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WASHINGTON, D.C., October 12, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – In what pro-lifers are attributing to the hand of God, a Washington D.C. court has dismissed charges against four pro-lifers arrested in a July Red Rose Rescue. The pro-life supporters and their attorney with Life Legal Defense Foundation (LLDF) were prepared for trial, when the charges of criminal trespass were promptly and unexpectedly dismissed due to there being no witnesses for the prosecution. “Great victory in court today,” Citizens for a Pro-life Society (CPLS) Director Monica Migliorino Miller told supporters via email Thursday. “Charges dismissed against the 4 Red Rose Rescuers – Except...

Pluto is a dwarf planet. A dwarf planet travels around, or orbits, the sun just like other planets. But it is much smaller. Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. He was an astronomer from the United States. An astronomer is a scientist who studies stars and other objects in space. Venetia Burney named Pluto that same year. She was an 11-year-old girl from England. Pluto is not very big. It is only half as wide as the United States. Pluto is smaller than Earth's moon. This dwarf planet takes 248 Earth years to go around the sun. If you lived...

Democrat Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) has suggested the Senate introduce a resolution urging the Biden administration to pull back its federal mask mandate, concluding that agencies are sometimes “a little too precautionary.” President Joe Biden took executive action immediately after assuming office, requiring individuals to wear masks for modes of international and domestic travel, including airports, commercial aircraft, trains, ferries, bus services, and “forms of public transportation as defined in section 5302 of title 49, United States Code.” On January 29, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) detailed an order “requiring the wearing of masks by people on...

People walk past the building that houses the offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London, March 20, 2018. Share WASHINGTON — Long before its controversial roles in the 2016 Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election, Cambridge Analytica influenced elections in Africa. The data mining company, under fire for its alleged use of 50 million Facebook accounts to shape campaign messages for then-candidate Donald Trump, also played a role in elections in Kenya and Nigeria, according to new reports. The company's first involvement in Africa dates to the general election in South Africa in 1994. That election marked the end of...

Explanation: What do the moons of Pluto look like? Before a decade ago, only the largest moon Charon was known, but never imaged. As the robotic New Horizons spacecraft was prepared and launched, other moons were identified on Hubble images but remained only specks of light. Finally, this past summer, New Horizons swept right past Pluto, photographed Pluto and Charon in detail, and took the best images of Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra that it could. The featured image composite shows the results -- each moon is seen to have a distinct shape, while underlying complexity is only hinted. Even...

This portrait of Pluto is in enhanced color, to illustrate differences in the composition and texture of Pluto's surface. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************ University of Maryland astronomers Silvia Protopapa and Douglas Hamilton are among the authors of the first published paper from the New Horizons flyby, which appears in the Oct. 16, 2015 issue of the journal Science. Protopapa helped map the composition of Pluto's surface and locate ices on it. Hamilton helped confirm the shapes, sizes and unique rotations of two of Pluto's moons and the finding that no other moons appear to orbit Pluto. The findings will help scientists...

In accordance with IAU guidelines concerning the naming of satellites in the Solar System, the moon was named Nix. Derived from Greek mythology, Nix is the goddess of darkness and night, the mother of Charon and the ferryman of Hades (the Greek equivalent of Pluto) who brought the souls of the dead to the underworld. The name was officially announced on June 21st, 2006, in an IAU Circular, where the designation “Pluto II” is also given. The initials N and H (for Nix and Hydra) were also a deliberate reference to the New Horizons mission, which would be conducting a...

Nix looks like a strawberry-flavored jelly bean, but that reddish region with its vaguely bulls-eye shape hints at a possible crater on this 26 miles (42 km) long by 22 miles (36 km) wide moon. Hydra, which measures 34 x 25 miles (55 x 40 km), displays two large craters, one tilted to face the Sun (top) and the other almost fully in shadow. Differences in brightness across Hydra suggest differences in surface composition. Now we’ve seen three of Pluto’ family of five satellites. Expect images of Pluto’s most recently discovered moons, Styx and Kerberos, to be transmitted to Earth...

Edging within 7,800 miles of its surface at 7:49 a.m. EDT, the spacecraft’s long-range telescopic camera will resolve features as small as 230 feet (70 meters). Fourteen minutes later, it will zip within 17,930 miles of Charon as well as image Pluto’s four smaller satellites — Hydra, Styx, Nix and Kerberos. Graphic showing New Horizons’ busy schedule before and during the flyby. Credit: NASA fter zooming past, the craft will turn to photograph Pluto eclipsing the Sun as it looks for the faint glow of rings or dust sheets illuminated by backlight. At the same time, sunlight reflecting off Charon...

The dwarf planet Pluto and its system of five moons are about as mysterious as the underworld of antiquity that inspired their names. ... “We are still baffled by how the system formed,” says study co-author Mark Showalter, a senior research scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. “I think everyone believes that, at some point in the distant past, a large object bashed into ‘proto-Pluto’ and the moons formed out of the debris cloud. However, after that point in the story, details get very sketchy.” Now, analysis of data collected from the Hubble Space Telescope following the...

It's not exactly a clean shot, but it's certainly a timely one: 85 years to the day after Pluto's discovery, NASA has released fresh images from New Horizons that show two of its smaller moons. The long-exposure images, which were taken between Jan. 27 and Feb. 8 from a distance of 125 to 115 million miles, show Hydra and Nix -- moons too small to show up in previous shots. Hydra is enclosed in a yellow diamond with Nix in orange. The image on the right has been specially processed to reduce the center glare, a result of the over-exposure...

The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for...

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — A California wind farm will become the first in the nation to avoid prosecution if eagles are injured or die when they run into the giant turning blades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday. The Shiloh IV Wind Project LLC, 60 miles east of San Francisco, will receive a special permit allowing up to five golden eagles to be accidentally killed over five years. Previously, such a violation could potentially draw criminal charges and discourage private investment in wind farms known for catching birds in their rotors. The permit will require the facility to...

WASHINGTON — Senate Finance Committee Democrats have rejected a GOP amendment that would have required a health overhaul bill to be available online for 72 hours before the committee votes. Republicans argued that transparency is an Obama administration goal. They also noted that their constituents are demanding that they read bills before voting. Democrats said it was a delay tactic that could have postponed a vote for weeks.

(IsraelNN.com) Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz (Likud) noted that the Saudis rejected that Israel be given air rights.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - King Abdullah has told Saudi editors to stop publishing pictures of women as they could make young men go astray, newspapers reported Tuesday. The king's directive, made in a meeting with local editors, caused surprise as the monarch has been regarded a quiet reformer since he took office in the ultra-conservative country last August. In recent months, newspapers have published pictures of women — always wearing the traditional Muslim headscarf — to illustrate stories with increasing regularity. Usually the stories have had to do with women's issues. The papers have also started publishing a range of...

IT directors shouldn't worry about SCO Group's latest sallies in its legal war on Linux vendors IBM Corp. and Novell Inc., says attorney Thomas Carey. It's just more posturing, or as Shakespeare said, a tale "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." In this interview, Carey explains why SCO has no case, predicts the open source legal fields of battle for 2006 and discusses SCO's claims against Novell. Carey chairs the Business Practice Group of Bromberg & Sunstein LLP, an intellectual property law practice in Boston, Mass. Carey's IT background includes a stint as a programmer for the city of...

WASHINGTON, Oct 4 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidemic. He said the military, and perhaps the National Guard, might be needed to take such a role if the feared H5N1 bird flu virus changes enough to cause widespread human infection. "If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?" Bush asked at a news conference. "It's one thing...

Associated Press (Sep 17, 05:59 AM) After voters in this caffeine capital rejected a proposed 10-cent tax on espresso drinks, cafe owners celebrated with beer, wine and - what else? - lattes. With 97 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday, 69 percent of voters opposed the tax. The initiative served a jolt of controversy to an otherwise sleepy off-year primary election. "You can't tax coffee. It just doesn't work," said coffee shop owner Jeff Babcock, celebrating the victory at a downtown espresso store. The measure would have taxed espresso drinks a dime per cup, with the revenue going to fund...

One of the Dixie Chicks is clarifying remarks she made about President George W. Bush during a concert in London earlier this week. Reporting on a Chicks' concert, the Web site for the United Kingdom paper The Guardian said singer Natalie Maines (pictured, center) told the crowd, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The singer's barb got the audience cheering, the Guardian said. In a statement on the Chicks' Web site Wednesday, Maines said, "We've been overseas for several weeks and have been reading and following the news accounts of our...