NATION & WORLD IN BRIEF

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio breaks US spaceflight record

NASA astronaut Frank

Rubio, along with two Russian cosmonauts, has returned to Earth after being stuck in space for more than a year.

Rubio now holds the record for the longest consecutive time in space as a NASA astronaut, but the new honor was not intentional.

His original mission was meant to last six months, but a coolant leak in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft was detected after it was docked at the space station. Without the coolant, the capsule could overheat, and that ultimately lengthened the stay while a replacement was sent.

The replacement capsule reached the trio two weeks ago.

After 371 days in space,

Rubio, alongside Russia’s

Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, landed Wednesday morning in a remote area of Kazakhstan.

Rubio, who was born in Los Angeles, joined NASA in 2017. He is the first astronaut of Salvadoran descent to travel to low-earth orbit.

According to NASA, Rubio traveled 157.4 million miles and orbited the Earth 5,963 times.

Before joining the space program, Rubio was a boardcertified family physician and flight surgeon and a special forces Army officer and Blackhawk helicopter pilot who flew combat missions in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. This was his first mission in space.

Before his return to Earth,

Rubio told reporters that he would have turned down the mission if he had known of the timeline in advance, citing missing important family milestones. Still, he said he felt honored and is looking forward to regaining his sense of balance and strength that was affected by prolonged microgravity.

When Rubio landed, it was reported that he smiled and said, “It’s good to be home.”

US won’t have any pandas for the first time in 50 years

WASHINGTON — Giant pandas are everywhere at Washington, DC’S National Zoo. Three live in the zoo’s $50 million Asia

Trail. T-shirts, trucker hats and refrigerator magnets bear their image. A 24-hour panda-cam broadcasts the trio’s every move. Even the QR code to reserve zoo tickets features a panda silhouette.

Now, after more than 50 years, Washington’s pandas are going away — and maybe for good.

The zoo’s three pandas are set to return to China by December with the expiration of a threeyear agreement with China’s wildlife agency that month. It’s not just the U.S. capital. The three other U.S. zoos that have Chinese pandas — Atlanta, San Diego and Memphis — have all either turned over their pandas or will see them return to China by the end of next year.

Although both sides deny politics are at play, China has long used “Panda Diplomacy” to curry favor, reward friends and punish adversaries. And the loss of America’s last pandas comes at a moment when ties between the U.S. and China have hit a historic low, with most avenues of cooperation cut off.

In the same vein, any hope that Washington will get new pandas rests on recent signs that ties might be getting a little better — or, at the very least, not getting worse.

“There’s some significance to the fact that all of the pandas in the United States will be back in China by next year,” said Elena Songster, a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California and author of “Panda Nation,” a book about China’s panda policy. “They have a plan. They know what they’re doing.”

The push-and-pull over pandas reflects in part the quirky way they show up in zoos around the world. Zoos don’t get full custody of pandas. Instead, they rent them, signing contracts to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to China.

Buddha is back: $1.5 million statue recovered, but mystery still surrounds theft

LOS ANGELES — Los

Angeles police recovered a stolen 250-pound Japanese Buddha statue valued at $1.5 million over the weekend and arrested a suspect in the case, authorities said Wednesday.

But the suspect is not believed to be the original thief, and mystery still shrouds the heist of the centuries-old artifact.

Source: Tribune News Service