Jan. 6 committee, racing year-end clock, expects final hearing next week
WASHINGTON — A House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol attack is seeking to reclaim some of the spotlight lost to other blockbuster legal developments around Donald Trump with what could be its final hearing next week.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters Tuesday that a hearing scheduled for Sept. 28 would be the last for the committee, “unless something else develops.”
The panel is also planning to release an interim report of its investigative conclusions in early October, just weeks before the Nov. 8 elections that will determine control of Congress.
“It won’t be a quiet period,” Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said last week.
The panel will need to crank up the volume to regain attention seized by the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and the dozens of subpoenas issued by federal and state grand juries. Since its last hearing, on July 21, the committee’s vice chair, Republican Liz Cheney, suffered a deflating primary loss to a Trump-backed candidate in Wyoming.
With the committee’s charter sunsetting at the end of the year, some of the loftier investigative pursuits — such as seeking testimony from the ex-president — may simply run out of time. And efforts to enforce subpoenas served on Trump’s congressional allies will probably remain unresolved.
—Bloomberg News
NASA works through new leak for Artemis I tanking test ahead of potential launch next week
ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA began its tanking test of the Space Launch System core and upper stage Wednesday at Kennedy Space Center that could pave the way for the Artemis I launch to the moon next week, but a new leak in a fuel line yet again gave NASA headaches.
The test that got the go to proceed at 7:30 a.m. Eastern time at Launch Pad 39-B looks to make sure repairs to fuel lines made since a scrub on Sept. 3 can support the more than 730,000 gallons of cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that needs to flow into the core stage as well as the upper Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage of SLS.
But a new leak in the same line that caused that scrub was detected as NASA halted liquid hydrogen fueling shortly before10 a.m.
“They did have a detection of a hydrogen leak in the tail service mast umbilical,” said commentator Derrol Nail with NASA Communications. “It’s in the lower portion of the rocket. They have a 7% reading of hydrogen in a cavity there where that quick disconnect line is. This is the one that was repaired.”
A quick disconnect is designed to fall off and away from the rocket when it launches.
The 7% leak is above the 4% threshold NASA has in place for cryogenic fueling limits.
—Orlando Sentinel
6 killed in Iran protests sparked by woman’s death in police custody
The death toll in protests that have roiled towns and cities across Iran rose to six, state media reported, as anger sparked by the case of a young woman who died in police custody spreads.
Two people were killed in the predominantly Kurdish western city of Kermanshah, reports said Wednesday, while a “police assistant” died and four officers were injured in clashes in the southern city of Shiraz. On Tuesday, state media said three people died in protests in western Kurdistan province, where Mahsa Amini, 22, was buried Saturday.
She’d been detained by so-called “morality police” for breaking the Islamic Republic’s rules on what women can wear in public. By Tuesday night, protests had spread to multiple cities, according to a government statement, including Karaj, Tabriz, Shiraz,Mashhad, Kish Island, Kerman, Yazd, Esfahan and Hamedan.
Iran’s state media, which is closely aligned with the country’s ruling hard-liners, said “anti-revolutionary” agents and “rioters” were responsible for the deaths and weapons used weren’t the same as those carried by police. Iranian authorities frequently refer to protesters as seditionists, anti-revolutionaries or terrorists, and police are rarely blamed for the deaths of protesters in state media.
The violence has gripped Iran since the weekend and it’s the biggest public backlash against the country’s dress code for women since the 1979 revolution that ushered in the laws. It’s also the most widespread unrest since November 2019 protests over fuel prices.
—Bloomberg News
———
