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turbinetree's JournalMarine's shooting death inside DC barracks being investigated as an accident
Source: WTOP NEWS
By Zeke Hartner
and Teta Alim
January 1, 2019 5:55 pm
WASHINGTON — D.C. police are investigating the death of a U.S. Marine who was shot and killed Tuesday morning at the Marine Barracks Washington as an apparent accident.
The Marine was shot around 5 a.m. while he was on duty inside the barracks on Capitol Hill. It was not a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Marine Corps spokesman Chief Gunnery Sgt. John Jackson confirmed to WTOP. Police said it appeared that a gun accidentally discharged.
Police said they are treating the fatal shooting as a death investigation, and added that there are no criminal charges being investigated at this point.
The investigation is still ongoing, and the Marine’s name has not yet been made public. There was no threat to local residents, the Marine Corps said in a news release.
“The command’s priorities are to take care of the Marine’s family and friends,” said Col. Don Tomich, the barracks’ commanding officer, in the release. “We want to ensure these personnel are being provided for during this challenging time.”
Read more: https://wtop.com/dc/2019/01/marines-shooting-death-inside-dc-barracks-being-investigated-as-an-accident/
Conservative Supreme Court could reverse decades of First Amendment law
The American Legion and its supporters recently filed initial briefs in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, a Supreme Court case to be argued in February concerning the constitutionality of a four-foot, 90-year-old memorial cross displayed and maintained by a state agency in Bladensburg, Maryland. Depending on how the court rules, however, much more is at stake.
Now that the court has turned decidedly to the right with the confirmation of President Trump’s nominees, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, the American Legion’s lawyers and supporters are arguing that the court should upend numerous court decisions and rule that government can legally take action to promote or endorse a specific religion. This would effectively turn those who do not believe in that religion into second-class citizens.
Specifically, even though the formal questions presented in the case relate narrowly to whether the Bladensburg cross violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, the first legal argument in the American Legion’s brief proclaims broadly that “coercion, not endorsement, is the proper standard” to judge Establishment Clause claims. Former Reagan Justice Department lawyer Michael Carvin and the conservative First Liberty Institute urge in the brief that the court should “clarify” that “coercive state activity” is required to violate the First Amendment.
This should be “compulsion by law” to “coerce belief in, observance of, or financial support for religion” by government, they claim. It is perfectly legal for government to promote or endorse a religion, they assert, regardless of whether it results in “feelings of offense and exclusion,” since government is free to promote other non-religious messages even if some disagree. Friend-of-the-court briefs by groups such as Liberty Counsel, the Becket Fund, and the American Association of Christian Schools make similar arguments.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/423129-conservative-supreme-court-could-reverse-decades-of-first-amendment-law
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Of course, none of this needs to, or should, happen as a result of this Bladensburg case. Even the American Legion’s brief acknowledges that the court can uphold the presence of the memorial cross without changing Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and hopefully at least one of the court’s five conservative members, such as Chief Justice Roberts, will see no need to go as far as far-right advocates are pushing.
But if the five Trump- and Bush-appointed justices adopt the coercion test being pushed by the American Legion and its allies, all Americans will suffer the consequences. Such a decision would be only among the first in which the current 5-4 majority overrules precedent and harms our rights and liberties.
Elliot Mincberg is a senior fellow at People For the American Way and a former chief oversight counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.
U.S. Navy pursuing block buy of two aircraft carriers: senator
POLITICS DECEMBER 31, 2018 / 7:23 PM / UPDATED 16 HOURS AGO
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy has informed lawmakers of its intent to pursue a block purchase of two Ford-class aircraft carriers, Senator Tim Kaine’s office said on Monday, a step officials have said could save billions of dollars as the Trump administration tries to expand the size of the fleet.
The decision comes nine months after the Navy expressed interest in a block buy and asked shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries for detailed pricing on the cost of two aircraft carriers as it considered doubling its order for the most expensive ship in the U.S. fleet in a bid to save money.
The Navy commissioned the first Ford-class aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, in July 2017, three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The Ford cost about $13 billion.
The Navy has said it would spend about $43 billion in total to build the first three ships in the Ford class. Huntington Ingalls Chief Executive Mike Petters has said multi-ship purchases are the best way to reduce costs.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-carriers/u-s-navy-pursuing-block-buy-of-two-aircraft-carriers-senator-idUSKCN1OV189
Retired U.S. Marine suspected of spying on Russia is innocent: family
Source: Reuters
brielle Tétrault-Farber, Barbara Goldberg
MOSCOW/NEW YORK (Reuters) - A retired U.S. Marine detained by Russia on spying charges was visiting Moscow for a wedding and is innocent, his family said on Tuesday
Paul Whelan was staying with the wedding party for a fellow former Marine at the Metropol hotel in Moscow when his brother David Whelan learned on Monday that he had been detained.
“His innocence is undoubted and we trust that his rights will be respected,” his family said in a statement released on Twitter on Tuesday.
Russia’s FSB state security service said the American had been detained on Friday, but it gave no details of the nature of his alleged espionage activities. Under Russian law, espionage can carry between 10 and 20 years in prison.
A U.S. State Department representative said Russia had notified it that a U.S. citizen had been detained and it expected Moscow to provide consular access to see him.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-espionage/retired-u-s-marine-suspected-of-spying-on-russia-is-innocent-family-idUSKCN1OV1NZ?il=0
Queen's ..............Brian May - New Horizons (Ultima Thule Mix) [Official Music Video]
NASA spacecraft opens new year at tiny, icy world past Pluto
By MARCIA DUNN today
LAUREL, Md. (AP) — The NASA spacecraft that yielded the first close-up views of Pluto opened the new year at an even more distant world, a billion miles beyond.
Flight controllers said everything looked good for New Horizons’ flyby of the tiny, icy object at 12:33 a.m. Tuesday. Confirmation was not expected for hours, though, given the vast distance.
The mysterious, ancient target nicknamed Ultima Thule is 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth.
Scientists wanted New Horizons observing Ultima Thule during the encounter, not phoning home. So they had to wait until late morning before learning whether the spacecraft survived.
With New Horizons on autopilot, Mission Control was empty at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Instead, hundreds of team members and their guests gathered nearby on campus for back-to-back countdowns.
The crowd ushered in 2019 at midnight, then cheered, blew party horns and jubilantly waved small U.S. flags again 33 minutes later, the appointed time for New Horizons’ closest approach to Ultima Thule.
https://www.apnews.com/a3f0cf63780541a69923d59ce9d84b09
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“I can’t promise you success. We are straining the capabilities of this spacecraft,” Stern said at a news conference Monday. “By tomorrow, we’ll know how we did. So stay tuned. There are no second chances for New Horizons.”
The risk added to the excitement.
Queen guitarist Brian May, who also happens to be an astrophysicist, joined the team at Johns Hopkins for a midnight premiere of the rock ‘n’ roll song he wrote for the big event.
“We will never forget this moment,” said May who led the New Year’s countdown. “This is completely unknown territory.”
Despite the government shutdown, several NASA scientists and other employees showed up at Johns Hopkins as private citizens, unwilling to miss history in the making.
Dedicated scientists and a Rock Legend....................who is a astrophysicist............
NASA spacecraft opens new year at tiny, icy world past Pluto
Queen guitarist Brian May, who also happens to be an astrophysicist, joined the team at Johns Hopkins for a midnight premiere of the rock ‘n’ roll song he wrote for the big event.
Happy new year? Tell that to the natural world we are destroying
Philip Hoare
As humans slow down for the holidays, so does the environmental damage they inflict – if only briefly
So the animals must pay for our dysfunctionality. Japan, swayed by some notion of nationhood, asserts itself by declaring its resumption of whaling. Revenge is being wreaked on the Save the Whale campaigns of the 1970s and 80s – the bedrock of modern environmentalism – and all those yoghurt-knitting hippies. Killer whales and belugas are kept in “whale jail” in the far east of Russia, as far from prying eyes as possible – ready to be sold to marine parks in China. Highly evolved animals are stolen from the sea and people buy tickets so their family can watch them perform in artificial pools thousands of miles from home.
Meanwhile people stand on the banks of the Thames, at the aptly named Gravesend, hoping for a peek at a lone lost beluga. (I decline to call it by its presumptively gendered and anthropomorphic name). Animals have become entertainment, and must therefore bend to our will, adopt our demotic. There are protests when prisoners are allowed to pet goats for therapeutic purposes, but plaudits when spy cams are sent into the natural world as if in extension of our own over-surveilled and tracked existence, and serious public discussions as to whether a film crew in the Antarctic should dig some penguins out of a hole. As if we weren’t in a deep enough one already.
We have to deny the innate beauty of animals because we know we are destroying their world. Newly discovered species can barely raise their heads in the jungle or the ocean depths. “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation,” as WG Sebald wrote in his melancholy The Rings of Saturn. They are the bycatch of our remorseless progress, like the roadkill of whom Barry Lopez, the great American nature writer, observed: “They are the ones you give some semblance of burial, to whom you offer an apology, who may have been like seers in a parallel culture.”
In an essay for the online magazine Aeon, Gary Kroll, professor of history at the State University of New York, wrote: “We must understand that getting in a car, plane or train, that ordering a book from Amazon – all are destructive acts … Wildlife deserves an apology.” We even suborn the weather. Storms are given human names, as if to announce our control over the climate, even as we destroy it. These are the ultimate anthropomorphisations: Storm Emma, the beast from the east. Weather forecasters talk about “useful weather”, as if the heavens had been invented for our utility.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/31/happy-new-year-natural-environmental-damage
Space probe Osiris-Rex makes closest ever orbit of smallest ever object
Nasa sampling mission skims a mile above tiny asteroid Bennu where it will try to land and collect samples
The Nasa spacecraft Osiris-Rex has gone into orbit around an ancient asteroid, setting a pair of records.
Osiris-Rex spacecraft entered orbit on Monday around Bennu, 70m miles (110m kilometres) from Earth. It is the smallest celestial body ever to be orbited by a spacecraft, at just 500 metres across (1,600ft).
The spacecraft is orbiting barely a mile above the asteroid’s surface, another record.
Osiris-Rex arrived at Bennu in early December and flew in formation with it until the latest manoeuvre. The goal is to descend to the surface and collect samples of regolith – loose rock and dust – for return to Earth in 2023.
The New Year’s Eve milestone occurred a few hours before another Nasa explorer, New Horizons, was due to fly past the icy asteroid Ultima Thule out beyond Pluto.
Associated Press contributed to this report
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jan/01/space-probe-osiris-rex-makes-closest-ever-orbit-around-smallest-object
Nasa probe believed to have performed most distant space flyby
New Horizons expected to have encountered Ultima Thule space rock on edge of solar system
A Nasa probe is believed to have performed the most distant flyby in history in the early hours of New Year’s Day, barrelling past a space rock called Ultima Thule on the outer edge of the solar system.
Unless gremlins intervene, the New Horizons spacecraft will have zoomed by the cosmic body at 5.33am GMT and snapped thousands of photographs of the dark, icy body as it speeds on into the void.
Ultima Thule lies 4bn miles from Earth in the Kuiper belt, a band of dwarf planets, space rocks and icy debris left over from the formation of the solar system 4.6bn years ago.
New Horizons is so distant that mission scientists had no way of helping out with any last-minute glitches. Instead any final troubleshooting will have to have been handled by the probe’s onboard software.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/31/new-horizons-heads-for-flyby-of-space-rock-ultima-thule
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