In a hardscrabble crater on Mars, a tiny helicopter with a smartphone brain is now days away from attempting the first powered flight on another world. NASA hopes its spindly robot copter, named Ingenuity, will prove that powered flight is possible in the perilously thin Martian air and help usher in a new era of planetary exploration in which drones play a vital role.
Ingenuity reached Mars like a stowaway, folded up on the underside of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February after a seven-month, 293-million-mile voyage from Earth. For its maiden flight, the 4-pound, $85 million craft will simply rise about 10 feet above the surface and hover—no higher than the rim of a regulation basketball hoop—before returning to the surface. The whole flight should be over within 90 seconds.
The brief excursion—one of five planned for a one-month period expected to start on or about April 11—is a short hop by the measures of interplanetary travel. But agency officials said it would be a giant leap for Mars exploration. In the future, they said, autonomous drones like Ingenuity could take to the skies to explore canyons, ice caps and other terrain that is inaccessible to rovers. Should human explorers ever land on Mars, drones could serve as scouts and aerial sensors.
“We are hoping that Ingenuity allows us to expand and open up aerial mobility on Mars,” said Bob Balaram, the project’s chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The flight of Ingenuity, part of a broader mission to seek signs of past life on the red planet, is the latest in a flurry of notable Mars moments this year.
The National Labor Relations Board on Thursday ordered Tesla Inc. to reinstate an employee it fired in 2017 and said Chief Executive Elon Musk must remove a three-year-old tweet urging against unionizing.
The NLRB in Washington, D.C., agreed with a 2019 ruling by an NLRB judge in California, who found that the electric-car maker violated labor laws related to unionization efforts at its Fremont, Calif., plant.
Tesla
TSLA,
+1.61%
must offer to reinstate Richard Ortiz to his former job as a production associate within 14 days, as well as give him back pay and benefits. The company must also compensate him for any resulting tax consequences, according to the ruling.
Tesla said in filings that Ortiz was fired for lying during an investigation into a Facebook post about union activity at the company.
Margo Feinberg, an attorney with Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers who was retained by the United Auto Workers on behalf of Ortiz, told MarketWatch on Thursday that as far as she knows, Ortiz had wanted to return to work at Tesla.
The decision in the Tesla case, first reported by Bloomberg News, comes as the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, or HR 482, was passed by the House earlier this month. The legislation — which would give workers new protections when they seek to unionize and penalize companies that violate workers’ rights — is expected to be taken up by the Senate.
See: PRO Act, called ‘most important labor legislation in several generations,’ passes House
“If this was OSHA, there would be fines,” Feinberg said. “The NLRB ruling is not enough, but it’s an important message.”
“Ultimately, we need reform,” she added, saying the PRO Act would provide for injunctive relief and damages in a case like this.
The UAW echoed that sentiment.
“While we celebrate the justice in today’s ruling, it nevertheless highlights the substantial flaws in U.S. labor law,” said UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada in a statement. “Here is a company that clearly broke the law and yet it is three years down the road before these workers achieved a modicum of justice.”
As for the tweet by Musk that must be taken down, the NLRB deemed it to be threatening. In 2018, as the UAW continued to try to organize Tesla employees, the Tesla CEO tweeted: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.”
Tesla must also delete a warning from the file of another employee who was disciplined when he interacted with Ortiz about union-related activity, the NLRB said in its Thursday ruling. The company was additionally ordered to rescind rules barring employees from distributing union-related literature during non-work hours and from wearing union insignia, and threatening, disciplining or terminating an employee over union activity. In addition, Tesla must post a notice at its plant that it was found to have violated labor law.
The company must also delete language from a confidentiality agreement it asks employees to sign that they cannot talk to the media, because labor law “protects employees when they speak with the media about working conditions, labor disputes or other terms and conditions of employment.”
The company, which has reportedly dissolved its public relations team, has not returned a request for comment.
When a Boeing 777’s engine cover broke apart and rained parts on a Denver suburb on Feb. 20, the news rang familiar to Christopher Behnam. In February 2018, the 777 he was piloting as captain suffered a similar emergency with the same engine type.
His plane, United Airlines Flight 1175 to Honolulu, was over the ocean 120 miles from the runway carrying more than 370 passengers and crew when a violent blast rocked it.
The jet shook uncontrollably, rolled sharply, and the noise was deafening, said Capt. Behnam. An engine had suffered severe damage. Years of training kicked in, the pilots regained control and shut the engine down. Even so, the plane was hard to handle. A third pilot went into the cabin and looked out the window: The engine hadn’t just failed; its cover had ripped away.
“After the explosion, it felt like she was going to fall apart,” Capt. Behnam said. “I knew I could fly the airplane. The issue was, can I fly it long enough to land it?” The pilots brought the plane to a safe landing in Hawaii.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates U.S. aviation failures, concluded that a roughly 35-pound fan blade broke in the plane’s Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine due to fatigue, spiraling forward and causing parts of the engine cover to drop into the sea.
’s authority to inspect and sign off on several newly produced 787 Dreamliners, part of heightened scrutiny of production problems that have halted deliveries of the popular wide-body jets.
The Federal Aviation Administration said its inspectors, rather than the plane maker’s, would perform routine pre-delivery safety checks of four Dreamliners that Boeing has been unable for months to hand over to its airline customers while it grapples with various quality lapses.
The agency has long empowered Boeing to perform the final safety signoffs on the FAA’s behalf, allowing it to issue what are known as airworthiness certificates needed to hand over new jets to airlines. The FAA said it has withheld the same authority on some of the planes in previous years to keep inspectors’ skills current.
Now, the FAA said its move to withhold final-approval authority was part of a broader set of actions directed at Boeing’s 787 production issues. A spokesman said the agency could decide to have its own inspectors sign off on more Dreamliners. “We can extend the retention to other 787 aircraft if we see the need,” he said.
A Boeing spokesman said Wednesday that the company has engaged the FAA throughout its efforts to resume Dreamliner deliveries and would follow the agency’s direction on final approvals as it has in the past. The spokesman said Boeing was “encouraged by the progress our team is making” on restarting the deliveries.
After halting deliveries in October, Boeing has built up an inventory of more than 80 newly produced, undelivered Dreamliners, according to aviation consulting firm Ascend by Cirium. Boeing has said it expects to resume deliveries by the end of March.
The wide-body jets have an excellent safety record and are used frequently on international routes. Boeing learned of the FAA’s move in January and has already factored the FAA signoffs into its expected delivery schedule, a person familiar with Boeing’s planning said.
Among specific aircraft slated for final approvals by agency inspectors are two Dreamliners ordered by
United Airlines Holdings Inc.
United expects to receive the planes in late March or early April, a person familiar with the Chicago-based carrier’s plans said this week.
The Boeing spokesman said the manufacturer would adjust its delivery plans if needed so it can take the time to conduct comprehensive 787 inspections “to ensure each meets our rigorous engineering specifications.”
The suspension of deliveries has cut off a significant source of cash paid by customers as the plane maker navigates the Covid-19 pandemic and weak demand in global air travel. Bernstein analyst
Doug Harned
has estimated the Dreamliner delivery slowdown could cost Boeing as much as $8 billion in cash flow through 2020 and 2021. He expects half of that to be recovered next year as airlines take delivery and pay the rest of the cost.
Boeing said in January that it would likely continue burning cash this year but has adequate liquidity after raising billions of dollars in debt last year. Investor optimism about the broader travel recovery helped lift its shares by 21% last week. The stock gained another 3.3% on Wednesday, valuing Boeing at $149 billion.
While limited in scope, the FAA move on the Dreamliner is similar to a step the agency took after two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX jets killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.
The FAA stripped Boeing of its authority to perform the pre-delivery safety checks on MAX jets in late 2019. At the time, a faulty flight-control system and production-related missteps with that aircraft were under congressional and regulatory scrutiny. The FAA approved the 737 MAX to resume passenger flights last year.
The Dreamliner lapses are among several quality problems Boeing has faced in recent years in its commercial, defense and space programs.
Many of the 787 quality lapses involve tiny gaps where sections of the jet’s fuselage, or body of the plane, join together. Problems have emerged in other places, too, including the vertical fin and horizontal stabilizer at the tail, according to a March 12 FAA summary of the agency’s regulatory actions viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Boeing has previously disclosed problems with a factory process used to generate small shims—materials used to fill the small gaps where the aircraft sections are joined together. Such gaps could lead to eventual premature fatigue of certain portions of the aircraft, potentially requiring extensive repairs during routine, long-term maintenance.
In its summary, the agency said it would hold on to its Dreamliner approval authority “until it is confirmed all shimming issues are resolved and airplanes conform to the FAA-approved design.”
BERLIN—Germany, France and Italy joined a group of smaller European countries that have temporarily stopped administering Covid-19 vaccines made by
AstraZeneca
AZN 0.40%
PLC, saying the move was precautionary amid a small number of cases of blood clotting reported on the continent.
Denmark last week said it had paused AstraZeneca shots for two weeks following reports of blood clotting, and several other European countries quickly followed suit, saying they were doing so out of an abundance of caution. Norway, Ireland and the Netherlands are among countries that have paused vaccinating with AstraZeneca’s shot.
Health regulators in the U.K. and Europe, along with AstraZeneca and its vaccine development partners at the University of Oxford, say there is no known connection between severe clotting and the shot. AstraZeneca has said the number of cases of blood clotting among the roughly 17 million people in the European Union and U.K. who have received the shot is lower than for the general population.
Europe’s medicines regulator said last week it was looking into around 30 reported cases of severe clotting, out of around five million people who have received the shot in the bloc. Last week, the regulator, the European Medicines Agency, said the “vaccine’s benefits currently still outweigh risks” and has continued recommending its use. The agency said most side effects are mild or moderate. Clinical trials didn’t raise flags about blood clotting as a risk.
The temporary halt to the AstraZeneca shots is another major setback in a wider vaccine rollout in Europe hamstrung by supply shortages and other hurdles at the same time as the continent wrestles with rising Covid-19 cases. Europe’s vaccination rates are far lower than in the U.S. and the U.K., where Covid-19 cases have stabilized or are falling.
Delays in giving out the AstraZeneca vaccine threaten to exacerbate vaccination-drive woes and could put further pressure on governments trying to speed things up. AstraZeneca has become a particular target of European politicians who have accused it of not doing enough to provide the continent with more shots.
French President
Emmanuel Macron,
in announcing his country’s pause, said the EMA was expected to publish a recommendation regarding the vaccine on Tuesday. The agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The series of pauses across Europe threatens to undermine the AstraZeneca vaccine’s credibility just three months into its rollout. The U.K. was the first country to adopt the shot for mass use, at the end of December.
The shot previously faced skepticism over clinical-trial results that suggested it wasn’t as effective as other vaccines hitting the market. Some of those perceptions have faded as the U.K. inoculated millions of people with the shot, generating real-world data that showed it to be strongly effective in preventing severe disease and death.
The U.K.’s relatively quick vaccination program—with some 11 million AstraZeneca shots playing a key role—hasn’t raised blood-clotting concerns. The British medicines regulator has said it maintains its confidence in the vaccine and its safety.
Last week, reports surfaced of a potential clotting issue, with one death and a case of severe illness, in Austria. That country suspended one batch of the vaccine but said it didn’t have evidence of a connection between the health incidents and the shot and kept using it otherwise.
AstraZeneca has warned it would fall short of projected vaccine deliveries to Europe in coming months.
Photo:
Sean Gallup/Zuma Press
On Thursday, Denmark, Norway and Iceland halted use of the vaccine altogether. Danish authorities said they would wait at least two weeks before administering it again. The EMA, which acts much like the Food and Drug Administration in regulating medicine across the European Union, has already said serious blood clots weren’t any more common among vaccinated people than among the general population. It has said it is investigating the reported cases of multiple thrombosis, or the formation of blood clots within blood vessels, and similar conditions.
Last week, AstraZeneca warned it would fall short of projected vaccine deliveries to Europe in coming months, by 100 million doses—almost two-thirds less than what the continent was expecting based on the company’s earlier pledges.
AstraZeneca Chief Executive
Pascal Soriot
has repeatedly pushed back against doubts about the shot’s effectiveness and criticism of its rollout. Last month, AstraZeneca said it would roughly double global vaccine production to 200 million doses a month by April.
In Germany, the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which regulates vaccine use, said it became concerned by an unspecified number of new cases showing thrombosis, blood-platelet deficiency and bleeding in people soon after vaccination with the AstraZeneca shot. In a statement on its website Monday, the institute said it recommended temporarily halting use of the vaccine until further study by the EMA after seeing what it called a “striking accumulation” of those symptoms.
The regulator recommended that people who “feel increasingly unwell” more than four days after receiving a vaccination should seek medical attention. It flagged severe, persistent headaches or “pinpoint bleeding” of the skin as symptoms of concern.
On Friday, a nonprofit global organization of specialists in blood-clotting disorders and research, the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis, advised continued use of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The society said that based on available data, the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks “even for patients with a history of blood clots or for those taking blood-thinning medications.”
Covid-19 itself is known to cause blood clots, a factor researchers say they are taking into account when considering the benefits versus potential risks of vaccination.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com and Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com
Tech companies are turning their attention to statehouses across the country as a wave of local bills opens a new frontier in the push to limit Silicon Valley’s power.
Arizona, Maryland and Virginia are among states where lawmakers are seeking to limit the power of tech companies like
Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOG -2.50%
Google and
Apple Inc.
AAPL -0.76%
on a range of issues, from online privacy and digital advertisements to app-store fees. State policy proposals have bipartisan support from lawmakers who want to temper companies’ influence and financial clout, which have grown during the pandemic.
Google, Apple and others are hiring local lobbyists and immersing themselves in the minutiae of proposed legislation, according to state representatives. Tech companies face potential rules that would curb the reach of their platforms, crimp revenues with taxes or force them to facilitate additional privacy disclosures.
Prominent tech companies are embracing remote work amid an exodus of skilled labor from Silicon Valley. WSJ looks at what that could mean for innovation and productivity and what companies are doing to manage the impact.
While federal lawmakers have held hearings and are in discussions about policies to regulate tech companies, debates and votes could occur in states first. If passed, state laws matter because they can become de facto national standards in the absence of federal action, as with California’s 2018 privacy law, which gave consumers both the right to access personal information that businesses collect from them and the right to request that data be deleted and not sold.
Facebook Inc.
FB -2.00%
initially opposed the California measures, but supported them after they took effect. Companies such as
Microsoft Corp.
have opted to honor the new rules across the country.
“So much has happened since California passed the original [data] privacy act” in 2018, said
Sam McGowan,
a senior analyst at policy research firm Beacon Policy Advisors LLC. Lawmakers’ concerns now stretch well beyond privacy to such topics as anticompetitive behavior and how social-media companies police content, he said.
In Arizona, a closely watched bill regarding app-store payments has cleared the state House and is expected to be debated in the Senate in the next several weeks. The legislation would free some software developers from fees that Apple and Google place on apps, which can run up to 30% of sales from paid apps and in-app purchases. App developers would be able to charge people directly through the payment system of their choice. The bill would apply to Arizona-based app developers and consumers yet could set a wider precedent.
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Republican state
Rep. Regina Cobb,
the legislation’s chief sponsor, said the bill is about “consumer protection and transparency,” and said a final vote could take place within the next month. Ms. Cobb said she believes there are sufficient votes to pass the bill in the narrowly divided Senate. Apple and Google have lobbied heavily against the bill, Ms. Cobb said.
Apple declined to comment on lobbying in Arizona. A company spokeswoman said Apple “created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place for users to download the apps they love and a great business opportunity for developers. This legislation threatens to break that very successful model and undermine the strong protections we’ve put in place for customers.”
Google declined to comment on the legislation or any lobbying efforts in the state.
In February, Maryland lawmakers passed legislation that would tax the revenue of companies such as Google, Facebook and
Amazon.com Inc.
from digital ads. This month
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam
signed into law new privacy rules similar to those in California, with added limits on the consumer data that companies can collect online.
Washington state has introduced privacy legislation. Some states have targeted online content moderation, with Texas proposing a measure that would prohibit social-media companies from banning users based on their viewpoints. New York state recently looked into changing its antitrust laws to make it easier for it to sue tech companies.
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States may have an easier path to pass laws than Congress does, Mr. McGowan said, because many state governments have fairly short legislative sessions lasting a few weeks or months, meaning bills can swiftly make their way through committees and to votes.
Tech companies’ soaring growth and influence during the pandemic has raised urgency at the state level, according to
Robert Siegel,
a lecturer in management and a business-strategy researcher at Stanford University.
The biggest five companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft—all saw staggering growth in 2020, as stuck-at-home Americans and businesses turned to online shopping, software and cloud-computing services, smart devices and video streaming. Those companies’ combined revenue grew by a fifth, to $1.1 trillion, and their collective market capitalization soared to $8 trillion during the pandemic.
Given the stakes and what some view as the inevitability of more regulation, tech companies must play a more active role in influencing legislation, Mr. Siegel said. Facebook and Google are among tech companies now calling for federal rules on issues such as data privacy and artificial intelligence.
“Large technology companies have no choice but to engage,” Mr. Siegel said. “So much money has been made by these companies, and that has everyone gunning for them. They have a size and scale and reach that nobody has.”
Facebook Vice President of State and Local Policy
Will Castleberry
said the company “will continue to support bills that are good for consumers, but a patchwork approach to privacy doesn’t give the consistency or clarity that consumers or businesses need. That’s why we hope Congress will pass a national privacy law.”
Technology companies have stepped up legislative spending at different levels of government recently. Facebook and Amazon outspent all other U.S. companies in federal lobbying last year, The Wall Street Journal reported in January.
Facebook spent nearly $20 million, up about 18% from the previous year, while Amazon spent about $18 million last year, up about 11%. Apple disclosed $6.7 million in lobbying spending, down from a record $7.4 million in 2019, and Google also reported a drop, spending $7.5 million. Google and Facebook are facing multiple antitrust lawsuits, and Amazon and Apple have been the subject of preliminary inquiries that could advance further under the Biden administration.
States are also using courts to seek change. A Colorado-led coalition of attorneys general filed an antitrust suit against Google in December over its dominance in online search. Meanwhile, California is looking into how Amazon treats sellers in its online marketplace, and authorities in Connecticut are investigating how Amazon sells and distributes digital books.
Amazon declined to comment.
Write to Sebastian Herrera at Sebastian.Herrera@wsj.com and Dan Frosch at dan.frosch@wsj.com
ORYOL, Russia—Around 200 miles southwest of Moscow, Oryol is a world away from the bright lights and prosperity of Russia’s capital city. To understand the tens of thousands of demonstrators who turned out across the nation to protest the detention of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, look here.
Industry in Oryol never fully recovered from Russia’s post-Soviet collapse. Once-proud factories sit abandoned. Parts of the city lack indoor toilets and running water. With few job prospects, many young people feel they have no choice but to leave.
The treatment of Mr. Navalny may have lit the fuse for protests, but the rallies quickly became an outlet for Russians’ widespread grievances about falling living standards, collapsing infrastructure and chronic corruption, and mark a tectonic shift in relations between ordinary citizens and the Kremlin.
“People don’t go out to protest for someone, they go out against something,” said Artyom Prokhorov, a marketing manager in Oryol who shares a two-bedroom apartment with his ex-wife and their two children. “Navalny simply served as a trigger. People are tired of what’s happening here.”
For much of President Vladimir Putin’s 20 years in power, oil prices were high and economic growth solid. Russian military interventions abroad stirred national pride. And Russians largely stayed out of opposition politics and protests.