Throwing Granny under the bus, and tying the dog on top. I guess the Republicans really plan on winning Florida by cheating again.

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A prototype design for future NASA lunar landers crashed during testing on Aug. 9, destroying the test craft. The vehicle was unmanned and no injuries occurred as a result of the crash, but the vehicle, called Morpheus, was destroyed as a result of the incident. An announcement on NASA’s website stated, “During the free-flight test of the Project Morpheus vehicle on August 9, it lifted off the ground and then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight. No one was injured and the resulting fire was extinguished by Kennedy Space Center fire personnel.”

“At this point we’re still looking into the data,” NASA officials said in a statement released Thursday. “We will provide more information as we learn more through our investigation.”

NASA officials called the failure a disappointment but said the Morpheus program could continue testing with a new lander in a matter of months.

“We anticipated the potential for this type of scenario, and so we had a second vehicle in work,” said Jon Olansen, the project manager from Johnson Space Center. “We look forward to learning from what happened today and preparing ourselves for future testing.”

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Officials in east Mississippi operate a “school-to-prison pipeline” that incarcerates students for disciplinary infractions as minor as dress code violations with a policy that affects mostly black and disabled children, the U.S. Justice Department said Friday.

The Justice Department said police in the city of Meridian routinely arrest public school students without determining if there’s probable cause when the school wants to press charges for a violation. Federal authorities say the students are then denied due process in youth court and on probation. The Justice Department did not outline specific allegations of wrongdoing against the school district in a letter to state and local authorities. Instead, it appears from the letter that the problems begin once a student is arrested.

Once arrested, the youth court puts the students on probation, sometimes without proper legal representation, according to the letter. If the students are on probation, future school violations could be considered a probation violation that requires them “to serve any suspensions from school incarcerated in the juvenile detention center,” the department said.

That means if a student is on probation and then gets suspended for a minor infraction like “dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect,” the student could have to serve that suspension in the detention center.

“The students most severely affected by these practices are black children and children with disabilities in Meridian,” the Justice Department said.

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Lendink was a hobby site put together by disabled army vet Dale Porter, who created a person-to-person e-mail request system where e-book fans could find out about lend-enabled books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and contact each other to arrange loans on titles they wanted to read.

Borrowing lend-enabled Kindle and Nook e-books is perfectly legitimate, as spelled out on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble Web sites; book e-tailers have a series of permissions in place where publishers can allow a 14-day lend of a purchased book between customers. (Amazon notes that “not all books are lendable — it is up to the publisher or rights holder to determine which titles are eligible for lending.”)

But to a few virulently righteous individuals, this was not a new model for library science, but a hotbed of peer-to-peer piracy that had to be stopped at any cost.

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In a May hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers asserted even more extreme powers – the right to disregard entirely the judge and the law. On Monday 6 August, Obama’s lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction – a profoundly important development that, as of this writing, has been scarcely reported.

In the earlier March hearing, US government lawyers had confirmed that, yes, the NDAA does give the president the power to lock up people like journalist Chris Hedges and peaceful activists like myself and other plaintiffs. Government attorneys stated on record that even war correspondents could be locked up indefinitely under the NDAA.

Judge Forrest had ruled for a temporary injunction against an unconstitutional provision in this law, after government attorneys refused to provide assurances to the court that plaintiffs and others would not be indefinitely detained for engaging in first amendment activities. At that time, twice the government has refused to define what it means to be an “associated force”, and it claimed the right to refrain from offering any clear definition of this term, or clear boundaries of power under this law.

This past week’s hearing was even more terrifying. Government attorneys again, in this hearing, presented no evidence to support their position and brought forth no witnesses. Most incredibly, Obama’s attorneys refused to assure the court, when questioned, that the NDAA’s section 1021 – the provision that permits reporters and others who have not committed crimes to be detained without trial – has not been applied by the US government anywhere in the world after Judge Forrest’s injunction. In other words, they were telling a US federal judge that they could not, or would not, state whether Obama’s government had complied with the legal injunction that she had laid down before them.

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Engineers said Friday that the Curiosity rover happened to catch a picture of its own ride crash-landing on Mars — a wink-of-an-eye serendipity that some dismissed as a statistical impossibility, but appears to have been confirmed by a thorough review of landing data.

The final seconds of Curiosity’s eight-month-plus journey to Mars called for a spacecraft to lower the rover to the surface using a “sky crane” — three ropes. The ropes were then cut, and the last of the spacecraft, known as the “descent stage,” cast itself toward the horizon. It crash-landed, on purpose, about 2,000 feet away.

And here is the first panorama of the landing site..

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Here is the formal statement I gave to Federal Police on 16 June 2012:

On a trip to visit family in Seoul in April, I was approached by a man and a woman who claimed to be North Korean defectors. They presented me with a DVD that recently came into their possession and asked me to translate it. They also asked me to post the completed film on the Internet so that it could reach a worldwide audience. I believed what I was told and an agreement was made to protect their identities (and mine).

Despite my concerns about what I was viewing when I returned home, I proceeded to translate and post the film on You Tube because of the film’s extraordinary content. I have now made public my belief that this film was never intended for a domestic audience in the DPRK. Instead, I believe that these people, who presented themselves as ‘defectors’ specifically targeted me because of my reputation as a translator and interpreter.

Furthermore, I now believe these people work for the DPRK. The fact that I have continued to translate and post the film in spite of this belief does not make me complicit in their intention to spread their ideology. I chose to keep posting this film because – regardless of who made it – I believe people should see it because of the issues it raises and I stand by my right to post it for people to share and discuss freely with each other.

And for contrast, here’s an actual propaganda film from North Korea:

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I just made a tool to transform any javascript code into an equivalent sequence of ()[]{}!+ characters. You can try it here, or grab it from github or npm. Keep on reading if you want to know how it works.