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katyshannon

Nasa seeks new class of astronauts as US nears return to crewed space missions | Scienc... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-new-astronauts-space-missions

nasa space missions the guardian history science astronauts mars mission

shared by katyshannon on 05 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • A new class of astronauts is being sought by Nasa, now that a return to crewed missions from American soil is on the horizon.
  • The US space agency said it would accept applications for its astronaut corps from 14 December to mid-February 2016 and announce the successful candidates in mid-2017.
  • Since the space shuttle was mothballed in 2011, the only way to get into space has been to secure a seat aboard the three-person Russian Soyuz capsule and fly from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. While the Soyuz will continue to ferry people to and from the International Space Station, other vessels are on course to take over some of the trips. Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are developing the CST-100 Starliner and Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively. Meanwhile, Nasa is building the Orion deep space exploration vehicle.
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  • Nasa’s chief administrator, Charles Bolden, said the new class of space-farers would work on missions that will pave the way for putting humans on the surface of Mars. The agency last advertised for astronauts in November 2011.
  • Flights on the Boeing and SpaceX vessels are expected to allow a seventh person to live on the International Space Station, meaning the equivalent of one astronaut can work full time on scientific research in space. One priority of space station science is to understand more completely how long duration space travel takes its toll on the human brain and body. Two crew members, Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko, are taking part in the One Year Mission on the station, the results of which could help devise ways of keeping astronauts healthy on the way to and from Mars.
  • Before they can hope to join the 47 active astronauts in the corps, candidates need a bachelor’s degree in maths, engineering, biological or physical sciences, but preferably an advanced degree too. On top of that, to meet the basic requirements, at least three years’ professional experience is needed, or at least 1,000 hours piloting a jet plane.
  • “This next group of American space explorers will inspire the Mars generation to reach for new heights, and help us realise the goal of putting boot prints on the Red Planet,” he said.
  • Nasas new rocket, the space launch system, along with its Orion capsule, are expected to take astronauts into lunar orbit for missions that will act as stepping stones for the far more ambitious, and technologically challenging, trip to Mars.
  • katyshannon on 05 Nov 15
     
    Nasa is now hiring astronauts for a manned mission to Mars in the near future.
anonymous

NASA Picks Twin Missions To Visit Venus, Earth's 'Evil Twin' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...o-visit-venus-earths-evil-twin

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • NASA has decided to send two new missions to Venus, our closest planetary neighbor, making it the first time the agency will go to this scorching hot world in more than three decades.The news has thrilled planetary scientists who have long argued that Venus deserves more attention because it could be a cautionary tale of a pleasant, Earth-like world that somehow went horribly awry.
  • Venus has been called Earth's "evil twin" because it is about the same size as Earth and probably was created out of similar stuff; it might have even had at one time oceans of liquid water.
  • But Venus appears to have suffered a runaway greenhouse effect. Temperatures at its surface now exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and its atmosphere is toxic to humans.NASA's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced that after considering four different proposals for its Discovery Program, including proposed trips to moons of Jupiter and Neptune, the agency went all in on Venus.
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  • These Venus missions could be ready to launch in 2026, but the exact timing is still to be determined. "The best case, if possible, would be if they could launch on a single rocket," Gilmore said.
  • The VERITAS mission will have an orbiting probe with instruments that will let scientists create detailed 3D reconstructions of the planet's landscape, and will reveal whether Venus has active plate tectonics and volcanoes.
  • The DAVINCI+ descent probe would sniff in atmospheric gases to measure their composition precisely, and it would be equipped with cameras that could take photos of the surface on the way down.
  • Much remains mysterious about Venus, even though it was the first planet that NASA explored, in the groundbreaking Mariner 2 mission that flew by Venus in 1962. It was the first time a spacecraft had ever successfully reached another world at a time when the planets were only known by peering at them through telescopes.
  • While rovers on Mars have sent back lots of vivid panoramas showing the stark beauty of the red planet, images of the surface of Venus are hard to come by. The heat and intense pressure simply obliterate spacecraft.
  • The last NASA spacecraft sent on a Venus mission was Magellan, which launched in 1989 to map its surface. Its work showed that much of the planet was covered with volcanic flows. The spacecraft burned up in the harsh Venusian atmosphere about 10 hours after being commanded to plunge toward the surface.
rerobinson03

New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nasa-neptune-venus.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.On Wednesday, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced the agency’s latest choices for robotic planetary missions, both expected to head to Venus in the late 2020s: DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.
  • In the past year, a neglected Venus re-entered the planetary limelight after a team of scientists using Earth-based telescopes claimed they had discovered compelling evidence for microbes living in the clouds of Venus today where temperatures remain comfortably warm instead of scorching.
  • The other finalists were Io Volcanic Observer, which would have explored Io, a moon of Jupiter that is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, and Trident, which would have sent a spacecraft flying past Triton, an intriguing large moon of Neptune.
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  • Concentrations of krypton, argon, neon and xenon — the noble gases that do not react with other elements — may provide hints about how Venus and its atmosphere formed. The measurements might also find signs of whether water has escaped from Venus into space and whether oceans ever covered the surface.
  • The floors of craters on Venus are dark, but no one knows if that is because they are lava flows from recent eruptions or accumulated sand dunes. “That’s a super important question for understanding the history of volcanism,” Dr. Smrekar said.
  • Also in 2017, for the larger, more expensive New Frontiers competition, NASA considered a Venus mission called Venus In situ Composition Investigations, or Vici, which sought to put two landers on the planet’s surface. It was passed over for Dragonfly, which will send a plutonium-powered drone to fly on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.In addition, planetary scientists are in the middle of putting together their once-a-decade recommendations to NASA about their priorities. NASA usually undertakes only one flagship mission — a big, ambitious, expensive effort — at a time. A Venus flagship mission under consideration would include two balloons that would float in the atmosphere for a month.
  • One goal of the Trident mission was to study plumes that could be emitted from a subsurface ocean on Triton, Neptune’s large moon. If hypotheses for how those plumes form are correct, by the time another mission reached Triton, the moon’s activity will have ceased because of its position in orbit relative to the sun. There may not be another opportunity to observe the outbursts for 100 years.
anonymous

Pandemic Strain Pushes Some Health Care Workers Toward Unions : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ing-renewed-interest-in-unions

shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In September, after six months of exhausting work battling the pandemic, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., voted to unionize. The vote passed with 70%, a high margin of victory in a historically anti-union state,
  • The nurses had originally filed paperwork to hold this vote in March but were forced to delay it when the pandemic began heating up. And the issues that had driven them toward unionizing were only heightened by the crisis. It raised new, urgent problems too, including struggles to get enough PPE, and inconsistent testing and notification of exposures to COVID-positive patients.
  • For months now, front-line health workers across the country have faced a perpetual lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and inconsistent safety measures. Studies show they're more likely to be infected by the coronavirus than the general population, and hundreds have died,
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  • Research shows that health facilities with unions have better patient outcomes and are more likely to have inspections that can find and correct workplace hazards. One study found New York nursing homes with unionized workers had lower COVID-19 mortality rates, as well as better access to PPE and stronger infection control measures, than nonunion facilities.
  • Recognizing that, some workers — like the nurses at Mission Hospital — are forming new unions or thinking about organizing for the first time. Others, who already belong to a union, are taking more active leadership roles, voting to strike, launching public information campaigns and filing lawsuits against employers.
  • Labor experts say it's too soon to know if the outrage over working conditions will translate into an increase in union membership, but early indications suggest a small uptick. Of the approximately 1,500 petitions for union representation posted on the National Labor Relations Board website in 2020, 16% appear related to the health care field, up from 14% the previous year.
  • Stephanie Felix-Sowy said her team is fielding dozens of calls a month from nonunion workers interested in joining. Not only are nurses and respiratory therapists reaching out, but dietary workers and cleaning staff are as well, including several from rural parts of the state where union representation has traditionally been low.
  • many hospitals across the country have said worker safety is already their top priority, and unions are taking advantage of a difficult situation to divide staff and management, rather than working together.
  • The nurses at Mission Hospital say administrators have minimized and disregarded their concerns, often leaving them out of important planning and decision-making in the hospital's COVID-19 response.
  • Early in the pandemic, staffers struggled to find masks and other protective equipment,
  • The hospital discouraged them from wearing masks one day and required masks 10 days later. The staff wasn't consistently tested for COVID-19 and often not even notified when exposed to COVID-positive patients.
  • the concerns persisted for months. And some nurses said the situation fueled doubts about whether hospital executives were prioritizing staff and patients, or the bottom line.
  • Although the nurses didn't vote to unionize until September, Waters said, they began acting collectively from the early days of the pandemic. They drafted a petition and sent a letter to administrators together. When the hospital agreed to provide advanced training on how to use PPE to protect against COVID transmission, it was a small but significant victory
  • Even as union membership in most industries has declined in recent years, health workers unions have remained relatively stable:
  • But with another surge of COVID cases approaching, the nurses decided not to wait any longer to take action
Javier E

The Purpose of Journalism Is to Get the Story - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-media-bias-diversity-b0b736fe

journalism purpose storytelling DEI news bias

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric cicadas, the scream of a hyena. A tribe of cavemen sit grunting around a fire. An antelope turns on a spit. Suddenly another caveman runs in, breathlessly, from the bush. “Something happened,” he says. They all turn. “The tribe two hills over was killed by a pack of dire wolves. Everyone torn to pieces.”
  • Clamor, questions. How do you know? Did you see it? (He did, from a tree.) Are you sure they were wolves? “Yes, with huge heads and muscled torsos.” What did it look like? “Bloody.”
  • As he reports he is given water and a favored slice of meat. Because he has run far and is hungry, but mostly because he has told them the news, and they are grateful.
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  • The purpose of journalism is to get the story and tell the story.
  • Now the cavemen turn to the tribal elder. “What should we do?” “Short term, climb a tree if you see a wolf,” she says. “They don’t like fire and noise, so we should keep lit torches and scream. In the longer term, wolf packs are seen in the west, so we should go east to high ground.” That is the authentic sound of commentary, of editorials and columns. Advice, exhortation—they’re part of the news too. People will always want it, question it, disagree.
  • It is as if journalism is no longer about Get the Story but about Meeting People Where They Are and helping them navigate through a confusing world. But do you really think current editors know where people are? Do you think they know how to navigate? It all feels presumptuous.
  • The great news for journalism is there will always be a huge market for this. The need for news is built into human nature. Tech platforms change, portals change, but the need is forever.
  • The past two decades, accelerating over the past four years, newsrooms have increasingly become distracted from their main mission, confused about their purpose. Really, they’ve grown detached from their mission
  • the journalistic product now being offered has become something vaguer than it was, more boring, less swashbuckling, more labored, as if it’s written by frightened people. There’s an emphasis on giving the story “context,” but the story doesn’t feel alive and the context seems skewed
  • But even cavemen who eat bugs and wear hides are not always grim. Man wants not only to be informed but to be amused, entertained. He wants humor, wit, mischief, a visual tour of the latest cave paintings. Cave man want cooking app. And word games and reporting on the richest tribes: “Most Expensive Cave Dwelling Sells in Malibu.”
  • More disturbing, major stories go unreported because, the reader senses, they don’t relate to the personal obsessions of the editors and reporters, or to their political priors.
  • Facebook and social media can’t get the story. They can amplify it, give an opinion, comment. But they don’t have the resources and expertise; they don’t have trained investigative journalists and first-class experienced editors and a publisher willing to take a chance and spend the money. Social media has opinions, emotions, propaganda.
  • And the great thing for newspapers is if you get the story—if you are known to get the story, like the Washington Post in the Watergate years—you will be read.
  • In early 2023, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote a paper about how modern journalists see standards within their professions, and it seemed to me not only confused but a kind of capitulation. There had been a “generational shift” in journalism, and the many editors and reporters they interviewed think objectivity is more or less “outmoded,” a false standard created by the white male patriarchy.
  • What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It was all about the guck and mess, not the mission, and made them look like news bureaucrats, joyless grinds, self-infatuated bores.
  • They were obsessed with who’s in the newsroom when their readers are obsessed with what comes out of the newsroom.
  • current ways of encouraging diversity seem to yield a great sameness in terms of class and viewpoint, and in any case diversity is a mission within a mission, it isn’t the mission itself, which is: Get the story, tell the story.
johnsonma23

Pentagon Seeks Easing of Ban on Russian Rockets for U.S. Space Missions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ets-for-us-space-missions.html

nytimes com US politics policy culture obama

shared by johnsonma23 on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Pentagon Seeks Easing of Ban on Russian Rockets for U.S. Space Missions
  • Congress passed legislation that forced the Pentagon to stop buying Russian rocket engines that have been used since 2000 to help launch American military and intelligence satellites into space.
  • Only five months after the ban became law, the Pentagon is pressing Congress to ease it
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  • The ban applies only to national security missions, but the Pentagon’s request has also frustrated those who have pressed to end American reliance on Russia for NASA and commercial spaceflights, at a time when relations between the two countries have become tenser than in any other period since the Cold War.
  • “I don’t know what the Pentagon’s position can be, except for them and the Obama administration trying to placate Putin,
  • The Pentagon’s position, however, has powerful support from the nation’s intelligence chief and two of the most influential defense contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
  • When the House passed its annual defense authorization bill, it approved language that would ease the ban.
  • The debate is an example of the seismic shift in relations between the United States and Russia, ending a quarter century of tentative and sometimes strained efforts to cooperate.
  • The arrangement attracted opposition because of Energomash’s majority state ownership and, according to an article by Reuters last year, a minority share tied to one of Mr. Putin’s closest friends, the billionaire Yuri V.
  • “Certainly we cannot have Vladimir Putin and his cronies profit from the sale of rocket engines,”
  • The debate over the Russian engines has become entangled in an emerging rivalry among the companies vying for the lucrative business of space launches, amounting to $70 billion in contracts for military and intelligence missions alone
Javier E

Smells Like School Spirit - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...01brooks.html

education testing content assessment research reform

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • she is right that teaching is a humane art built upon loving relationships between teachers and students. If you orient the system exclusively around a series of multiple choice accountability assessments, you distort it.
  • The places where the corrosive testing incentives have had their worst effect are not in the schools associated with the reformers. They are in the schools the reformers haven’t touched. These are the mediocre schools without strong leaders and without vibrant missions. In those places, of course, the teaching-to-the-test ethos prevails. There is no other.
  • Ravitch thinks the solution is to get rid of the tests. But that way just leads to lethargy and perpetual mediocrity. The real answer is to keep the tests and the accountability but make sure every school has a clear sense of mission, an outstanding principal and an invigorating moral culture that hits you when you walk in the door.
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  • the untrumpeted and undeveloped secret of the reform movement is the content — the willingness to develop character curriculum or Core Knowledge curriculum, the willingness to infuse the school with spiritual fervor.
  • tests are not the end. They are a lever to begin the process of change. They are one way of measuring change. But they are only one piece of the larger mission. The mission may involve E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curricula, or character education, or performance arts specialties. But the mission transcends the test. These schools know what kind of graduate they want to produce. The schools that are most accountability-centric are also the most alive.
Javier E

The Profound Contradiction of Saving Private Ryan - John Biguenet - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...371539

war morality gratitude patriotism movie community contradiction

shared by Javier E on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • a handpicked squad of Rangers are sent to extricate a paratrooper, James Ryan, from the intense fighting behind enemy lines because his three brothers have been killed in combat. Despite the efforts of his subordinates to dissuade him from authorizing the mission, General George C. Marshall determines to save Ryan's mother from a fourth telegram of condolence
  • The great bulk of dialogue in Saving Private Ryan not directly connected to the prosecution of battles is dedicated to an ongoing debate about the morality of the squad's mission. No one makes a case that their mission is heroic. It is idiocy and, as far as the soldiers are concerned, immoral idiocy.
  • Over and over again, the fundamental theorem of war—that one is sacrificed to save many—is examined
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  • Saving Private Ryan offers not a single word about love of country. Generals may still talk like their Civil War counterparts, but soldiers in the field have ceased to cloak their duty in such sentiments.
  • The mission can't be justified on moral or patriotic grounds, and yet the toughest soldier in the squad, Sergeant Horvath, says saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing they "were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess."
  • Spielberg never suggests that we are any better than our enemy or, to put it more generously, that they are any worse than we are.
  • this is not a patriotic film; if anything, it argues that patriotism is beside the point in modern warfare. Even the mission itself has no heroic or patriotic aim; there is no hill to be taken, no redoubt to be stormed. Its goal, according to Captain Miller, is public relations.
  • there is no shortage of cruelty and brutality. Nazis move through battle-scarred streets indifferently finishing off wounded Americans, but, early in the film, we have witnessed callous GIs mowing down surrendering Germans with a laugh.
  • Schindler's List and Amistad are, in fact, about guilt and responsibility. They are not, as many imagine, noble memorials to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and slavery; rather, they are agonized meditations on all of those somehow implicated in those vast human tragedies.
  • How can the sentimental tableau of a weeping old man, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsentimental a film?
  • he described his father's own war stories: "I was supposed to wave the flag and be patriotic and say that without his efforts I wouldn't have the freedoms I had or even the freedom to have the bicycle I was riding." Only later did the director realize that it wasn't "a bunch of bunk he was telling me."
  • Private Ryan, a dazed kid surrounded by the bodies of men who were absurdly ordered to their deaths to save him, is given the equally absurd command by the dying hero, Captain Miller, to "earn this" and must now bear the terrible, impossible order until his own death.
  • at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as a grandfather and his son and grandchildren pay homage to those whose deaths we have just witnessed, the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of fallen heroes; the living are, in fact, the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan, we cannot help but ask what we've done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.
  • Saving Private Ryan is not about those who suffered; it is about those who have been spared suffering. Spielberg's subject, in the end, is not the courage of the soldiers who fought at Normandy; his subject is the debt owed them by their children and their children's children.
bluekoenig

Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster: Major Malfunction | Retro Report | The New York Time... - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history culture crisis space NASA

shared by bluekoenig on 14 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 14 Jan 20
     
    In 1986 and 2003, NASA had its two biggest disasters ever with the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle on launch and the annihilation of the Columbia shuttle on reentry. NASA became over ambitious after the Appolo missions, attempting to launch shuttles up to 60 times a year due to their funding by private organizations who wanted the shuttles to release experiments and satellites into space. They started out successful with the original Columbia missions and then they became sloppy with the building and safety of their rocket boosters, which later caused the explosion of the Challenger rocket. NASA reevaluated its boundaries for acceptable risk and purged the members of NASA who pushed the Challenger mission through despite the risks. They stopped all launches for years Then in 2003 the Columbia shuttle had its first mission in years and a piece of foam from the rocket hit the wing of the shuttle, causing what they thought were possible damages. They made another bad call in not alerting the crew until the last minute and not investigating, changing the reentry plan, or trying to mend it while in space due to the fact that other foam had not caused issues before. The Columbia burned up on reentry after the piece of foam destroyed a heat resistant panel on the wing that acted as a weak point. NASA's biggest issue throughout all of this was refusing to learn from their mistakes, the Columbia mission could have been saved had NASA taken the proper protocols and tried harder to assess and fix the situation.
Alex Trudel

Pentagon IDs American killed in Iraq hostage rescue - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics Obama US crisis economic culture pentagon american killed iraq hostage rescue

shared by Alex Trudel on 27 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Pentagon identified the U.S. Army soldier who died as part of a rescue mission in Northern Iraq earlier this week as Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, of Roland, Oklahoma.
  • Wheeler, who was was part of the Army's Delta Force and assigned to Headquarters of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is the first American to die in combat in Iraq since November 2011.
  • 20 members of the Iraqi Security Forces
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  • "There was not a lot of time," one U.S. official told CNN on condition of anonymity. "The threat of execution was imminent."
  • The firefight represents the first time U.S. forces stepped into combat against ISIS in Iraq, one U.S. official said.
  • Thirty troops from Delta Force on an "advise and assist role" participated in the raid when Kurdish "Cobra" commandos were overwhelmed after entering the walled compound on their own, the official said.
  • Four Peshmerga soldiers were wounded, officials said
  • 70 Kurdish hostages were rescued.
  • The mission did not represent a change in U.S. tactics in Iraq, Cook said.
  • White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the Pentagon, not the White House, signed off on the operation under the U.S. military mission against ISIS.
  • there are 70 people whose lives were saved as a result of this," Cook said.
  • 20 ISIS fighters were killed and six were captured
  • In a statement, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, commander of the U.S. Central Command, described the mission as "complex and highly successful."
  • "Our gratitude and heartfelt condolences go out to this young man's family, his teammates and friends."
  • The operation came more than a month after Kurdish security forces said the Islamist militant group ISIS kidnapped dozens of men near Hawija. It wasn't immediately clear whether the overnight rescue was related to this early September kidnapping.
malonema1

Top US general stresses patience in Niger investigation: 'We want to make sure we have ... - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

Terrorism US Military

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that he wants to wait for the results of the full investigation into the ambush in Niger that killed four U.S. soldiers before commenting on what may or may not have happened on Oct. 4. That includes questions on whether the soldiers’ mission had been changed to include a capture or kill mission of a high-value target, as was reported Monday evening by ABC News.
  • Did the Niger mission change? Dunford described anything to that effect as speculation and said that he preferred to withhold comment until the investigation is completed to gather all the facts about the mission. Though he acknowledged it is a legitimate question to ask, Dunford said, “Anything you’ve seen to that regard is speculation and once the investigation is complete we'll have the facts and we'll share them." He described the “bits and pieces of information coming out" as "some speculation, some bits of fact." "We want to make sure we have the whole story in context that we can provide to the families. That's my primary target audience right now," said Dunford. "They have legitimate questions, they've lost their loved ones and they have legitimate questions about what happened."
  • ISIS in Africa? As for the ISIS groups in Africa, Dunford explained how ISIS is “leveraging” local insurgencies.
horowitzza

Trump will move embassy, one-congressman mission predicts | The Times of Israel - 0 views

www.timesofisrael.com/e-congressman-mission-predicts

trump U.S. embassy mission movetheembassy israel politics policy

shared by horowitzza on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • S President Donald Trump will likely decide to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the head of a Congressional fact-finding mission into a possible relocation said on Sunday.
  • “To see this happen 50 years after the liberation of Jerusalem is going to be exciting for a lot of people in the US, and I know it’s going to be very exciting for a lot of Israelis here in Jerusalem.”
  • rump, who during his campaign vowed to move the embassy and, according to reports was willing to do it on his first day in office, has recently backtracked, saying he is still studying the matter.
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  • “He’s in a position where he’s either going to follow his campaign promise or he’ll have to actually have to sign this waiver,”
  • Many in the international community have warned against moving the embassy, a move that would be seen as de facto recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
mimiterranova

New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nasa-neptune-venus.html

nasa missions science venus

shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.
  • They said they had detected a molecule, phosphine, for which they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it might have formed there except as the waste product of living organisms.
  • Venus is in many ways a twin of Earth — it is comparable in size, mass and composition, and it is the planet whose orbit is the closest to Earth’s. But the history of the two planets diverged. While Earth is moderate in temperature and largely covered with water, Venus, with a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, is a hellishly hot 900 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface. After numerous missions by the United States and the Soviet Union to explore it in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, attention shifted elsewhere.
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  • Concentrations of krypton, argon, neon and xenon — the noble gases that do not react with other elements — may provide hints about how Venus and its atmosphere formed. The measurements might also find signs of whether water has escaped from Venus into space and whether oceans ever covered the surface.
  • The new mission will be able to provide topographic measurements that are more than 100 times better than what Magellan produced, stitched together into a highly detailed three-dimensional map.
carolinehayter

Pentagon watchdog finds National Guard's use of helicopters to fly over DC protestors "... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics trump us

shared by carolinehayter on 28 May 21 - No Cached
  • The Pentagon's watchdog found that the DC National Guard's use of low-flying helicopters in response to protests in DC on June 1, 2020, over the death of George Floyd was "reasonable," but the mission was mired in confusion.
  • The report from the Department of Defense's Inspector General, released Thursday, concluded the deployment of helicopters was justifiable based on the needs of the emergency, as well as the direction from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper to "flood the zone" and "use everything available" to protect "federal property and symbols."
  • A lack of clear guidance on the helicopters' mission compounded the confusion, because Ryan "did not provide clear and consistent direction and mission guidance" and "did not provide his clear and consistent commander's intent to include key tasks and parameters for the operation."Enter your email to sign up for CNN's "What Matters" Newsletter. "close dialog"Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters Newsletter<di
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  • "No specific training, policies, or procedures were in place for using helicopters to support requests for assistance from civilian authorities in civil disturbances," the report's authors wrote. "Prior to the night of June 1st, 2020, the DC [National Guard] did not have a prepared plan to maintain command and control of aviation assets used to support civil disturbances."Read More
  • Well after the curfew, protesters were still out on the streets, and video captured by CNN showed a military helicopter hovering over a group of them, kicking up strong wind and debris with its downwash. The tactic is a show of force and commonly used by the military in overseas combat zones to drive away targets from a specific area.
  • The Defense Department Inspector General largely agreed with an earlier report from an Army investigation that found the use of helicopters was not against federal laws or policies, though there was a "lack of understanding" about their mission.But the new report contradicted the Army investigation's finding that MEDEVAC helicopters were used against regulations and that the helicopters were used without approval from the chain of command.
Javier E

Can Megyn Kelly Escape Her Fox News Past? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513842

fox news media propaganda politics obama

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The TV producer in Ailes saw a marketing niche, and the political operative in him saw a direct way of courting voters. Rupert Murdoch owned the network, but Ailes was its intellectual author. In the two decades since, the network has thrived without legitimate competition of any kind. It has proved to be a big tent, sheltering beneath it some excellent reporters but also a collection of blowhards, performance artists, cornballs, and Republican operatives in rehab from political failures and personal embarrassments. With the help of this antic cast, the Fox audience has come to understand something important that it did not know before: The people who make “mainstream” news and entertainment don’t just look down on conservatives and their values—they despise them.
  • Her understanding of the legal aspects of news stories and her tendency to conduct interviews as hostile cross-examinations (“Stay in bounds!” “I’ve already ceded the point!” “Don’t deflect!”) made her a riveting journalist-entertainer
  • Almost as soon as the election ended, Fox News went back to work on the mission, emphasizing a variety of themes, each intended to demonize the left. At the top of the list was the regular suggestion that Barack Obama was an America-hating radical, an elaboration of Glenn Beck’s observation (on Fox) that the president had “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Other themes included the idea that straight white men were under ever-present threat from progressive policies and attitudes; that Planned Parenthood was a kind of front operation for baby murder; that political correctness had made the utterance of even the most obvious factual statements dangerous; and that the concerns of black America—including, especially, those of the Black Lives Matter movement—were so illogical, and so emotionally expressed, that they revealed millions of Americans to be beyond the reach of reason.
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  • We will never know to what extent Fox created or merely reported on the factor that turned out to be so decisive in the election: that to be white and conscious in America was to be in a constant state of rage.
  • In the middle of all this, feeding clips of ammo into the hot Fox News machine, was Megyn Kelly. To watch her, during one of her interviews on the subject of race and policing, interrupt a black guest to ask her whether she’d ever called white people “crackers” was to see Kelly in action, fired up and ready to go. In some respects, she was an independent actor at Fox, with her own show and ultimate control of its editorial content. But she was also a cog in something turning, and what the great machine ultimately produced was President Donald Trump.
  • As she tells it, one of the first questions Ailes asked her was “how the daughter of a nurse and a college professor understood anything other than left wing dogma.” She replied that although she’d been raised in a Democratic household, she had always been apolitical. She got the job.
  • he wanted people who hadn’t been tainted by the left-wing media machine, so they could be trained in the attitudes and opinions the network had been founded to advance.
  • Kelly is an unbelievably talented broadcaster—smart, funny, quick-witted, and able to handle a bit of fluff with as much zeal as she tackles a serious story. There can’t have been anyone more telegenic in the history of the business.
  • By 2010, the network had become so popular that—according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room—Ailes added a new goal to the mission: the election of the next president.
  • she evinced her signature political stance: free-market enthusiasm combined with Nixonian law-and-order conservatism. “Enjoy prison!” she would call out after showing a video of an especially inept criminal enterprise.
  • She popped off the screen—fun, sexy, tough—and became popular not just with conservatives but also (in the mode of a guilty pleasure) with many progressives, including her sometime nemesis Jon Stewart, who once said she was his favorite Fox personality.
  • to see her segments on Black Lives Matter—which first aired as the primaries were getting under way and continued until the general election itself—was to see how Fox often stirred up racial anger among its viewers, a kind of anger that was crucial fuel for the Republican outcome Roger Ailes so desired.
  • hen Kelly was a litigator in high-stakes lawsuits, she learned a skill of the trade: taunting her adversaries until they snapped. “I might say something passive-aggressive just to get opposing counsel mad,” she writes. “And then when he got worked up about it, I would say calmly, ‘You seem upset. Do you need a break? We can take a moment if you’d like to step outside and get yourself together.’ ” She became “an expert in making them lose their cool.”
  • n her regular application of it to black activists, she contributed to an ugly mood that was the hallmark of Fox all last year: one of white aggrievement at a country gone mad, led by a radical black president supported by irrational black protesters who were gaining power.
  • , she introduced her TV audience to Malik Shabazz, the president of Black Lawyers for Justice and a former president of the New Black Panthers Party. Shabazz is a radical—an anti-Zionist who believes that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade and were involved in the 9/11 attacks, he is in a sense far more radical than Bill Ayers—but Kelly did not tell the audience that. Nor did she tell them that she had had Shabazz on her show in the past. The two proved useful to each other; he got to go deep behind enemy lines to spread his theories, while she got to show her audience members a black man who really does hate them. But to the casual viewer, he seemed like merely another Black Lives Matter supporter, no more or less extreme in his views than D. L. Hughley.
  • This was Fox News last spring and summer and into the fall: a place where black guests were always a few prodding questions away from telling the audience what they really felt about whites, and a place where white hosts were quick to defend other members of their race from unfair accusations of bias. These tactics were integral to the network’s mission: to get conservative ideas out there, to help elect a Republican president, and to make exciting television while doing it. Kelly proved adept on all fronts.
julia rhodes

Military Plans Reflect Afghanistan Uncertainty - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-and-nato-afghanistan.html

military plans afghanistan uncertainty US history politics crisis policy economic obama

shared by julia rhodes on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • American and NATO military planners, facing continued political uncertainty about whether foreign troops will remain in Afghanistan after December, have drawn up plans to deploy a force this summer that is tailored to assume a training mission in 2015 but is also small enough to withdraw if no deal for an enduring presence is reached, alliance officials said.
  • With President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan refusing to sign security agreements approving a presence for American and NATO troops after 2014, allied military planners have been forced to prepare for both sudden success and abject failure of proposals for a continuing mission to train, advise and assist Afghan forces after combat operations officially end this year.
  • In preparing the mechanics of this summer’s regular troop rotation, American and NATO military commanders have set in motion a plan intended to give the alliance’s political leadership maximum flexibility, according to senior NATO officials.
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  • If the Afghan government signs a security agreement, the president said, then “a small force of Americans could remain in Afghanistan with NATO allies.” He described the potential follow-on deployment as intended “to carry out two narrow missions: training and assisting Afghan forces, and counterterrorism operations to pursue any remnants of Al Qaeda.”
  • Many nations are watching with concern as Mr. Karzai demurs on signing a deal with Washington — a requirement for a similar deal with NATO — because the efficient and lawful disbursement of billions of dollars of pledged international assistance is viewed as dependent on oversight by foreign troops in a country known for corruption.
Javier E

The Secret History of SEAL Team 6: Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...et-history-of-seal-team-6.html

Special Ops mission military war

shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • “War is not this pretty thing that the United States has come to believe it to be,” said Britt Slabinski, a retired senior enlisted member of Team 6 and veteran of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. “It’s emotional, one human being killing another human being for extended periods of time. It’s going to bring out the worst in you. It’s also going to bring out the best in you.”
  • Like the C.I.A.’s campaign of drone strikes, Special Operations missions offer policy makers an alternative to costly wars of occupation. But the bulwark of secrecy around Team 6 makes it impossible to fully assess its record and the consequences of its actions, including civilian casualties or the deep resentment inside the countries where its members operate. The missions have become embedded in American combat with little public discussion or debate.
Javier E

The Real Libya Policy Obama Won't Admit | FrumForum - 0 views

www.frumforum.com/-libya-policy-obama-wont-admit

policy libya foreign oil Obama

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • President Obama’s campaign in Libya may be the most deceptively sold U.S. military policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s “all aid short of war” policy in 1941. In his speech to the nation Tuesday night, the president described a military action in Libya where the main U.S. military commitment had already ended, where NATO was relieving the U.S. of operational responsibility, where the U.S. mission was limited to protecting civilian populations, where the U.S. goal is strictly humanitarian, and where the U.S. took no view about Libya’s future government beyond a vague preference that Muammar Qaddafi move on. As described, this is a preposterous policy. Fortunately, the president is giving every sign of not believing a word of it.
  • In fact, the U.S. mission is aimed at the overthrow of Qaddafi. The U.S. is engaged in sophisticated propaganda operations urging Qaddafi’s troops to turn on him. And it’s reported that the U.S. is negotiating with Qaddafi about a secure exit from Libya. In fact, the U.S. mission is as deeply concerned with European energy security as with the humanitarian crisis. Critics correctly point out that the US has managed to ignore many other humanitarian crises – and is in fact ignoring one right now in the Ivory Coast. This particular crisis is occurring in a country from which NATO ally Italy buys more than one-fifth of all its net oil imports and in which Britain has a very large investment. We are not going to war for oil. But we very rarely go to war without oil.
  • Henry Kissinger used to contrast the Bush 43 and Clinton administrations: “Under Clinton, the explanations were much better than the policies; under Bush, the policies were always much better than the explanations.” The Libyan war takes the Bush frailty to extremes: the explanations are laughable on their face – but the policy seems astute and promising.
redavistinnell

South China Sea: Beijing 'not frightened to fight a war' after US move | World news | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...war-south-china-sea-uss-lassen

south china sea beijing fight war world world news

shared by redavistinnell on 28 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • South China Sea: Beijing 'not frightened to fight a war' after US move
  • “The United States has been very irresponsible,” defense ministry spokesperson Yang Yujun said, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.
  • The People’s Liberation Army Daily, China’s leading military newspaper, used a front-page editorial to accuse the US of sowing chaos in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
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  • Tuesday’s manoeuvre, which saw the guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sail close to artificial Chinese islands, came after Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping failed to find common ground over the issue during recent talks at the White House.
  • Twenty-four hours after Washington challenged Beijing’s territorial claims in the region by deploying a warship to waters around the disputed Spratly archipelago, the notoriously nationalistic Global Times accused the Pentagon of provoking China.
  • Lu Kang, a foreign ministry spokesperson, said China would “resolutely respond” to any deliberate provocations but declined to be drawn on any potential military response.
  • China’s military buildup in the South China Sea – including the construction of a 3km runway capable of supporting fighter jets and transport planes – has become a major source of tension between Beijing and Washi
  • Washington hoped Tuesday’s mission would encourage Beijing to step back from its controversial island building campaign, which China claims is for civilian purposes but critics believe is an attempt to use military power to cement its grip over the region.
  • Townshend said the US mission may have temporarily strengthened Washington’s hand. “[But] there’s an element of you win the battle but you lose the war if actually these freedom of navigation missions make China more determined to militarise these islands,” he added. “These islands are not going away – unless global warming takes them out.”
Javier E

Enter the Age of the Outsiders - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-age-of-the-outsiders.html

reason anarchy institutions decentralization fringe spiritual meaning mission realism barbarism

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In the 1990s, the central political institutions radiated confidence, derived from an assumed vision of the post-Cold War world. History would be a slow march toward democratic capitalism. Nations would be bound in peaceful associations like the European Union. The United States would oversee a basic international order.
  • This vision was materialistic and individualistic. Nations should pursue economic growth and a decent distribution of wealth. If you give individuals access to education and opportunity, they will pursue affluence and personal happiness. They will grow more temperate and “reasonable.”
  • Since 2000, this vision of the post-Cold War world has received blow after blow. Some of these blows were self-inflicted. Democracy, especially in the United States, has grown dysfunctional. Mass stupidity and greed led to a financial collapse and deprived capitalism of its moral swagger.
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  • the deeper problem was spiritual. Many people around the world rejected democratic capitalism’s vision of a secular life built around materialism and individual happiness. They sought more intense forms of meaning. Some of them sought meaning in the fanaticisms of sect, tribe, nation, or some stronger and more brutal ideology
  • In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate.
  • The uncertain Republican establishment cannot govern its own marginal members, while those on the edge burn with conviction. Jeb Bush looks wan but Donald Trump radiates confidence.
  • The Democratic establishment no longer determines party positions; it is pulled along by formerly marginal players like Bernie Sanders.
  • Republicans blame Obama for hesitant and halting policies, but it’s not clear the foreign policy and defense apparatus believes anymore in its own abilities to establish order, or that the American public has any confidence in U.S. effectiveness as a global actor.
  • the primary problem is mental and spiritual. Some leader has to be able to digest the lessons of the last 15 years and offer a revised charismatic and persuasive sense of America’s historic mission.
  • This mission, both nationalist and universal, would be less individualistic than the gospel of the 1990s, and more realistic about depravity and the way barbarism can spread. It would offer a goal more profound than material comfort.
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