Source: Time

Donald Trump may be the current president, but in terms of who Americans most admire, his predecessor and the person he beat in the 2016 election top the list.

Barack Obama edged his successor as the most admired man for 2017, a Gallup poll finds, marking the first time since 2008 when a sitting president didn’t win the annual accolade. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is the woman Americans most admire for the 16th year in a row.

It was a close race. Seventeen percent of those surveyed named Obama as the man they most admire, to 14 percent for Trump. To no surprise, there was a wide partisan split, with 35 percent of Republicans saying Trump was most admired man of the year, and 39 percent of Democrats picking Obama.

“Trump’s unpopularity is holding him back from winning the most admired distinction,” Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones wrote. “The incumbent president is the usual winner, since he is arguably the most prominent figure in the country — but when the president is unpopular, other well-known and well-liked men have been able to finish first.”

Read more: http://time.com/5080498/admiration-poll-donald-tru

Source: The Hill

President Trump on Wednesday issued his first commuted sentence for a federal prisoner, freeing Sholom Rubashkin, the former owner of the country’s largest kosher meat-processing plant who in 2009 was sentenced to 27 years in prison for a litany of financial crimes.

The commutation had bipartisan support from lawmakers and had become a cause among many leading voices in the legal community, petitioning the Obama and Trump administrations to draw attention to a sentence they said was wildly disproportionate to the crime that had been committed.

Rubashkin, a father of 10, will have served eight years of his sentence. The commutation is not a presidential pardon — Rubashkin’s conviction will stand, as will his terms of release and the restitution payments he will be obliged to pay.

Still, the commutation will clear Rubashkin of the remaining 19 years of a sentence that had been condemned by politicians on the left and the right as cruel and unusual.

Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/365907-trump-issues-first-commuted-prison-sentence

Source: CBS News

After nearly 12 years at E!, Catt Sadler has announced that she is leaving the network after finding out that her co-host, Jason Kennedy, makes "close to double" her salary. Sadler said the anchor job there was a "dream come true," but she decided to leave after E! did not meet her request for a salary close to Kennedy's.

Sadler wrote on her website, "It was important for me to explain my departure." She said that hosting both the new show "Daily Pop" and "E! News" this year was "one of the most fulfilling years" of her professional career, but her joy was dampened when an executive informed her that "there was a massive disparity in pay" between Sadler's and Kennedy's salaries.

"I learned that [Kennedy] wasn't just making a little more than I was. In fact, he was making close to double my salary for the past several years," she wrote. "My team and I asked for what I know I deserve and were denied repeatedly."

Sadler said that she does not fault Kennedy, who is her close friend, but pointed out that the two have a similar background and started at E! at the same time.



Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/catt-sadler-says-shes-leaving-e-because-her-co-host-got-paid-nearly-double-her-salary/

Source: Gizmodo

On October 19, 2017, astronomers witnessed the first known interstellar asteroid—a bizarre, cigar-shaped rock that, just as quickly as it entered into our Solar System, exited in a hurry. Not satisfied that ‘Oumuamua, as it’s been named, is just an odd asteroid, astronomers from Breakthrough Listen recently tuned their Green Bank telescope into the object to see if it’s an alien spaceship or some kind of probe. The preliminary results are now in and—brace yourself—it’s still a rock.

Typically, scientists at Breakthrough Listen hunt for aliens by scanning distant stars, but when ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-moo-ah-moo-ah” and meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first”) paid us an unexpected visit, it was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. Indeed, astronomers have catalogued around 750,000 asteroids, yet this is the only known chunk of rock to originate from a different stellar neighborhood. What’s more, ‘Oumuamua’s strange shape and awesome speed (it’s moving at 26.3 km/s) hinted at something perhaps not quite natural.

Using Breakthrough Listen’s backend instrument on the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the astronomers ran the first of four scans, or “blocks,” of observations from 3:45pm to 9:45pm ET on December 13. The asteroid, or alleged spaceship, was scanned across four radio bands, each of which corresponded to four radio receivers, denoted L, S, X, C, and spanning billions of individual channels from 1 to 12 GHz. During this first block of observations, the astronomers also collected 90 TB of data, which, unsurprisingly, they’re still parsing through.

No artificial signals were detected within this first block of data. So depending on your opinion of aliens, this is either good or bad news (raises hand that this is good news).

Read more: https://gizmodo.com/preliminary-scan-suggests-this-interstellar-visitor-is-1821305279

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Well, that's disappointing.

"Cows are just machines we invented, to turn grass into steak." - Neil deGrasse Tyson (10.15.17 - StarTalk)

Source: USA Today

The House is expected to take up gun legislation this week to expand concealed carry rights, the National Rifle Association’s top legislative priority, as gun-control advocates hold vigils across the country for victims of gun violence.

The move comes a week before the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 26 people in Newtown, Conn., and follows two of the deadliest shootings in modern U.S. history. In October, a gunman killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 in Las Vegas. A month later, another gunman opened fire in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 25 people including a pregnant woman whose unborn baby also died.

“They are being insensitive and basically irresponsible for moving forward with the NRA’s No. 1 bill,” said Po Murray, chair of the Newtown Action Alliance. “We’re not shocked and we’re not surprised by their actions but we’re pretty outraged.”

The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act would require each state to recognize concealed carry permits from every other state — as they would a driver’s license — regardless of different permitting standards. Residents of states that don't require permits to carry a concealed weapon would be able to carry their weapons in other states that allow concealed carry, as long as they abide by local laws.

Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/12/04/house-looks-expand-right-carry-concealed-wpeaconcealed-carry-rights-gun-control-advocates-hold-vigil/920352001/

Source: Reuters

A former Stanford University swimmer found guilty of sexual assault in California has appealed his conviction after serving a sentence that many condemned as an example of how the justice system fails to take such crimes seriously enough.

Brock Turner, then 19, was arrested in 2015 after two of his fellow students at the Northern California university saw him outside of a fraternity house on top of an unconscious woman. He was convicted of sexual assault the following year.

After serving three months of a six-month sentence, Turner was released early for good behavior. He had to register as a sex offender in his home state of Ohio last year, after leaving Stanford.

Turner’s lawyer, Eric Multhaup, said in papers filed on Friday in a California appeals court that a prosecutor in the trial incorrectly told jurors the sexual assault occurred behind a trash bin. The woman Turner was convicted of sexually assaulting was found near a garbage enclosure but not behind a trash bin, according to the appeal. Multhaup said that implying otherwise gave the impression Turner tried to hide his activities with the woman.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-rape/ex-stanford-swimmer-appeals-sexual-assault-conviction-idUSKBN1DW0N2

Source: CNET

Way out in interstellar space, humanity's most distant messenger wanders through the universe. NASA's Voyager 1 launched way back in 1977, but it's still in touch with Earth. To help keep it in contact, NASA scientists just fired up a set of thrusters that have been dormant for 37 long years.

Voyager 1 had been using a set of "attitude control thrusters" to point the spacecraft's antenna at Earth in order to send back data. Those thrusters aren't functioning well anymore, so NASA engineers figured out how to revive a different set of thrusters called "trajectory correction maneuver" (TCM) thrusters. NASA last called on those thrusters in late 1980.

On Tuesday, NASA sent the command to fire the TCM thrusters in 10-millisecond pulses as a test to see if they could reorient the spacecraft. It took nearly 20 hours before Voyager's signal reached back to Earth, but it was successful.

Voyager 1 reached interstellar space, which NASA describes as "the environment between the stars," in 2012, making it the first human-made object to leave our solar system.

Read more: https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-fires-voyager-1-thrusters-after-decades-long-sleep/