Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A former Troup County commissioner once called a prolific collector of child pornography will have a chance to spend the rest of his 1,000-year prison sentence on parole.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles released Peter Mallory on parole May 27, three weeks after an appeals court found the sentence for Mallory’s 2012 conviction was appropriate. District Attorney Herb Cranford said he opposed the decision “but was powerless to stop it.”

Cranford on Tuesday released a statement explaining his opposition after he said several members of the Troup County community expressed concern over Mallory’s release. Mallory, 72, a former owner of LaGrange television station WCAG-TV, was convicted of 60 counts of sexual exploitation of children, three counts of invasion of privacy and one count of tampering with evidence in December 2012 after a three-week trial.

Read more: https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/georgia-man-sentenced-000-years-for-child-porn-gets-parole/Uie7PYeixE4bTkt9nCZJvM/

Source: ARS Technica

On Friday morning, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that he had selected Kathy Lueders to serve as the space agency's new chief of human spaceflight. In this position, she will help set human spaceflight policy and implement it across the agency. Her top mandate will be getting humans to the Moon by 2024, or soon thereafter.

“Kathy gives us the extraordinary experience and passion we need to continue to move forward with Artemis and our goal of landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024,” Bridenstine said. "Kathy’s the right person to extend the space economy to the lunar vicinity and achieve the ambitious goals we’ve been given.”

As program manager for Commercial Crew—which recently saw SpaceX launch NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station—Lueders has led the one big-ticket program for the space agency that has delivered for Bridenstine. Other high-profile programs, including the Space Launch System rocket and James Webb Space Telescope, have continued to experience delays.

Several sources indicated that this hire is consistent with Bridenstine's view that commercial space companies will play an increasingly important role in human space exploration going forward. Bridenstine has been pushing NASA to do more of its bidding on the basis of fixed price contracts and favoring bidders that also invest in their own hardware and seek to sell their spaceflight services to customers other than NASA.


Read more: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/nasas-new-chief-of-human-spaceflight-has-a-commercial-background/

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Solid choice imo.

Source: Physics World

NASA’s troubled space telescope, WFIRST, has been renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in honour of NASA’s former chief of astronomy.

The telescope has had a difficult existence so far, having twice been given zero funding by the Trump administration only for the US Congress to reinstate its budget.

In March this year, NASA approved construction of the $4bn space telescope, and the naming of the Roman Space Telescope has now cemented NASA’s commitment to the project, which ranked highest for astrophysics at the last US National Academy of Science Decadal Survey.

...

Astronomer Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018) studied astronomy at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and in 1949 completed a PhD at the University of Chicago, where she worked at the Yerkes Observatory. She joined NASA in 1958, where she became one of the chief architects of NASA’s space telescope programme.

Read more: https://physicsworld.com/a/planned-nasa-space-telescope-renamed-after-astronomer-nancy-grace-roman/

Source: Reuters

U.S. authorities are not yet seeing spikes in coronavirus cases in places that are reopening but it was still too early to determine such trends, health secretary Alex Azar said on Sunday.

“We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases,” Azar said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed.”

However, Azar said identifying and reporting new cases takes time. A critical part of reopening will be surveillance of flu-like symptoms in the population and other hospital admissions data, as well as testing of asymptomatic individuals, he said.

“It’s still early days,” Azar cautioned in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He said data will take some time to come in from states that reopened early such as Georgia and Florida.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-idUSKBN22T0HN

Source: CNN

Police officer told homeowner he could contact Ahmaud Arbery shooting suspect for help with potential trespassers, text message shows
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A text message obtained by CNN shows a Glynn County police officer told the owner of a home under construction near the Georgia coast that he could contact Gregory McMichael for help with potential trespassers seen in surveillance video from his property.

Months later, Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, would be arrested for the February 23 fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging through the neighborhood and, according to attorneys for Arbery's family, seen in surveillance footage from the property that day.

Elizabeth Graddy, an attorney for the homeowner, Larry English, said the text exchange occurred on December 20, 2019. In it, English sends a video clip from his surveillance camera to the police officer. The officer responded, telling English that one of English's neighbors is Gregory McMichael, a retired police officer and retired investigator in the local district attorney's office.

McMichael "said please call him day or night when you get action on your camera," the officer wrote in his text message to English.


Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/16/us/ahmaud-arbery-text-message/index.html

Source: Stars and Stripes

Ronald Shurer, the Green Beret medic awarded the Medal of Honor for aiding the wounded during a six-hour firefight in Afghanistan in 2008, died of lung cancer Thursday. He was 41.

His death was announced by the U.S. Secret Service, for whom Shurer had worked since retiring from the Army in 2009.

“Today, we lost an American Hero: Husband, Father, Son, Medal of Honor Recipient — Special Agent Ronald J. Shurer II,” the Secret Service said in a tweet. “From a grateful Nation and Agency — your memory and legacy will live on forever.”

Shurer was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in 2017 and had chronicled his treatment and hospitalization on Instagram.

Read more: https://www.stripes.com/news/us/medal-of-honor-recipient-ronald-shurer-dies-after-lengthy-struggle-with-lung-cancer-1.629830

Source: Gizmodo

A large, out-of-control piece of space debris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean yesterday, passing over much of the United States.

China launched the the Long March 5B rocket on May 5 from the Wenchang launch site in order to deploy a test model of its upcoming crew capsule. After a week in orbit, the nearly 18-metric-ton core stage re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the largest piece of uncontrolled space debris to re-enter the atmosphere since 1991, as Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell noted on Twitter.

After the launch, the rocket began a week-long orbit. The U.S. military soon started tracking the rocket’s core stage. After a trajectory that took it over heavily populated areas such as New York and Los Angeles, the rocket hit the ocean off the coast of West Africa. Uncontrolled reentries and eventual crash sites are difficult to model, since scientists don’t fully understand the complex dynamics of the upper atmosphere, Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office, said in a 2018 statement. Such debris can travel vast distances in short stretches of time.

The 176-foot Long March 5B rocket is designed to bring large payloads, like components of China’s upcoming space station, into orbit. This mission deployed a prototype crew capsule that would be used to bring astronauts into orbit, as well as an experimental cargo return capsule, which malfunctioned as it returned into the atmosphere, reports Spaceflight Now.

Read more: https://gizmodo.com/hunk-of-chinese-rocket-falls-to-earth-as-uncontrolled-s-1843418082

Source: The Hill

NBC "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd apologized on Tuesday for airing a clip Sunday of Attorney General William Barr's interview with CBS reporter Katherine Herridge, which Todd acknowledged was misleading because of an edit that took Barr's remarks out of context.

Todd and "Meet the Press" had come under heavy criticism for airing the clip, which made it appear that Barr had decided to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn for political reasons.

After the clip from the May 7 CBC interview aired, Todd said that Barr "didn't make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job."

...

He said the Barr's full answer would have put in context the portion of the interview that "Meet the Press" did air.

"Had I seen that part, I would not have framed the conversation the way I did," he said. "And I am obviously very sorry for that mistake and we strive to do better going forward.”

Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/497458-chuck-todd-apologizes-for-airing-edited-william-barr-clip

Source: Law & Crime

Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas each penned opinions on Thursday in United States v. Sineneng-Smith bashing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for an “abuse of discretion.”

The Supreme Court unanimously held that the Ninth Circuit “panel’s drastic departure from the principle of party presentation” in the case of immigration consultant Evelyn Sineneng-Smith “constituted an abuse of discretion.” Ginsburg penned the opinion for the court; Thomas filed a concurring opinion that took things a step further.

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The Court called the Ninth Circuit‘s hijacking of the case a “radical transformation” that went “well beyond the pale.”

Sineneng-Smith is a U.S. citizen who worked as an immigration consultant in San Jose, California for almost 20 years; in her practice, she helped non-citizens navigate the American immigration system. Sineneng-Smith was charged in 2010 in connection with helping three undocumented workers and their employers complete applications for employment-based lawful permanent residence. Among the charges were three felony counts under 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv), for Sineneng-Smith’s use of “dangerous words,” and for “words and … deeds” aimed at “encourag[ing] or induc[ing] an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States.” The § 1324 charges were the focus of the ensuing appeal, not the tax fraud charges Sineneng-Smith pleaded guilty to committing nor the mail fraud counts. Even though there was already sufficient evidence to support the fraud conviction, the government chose to bring criminal charges based on immigration advocacy generally.

Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/justices-ginsburg-and-thomas-bash-9th-circuit-for-abuse-of-discretion-in-immigration-consultant-case/

Source: The Hill

A Georgia prosecutor on Tuesday said he would present the case of a man who was shot by a father and son earlier this year to a grand jury for review.

The case involves the death of Ahmaud Arbery, 25, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed on Feb. 23 in Brunswick, Ga., after Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael followed him in their truck. The McMichaels have claimed they believed Arbery to be a burglar, while an attorney for Arbery’s family said he was in the neighborhood jogging.

"I am of the opinion that the case should be presented to the grand jury of Glynn County for consideration of criminal charges against those involved in the death of Mr. Arbery," District Attorney (DA) Thomas Durden said Tuesday, according to NBC News.

...

Durden is the district attorney of Hinesville, about 70 miles from where the incident occurred. He is the third prosecutor to take up the case after two others recused themselves over potential conflicts of interest, including the DA of Brunswick, the jurisdiction where the incident occurred and where Gregory McMichael is a longtime investigator for the DA's office. Under lockdown orders in Georgia, courts are barred from empaneling either standard trial juries or grand juries through at least June 12.

Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/496248-georgia-district-attorney-vows-grand-jury-review-of-shooting-of