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After spending nearly six months on the International Space Station, an astronaut and two cosmonauts have landed safely back on Earth. While in orbit, they traveled almost 71 million miles, NASA says.

Commander Barry Wilmore of NASA and flight engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) touched down in Kazakhstan Thursday morning, local time.

The astronauts began their trip home by undocking a Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft from the space station and undergoing a 4-minute, 41-second deorbit burn, NASA says. A parachute later eased the Soyuz craft down to the recovery area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.

In the 167 days they were aboard the space station, the crew of Expedition 42 researched "the effects of microgravity on cells, Earth observation, physical science and biological and molecular science," NASA says.

The space agency adds that the space station now has an Electromagnetic Levitator, which will let scientists "observe fundamental physical processes as liquid metals cool," possibly leading to the production of "lighter, higher-performing" alloys.

The space station now has a three-person crew; a new trio will launch to join them in late March.

In other NASA news, the agency successfully tested what it calls the "largest, most powerful rocket booster ever built" Wednesday, producing some 3.6 million pounds of thrust during a two-minute burn at a test site in Utah. Temperatures inside the booster reached more than 5,600 degrees, NASA says.

The agency says the booster rocket is being developed "to help propel NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft to deep space destinations, including an asteroid and Mars."

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Expedition 42 Cosmonauts Elena Serova, left, and Alexander Samokutyaev, center, sit in chairs along with NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore, minutes after they landed back on Earth. Bill Ingalls/NASA hide caption

itoggle caption Bill Ingalls/NASA

Expedition 42 Cosmonauts Elena Serova, left, and Alexander Samokutyaev, center, sit in chairs along with NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore, minutes after they landed back on Earth.

Bill Ingalls/NASA

NASA

The Discreet Hero is set in two Peruvian cities, the provincial desert town of Piura and the metropolis of Lima, and tells of two aging businessmen, each of whom we meet on the verge of life-changing situations.

A transportation company owner from Piura, Felicito Yanaque, has spent most of his adult years in a bloodless marriage. He has two sons, a young mistress, and has recently become the apparent target of an extortion threat against his transit enterprise, a threat that, he vows heroically, to fight against, with or without the help of the police.

The other businessman, Ismael Carrera, is a Lima insurance executive and a widower ready to retire and travel a bit. He has a new love, but when his two playboy sons hear of it, Ishmael finds himself in the middle of a war with his spoiled and rather nasty offspring. As we go back and forth between Piura and Lima, and between these two men, each struggling to seize his own destiny and live out a peaceful second half of life, the plot builds with a tension usually reserved for novels about war and politics.

Felicito takes his initial threat — a note signed with the drawing of a spider — to the Piura police, but they give him little satisfaction. In the arms of his mistress, the attractive and ultimately duplicitous Mabel, he finds some pleasure. But the threats continue. When someone sets fire to his office and posts another threat on the door of Mabel's hideaway Felicito goes into higher gear, pushing the police ever harder to catch his extortionists.

Felicito's story comes to the reader directly by means of a third person narrative. The Lima strand, the story of Ismael Carrera, comes filtered through the experiences of a colleague at his insurance company. Don Rigoberto is a dear friend and deep thinker edging toward retirement who serves as witness to Ishmael's personal trials and family turmoil. When his friend and colleague fights back against his sons, Don Rigoberto himself becomes entangled in the war of the younger generation against the older.

Felicito to Ismael, then back to Felicito, from hot dusty Piura to damp and foggy ocean-side Lima, the story continues until finally building to the high point where the two men intersect. In anyone else's hands this material might seem drab, but I can't think of another novel in recent years that has given readers these kinds of thrills alongside and old-fashioned kind of high novelistic narrative.

As he considers how he's become caught up in his boss's struggle, Don Rigoberto puts it this way: "My God, what stories ordinary life devised; not masterpieces to be sure, they were doubtless closer to...soap operas than to Cervantes and Tolstoy...but then again not so far from... Dumas... Zola... Dickens, or...Galdos..."

Somewhere between soap opera and Dickens, Zola and Galdos, is not a bad place to be. By plucking his heroes from the world of business rather than government or the military, Vargas Llosa calls our attention to the strengths of people we don't normally think of as noble characters. It makes for a peerless novel about middle-class people wrestling with the nature of fate, happiness, the nature of success, and the struggle to lead an ethical life — a tale of two men, two families, two cities, two crises, two scandals.

And in his use of the double hero Vargas Llosa demonstrates yet again his broad reach — not one major figure but two, who, taken together, reveal a great deal about the national character and the geographical particularities of the writer's native country. After setting three of his last four novels in places other than Peru, this return home is a welcome one, allowing him to reassert his old and enduring allegiances to the Nineteenth Novel (Flaubert's to be specific) even as he exercises his modernist prowess. Let me say just a little indiscreetly this big book about ordinary people living out big modern themes is the best new novel I've read in quite a while.

Iraqi troops and militia fighters are reportedly inside the city of Tikrit, the city that has been held by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, since last June. Officials and witnesses say the Iraqis now control part of northern Tikrit.

Tikrit is the capital of Salahuddin province, between Baghdad and ISIS-controlled Mosul. Citing state-run television, The Associated Press quotes Salahuddin police Brig. Kheyon Rasheed as saying Wednesday, "The terrorists are seizing the cars of civilians trying to leave the city and they are trying to make a getaway."

The push to retake Tikrit began nine days ago, with thousands of Iraq's military troops bolstered by Kurdish fighters and both Sunni and Shiite militia groups. Despite the apparent progress in the city's northern district of Qadisiyya, troops have been slowed by sniper fire and hidden bombs.

Reuters reports: "The army and militia fighters raised the national flag above a military hospital in the section of Qadisiyya they had retaken from the militants, security officials said."

Word of the advance comes after the Iraqi force pushed ISIS fighters out of the town of al-Alam, on the northern outskirts of Tikrit, on Tuesday.

Tikrit

Iraq

On a hillside on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, about 50 red-haired refugees are learning how to be orangutans once again. The country's booming palm oil industry has encroached on their habitats, leaving many of them homeless and orphaned.

Palm oil is hard to avoid. It's in cookies, soap, doughnuts and lipstick. It's so common that it's found in about half of all the items in an ordinary supermarket. As a result, it's in high demand, and environmentalists blame it for deforestation, climate change, social conflict and animal extinction in Indonesia.

Sumatra's orangutans are among the victims.

"The definition of a refugee is someone whose homeland is no longer available to them, and that's exactly the case with these orangutans," says Ian Singleton, director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program. "These are the survivors of this annihilation of the forest, and everything that lives in it."

Environmental groups' publicity about the plight of orangutans has helped to increase public pressure on the palm oil industry to stop destroying forests. But the primates are already endangered, with fewer than 7,000 believed to be surviving in the Sumatran wilds.

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A truck passes the barren land of a former palm oil plantation that is to be replaced by forest in Aceh Tamiang, an area inside Sumatra's Leuser Ecosystem. The 6.5 million-acre area is an important part of the orangutans' habitat. But it is threatened by palm oil plantations, mining and logging. Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP/Getty Images

A truck passes the barren land of a former palm oil plantation that is to be replaced by forest in Aceh Tamiang, an area inside Sumatra's Leuser Ecosystem. The 6.5 million-acre area is an important part of the orangutans' habitat. But it is threatened by palm oil plantations, mining and logging.

Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP/Getty Images

The orangutan project, located about an hour's drive outside Medan, the capital of Indonesia's North Sumatra province, is set among lush foliage in the only forest land in the area that's not palm oil plantation.

Singleton's program rescues orangutans displaced by palm oil plantations, or whose families were killed so humans could keep them as illegal pets. Most of the orangutans are released back into the wild, but not all.

Take Leuser, a large adult male who cannot return to the forest because he is blind. He was rescued, taken to the center and then released back into the forest.

Ian Singleton, director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, also campaigns to stop the illegal clearing of forests for palm oil, which continues despite a moratorium on destroying primary forests and peat land. Anthony Kuhn/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Anthony Kuhn/NPR

Then, he wandered too close to a village.

"Three farmers there carrying air rifles to shoot squirrels and monkeys found him and decided to take potshots at him as well," Singleton says. "They put 62 air rifle pellets into him, including his eyes. He's still got 48 inside him. But otherwise, he's perfectly healthy and fit."

A female named Tila plays nearby. Singleton, a former zookeeper in Britain, says she's one of the saddest cases so far.

"She came here as a youngster, tested positive for ... human hepatitis B, which means we can't release her to the forest because there's always a risk she'll infect wild primates," he says.

How did she contract the human disease? Almost certainly by biting the people who captured her, Singleton says.

The animals who make it to the conservation project are the lucky ones — and the tough ones.

"The orangutans that make it this far are the real survivors. Everybody else is dead," he says. "The ones that get here are the ones that are hard to kill."

An adult orangutan in a cage at the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program. It's one of four that remain at the program, either because they are disabled or because they pose a risk to people and animals outside the program. Anthony Kuhn/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Anthony Kuhn/NPR

When they first arrive, the orangutans are quarantined for 30 days and given thorough health checks. After they're confirmed to be healthy, and before they're released back into the wild, the orangutans spend time in "socialization" cages.

"This is where they really learn how to be an orangutan again," Singleton explains, as young orangutans swing on ropes and open coconuts nearby. "They need to know how to protect their food, and fend off attack, and you find out who are the bullies and who are the wimps, so they've really got to figure out their place in orangutan society, and that happens here."

Out in the wild, if an orangutan puckers up, kiss-like? It's a sign of annoyance, he says, signaling unease.

Singleton is planning to build a haven for Leuser and Tila and other apes who can't return to the wild. The haven will serve as an educational facility for visitors, including many Indonesians, who have never seen orangutans and know little about them.

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Besides caring for these primates, Singleton also campaigns to stop illegal clearing of forests for palm oil. He's fighting to protect an important part of the orangutans' habitat, a 6.5 million acre swathe of Sumatra called the Leuser Ecosystem.

"It's probably the biggest single contiguous forest bloc in the whole of Southeast Asia now," he says. "And it's the only place in the world where you get Sumatran orangutans, tigers and rhinos living together."

On the positive side, in 2011, Indonesia's president declared a moratorium on destroying primary forests and peat land.

But local officials in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra have drafted a development plan that will dole out large swathes of the Leuser Ecosystem for mining, logging and palm oil plantations in violation of that moratorium. The matter is now before Indonesia's Supreme Court.

Recently, major palm oil companies, under pressure from environmental groups and consumers, have issued pledges not to destroy forests in the making of their products.

But as permits to legally clear forest for palm oil become scarce, Singleton says, an unregulated layer of middlemen and local elites continues to do it illegally.

"Middle-class, well-connected people — the cousin of the police or the nephew of the governor — are just going into areas and clearing forests for palm oil without any permits, totally against the law," he says.

For now, Sumatra still has enough forests into which Singleton can release his orangutan refugees. But if illegal deforestation continues, that could change.

"Where do you put them?" Singleton wonders. "You keep them alive, but at what cost?"

palm oil

deforestation

Sumatra

orangutans

conservation

environment

Indonesia