our time, ah no, jessie yo from the villas of correct us. so the battle fields around most of our job is to get to the truth and empower people through knowledge. ah, i molly inside indo. all he top stories on al jazeera, the u. s. the u. k friends, portugal and greece, the all reporting record numbers of daily news cove at 19 infections in the united kingdom. despite the rising number of cases, the government seems we're lucky to impose new restrictions. john hall explains the christmas and new year holiday period was always likely to speed the advance of the micron variant. and so it is proofing in the u. k. a record 129000 new infections were reported on tuesday. but the government's decision not to disrupt new year's

celebrations, and instead to emphasize vaccine booster shots reflects positive signs that hospital admissions and death numbers aren't rising with the same intensity. we're looking at the data and we wouldn't hesitate to act if we saw that the data told us that we needed to introduce further measures. but so far that's not what the data is telling us. the cautious optimism that on the chrome may be less of a threat than the previous delta variant isn't being embraced everywhere. countries like the netherlands, austria and denmark are under varying degrees of locked down and in spain, a wave of new infections has provoked such public concern that free covert 19 tests are running out. france though, is holding its nerve also promoting vaccine booster shots as the 1st line of defense. it reduce the required delay before getting a booster from 4 months to 3. we on the morphic, i think the government is doing what they can with what they know about the virus

that is spreading throughout the world. it's not only here, we just hope that there won't be a 7th or 8th, but they're doing what they must. germany is taking a hybrid approach, buying time, the government says for boosters to work with a range of restrictions including restaurant curfews night club closures, and limits on sports and other public gatherings. it's expected that all my will become the dominant corona virus strain in germany within days. just last, almost something has to be done to bring the infection figures down. but i also understand that we have to look ahead to the next few weeks. looking ahead is made easier by watching what's happening in the u. k. currently, the article epicenter the u. k. governments like touch booster driven gamble based on data that still evolving will either be proven rights to everyone's relief or wrong, perhaps giving other countries just enough time to change course jona whole al jazeera,

palestinian president mahmoud abbas has had his 1st formal meeting with an israeli official in israel, in more than a decade. it was hosted by the israeli minister of defense. bunny counts gone, says they discuss security coordination on economic issues amongst others are for several course. i think there are a couple of things prompting this american pressure almost certainly to see progress or at least some indication of willingness to talk by the israelis with the palestinians. at the same time as the prime minister natalie bennett is still rejecting the idea of the u. s. reopening, it's palestinian focused consulate in jerusalem. also the security situation in the occupied west bank and inside east jerusalem as well in recent weeks has deteriorated. and so there is some imperative there for the 2 sides to talk. here are sexual, they will, blanket has condemned an attack by me on most military which killed at least 35

people in kaya state on christmas eve, women, children. i'm to star from a group, save the children, were among the dead blinking edge countries to stop selling weapons to the military to prevent more trustees. one of russia's most prominent human rights groups has been ordered to shut down by the supreme court. memorial. international documents abuse is committed by the former soviet union. prosecute is a keys. the group of distorting history memorial international says the accusations are politically motivated. indonesian officials say they will not over refuge to a group of more than a 100 were hanging. they own a stranded boat near the country's ha province. that the headlines. nice. continue here on to al jazeera correspondent. ah

ah ah bill my you know, in the modem with just 60 years after the wright brothers man in the i, scientists and engineers will grappling with the next major challenge. but putting a man in space and keeping him alive that as an engineering challenge, it was the most extreme imaginable destination. a rocket and the most

complicated piece of personal protection equipment man has ever known a space suit for the american side of the space race. the design challenge was handed to a small team inside nasa, approved system of the leader of that team was matthew rad, knocked ski mad russian and eccentric 2nd generation. jewish immigrant with a can do attitude and a broad boston accent. he was also my grandfather. i barely knew him, he died when i was just 3 years old. apollo 11 was his try. i'm warm all for a program and a perfectly designed space. suits them and flew in where his legacy. i've always been fascinated by space, and i've often wondered how he did it. for me. the story of the space race isn't just about the men who risk their lives to traveling alone. but the ones who held those lives in that handsome

i grew up in hot fisher england, a world away from america in the space race. i'm at my parents house to ask my dad hugh members about grandpa. looking at her old photograph than what she and asked the film, i realized how little i really know about my grandfather. your grandfather and his colleagues worked on the space suits they designed space suits. that became the, the centerpiece of what the astronauts war and the mercury gemini, and the apollo program that neil armstrong buzz aldrin and all the astronauts who followed them. who walked on the moon. i never really quite realized, actually i always thought that, oh, it was. it was just a very small part in this big machine. and actually i realized not was actually a big part in the big machine. i think he and

a lot of people were big parts in that machine. i think there were a lot of people who took the goals that were given them and they just went on the chief it. why did he say when we were born? i see, i don't know, was he a nice compa? yeah, any call? yeah. you didn't. he didn't see a lot of him because he lived in texas and we were here already by the time you were born. i was he please. this is the same sancho. probably oh yeah, he loved left. all of you like to talk about it. what is it not, not to come. allison little the pictures in me getting on the counter the nation. um now it, it, it feels great. it's, it's really interesting to reevaluate a little bit and to remember the terrific person that your grandfather was. my dad was he was, he was a, he was a real character. and i think about him what i always have.

and it's interesting when your parents have been gone for, for a while, you know, what do you think about and they're still there in the rear and you can hear them anything on my think, papa anything. ha fountain. not doing a film novice, great. i think it's so i think it's a chance for you to discover who your grandfather was and it's, it's for you to get to know my dad in a way that may be the start. i mean, we have a few pictures. you know, you're going to go off and talk to people who knew him and worked with them. and i think that's just terrific. i'm really glad my grandfather's fascination with safety clothing and subsequently space seats began during world war t. matt right now, ski was stationed at 3rd light. bedfordshire in england in the 3 or 6 bombardment

group as a navigator in the b 17 flying fortress. who has left now? is a small museum operated by ra franklin, on the outskirts of the old airfield. ah, i've come here with my dad because we both went to hear my grandfather's combat story. i think that some of the equipment used in the u. s. air force at that time may have influenced grampa when he subsequently designed the astronauts clothing and equipment. ralph has a good collection of that old air force equipment hair during his time at nasa. grandpa designed the astronauts communications helmet effects known as the snoopy cap. it's easy to see how the influence that came from the 8 is flying helmets. i always had, i had like this, my only one you a floor and it was easier to have the of hedge say it, his face and the helmet, ours, all

a complete fixture. and that was what i often well, apparently, when grandpa was working on the gemini projects, they were the astronaut kept complaint i come, devices kept slipping and said grandpa said somebody, oh, just get an aviators cap and they can wear that underneath their helmet. and that will keep the common device in place. maybe we attached that device to the hat. and i hadn't really realized that it was so literally exactly like that. like he was just like, oh let's get this hat the i remember from the war and see if we can put together he let she was, i would just do what i did during the war. that makes sense. that's. that's really cool. ralph also shows me a heated suit that the 8 his war to keep warm when they flew at high altitude. right, well this is a he to suit, commonly known as a blue bunny, obviously because it's blue, i suppose. why bonnie, i don't know. you can see it with all the heating elements running through it.

i'm surprised how much it looks like something worn by nasa astronaut. this looks just like a cooling suit. you were underneath your, your space suit. so you say ok how we can manage to keep the actual cool when they're wearing this matter through that weighs more than 2 men. you just put them in a suit that has watering through it. and so again, like with the snoopy cup, you can see really clearly that this is something that he would have been it not even slide by such an o. v as against an obvious answer to problem during the war, grandpa was a navigator in a b. 17 caught the cost of the on re algo, but i've never been able to picture him in action. so this is really interesting because this is actually inside of a b 17. this picture here. and it's rudy. i like it because it the 1st chance i've had to understand what it would have looked like inside one. so where's that, where's the pilot in the snack here. okay. this is where that is. we're looking

from the back here, down to the friend. what kind of temperatures would have actually been inside the aircraft to mean that you'd have to weigh your jacket like more? this is wendy. i need you to. yeah, in on her line jackets because the american bombing was done from greater hives. that was the idea of it. dad asks route if there's any record of when grandpa was shot down in 1943, 306. this is going 1st over germany. and you might find that in here. and matthew, i reckon oscar page $289.00. ah, on november 21st, lieutenant edwin turned poplar through cast with amber jago with knocked out a formation when 2 rounds, aflac hit the notice we hit once you fall back out of formation, you're an easy target. we had

a fall back out of formation because they had hit an engine and when they hit an engine, it was then board edge and it hit me. wounding 1st lieutenant nasty roy red na ski, the navigator there we are. very. are the tail gunner failed out? everybody bailed ali listed men bailed out of the pilot, and the co pilot stayed holding the plate plane level. i was hit in the plane and these same explosions also set the number to engine on fire, severed the throttle linkage to number one, engine via plain logic to engines ultimately and the 3rd engine. finally, they got a great big piece of flack that went into my back ah, right through the armored suit that i was wearing. i had to i'm, it's which one that i laid on the floor and another one that was that was sitting

in wearing. but i went right through. it didn't make any difference than another verse to the right side of this for 23rd plane. and 2nd, lieutenant marvin travis, co pilot is bad when his right leg. wow. they were having a very bad day. and our laid me out flat. i was laying there and it. and it opened my parachute. my parents was laying there in inside. so the bomb idea gave me his parachute and me to a, a static line right next to me and threw me out. and other members of the crew who bailed out were 1st. lieutenant douglas mcknight was received to metal saving money, saving my dad, get him out if he was. the bombardier and sam polk lazy faltered, he came down from a very high altitude because it's,

it deployed very quickly and it took a long time to get down. it's but it was wonderful was so quiet. and then i heard a dog barking. i heard a bell ringing from a church. and then i landed in the trees in a whisper. wonderful landing you could ever get. i landed in the parachute kind of landed over the top of the trees and i plunged down. never hit the ground just a couple of feet from the ground hanging there at british parachute on, which was you just turn turner thing and hit it and you fall out of it. and i was pretty much paralyzed due to my wounds. i was hit currently by machine dental as well as in the year cuz i got 3 machine gun bullets in addition in me when i, when i parachute and my boots fell off, my vest fell off mice escape fit, kit fell off everything. the only that worked was it was the parachute. thank god, but nothing works. that's how i became interested in working with safety equipment

. nothing worked. wow. well, i'm glad i saw the boat now. it's terrific to get warm as young. i'm ready to actually feel humble. when i was, when i was 19 years old, i wasn't doing anything like this ah. in the united states, the calling foundation has offered me the chance to put myself in grandpa speaks and take my own ride in the b 17. despite my fear of heights, it's an unmistakable opportunity. climbing up into the b 17. i'm surprised how craft it is. oh, my goal is creating narrow. it may look imposing from the outside, but it's actually crowded and very functional on the inside. the 1st time i get to

see what the painting in the museum is like in real life, i can see the bumper days position and to navigate table where my grandfather would have sat and where he was injured. i'm sitting here with the radio operator would have sat up there. you've got where the pilots and the co pilots would have been a great cuz you can actually this is open up here and it goes it. i think over 100 miles an hour. so here we go, here we go with

. ah, i think

it's a windy day and after the flight i'm told this is made on trip. unusually bumpy. similar to how dodging flat during the fall would have felt really cool, but i feel really thick. no, like i just, i have one night but i feel think grandpa is experience of being shut down and spied his passion for safety clothing and ultimately led to a career at nasa. well, over the 4th 1957 russia successfully launch. sputnik won the world's fast artificial satellites. this act marked the stars the space race. a battle for supremacy of space between the us and russia. america responds with the mercury project soccer making allen shepherd the 1st american space in 1900. 61,

followed by john glenn, less than a year later. barbara in 1962 president john f. kennedy declared, the country would go one step further by putting him out on the moon and returning him safely. and all, by the end of the day, we choose to go to the mall and mr. kate and do the other thing. not because they are easy, but because they are hard. they called that gold well served to organize and measure the best of our energies and scales. because that challenge is wong, that we're willing no, except one we are willing to postpone. and one when you plan to win, and the other still. ah kennedy's famous rallying call to beat russia to the moon, galvanized thousands of american engineers is developing new technologies, including the space suit. the smithsonian's national air and space museum in

washington dc is the perfect place to get the big picture of how the space it was developed. these basic spaces, good ones, bigger gara and glen war, basically had the same function. they were there to keep erin in case of emergency on to keep particles out and to protect against any sort of radiation that those high levels of altitude space suits are not very comfortable things to where they're peer heavy, they're awkward, they're bulky. ah, they're constraining. and getting those everything right for the astronaut is very important. so. so you've heard of my grandfather? yes. yes. and i've seen his signature on, on documents and materials low. yes. he sees very one that i think for me it's hard sometimes to understand exactly how you fit into everything. the process of

designing the suit is enormously iterative. it started with proposed suit designs and prototype suits. they come from private corporations as a bid for a contract with nasa and they work with with nasa and the crew systems division and the astronauts to decide what's good, what's bad, what has to be fixed and what has to be modified. so there is an ongoing discussion . they have to have a suit that doesn't cost an enormous amount of money on it that satisfies the astronauts because there are going to be the ones working in it. and that also meets the requirements to fit in the spacecraft to work on the operationally in fits the requirements of nasa and the crew systems division. it sounds like also grandpa would have an actually known a lot of different people if he was mediating between the astronauts. the nasa itself within the contractors. it via the contractor. he's known among the

astronauts, he's known among contractors and certainly at nasa who he's very famous and he has a signature and signing off on materials and designed crazy. i love you incredible to hear someone say he was famous. i can't believe that. it's just. yeah. wow, so everything you or your parents told you was true. 0, one story they did tell me unites astronauts, engineers, and contract is a disaster. could have ended the entire space program by on january 27th, 1967, the crew of apollo one for chaffey. gus grissom and dead white carrying out routine tests with a plug out to kind of the rest of the launch when it went disastrously wrong. everything. when suddenly the control room had one of the crew shouting over the intercom, there was

a fire in the capital one and in a pure oxygen environment, the course of fire. the 3 astronaut were dead within 90 seconds. walter cunningham, luna mosher pollard for polo 7 was also a member of the backup crew for apollo one. he had been in the same faith cross just the night before taking process. similar test to the prime crew was a real shot because we had done the night before, almost same test. and we were waiting the next day for us in roger to form it with the plunge out and the has closed. so we are all going to fly back together. and by late afternoon they had been so many delays and little problems in the spacecraft

that we finally decided them. about 5 o'clock we were going to take off, we flew back by ourselves. volleyed on the shock we had was when we landed back here at ellington, air force base. and usually we would just walk in and change and help leave our helmets and drive home. but there was a operations officer. was there meeting us something wrong when inside and he told us about the fire and who died? so it was a shock to us. and so we mainly started trying to find out what had happened. and of course, gone by saying the surviving spouse isn't doing what you do after somebody a friend gets killed by the gus christian and roger chaffee were buried owing to national cemetery. the resting place of the nation's hearing body at white family,

buried him at west point military academy in new york. ah, i think it's very moving to come face to face with that real grave because it makes them more real obviously to see their names and just to see them along with the other graves of military men. these men died that country in a way that i think they never expected to die. and that's what's also so hard. they died on the ground on a daily task that no one expect it to be fatal. and i think that's probably what was hard for their families, is that they, they died in the, in the development stages. they didn't die in space. it was just what considered to be a mundane. friday, the space program was suspended for 18 months while a major investigation looked into just what had gone wrong and advised changes to

be made. among them, the hatch to the capsule was re designed to make emergency escape much easier and the air inside it was changed to a less flammable mix of nitrogen and oxygen. the new challenge should grandpa and the crew systems team be to make the whole command module fireproof. and crucially, the space suit was specifically redesigned to be made from non flammable material. the fire was a tiny point in the space program. it brought about the realization that not just the most obvious dangerous scenarios needed caution, even of routine test on the launch pad to be fatal after the investigation as the fire closed. all eyes were on what new fireproof suit, the apollo astronauts would where and who would create her january or that just, you know, 20 years ago the euro was brought into circulation. we investigate how the usaa and

benefited from having an official currency be part of the stream, a joy most social media community. se early owns recovery from civil war continues . we month, 2 decades since the end of one of africa's most brutal complex, the bottom line, steve herman's dives headlong into the u. s. issues that shape the rest of the world. as we enter the 3rd year cubic 19, we go back to woo hm. where it all began and investigate how far we've come. since the pandemic stuff, january or no, just the power defines how wow, loans knew, babies were dying. i did nothing about people empower, investigates, exposes, and questions they use and abuse of power around the globe on how to get back to alger, a wild alarm we

listen, design is, are making serious effort in order to in p. i'm to stop the trend, negotiate and we meet with global use maintenance. talked about the stormy style. imagine ah, i'm molly insight into your top stories on al jazeera in hong kong police have rated the office of stan news, an independent online media outlet. 6 current and former staff members have been arrested on suspicion of publishing a serious a seditious publication among them as a form of politician on prominent pro democracy cantonese thing it denise ho.