Archives for April 2021

Supreme Court asked to give access to secretive court’s work

WASHINGTON (AP) — Civil liberties groups are asking the Supreme Court to give the public access to opinions of the secretive court that reviews bulk email collection, warrantless internet searches and other government surveillance programs.

The groups say in an appeal filed with the high court Monday that the public has a constitutional right to see significant opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They also argue that federal courts, not the executive branch, should decide when opinions that potentially affect the privacy of millions of Americans should be made public.

The appeal was filed by Theodore Olson, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. Olson is on the Knight institute’s board and was the Bush administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer as the FISA court’s role was expanded after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“You’re talking about judicial decisions here that may affect millions of people. The public needs to know the outlines of what those decisions are and how far they go,” Olson said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Because of my experience with it, I know that government, with the best of intentions, will tend to err on the side of keeping everything secret.”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established in 1978 to receive applications from the FBI to eavesdrop on people it suspects of being agents of a foreign power, such as potential spies or terrorists. After Sept. 11, Congress expanded the court’s role to consider broad surveillance programs.

In recent decisions, judges ruled that opinions sought by the groups couldn’t be made public, even in censored form, and that they didn’t even have the authority to consider releasing the opinions.

Legislation adopted in 2015 includes a provision that requires the government to consider releasing significant FISA court opinions. But the law doesn’t apply to opinions written before it was enacted and leaves the review process entirely to the executive branch.

The high-court appeal says the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press demands greater access.

The Justice Department had no comment on the filing Monday. Its response is due at the court by late May.

The ACLU has been seeking the FISA court opinions for years, and the current case dates to 2016.

“These opinions and orders address, among other matters, the lawfulness of bulk email searches, the government’s authority to surreptitiously install malware on Americans’ computers, and the use of warrantless internet surveillance for cybersecurity purposes,” the appeal says.

Today in History | Federal News Network

Today in History

Today is Tuesday, April 20, the 110th day of 2021. There are 255 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On April 20, 1999, the Columbine High School massacre took place in Colorado as two students shot and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives.

On this date:

In 1812, the fourth vice president of the United States, George Clinton, died in Washington at age 72, becoming the first vice president to die while in office.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation admitting West Virginia to the Union, effective in 60 days (on June 20, 1863).

In 1914, the Ludlow Massacre took place when the Colorado National Guard opened fire on a tent colony of striking miners; about 20 (accounts vary) strikers, women and children died.

In 1916, the Chicago Cubs played their first game at Wrigley Field (then known as Weeghman Park); the Cubs defeated the Cincinnati Reds 7-6.

In 1938, “Olympia,” Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, was first shown in Nazi Germany.

In 1945, during World War II, allied forces took control of the German cities of Nuremberg and Stuttgart.

In 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

In 1972, Apollo 16′s lunar module, carrying astronauts John W. Young and Charles M. Duke Jr., landed on the moon.

In 1986, following an absence of six decades, Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz performed in the Soviet Union to a packed audience at the Grand Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.

In 1988, gunmen who had hijacked a Kuwait Airways jumbo jet were allowed safe passage out of Algeria under an agreement that freed the remaining 31 hostages and ended a 15-day siege in which two passengers were slain.

In 2003, U.S. Army forces took control of Baghdad from the Marines in a changing of the guard that thinned the military presence in the capital.

In 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, leased by BP, killed 11 workers and caused a blow-out that began spewing an estimated 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. (The well was finally capped nearly three months later.)

Ten years ago: Two Western photojournalists, including Oscar-nominated film director Tim Hetherington, were killed in the besieged Libyan city of Misrata while covering battles between rebels and government forces. The U.S. government announced new protections for air travelers when airlines lose their bags, bump them off flights or hold them on the runway for hours.

Five years ago: Five former New Orleans police officers pleaded guilty to lesser charges in the deadly shootings on a bridge in the days following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that Harriet Tubman, an African-American abolitionist born into slavery, would be the new face on the $20 bill, replacing President Andrew Jackson. (The redesign of the bill was delayed during the administration of President Donald Trump, who had called the move “pure political correctness”; the effort was resumed by the Biden administration.) Pro wrestler Chyna (Joan Marie Laurer) was found dead in her Redondo Beach, California, apartment; she was 46.

One year ago: Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp announced plans to restart the state’s economy by lifting some coronavirus restrictions before the end of the week; the plan would allow gyms, hair salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors to reopen as long as owners follow strict requirements. Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top authority on infectious diseases, warned again that resuming business too soon risked a fresh spike in virus infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said reports of accidental poisonings from cleaners and disinfectants were up about 20 percent in the first three months of the year; researchers believed it was related to the coronavirus epidemic.

Today’s Birthdays: Actor Leslie Phillips is 97. Former Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., is 85. Actor George Takei is 84. Singer Johnny Tillotson is 83. Actor Ryan O’Neal is 80. Bluegrass singer-musician Doyle Lawson (Quicksilver) is 77. Actor Judith O’Dea is 76. Rock musician Craig Frost (Grand Funk; Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band) is 73. Actor Gregory Itzin (iht-zihn) is 73. Actor Jessica Lange is 72. Actor Veronica Cartwright is 72. Actor Clint Howard is 62. Actor Crispin Glover is 57. Actor Andy Serkis is 57. Olympic silver medal figure skater Rosalynn Sumners is 57. Actor William deVry is 53. Country singer Wade Hayes is 52. Actor Shemar Moore is 51. Actor Carmen Electra is 49. Reggae singer Stephen Marley is 49. Rock musician Marty Crandall is 46. Actor Joey Lawrence is 45. Country musician Clay Cook (Zac Brown Band) is 43. Actor Clayne Crawford is 43. Actor Tim Jo is 37. Actor Carlos Valdes (TV: “The Flash”) is 32.

NASA’s Mars helicopter takes flight, 1st for another planet

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s experimental helicopter Ingenuity rose into the thin air above the dusty red surface of Mars on Monday, achieving the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet.

The triumph was hailed as a Wright brothers moment. The mini 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) copter even carried a bit of wing fabric from the Wright Flyer that made similar history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

It was a brief hop — just 39 seconds and 10 feet (3 meters) — but accomplished all the major milestones.

“Goosebumps. It looks just the way we had tested,” project manager MiMi Aung said as she watched the flight video during a later briefing. “Absolutely beautiful flight. I don’t think I can ever stop watching it over and over again.”

Flight controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California declared success after receiving the data and images via the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity hitched a ride to Mars on Perseverance, clinging to the rover’s belly when it touched down in an ancient river delta in February.

The $85 million helicopter demo was considered high risk, yet high reward.

Scientists cheered the news from around the world, even from space, and the White House offered its congratulations.

“A whole new way to explore the alien terrain in our solar system is now at our disposal,” Nottingham Trent University astronomer Daniel Brown said from England.

This first test flight — with more to come by Ingenuity, the next as soon as Thursday — holds great promise, Brown noted. Future helicopters could serve as scouts for rovers, and eventually astronauts, in difficult, dangerous places.

Ingenuity has provided a third dimension to planetary exploration and ”freed us from the surface now forever,” said JPL director, Michael Watkins.

Ground controllers had to wait more than three excruciating hours before learning whether the preprogrammed flight had succeeded 178 million miles (287 million kilometers) away. The first attempt had been delayed a week because of a software error.

When the news finally came, the operations center filled with applause, cheers and laughter. More followed when the first black and white photo from Ingenuity appeared, showing the helicopter’s shadow as it hovered above the surface of Mars.

“The shadow of greatness, #MarsHelicopter first flight on another world complete!” NASA astronaut Victor Glover tweeted from the International Space Station.

Next came stunning color video of the copter’s clean landing, taken by Perseverance, “the best host little Ingenuity could ever hope for,” Aung said in thanking everyone.

The helicopter hovered for 30 seconds at its intended altitude of 10 feet (3 meters), and spent 39 seconds airborne, more than three times longer than the first successful flight of the Wright Flyer, which lasted a mere 12 seconds on Dec. 17, 1903.

To accomplish all this, the helicopter’s twin, counter-rotating rotor blades needed to spin at 2,500 revolutions per minute — five times faster than on Earth. With an atmosphere just 1% the density of Earth’s, engineers had to build a helicopter light enough — with blades spinning fast enough — to generate this otherworldly lift. The Martian wind was relatively gentle Monday: between 4 mph and 14 mph (7 kph to 22 kph).

More than six years in the making, Ingenuity is just 19 inches (49 centimeters) tall, a spindly four-legged chopper. Its fuselage, containing all the batteries, heaters and sensors, is the size of a tissue box. The carbon-fiber, foam-filled rotors are the biggest pieces: Each pair stretches 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip to tip.

Ingenuity also had to be sturdy enough to withstand the Martian wind, and is topped with a solar panel for recharging the batteries, crucial for surviving the minus-130 degree Fahrenheit (minus-90 degree-Celsius) Martian nights.

NASA chose a flat, relatively rock-free patch for Ingenuity’s airfield. Following Monday’s success, NASA named the area for the Wright brothers.

“While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and … million miles of space, they now will forever be linked,” NASA’s science missions chief Thomas Zurbuchen announced.

The little chopper with a giant job attracted attention from the moment it launched with Perseverance last July. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger joined in the fun, rooting for Ingenuity over the weekend. “Get to the chopper!” he shouted in a tweeted video, a line from his 1987 sci-fi film “Predator.”

Up to five increasingly ambitious flights are planned, and they could lead the way to a fleet of Martian drones in decades to come, providing aerial views, transporting packages and serving as lookouts for human crews. On Earth, the technology could enable helicopters to reach new heights, doing things like more easily navigating the Himalayas.

Ingenuity’s team has until the beginning of May to complete the test flights so that the rover can get on with its main mission: collecting rock samples that could hold evidence of past Martian life, for return to Earth a decade from now.

The team plans to test the helicopter’s limits, possibly even wrecking the craft, leaving it to rest in place forever, having sent its data back home.

Until then, Perseverance will keep tabs on Ingenuity. Flight engineers affectionately call them Percy and Ginny.

“Big sister’s watching,” said Malin Space Science Systems’ Elsa Jensen, the rover’s lead camera operator.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Japanese businessmen brighten makeup industry amid pandemic

TOKYO (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic has pushed many businesses in Japan to the edge of financial ruin, but Takumi Tezuka, who owns a makeup and hair salon for men in Tokyo, has seen his customer base expand.

Japanese businessmen in their 40s, 50s and 60s who had little interest in cosmetics before the pandemic are increasingly visiting Tezuka’s salon, Ikemen-Works, hoping for a better look in online meetings.

A large personal care company, Shiseido, says one of its male makeup lines has seen double-digit growth during the pandemic. Company officials give a similar reason: Men, confronted with the sight of their faces repeatedly during online meetings, want to improve what they see.

“Before, most of our customers were males in their teens and 20s, but thanks to remote work we now have more businessmen,” said Tezuka. Unlike many younger men, who want a drastic makeover, older businessmen want to show a slightly better version of themselves by using makeup, he said.

“Men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s come to our salon because they feel they must wear makeup,” he said. Tezuka said that’s because businessmen who work from home have more opportunities to see their faces during online meetings and have thus started to care more about their looks.

The men’s beauty industry has been expanding in Japan. According to research company Fuji Keizai Group, the men’s cosmetic market grew from about 600 billion yen ($5.5 billion) to an estimated 623 billion yen ($5.7 billion) from 2018 to 2019.

Tezuka said older businessmen tend to spend more money and visit more regularly than those in their 20s and 30s.

One customer, Yoshihiro Kamichi, 44, recently came to Tezuka’s salon to buy makeup for the first time.

Kamichi chose makeup for his eyelids and had foundation applied to his face. A makeup artist carefully trimmed his eyebrows and contoured his nose and face with brown shadow power.

“Who is this person? I was surprised at how different I look,” Kamichi said while looking at himself in the mirror.

Shiseido, one of the world’s oldest cosmetics companies, released free online makeup filters last month that let male users look like they are wearing men’s beauty products such as blemish balms and foundation.

After Shiseido released makeup filters for women for online meetings like Zoom last year, comments from businessmen flooded in to its social media accounts requesting filters for men.

Uno, Shiseido’s men’s care brand, is now expanding its target age for cosmetics from men in their early 20s to men in their 40s.

“I think the coronavirus has created a certain condition that urges businessmen to be more aware of their skin condition,” said Uno’s assistant branding manager, Yoshiyuki Matsuo. “We have seen double-digit growth even amid the pandemic.”

Matsuo wouldn’t provide more details about Uno’s growth.

To make cosmetics accessible to men, Japanese cosmetics store @Cosme Tokyo created an entire section dedicated to male and unisex makeup items last year at their newly opened shop in front of Harajuku Station, a trendy Tokyo area.

One recent customer, Kenta Yamashita, 24, a hairdresser, has been using cosmetics daily.

“There are men who cannot buy cosmetic products because it’s hard for them to casually drop in. I think it’s nice we now have this section,” Yamashita said. “But I wish they would make the section bigger so that men can more casually drop in.”

Winners of $20M contest make concrete to trap carbon dioxide

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Organizers of a $20 million contest to develop products from greenhouse gas that flows from power plants announced two winners Monday ahead of launching a similar but much bigger competition backed by Elon Musk.

Both winners made concrete that trapped carbon dioxide, keeping it out of the atmosphere, where it can contribute to climate change. Production of cement, concrete’s key ingredient, accounts for 7% of global emissions of the greenhouse gas, said Marcius Extavour, XPRIZE vice president of climate and energy.

“So it’s not surprising that the winning teams focused on reducing emissions associated with concrete, which will be a game-changer for global decarbonization,” he said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Musk, the electric car and space entrepreneur, has pledged $100 million for researchers who can show how to trap huge volumes of carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere and store the gas permanently. That competition will kick off Thursday, which is Earth Day.

“We want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level. Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence,” Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said in February.

Both contests are organized by XPRIZE, which encourages new technology by putting up prize money for demonstrating achievements. Most famously, Mojave Aerospace Ventures won a $10 million XPRIZE in 2004 by being first to fly a privately funded, reusable rocket plane into space multiple times.

The $20 million prize announced Monday had two parts: One at a coal-fired power plant in Wyoming and the other at a gas-fired power plant in Alberta, Canada. The contest focused on using carbon dioxide nabbed from the plants’ smokestacks, and the winners showed they can trap the emissions in cement, making stronger concrete in some cases.

The winner at the Wyoming plant, Los Angeles-based CarbonBuilt, used carbon dioxide to cure concrete, trapping it in a process that also emitted less of the greenhouse gas compared with traditional cement production, according to XPRIZE.

The winner in Alberta was CarbonCure Technologies, based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which showed it can inject carbon dioxide into water used to wash out cement trucks and mixers at a cement plant, resulting in a mix that makes stronger concrete, according to XPRIZE.

The two winners will split $15 million. Ten finalists split the other $5 million in 2018.

The U.S. portion of the contest took place at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, a facility at a coal-fired power plant near the city of Gillette that hosts research into ways to trap and use carbon dioxide in real-world scenarios.

Gov. Mark Gordon has often touted the research center as an example of Wyoming’s interest in finding solutions to climate change — potentially preserving the state’s declining coal industry in the process.

U.S. coal production has declined by half over the last 15 years or so as utilities get more electricity from renewables and cheaper natural gas. About 40% of U.S. coal comes from Wyoming, more than any other state by far.

The state covered three-quarters of the $20 million cost of the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, which opened in 2018.

“Managing carbon, there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all,” said Jason Begger, the center’s managing director. “A cement plant might not make a lot of sense at a power plant in Wyoming, but it might make a heck of a lot of sense in Japan.”

Wyoming officials have expressed interest in participating in the Musk-funded XPRIZE contest but hasn’t heard back from him, Gordon spokesman Michael Pearlman said.

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Follow Mead Gruver at https://twitter.com/meadgruver.

Archives for April 2021

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