Cheers to 40 Years! Voyagers 1 and 2 going strong

It's been 40 years to the day since the Voyager mission commenced with the launch of Voyager 1.

This groundbreaking and incredibly ambitious mission touched on practically every aspect of our solar system and planetary neighbors.

Voyager 1 left Earth on September 5, 1977 - preceded by Voyager 2 on August 20th - on a quest to study the outer solar system. Today NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum are celebrating the 40th anniversary of this history-making mission.

Throughout the 1960s, NASA had focused on sending astronauts to the Moon. But by the 1970s, as the Apollo era ended, the agency's focus shifted toward robotic missions to the planets, as well as developing the Space Shuttle program for delivering payloads to Earth orbit.

In 1964, with Apollo 11's landing still a half decade away, Caltech graduate student and Jet Propulsion Laboratory intern Gary Flandro was working to develop feasible trajectories for a mission to the outer planets. He turned his attention to the relatively new idea of gravity assist, whereby a spacecraft passing close by a planet steals some of its orbital speed, accelerating without expending any rocket fuel.

Flandro's pencil-and-paper plots of the outer planets revealed that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would align in the late 1970s such that one spacecraft could visit all four in a single mission if it launched by 1977.

The craft would slingshot around each planet in succession, completing a "Grand Tour" in only 10 to 12 years. By comparison, sending a dedicated spacecraft to only Neptune would take 40 years without passing any other planets along the way.

At: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/cheers-to-40-years-voyager-1-and-2-going-strong/

Voyager 1: going strong at 40 years.

Brutality returns to Argentina's streets as police moves in on peaceful demonstrators

Police used water canon and batons against peaceful protesters in Buenos Aires as they campaigned to know the whereabouts of ‘disappeared’ human rights activist Santiago Maldonado.

Journalists have called Friday night events an attack on the free press as police arrested reporters covering the protest. Thirty people were detained - including seven reporters - and 23 were wounded, according to the Buenos Aires Press Union (Sipreba).

Maldonado was last seen at an indigenous-rights demonstration in Patagonia on August 1. Police deny arresting him, and there are no official records showing he was detained.

Human rights campaigners, union leaders and left-wing groups gathered under the slogan "Donde está Santiago?" (Where is Santiago) as they called for President Mauricio Macri's government to do more to find him.

Maldonado's disappearance last month has sparked fury and fear among people in Argentina, who have compared it the up to 30,000 'disappeared' under the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983.

Security Minister Patricia Bullrich faced calls to resign after giving false testimony in Congress last week and later divulging the name of a man, Ariel Garzi, who had been at the site of Maldonado's disappearance and was under witness protection.

Bullrich's top adviser Pablo Nocetti, a former defense attorney for some of the 2,400 officers charged with dictatorship-era abuses, admitted being at the scene of August 1 incident. "The police are not the same as 40 years ago," Bullrich said.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) urged Argentina to take "the necessary measures to determine the situation and Maldonado's whereabouts" as well as to report on the investigation of the facts.

The IACHR has also condemned the right-wing Macri administration for its arbitrary detention of indigenous activist Milagro Sala, who was granted house arrest last week after the IACHR verified she had been mistreated in prison and on July 28 ruled she be released.

At: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/850194/argentina-protest-santiago-maldonado-police-brutality-mauricio-macri

Protesters call on Bullrich to reveal Santiago Maldonado's whereabouts. "One of the officers might have gotten out of hand," she admitted to a congresswoman.

Senior journalist Gauri Lankesh shot dead at her residence in Bengaluru, India

Gauri Lankesh, a senior journalist and activist in Bengaluru, was shot dead outside her home in Rajarajeshwari Nagar on Tuesday evening. Police said her body was found on the verandah of her home in West Bengaluru.

"We learnt that the victim was shot dead from close range when she was standing outside her house in Rajarajeswari Nagar (in the suburbs) around 8.00 p.m.," a senior police officer said.

Lankesh had just reached home and was about to enter when unidentified men shot at the 55-year-old journalist seven times from close range; three bullets hit her on the neck and chest. Her body has been taken to the Victoria Hospital for a postmortem.

She ran the weekly Lankesh Patrike, a Kannada tabloid. Like her father, noted Kannada writer P. Lankesh, Gauri Lankesh faced opposition and criticism of her journalism. She was part of a group that worked for communal harmony, and her views were considered Leftist and anti-Hindutva.

In November 2016, she had been found guilty of defamation in a case involving right-wing MP Prahlad Joshi and had been sentenced to six months in jail; she was out on bail.

Lankesh was a vocal opponent of Prime Minister Narendra Mori, whom she slammed for asserting last year that "women don't own anything."

"No one owns me," she said. "I might not have gold; but I have independence, self-respect, and freedom of thought. I guess a man like you could never understand that."

At: http://www.ndtv.com/bangalore-news/senior-journalist-gauri-lankesh-shot-dead-at-her-residence-in-bengaluru-1746480

Gauri Lankesh, 1962-2017.

President Bachelet of Chile is the last woman standing in the Americas

For a few years, President Michelle Bachelet of Chile and two other female leaders presided over much of South America, representing more than half of the continent’s population.

Their presidencies — in Argentina, Brazil and Chile — made the region an exemplar of the global push for a more equitable footing for women in politics. But now, with one of her counterparts impeached and the other fighting politically-motivated corruption charges, Ms. Bachelet finds herself in an unsettling position: the last female head of government standing in the Americas.

And in a few months, she will be gone, too. After Ms. Bachelet’s term ends next year, none of the countries in North or South America are expected to have female presidents - a notable turnaround in a region where, until recently, women have been elected to lead influential democracies.

The end of the Bachelet era is raising troubling questions for advocates of women’s rights who had hoped that the region’s recent track record of electing women was a lasting step toward gender equality.

The three powerful female presidents in South America — Ms. Bachelet, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina — came to office with the endorsement of popular male incumbents at a time when leftist parties promising to create more equitable societies appealed to voters.

But the standing of the three presidents — and the perception of their parties — suffered as the end of a commodities boom in 2014 hurt regional economies and a series of corruption scandals called into question their integrity and leadership.

Presidents often see their support plunge while in office. But the three female presidents agree that their gender exposed them to particularly virulent backlashes.

“They accused me of being overly tough and harsh, while a man would have been considered firm, strong,” former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said. “Or they would say I was too emotional and fragile, when a man would have been considered sensitive. I was seen as someone too obsessed with work, while a man would have been considered hard-working.”

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, 65, is a pediatrician and single mother who began her government career as an adviser in the Health Ministry, rising quickly to become the nation’s first female health minister in 2000 and then its first female defense minister in 2002.

Bachelet's first presidential election victory in 2006 - widely regarded as the first to be elected on her own merits, without riding the coattails of a politically powerful husband - was a watershed moment inspired women across Latin America.

During her first four-year term, Ms. Bachelet signed legislation curbing workplace discrimination, to protect victims of domestic violence, and to expand health care for women.

During her second term, she created a ministry of women and gender equality, and passed an electoral change requiring that at least 40% of candidates for elected office be women. She recently obtained a partial decriminalizion of abortion - a pressing women's health issue in a country where up to 100,000 illegal abortions are performed annually.

“I always make a soccer analogy,” Ms. Bachelet said. “If, of the 11 players, we only had half in the field, we would never win a game. The country, in order to develop, needs the skills of men and women.”

At: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/world/americas/michelle-bachelet-president-of-chile.html?mcubz=3



Argentina's Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Chile's Michelle Bachelet, and Brazil's Dilma Rousseff during Bachelet's 2014 inaugural.

Steely Dan's Donald Fagen remembers Walter Becker in thoughtful note

Steely Dan's Donald Fagen shared a thoughtful note following the death of his bandmate Walter Becker.

Becker, who had been suffering from an unspecified illness, passed away Sunday (Sept. 3) at the age of 67.

Walter Becker was my friend, my writing partner and my bandmate since we met as students at Bard College in 1967. We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a mouldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm.

We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties), W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago blues.

Walter had a very rough childhood - I’ll spare you the details. Luckily, he was smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter. He was cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny. Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art. He used to write letters (never meant to be sent) in my wife Libby’s singular voice that made the three of us collapse with laughter.

His habits got the best of him by the end of the seventies, and we lost touch for a while. In the eighties, when I was putting together the NY Rock and Soul Review with Libby, we hooked up again, revived the Steely Dan concept and developed another terrific band.

I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band.

Argentine political prisoner Milagro Sala transferred to house arrest following IACHR ruling

Argentine indigenous activist Milagro Sala, whose imprisonment without charges 19 months ago has been ruled arbitrary by numerous international bodies, has been transferred to house arrest.

The transfer comes over a month after a July 28 ruling by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordering Argentina to comply with a formal UN request to release Sala from prison.

Despite an August 12 deadline, local courts did not order her transfer until August 16.

Jujuy Province Governor Gerardo Morales, who ordered Sala's detention, initially resisted the ruling. He accused the IACHR of being "controlled by leftists" - a charge which drew immediate comparisons to the rhetoric used by Argentina's last dictatorship against a 1979 IACHR fact-finding mission that verified that thousands of disappeared at the hands of the regime.

Half-built house

Sala was not transferred to her home in San Salvador de Jujuy (the provincial capital); but instead to a halfway house in El Carmen, a small town 15 mi to the south.

The house, however, was an abandoned property lacking doors, windows, most basic amenities, or connections to public utilities. Following Governor Morales' refusal to fund improvements, private donations were raised for its refurbishment.

Sala was greeted by her husband, journalist Raúl Noro, who was himself detained for four months without charges last year after leading a protest calling for her release.

She made an appeal for other political prisoners and for Santiago Maldonado, a 28 year-old activist who was detained by federal forces on August 1 and has not been seen since.

The Sala case

Sala, now 53, was ordered arrested on January 16, 2016, by Governor Morales on unsubstantiated charges of “inciting violence” — a charge that was later dropped.

She was charged nearly a year later with embezzlement, extortion, and conspiracy related to government earmarks for housing projects managed by the Túpac Amaru Association and related charges.

Critics note that prosecutors have offered no proof to substantiate charges, relying only on testimony from individuals including an illiterate man who was later awarded a public contract and an ex-convict who was released despite serving a sentence for murder.

Citing lack of evidence and serious irregularities such as the use of bribed witnesses, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled on October 21, 2016, that Sala's detention is in fact arbitrary, and urged President Mauricio Macri (a close ally of Morales) to release her immediately. The IACHR did likewise on December 4.

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.diarioregistrado.com%2Fsociedad-%2Ftrasladaron-a-milagro-sala-para-cumplir-la-detencion-domiciliaria_a59a8613a642ff2539677fb40&edit-text=

Milagro Sala being transferred to house arrest. Her 19-month detention has been ruled arbitrary by the UN and the IACHR.

Where was Obama during Hurricane Katrina? He definitely wasn't playing golf.

Lately, it seems like every time a news story comes up, so do unsubstantiated rumors — and thanks to both bots and retweets, those rumors can often make it further than the real news does. On Tuesday, one such rumor went viral, with bots responding to any criticism of President Trump's response to Hurricane Harvey with: "Well, where was Obama during Hurricane Katrina?"

The question usually came with a derogatory comment or two about President Obama being out golfing while the crisis devastated New Orleans.

In August 2005, Obama was still just a senator from Illinois. Katrina swept the country a good three years before Obama was sworn into office for the first time in 2009.

The man leading the country at that point was President George W. Bush, and his response to Katrina was so badly received that one Vanity Fair writer called the hurricane "the flood that sunk George W. Bush."

And guess what? Despite not being president, he still wasn't out golfing or on vacation. At that time, he went out to meet Katrina evacuees in Houston, Texas. Afterwards, he spoke frankly about the federal response to the hurricane.

So no, once more: Obama was not president during Hurricane Katrina. Nor was he golfing. Bush was president. It might seem like an easy fact that doesn't need to be repeated, but it does. Because the thing is, bots may be the ones mainly spreading this fake information online, but real people are reading it and accepting it as truth.

In fact, one 2013 poll found that a shocking 29% of Louisiana Republicans believed Obama was responsible for the federal response to Katrina, according to HuffPost.

That's a dangerous amount of people who have one really key fact entirely wrong, and as one Twitter user put it: "That's how propaganda starts."

At: https://www.romper.com/p/where-was-obama-during-hurricane-katrina-he-definitely-wasnt-playing-golf-guys-79818

Joel Osteen refuses to open his megachurch to hurricane victims

Joel Osteen, the “prosperity” preacher who has made a fortune grifting off the generosity of his devout flock, has endured a withering barrage of criticism from social media for his refusal to open the doors to his 16,000-capacity megachurch to help house the environmental refugees of Hurricane Harvey.

Actor Ron Perlman of Sons of Anarchy fame had a very snarky response to Osteen’s hypocrisy, rightfully calling him out for being more concerned with the cleanliness and propriety of his church than the Christian values of charity and support that he pretends to embody.

Perlman tweeted simply: “Concerned someone might track mud on the carpets?”

Joel Osteen is the very worst kind of human being and an absolute disgrace to all those who call themselves religious.

He is a financial predator of the worst kind, a pernicious agent of mammon who exploits the generosity and the faith of his flock to live a lifestyle of heretical luxury and sinful excess.

At: https://extremelifex.com/2017/08/29/joel-osteen-refuses-to-open-his-church-to-hurricane-victims-actor-ron-perelmans-response-is-great/

Osteen's Houston megachurch. No room for evacuees; plenty of room for suckers.

Rights commission urges Argentina to find missing activist

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is urging Argentina to find a missing activist last seen when police evicted a group of Mapuche Indians from lands owned by Italian clothing company Benetton.

The commission’s president said Thursday that Argentina should investigate the Aug. 1 disappearance of 28-year-old Santiago Maldonado and make its findings public.

Maldonado’s family and numerous witnesses say border police detained him when he and others were blocking a road in Chubut Province, in Patagonia. The protesters were demanding the release of a jailed Mapuche leader wanted by Chile. Authorities deny any wrongdoing.

Security Minister Patricia Bullrich faced calls to resign this week after giving false testimony in Congress and later divulging the name of a man, Ariel Garzi, who had been at the site of Maldonado's disappearance and was under witness protection.

Maldonado’s case has sparked protests in Argentina, where an estimated 30,000 people died or disappeared during the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

The IACHR has also condemned the right-wing Mauricio Macri administration for its arbitrary detention of indigenous activist Milagro Sala, whom the commission on July 28 demanded be granted house arrest after verifying she had been mistreated in prison.

At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/world/the_americas/human-rights-body-urges-argentina-to-find-missing-activist/2017/08/24/8d60803a-88f4-11e7-96a7-d178cf3524eb_story.html

Polish-Argentine writer and Holocaust survivor Jack Fuchs dies at 93

Polish-Argentine writer Jack Fuchs, who became the voice of Argentina's community of Holocaust survivors through books, columns, lectures, and interviews, died Friday in Buenos Aires. He was 93.

Born Yankele Fuks, the second of four brothers in a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland, in 1924, his otherwise happy childhood was turned upside down by the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. His family, like most of Łódź's Jews, were banished to a designated ghetto in 1940, and in August 1944 he and his family were deported to Auschwitz.

Selected by his Nazi captors to work in Dachau, he never saw his family again.

"On May 8, 1945, the horror came to an end," Fuchs recalled. "I remember the feeling as we got off the train the Nazis had put us in to make sure no witnesses remained alive. Allied planes had bombed the train, and I felt I had died."

"I walked through the Bavarian countryside and fell from exhaustion in a farm. For days a German family fed me, and then took me to the Allied hospital in Saint Ottilien Monastery. That's how I spent the end of the war. I had lost everyone at Auschwitz, and was alive - despite being sentenced to die like millions of other people."

Fuchs emigrated to the United States in 1946, and in 1963 to Argentina - home to Latin America's largest Jewish community. He settled in Buenos Aires, married a woman from France, and together ran a small garment mill. For Fuchs, the demanding nature of the business was also a way to bury wartime memories.

"I could only think of how to start over," he said. "You cannot live with pain. Nature itself helps you by creating a filter. One does not commit to remember or forget; you simply go on."

Long reluctant to speak of the Holocaust even with family members, Fuchs was interviewed on the subject by the Steven Spielberg Foundation in 1993. The experience encouraged him to share his memories with the broader public, and he quickly became a favorite in lecture and interview circuits in universities and other institutions across Argentina.

Fuchs authored numerous columns for the left-leaning Buenos Aires daily Página/12, authored two books - Time to Remember (1995) and Dilemmas of Memory (2006) - and was the subject of a 2012 documentary, The Tree on the Wall. He was named an Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires in 2010.

"The end of the war also meant trying to understand man's war against himself," he once noted. "That's the war behind all the others."

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pagina12.com.ar%2F58981-la-ultima-muerte-de-jack-fuchs&edit-text=

Jack Fuchs, 1924-2017.