NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft could end up bearing a message for intelligent aliens, just as the agency’s venerable Voyager probes are doing.
Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 famously carry copies of the “Golden Record,” which are loaded with photos, music, sounds and other data designed to teach any extraterrestrials who might encounter the probes about humanity and its home planet.
Though such an alien encounter isn’t likely, it is possible; Voyager 1 popped into interstellar space in August 2012, and its twin will probably do the same in the next few years, mission team members have said.
Marking an impassioned return to the campaign trail, former President Barack Obama made a plea Thursday night to Virginia voters to vote for Democratic candidates in the state’s first elections to be held since last year’s presidential contest.
“We need you to take this seriously, because our democracy is at stake, and it’s at stake right here in Virginia,” Obama told a crowd of 7,500 people at the Richmond Coliseum. “You can’t sit this one out.”
As Obama spoke, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam — the Democratic nominee for governor in the commonwealth — sat on a barstool next to the 56-year-old former two-term president, basking in the glow of the former president’s political star power.
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Former President Barack Obama with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam during a rally in Richmond, Va., Oct. 19, 2017. (Photo: Steve Helber/AP)
A senior congressional aide who has been briefed on the deaths of four U.S. servicemen in Niger says the ambush by militants stemmed in part from a “massive intelligence failure.”
The Pentagon has said that 40 to 50 militants ambushed a 12-man U.S. force in Niger on Oct. 4, killing four and wounding two. The U.S. patrol was seen as routine and had been carried out nearly 30 times in the six months before the attack, the Pentagon has reported.
The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly, said the House and Senate armed services committees have questions about the scope of the U.S. mission in Niger, and whether the Pentagon is properly supporting the troops on the ground there.
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Myeshia Johnson cries over the casket of her husband, Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in an ambush in Niger, upon his body’s arrival in Miami, on Oct. 17, 2017. WPLG / AP
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday chastised Russia for alleged cyberattacks during the 2016 election, charging it was an effort to turn “Americans against each other” and “exploit our country’s divisions.”
Bush urged America to “harden its own defenses” in the face of “external attacks on our democracy.”
In remarks at a forum in New York held by the organization that runs his presidential library, Bush said the Russian cyberattacks amounted to a “sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country’s divisions.”
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Bush Slams Russia for Attempts to ‘Exploit Our Country’s Divisions’
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’d give himself “a 10,” on a scale of 1 to 10, for how he has responded to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit the island.
“I’d say it was a 10,” Trump told a reporter at a White House event with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. “I give ourselves a 10. … We have provided so much, so fast. We were actually there before the storm hit.”
The president’s remark conveys a different reality than what’s going on in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory that is home to 3.4 million Americans. As of Thursday ― more than a month after Hurricane Maria hit ― 30 percent of the island still has no drinking water and 80 percent doesn’t have power. That’s according to government data updated daily, which some volunteer workers on the ground say is inaccurate. They say the situation is far more grim.
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Trump Gives Himself ‘A 10’ Out Of 10 On His Response To Puerto Rico
After Hurricane Maria toppled the bridge that connects him to the rest of civilization and ripped the roof and walls off his house here in the central mountains of Puerto Rico, Ramón Sostre raised a weathered American flag above the wreckage.
His message to the world: I’m alive, and I’m American.
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It worked, if temporarily. Helicopters came. So did a tarp, food and bottled water.
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Yet little else has changed. His roof is still missing, as are some walls. He and his cat, Tipo, sleep in the kitchen. When the wind blows at night, rain soaks them. The power is out, as it is for roughly 3 million Puerto Ricans, or more than 80% of the island’s residents. More than a third of households in the US territory, including much of Sostre’s community, are without reliable drinking water at home. That’s roughly 1 million American citizens.
The father of a slain U.S. Army corporal says President Donald Trump offered him $25,000 over the phone earlier this year while calling to offer his condolences and then never followed through, according to The Washington Post.
Chris Baldridge told the publication that a few weeks after his 22-year-old son, Army Cpl. Dillon Baldridge, was gunned down by an Afghan police officer on June 10, he had a 15-minute phone call with the president. Baldridge said he told Trump of “his struggle with the manner in which his son was killed,” according the Post story, and was offered $25,000 after telling the president about his frustration with the military’s survivor benefits program.
Baldridge said he “can barely rub two nickels together,” and that his ex-wife would receive the Pentagon’s $100,000 death gratuity because she was his son’s beneficiary.
On my last week in India, I went to say goodbye to Jahiruddin Mewati, the chief of a small village where I had made a dozen or so reporting trips.
Jahiruddin and I were not precisely friends, but we had spent many hours talking over the years, mostly about local politics. I found him entirely without scruples but candid. He suspected my motives but found me entertaining, in the way that a talking dog might be entertaining, without regard for the particulars of what I said.
Jahiruddin, though uneducated, was an adept politician, fresh from winning a hard-fought local election. During our conversations, he would often break into rousing, patriotic speeches about truth and justice, thumping the plastic table in emphasis and making it jump. The effect was somewhat tarnished by his Tourette’s syndrome, which caused him to interject the word “penis” at regular intervals.
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Jahiruddin Mewati, the chief of Peepli Khera, a small village in Uttar Pradesh, presided over a particularly Indian form of justice.Credit Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
A federal jury convicted Ahmad Khan Rahimi, a loner from New Jersey drawn to online calls to jihad and instruction manuals for carrying it out, of setting the explosives in the Chelsea neighborhood that blew out windows and sent shrapnel flying into buildings, cars and people during a two-day bombing campaign in and around New York City last year.
Mr. Ramini, 29, a stocky and bearded husband and father born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in New Jersey, remained mostly expressionless in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday as he listened to a single word — “guilty” — called out over and over, eight times, by the jury foreman. He blinked rapidly and at times appeared to nod.
Terror attacks that kill and injure scores of people have become all too common around the world. The Chelsea explosion, which took no lives, was widely seen as a near miss. But its proximity to the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in Manhattan, and its callbacks to that day, sent shudders through the city 15 years later. The police have said there have been some two dozen terror plots against the city since then, the vast majority thwarted, but none that shook and smashed a block as strongly.
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Ahmad Khan Rahimi in custody last year, after he was accused of setting bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey. He was found guilty on all counts Monday.Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press
George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund manager and a major Democratic donor, has given $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations, one of the largest transfers of wealth ever made by a private donor to a single foundation.
The gift, made quietly over the past several years but disclosed only on Tuesday, has transformed Open Society into the second-biggest philanthropic organization in the United States, behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It will also place Mr. Soros, a lightning rod for conservative critics, squarely in the middle of the social and political debates convulsing the country.
Founded by Mr. Soros more than 30 years ago, Open Society promotes democracy and human rights in more than 120 countries. In recent years, the organization has increased its attention on the United States, investing in programs to protect gays and lesbians and reduce abuses by the police.
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George Soros at the offices of the Open Society Foundations in New York in 2014.Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Voyager’s Golden RecordNASA
Trump Gives Himself ‘A 10’ Out Of 10 On His Response To Puerto Rico
About 1 million Americans without running water
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James' World 2 