing with) dolls, I drove cars when I was a child,” she told Reuters.
“Now the situation is such that they take people without experience and they train. I was lucky,” said Shulha, 40, wearing a company uniform in front of a large truck.
As the war with Russia drains the labor force, businesses are trying to cover critical shortages by hiring more women in traditionally male-dominated roles and turning to teenagers, students and older workers.
With millions of people, mostly women and children, abroad after fleeing the war, and tens of thousands of men mobilized into the army, the jobs crisis could endanger economic growth and a post-war recovery, analysts say.
Ukraine has lost over a quarter of its workforce since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, central bank data showed.
Nearly 60 percent of businesses said finding skilled workers was their main challenge, an economy ministry survey of over 3,000 companies showed.
“The situation is indeed critical,” said Tetiana Petruk, chief sustainability officer at steel company Metinvest, one of Ukraine’s largest employers with a workforce of about 45,000. It has about 4,000 vacancies.
“The staff deficit that we feel has an impact on our production,” Petruk told Reuters in an online interview.
“We are not the only ones who feel the staff shortages, all companies in the regions feel that, including our contractors.”
Reuters spoke to representatives of nine Ukrainian companies, from big industrial firms to retail groups and small private entrepreneurs. All said staff shortages and a growing mismatch of skills were big challenges.
Businesses said they were changing recruitment and business practices, automating, rotating existing staff and expanding their job descriptions, re-hiring retirees and offering more benefits, especially for younger workers.
They have also had to increase wages. The average monthly wage is now about 20,000 hryvnias ($470) compared to about 14,500 a year ago.
“There is a noticeable shift away from gender and age bias in candidate selection as employers adjust criteria to attract needed employees,” said the Kyiv School of Economics. “This trend also extends to entrepreneurship, where the share of female entrepreneurs is growing significantly.”
More women
Male-dominated industries are more affected by staff shortages, the central bank said.
The construction sector, transport, mining and others have all suffered because of military mobilization, for which men aged 25 to 60 are eligible. To keep the economy running, the government provides full or partial deferrals for critical companies.
In the energy and weapons production sectors, 100 percent of staff are eligible for draft deferral. In some other sectors, firms can retain 50 percent of male staff. But the process to secure deferral is long and complicated.
As the government toughened mobilization rules this year, the number of men preferring informal employment — allowing them to stay off public data records — grew, some enterprises said.
In the agricultural southern region of Mykolayiv, women are being trained as tractor drivers. Women are also increasingly working as tram and truck drivers, coal miners, security guards and warehouse workers, companies say.
“We are offering training and jobs for women who have minimal experience,” said Lyubov Ukrainets, human resources director at Silpo, part of Fozzy Group.
Including Shulha, the company has six female truck drivers and is more actively recruiting women for other jobs previously dominated by men, including loaders, meat splitters, packers and security guards.
The share of female employees is growing in industries such as steel production. Petruk said female staff accounted for about 30-35 percent of Metinvest’s workforce and the company now hired women for some underground jobs. Metinvest was unable to provide comparative figures for before the war.
Some other women are unable or unwilling to join the workforce because of a lack of childcare. Shulha, who works 15-day stretches on the road, has moved back in with her parents to ensure care for her 14-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.
Young people
Businesses and economists expect labor market challenges to persist. Employers are turning their attention to young people by offering training, job experience and targeted benefit packages.
Metinvest, which previously focused on students, is now increasingly working with professional colleges, Petruk said.
Silpo is more actively hiring teenagers for entry-level jobs in supermarkets and has launched a specialized internship program for students.
Mobile phone operator Vodafone repackaged its youth program, creating an opportunity for about 50 teenagers in 12 cities to get their first job experience.
“We want to offer the first proper experience of the official job to this young audience. Another objective is to build a talent pool,” said Ilona Voloshyna of Vodafone Retail.
“Also we want to understand the youth,” she said in a Vodafone shop in Kyiv as six teenagers consulted with visitors.
The government and foreign partners have launched several programs to help Ukrainians reskill.
“We provide the opportunity for everyone at state expense to obtain a new profession which is in demand on the labor market, or to raise their professional level,” said Tetiana Berezhna, a deputy economy minister.
SpaceX-Polaris crew poised to attempt first private spacewalk
- It is the Elon Musk-led company’s latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight
- Jared Isaacman has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars
WASHINGTON: The first private spacewalk is set for Thursday by a group of astronauts who will leave a SpaceX capsule after a delay of a few hours, testing a new line of spacesuits in the company’s riskiest mission yet.
A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees have been orbiting Earth aboard Crew Dragon since Tuesday’s pre-dawn launch from Florida of the Polaris Dawn mission.
It is the Elon Musk-led company’s latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight.
Live streaming of the event is set to begin at 4:55 a.m. ET (0855 GMT), SpaceX said on Thursday, with two astronauts venturing outside Crew Dragon while two stay inside.
The capsule, at an altitude of 700km (435 miles), will be completely depressurized, and the whole crew will rely on their slim, SpaceX-developed spacesuits for oxygen.
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.
He has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, based on Crew Dragon’s price of roughly $55 million a seat for other flights.
The others in Polaris include mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers.
FARTHEST SINCE APOLLO
Throughout Wednesday the spacecraft circled Earth at least six times in an oval-shaped orbit as shallow as 190km and stretching out as far as 1,400km, the farthest in space humans have traveled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.
The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft then began to lower its orbit into a peak 700-km position and adjust cabin pressure to ready for the spacewalk, formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA), the Polaris program said on social media on Wednesday.
“The crew also spent a few hours demonstrating the suit’s pressurized mobility, verifying positions and accessibility in microgravity along with preparing the cabin for the EVA,” it said.
During the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the Crew Dragon tethered by an oxygen line while Poteet and Menon stay within.
Only government astronauts with several years of training have done spacewalks in the past.
There have been roughly 270 on the International Space Station (ISS) since it was set up in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
The Polaris crew has spent 2-1/2 years of training with SpaceX mission simulations and “experiential learning” in challenging, uncomfortable environments, said Poteet.
Last month the fighter pilot told reporters in Florida that spaceflight preparation was more intense than he had experienced in his military career.
“I can tell you without a doubt this has been some of the most challenging training that I’ve ever experienced,” Poteet said in Cape Canaveral before the launch.
The spacewalk will happen as a record 19 astronauts orbit Earth, after Russia’s Soyuz MS-26 mission ferried two cosmonauts and a US astronaut to the International Space Station on Wednesday, taking its headcount to a rare high of 12.
Three Chinese astronauts are aboard the Tiangong space station.
The first US spacewalk in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch opened, and a spacesuited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.
During the mission, the private Polaris astronauts will be subjects for a range of scientific studies on how the human body reacts to deep space, adding to decades of health studies on government astronauts on the ISS.
Since 2001, Crew Dragon, the only US vehicle capable of reliably putting humans in orbit and returning them to Earth, has flown more than a dozen astronaut missions, mainly for NASA.
The agency seeded development of the capsule under a program meant to establish commercial, privately-built US vehicles capable of ferrying astronauts with the ISS.
Also developed under that program was Boeing’s Starliner capsule, but it is farther behind.
Starliner launched its first astronauts to the ISS in June in a troubled test mission that ended this month with the capsule returning empty, leaving its crew on the space station for a Crew Dragon capsule to fetch next year.
