Cease-fire strained

Cease-fire strained

BEIRUT

Government forces and rebels clashed Sunday across northern and western Syria, imperiling a monthlong cease-fire ahead of peace talks in Geneva, while airstrikes pounded the Islamic State group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, killing dozens.

Al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, is playing a leading role on the side of the insurgents, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group with a network of informers inside Syria.

The Nusra Front and the IS group are excluded from the cease-fire, which had brought relative calm to much of Syria for the first time in the 5-year-old civil war between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and those trying to topple him.

Election in Peru

LIMA, PERU

The daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori won the first round of Peru’s presidential election Sunday, though she didn’t get enough votes to avoid a June runoff, and the race to be her opponent was tight, according to two quick counts of ballots by pollsters.

Center-right candidate Keiko Fujimori was likely to end up with about 39 percent of the votes, said a quick count carried out by pollster Ipsos, representing 85 percent of polling stations nationwide.

Toddler’s SUV death

atlanta

Jury selection is to begin today in the case of a Georgia man accused of intentionally leaving his toddler to die in a hot SUV.

According to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, 550 summonses were sent to prospective jurors to hear the murder case of Justin Ross Harris, who is accused of leaving his 22-month old son, Cooper, in his SUV for hours June 18, 2014, a day when temperatures in the Atlanta area reached the high 80s.

Harris was indicted in September 2014 on multiple charges, including felony murder.

NASA’s Kepler in emergency mode

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.

NASA is trying to resuscitate its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, in a state of emergency nearly 75 million miles away.

The spacecraft – responsible for detecting nearly 5,000 planets outside our solar system – slipped into emergency mode sometime last week. The last regular contact was April 4; everything seemed normal then.

Ground controllers discovered the problem Thursday, right before they were going to point Kepler toward the center of the Milky Way as part of a new kind of planetary survey. Kepler was going to join ground observatories in surveying millions of stars in the heart of our galaxy, in hopes of finding planets far from their suns, like our own outer planets, as well as stray planets that might be wandering between stars.

SpaceX delivers 1st inflatable room

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.

SpaceX has made good on a high-priority delivery: the world’s first inflatable room for astronauts.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, two days after launching from Cape Canaveral. Station astronauts used a robot arm to capture the Dragon, orbiting 250 miles above Earth.

The Dragon holds 7,000 pounds of freight, including the soft-sided compartment built by Bigelow Aerospace. The tightly packed pioneering pod should swell to the size of a small bedroom once filled with air in May.

It will be attached to the space station Saturday, but won’t be inflated until the end of May. The technology could change the way astronauts live in space: NASA envisions inflatable habitats in a couple decades at Mars, while Bigelow aims to launch two inflatable space stations in four years for commercial lease.

Associated Press