18-year-old joining Blue Origin’s first passenger spaceflight

The four will blast off from West Texas atop a New Shepard rocket for a 10-minute flight.

According to Blue Origin, Daemen took a year off after high school to obtain his private pilot’s license. He’ll attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in September.

“This marks the beginning of commercial operations for New Shepard, and Oliver represents a new generation of people who will help us build a road to space,” Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said in a statement.

WHO chief says it was ‘premature’ to rule out COVID lab leak

The head of the World Health Organization acknowledged it was premature to rule out a potential link between the COVID-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak, and he said Thursday he is asking China to be more transparent as scientists search for the origins of the coronavirus.

In a rare departure from his usual deference to powerful member countries, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of COVID-19. The first human cases were identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Tedros told reporters that the U.N. health agency based in Geneva is “asking actually China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic.”

He said there had been a “premature push” to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan.

California blaze erupts near site of deadliest U.S. wildfire

A blaze that erupted near the flashpoint of the deadliest wildfire in recent U.S. history was heading away from homes on Thursday, but survivors of the 2018 blaze in the town of Paradise worried that history could repeat itself.

The Dixie Fire had burned 3.5 square miles of brush and timber near the Feather River Canyon area of Butte County and moved into national forest land in neighboring Plumas County.

There was zero containment, however, and officials kept in place a warning for residents of the tiny communities of Pulga and east Concow to be ready to leave.

In its early hours, the fire raced along steep and hard-to-reach terrain about 10 miles from Paradise, the foothill town that was virtually incinerated by the Camp Fire that killed 85 people.

The blaze is one of nearly 70 active wildfires that have destroyed homes and burned through about 1,562 square miles — a combined area larger than Rhode Island — in a dozen mostly Western states, according to fire officials.

Cuba’s leader lays some blame for protests on his government

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel for the first time is offering some self-criticism while saying that government shortcomings in handling shortages and other problems played a role in this week’s protests.

In a televised address Wednesday night, he also called on Cubans to not act with hate — a reference to the violence that occurred at some of the rare street demonstrations in which protesters voiced grievances over high prices, food shortages and power outages, while some people also called for a change in the government.

Until now, the Cuban government had only blamed social media and the U.S. government for the weekend protests, which were the biggest seen in Cuba since a quarter century ago, when then-President Fidel Castro personally went into the streets to calm crowds of thousands furious over dire shortages following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its economic subsidies for the island.

Top Senate Dem sets infrastructure vote, pressures lawmakers

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pressured lawmakers Thursday to reach agreement by next week on a pair of massive domestic spending measures, signaling Democrats’ desire to push ahead aggressively on President Joe Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar agenda.

Schumer, D-New York said he was scheduling a procedural vote for next Wednesday to begin debate on a still-evolving bipartisan infrastructure bill. Senators from both parties, bargaining for weeks, have struggled to reach final agreement on a $1 trillion package of highway, water systems and other public works projects.

“The time has come to make progress. And we will. We must,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.

South Africa deploys 25,000 troops to end week of rioting

South Africa’s army began deploying 25,000 troops Thursday to assist police in quelling the weeklong riots and violence sparked by the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma.

In the largest deployment of soldiers since the end of white minority rule in 1994, the South African National Defence Force has also called up all of its reserve force of 12,000 troops.

In a show of force, a convoy of more than a dozen armored personnel carriers brought soldiers Thursday into Gauteng province, South Africa’s most populous, which includes the largest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria.