Famed as India’s “Glass City” with a four-century tradition of glassmaking, Firozabad’s furnaces are now burning low, putting thousands of day labourers out of work in what would normally be peak season. The industry has been crippled by the war in the Middle East because of its intense energy needs. Gas-fired heat chambers need to run constantly at above 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) to keep the glass molten and prevent defects. India’s heavy reliance on gas across the economy — businesses of all sizes, households, agriculture, public transport — makes its factories among the most vulnerable in Asia. Workers pack bangles made of glass inside a factory amid fuel supply disruptions following the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Firozabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, March 26, 2026. —Reuters/File New Delhi stockpiles oil but not gas, and when supply dwindles, it cuts off industry first. With the war extending into a second month, Firozabad m...
The Artemis astronauts entered the final phase of their run-up to a lunar loop on Monday, a tipping point of sorts that means the Moon’s gravity is now having a stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s. The Orion capsule will now whip around the Moon, setting the crew up to travel farther from our home planet than any human before. The astronauts entered what NASA calls the lunar sphere of influence about 0442 GMT Monday and will soon record the first lunar flyby since 1972. As they entered the Moon’s gravitational influence, the crew was about 39,000 miles from the Moon and about 232,000 miles from Earth, a NASA official said on the agency’s livestream of the event. The historic occasion comes alongside a constellation of firsts for the crew of three Americans and one Canadian. Victor Glover will go down in the books as the first person of color to ever fly around the Moon, and Christina Koch will be the first woman. Canadian Jeremy Hansen, meanwhile, will become the fi...