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Apr 27

NATO Confronts Turkey On Human Rights Concerns After Donald Trump Lets Them Slide

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization didn’t shy away this week from speaking out about mass arrests in Turkey, one of its member states. But the United States, also part of the organization, hasn’t responded to the crackdown.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has thrown 47,000 people in jail since last summer and has eliminated about 120,000 government jobs. Turkish police arrested 1,000 people just this week for allegedly supporting Fetullah Gulen, an exiled Turkish cleric who the government believes is behind an attempted coup that took place last July.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned Turkey Thursday about potentially unlawful arrests.

“Turkey has the right to protect itself and to prosecute those who were behind the failed coup attempt, but that has to take place based on the full respect of the rule of law,” he said. “I attach a great importance to these values myself and this is an issue we have discussed with the Turkish leadership.”

During his campaign, President Donald Trump called NATO “obsolete,” even hinting at possibly pulling out of the organization. He changed his tune in April after meeting with Stoltenberg.

Still, Trump has so far stayed mum in the face of the Turkish crackdown. Turkey remains a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, especially in light of ongoing conflict in Syria and the threat that the so-called Islamic State poses to both the U.S. and Turkey.

Trump called Erdogan to congratulate him after an April 16 referendum in the country, which vastly expanded Erdogan’s powers. If the two leaders addressed the questionable practices carried out in the lead-up to the vote, it wasn’t included in the White House’s statement about the call. They instead reinforced their joint interest in combating the Islamic State and dealing with the situation in Syria.

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Apr 27

‘Spoiling The Belly’: The Dangers Of Backstreet Abortions In Liberia

Posted in: Today's Chili

Women are dying from botched backstreet abortions in Liberia, a country where access to terminations is severely restricted. Because of the stigma associated with abortion, they often refrain from seeking out medical help until it’s too late.

Two years ago, during Liberia’s Ebola outbreak, Mamie Tarr began hemorrhaging. When she arrived at the clinic, clutching her abdomen and complaining of intense pain, health workers at first suspected Ebola. In fact, without telling her family, the 30-year-old had visited a backstreet abortionist who used a combination of herbs, chalk and a rusty syringe to terminate her five-month pregnancy.

At the time, Mamie’s husband, Edwin, was sick. “My wife saw me being carried to the Ebola treatment center as a suspected Ebola case, and she thought I was going to die,” he said. “She got scared about raising the child without me, so she spoiled her belly. Then she just closed her mouth, she said nothing, until she started bleeding.”

Edwin was released from the Ebola treatment center without ever testing positive for the virus, but Mamie died from complications of the botched abortion.

Knives and Chicken Bones

Known as “spoiling the belly” or “taking the belly,” abortion is severely restricted in Liberia. As in most African countries, it is only legal in cases of rape, incest or if a woman can prove that childbirth would pose a serious threat to her health. In such instances, written justification must be provided by at least two medical doctors, and in cases of rape or incest, police and legal investigations are required.

So every month, hundreds of desperate girls and women take matters into their own hands — or place them in the ungloved hands of clandestine providers who offer backstreet abortions from $20. Some use speculums and syringes; others resort to using knives or sharp chicken bones. Some also use country herbs, boiled and ground avocado, or chalk.

According to a 2013 study by the Clinton Health Access Initiative, 32 percent of more than 3,000 surveyed Liberian women aged between 15 and 49 said they have had an abortion. Another study across six Liberian counties concluded that at least one in 10 women had undergone an unsafe abortion, with one young woman attempting to pull out the fetus herself, using a pair of iron handcuffs.

Regina Hodges, medical coordinator of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in Liberia, saw the photographs.

“It was really terrible. The girl brought her whole intestine into the uterus,” she said.

Because Planned Parenthood must operate within the legal confines of the countries in which it works, the organization cannot provide abortions in Liberia. But like other public and private facilities in the country, it is permitted to offer post-abortion care: counseling, manual vacuum aspiration and antibiotics following cases of botched abortion, and contraception for future use.

“Some girls have permanent damage, to the point where they require surgical removal of the uterus,” said Hodges.

‘Blood Coming, Coming’

Philip*, a nurse, says he has performed about 40 secret abortions at his drugstore in the Monrovia slum of West Point, a poor community that has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Liberia. Sitting among boxes of paracetamol and diapers, he recounts the procedure, though he is scant on specific medical detail.

“I used something they call a speculum to open up the cervix,” he said. “Then I’d use another instrument, a long thing, to enter inside. I’d see if anything bloodstained would be coming out. After that I’d take a syringe with liquid and then the blood would be coming, coming, the whole day.”

Philip said a doctor taught him the procedure when he worked as a nurse at a hospital. Eventually, Philip left to open his own drugstore, offering the procedure for $60, along with malaria tests and blood pressure screening. He eventually stopped providing the service for moral reasons, believing it to be sinful.

“I don’t like spoiling the belly anymore, and it can also be dangerous,” he said. “One time a girl came to see me after taking country herbs, bleeding all over the floor. Some of them can be scared to talk, and by the time they find a car to go to a clinic, they can fall off [die].”

Stigma and Knowledge

Because the stigma around abortion is so high, many girls and women make like Mamie and simply “close their mouth” after undergoing the procedure, fearing moral judgment from their partners, families or communities. This means they often don’t seek clinical help until it’s too late.

“Many young women die like that,” said Nelly Cooper, director of the West Point Women for Health and Development Organization. “Most of the time the herbs are not effective, or the girls get into severe pain and there’s no good medication or no good doctor around that will be able to save their life.”

Cooper’s volunteers work to create awareness around sexual and reproductive health. She said that an inequitable lack of access to information about contraceptive methods is fueling the number of unsafe abortions, putting the lives of women and girls at risk.

“Many parents don’t realize that the sexual education we are giving their daughters is important,” she said. “They say things like, ‘My daughter has to work, so she’s not going over there.’ And those girls are the ones that are getting pregnant.”

Because of the Trump administration’s reinstatement and expansion of the Global Gag Rule, Liberian gynecologists employed by the country’s Ministry of Health – which receives extensive funding from USAID – were unable to comment on the prevalence of unsafe abortion. The rule prevents global health providers from providing family planning services or USAIDfunding if they provide, discuss or even mention abortions to their patients. Subsequently, many international health NGOs in Liberia are afraid of even mentioning “the A-word” for fear of losing funding.

But for women’s reproductive health advocates like Hodges and Neeplo, their stance is clear.

“It’s a right and a choice,” Neeplo said. “And they should leave it to us as women to say, ‘I want this, or I don’t want this.’”

* Name has been changed.

This article originally appeared on Women & Girls Hub. For weekly updates, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list.

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Apr 27

Jay Dickey's Complicated Legacy Is A Lesson For Politicians And Scientists Alike

Posted in: Today's Chili

To a generation of researchers, the name “Jay Dickey” was synonymous with frustration.

For over 20 years, legislation authored by Dickey ― a former U.S. representative from Arkansas, and a Republican ― has stood in the way of public health researchers who want to examine American gun violence.

But when Dickey died last week at 77, many of those same researchers mourned his passing. They praised Dickey for publicly admitting that his amendment was a mistake, and for working to undo the damage it caused with his efforts to promote gun violence research.

The Dickey Amendment of 1996 prohibited the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding research meant to “advocate or promote gun control.” Unwilling to risk losing funding, the CDC cut back on its firearm violence research, and publications on the topic subsequently plummeted 64 percent between 1998 and 2012.

The ban likely deterred young scientists from entering the gun violence research field in the first place, Dr. Alice Chen, the executive director of Doctors for America, told HuffPost in 2015.

“If you are a young scientist, and you’re looking into which field you can go into to make a difference and there’s no funding, you’re not going to go into this field,” she said.

Today, just a handful of scientists regularly produce in-depth research on the subject. Given his namesake amendment’s chilling effect on their field, it would make sense for gun violence researchers to remember Dickey less than fondly. And certainly some do.

“Representative Dickey had a complicated legacy,” Charles Branas, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told HuffPost. “The nation continues to struggle with a famine in solutions to gun violence that never materialized.”

But in the final years of his life, Dickey made an about-face: Seeing how the Dickey Amendment had damaged public health research, he admitted his mistake.

“I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time,” Dickey told HuffPost in 2015. “I have regrets.”

That self-awareness hit home with researchers. And it forged Dickey’s legacy of understanding and evolution, two qualities that our polarized members of Congress could do well to emulate.

“To me, it’s a huge loss. I’m very, very sad,” Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, told HuffPost.

“Spoke w Rep. Dickey a few times,” Ted Alcorn, who works at the nonprofit advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, tweeted Wednesday. “He did something rare in politics ― admitted he was wrong ― & I admire him for it.”

A rivalry that became a partnership

As younger men, Dickey and Rosenberg were archrivals.

“I was told not to have anything to do with Mark Rosenberg,” Dickey told NPR in 2015.

When the pair met in person, however, they sought common ground. And over time, Dickey’s views on research shifted.

“What the highway industry did was to solve a problem that would be an example for us,” Dickey told NPR. “They had a goal of eliminating head-on collisions in our interstate system. And they never ― they didn’t come out and say, we’re going to eliminate the cars.”

By 2012, Dickey’s views had changed so much that he and Rosenberg co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post titled “We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it.”

Public health researchers often compare firearm deaths to traffic fatalities. As a result of public health research in the 1970s, evidence-based interventions such as child restraints, seat belts, frontal air bags, a minimum drinking age and motorcycle helmets saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

That comparison made sense to Dickey.

“Like motor vehicle injuries, violence exists in a cause-and-effect world; things happen for predictable reasons,” Dickey and Rosenberg wrote in their op-ed. “By studying the causes of a tragic — but not senseless — event, we can help prevent another.”

Dickey’s evolved thinking made a lasting impression on Rosenberg, who called it “a sign of a mature person that when you understand things differently, you’re willing to change to your mind, and you’re not so protective of your reputation.”

“We started out as fierce opponents as we could possibly be,” said Rosenberg, who plans to speak at Dickey’s funeral in Arkansas on April 29. “And we ended up coming to trust each other, and I would say deeply love and respect each other.”

That respect is echoed by others in field

“I will remember Mr. Dickey for his courage in publicly admitting his mistakes and working hard to rectify them,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, a physician at UC Davis Health who has researched gun violence for more than three decades, told HuffPost.

Erika Soto Lamb, of Everytown for Gun Safety, said she was grateful that Dickey spoke out about the importance of research.

“In order to better prevent the gun violence that kills more than 90 Americans and injures hundreds more every day, we have to improve our understanding,” she said.

“He made a compelling case for why ending research leaves us with open questions and challenges our capacity to have an informed debate,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and a dean at the Boston University School of Public Health. “If that can be his legacy, it will be worth remembering.”

In our current political climate, where the mere mention of firearms is controversial, Dickey’s willingness to critically examine his previously held beliefs is a reminder that politicians and scientists can work together for the public good.

“It’s possible to start at extremely different positions and come to listen, trust, respect and work out a path forward,” Rosenberg noted. “To me that’s a very important lesson.”

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Apr 27

Two U.S. Service Members Killed In Afghanistan: Pentagon

Posted in: Today's Chili

Two U.S. service members were killed during an operation against Islamic State militants in eastern Afghanistan overnight on Wednesday, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

The incident took place in the southern Nangarhar province, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said.

U.S. forces in Afghanistan added in a statement that a third U.S. service member was wounded in the raid, carried out with Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) against the militants.

The incident comes just days after U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited Afghanistan as President Donald Trump’s administration looks to craft a policy in the war-torn country.

U.S. troops are battling suspected Islamic State militants in Nangarhar province, near the border with Pakistan, where earlier this month, the United States dropped a massive bomb known as “the mother of all bombs.”

Another U.S. soldier was killed earlier in April while carrying out operations against Islamic State in Afghanistan.

The Islamic State’s offshoot in Afghanistan, known as the Sunni jihadist group’s so-called Khorasan Province, is suspected of carrying out several attacks on minority Shi’ite Muslim targets.

U.S. officials say intelligence suggests Islamic State is based overwhelmingly in Nangarhar and neighboring Kunar province.

Estimates of its strength in Afghanistan vary. U.S. officials have said they believe the movement has only 700 fighters but Afghan officials estimate it has about 1,500.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington and Josh Smith in Kabul; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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Apr 27

For Zimbabwean Widows, Losing A Husband Can Also Mean Losing A Home

Posted in: Today's Chili

In Zimbabwe, widows’ property is frequently stolen by their in-laws. While there are laws in place to prevent this, researchers say they’re difficult to enforce and that widows themselves lack awareness of their rights.

HARARE, ZIMBABWE – When 35-year-old Farai Mpalasa talks about the death of her husband, Charles, you can still hear the pain in her voice. This pain is not only caused by the loss of her partner, but also by the subsequent treatment she received from her in-laws.

When he died in 2006, Charles was the only breadwinner in the family and she had never dealt with the family finances. “He took care of everything and just gave me money for food and other household items,” she explained.

When Charles died, she left all the funeral arrangements to her brother-in-law, handing over her husband’s bank cards and documents to him. Two months later, when she requested tuition fees for her children, she discovered that her brother-in-law had drained all the accounts.

“He took all the money and he said the house and furniture belonged to his brother, as I had never worked a day in my life,” she said. Four months after her husband died, she and her three children, aged 17, 15 and 13, were forced to move out of their home in Chitungwiza, a suburb of Harare. Her brother-in-law now rents out the house.

Since this ordeal, Mpalasa has had to find a job as a live-in domestic worker in Harare. She has sent her children to live with her aunt in the countryside. She says her in-laws have done nothing to assist in taking care of them.

“It is as if we stopped being family after [my husband’s] death,” she says. “My children do not know his family, and they rely on me to take care of them.”

According to Zimbabwe’s latest census, conducted in 2012, the country is home to about 587,000 widows. Stories like Mpalasa’s are quite common, as a recent report by Human Rights Watch revealed. Bethany Brown, the author of the report, confirmed that this issue affects thousands of women from all walks of life.

“This is a problem that touches everyone in Zimbabwe. We talked to women who had their property grabbed in rural and urban areas; widows who were really poor to begin with and were left destitute; and those who were middle class or well off,” Brown said. “When this happens, it spans class, it spans income and it spans the rural-urban divide.”

She related the story of one of the widows she encountered, whose brother-in-law offered to drive her to her husband’s funeral only to confront her in front of all those gathered there: “You are rubbish and you will get nothing. I am taking everything.”

“This boldness is very indicative of the sense of entitlement,” Brown said. This results in many women “not only getting nothing, but feeling like they are nothing, and that someone can speak to them that way in public and no one will stand up for them.”

The report stressed that though Zimbabwean law is meant to protect the property rights of widows, the majority of women are not in civil marriages, but rather in unregistered customary unions. Ironically, the courts sometimes request confirmation of such marriages from the widow’s in-laws – the very people who stand to benefit if the marriage is not confirmed.

Researchers also found that widows who decided to enter into legal battles to keep their property faced significant barriers when trying to access the courts. Nearly all of the women who successfully reclaimed their property managed to achieve this only with the assistance of NGOs.

The Women and Law Southern Africa Research and Education Trust (WLSA) is one such NGO. The organization’s national coordinator, Sylvia Chirawu, points out that the problem is not with the laws: “The law actually allows women in unregistered customary unions to inherit, if they can prove lobola (bride price) was paid, but the major challenge is that there is no proof of these unions.”

She advised widows to “keep some sort of proof [of their customary marriages], whether it be a DVD of the proceeding, the lobola list or an affidavit from their relatives proving that they received lobola.”

For her part, Brown recommended the government of Zimbabwe align existing laws with provisions made in the constitution. The constitution gives men and women equal rights to property, but in practice the laws make it difficult for widows to enforce their property rights, as they must provide proof of their customary marriage through their in-laws. The constitution also states that everyone should have access to the courts, but the various court fees and procedures make accessing the courts difficult for widows.

Brown also suggests the government use awareness campaigns to educate widows and family members on inheritance laws, and review the various court fees that can prohibit widows from challenging their in-laws in court.

Such educational campaigns could help women like Mpalasa, who is unaware of her property rights. She believes her brother-in-law was justified in taking her property as she had not contributed financially to the household. “I could not fight him, because I was not working and everything was in Charles’ name,” she said. “I just wish he had allowed us to stay in the house – at least I would still be living with my children.”

This article originally appeared on Women & Girls Hub. For weekly updates, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Apr 27

If You Want To Connect With Teens, Go Niche

Posted in: Today's Chili

Welcome to HuffPost’s Keeping It 100. From infusing our culture with data to figuring out how to reach Gen Z and cultivate niche distributed communities, we’ll give you an inside look at the hits and misses of HuffPost’s biggest bets.

Gen Z is anything but one-note, and its members have tailored their social media behavior to express those multifaceted identities. There are so many platforms and ways of communicating that they’ve chosen a persona for each ― sometimes creating multiple accounts targeting different friend groups on a single platform.

Gen Zers are verticalizing themselves, and if brands want to reach them, they should adapt.

The Huffington Post and AOL’s Consumer Analytics Group collaborated on a five-day online discussion with 29 teens from across the U.S., ages 13 to 18. Through these digital dialogues, we found that, contrary to their millennial predecessors, Gen Z teens are much more likely to identify themselves based on what they like to do.

Likely because Gen Z consists of more multiracial people than any of its predecessors, teens’ racial or ethnic identities appear to take a backseat to the activities they’re interested in. For example, the digital dialogues suggested they are much more likely to find community as a soccer player or a member of the debate team than as a young Latina or a young biracial man.

And because each individual is involved in multiple activities, they’re using multiple social media platforms to tell those stories.

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In our survey, 11 percent of teens said they had fake or decoy Instagram accounts (called “finstas”). Teens’ “real” accounts are much more nuanced and geared toward specific friend groups ― they might have one for their camp friends, one for their middle school friends and one for their current high school friends. Communication within these activity-based communities tends to be more in-person or contained within private messaging features.

“I do enjoy the internet, but I don’t feel obligated to use it as the only way to communicate,” one Gen Z participant told us.

Gen Zers are drawn to Snapchat’s Stories function because it gives them the ability to send stories to specific friends or friend groups rather than broadcast them to their entire follower list or to the public (something they perhaps learned from millennials’ mistakes).

Teens are slightly more likely to use Instagram’s direct message feature to communicate with friends (45 percent) than to tag friends publicly in comments (43 percent) ― a tactic that is often used by millennials. Teens are also flocking to apps like House Party, where users can chat with only up to eight people at a time.

For brands, appealing to this self-verticalizing demographic means doing the same thing they’re doing ― to an extent. To be a more active presence within the lives of Gen Zers, it’s about authentic one-on-one communication, which has led a lot of brands and publishers looking to connect with Gen Z to platforms like Facebook Messenger and even email.

Gen Z-focused email products like Lenny Letter, Clover and The Tea (HuffPost’s Gen Z offering) are examples of email newsletters that are based on a direct and closed communication line with a Gen Z audience rather than an open broadcast. HuffPost has also experimented with a 1:1 Netflix recommendation bot geared toward members of Gen Z.

Gen Zers know what they want, and they aren’t willing to waste time to get it. Brands have about eight seconds to hook them with content or a product they can connect with before they leave. Because of that limited attention span, they prefer one-dimensional offerings that have a very clear and explicit purpose, and an immediately understandable voice and mission.

This doesn’t mean that generalist brands need to pack up shop. Gen Z is still heading to larger generalist brands or Google Search to fact-check things they hear from their friends or through other community filters. Their general skepticism and sensitivity to bias also prompts them to do a little further digging for a secondary source for news or facts they come across in their platform messaging or real-life conversations.

Four things that will make your brand Gen Z friendly:

Direct and consistent tone and voice

Clear utility

Segmented or one-dimensional distributed channels

1:1 experiences

To uncover how Generation Z uniquely consumes and shares content and why, HuffPost and AOL’s Consumer Analytics group embarked on a three-phase research initiative. For the first phase, we conducted four focus groups in New York and Dulles, Virginia, with teens 13 to 18 years old to develop foundational insights into their relationship with news and information platforms.

Equipped with this baseline understanding, we moved on to the second phase: qualitative digital dialogues. These dialogues took the form of a five-day online discussion with 29 teens from across the U.S. ages 13 to 18 to dive further into a rich and informed conversation on news, entertainment, technology, brands and overall life outlook.

We are now analyzing the results from the third and final phase of the initiative, our quantitative survey to put data behind the theories we generated in the qualitative phases. In this phase, we aim to show how and why teens discover content, trust it and share it, what topics they follow, and the tone or voice that resonates with them. Stay tuned for those results!

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Apr 27

Russia Accuses Macron Campaign Of Discriminating Against Its Media

Posted in: Today's Chili

Russia accused French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team of discriminating against its media on Thursday, saying it had trampled on the freedom of the press by banning Russian news outlets from its events.

The Kremlin has been irritated by accusations from the Macron camp that its campaign’s networks, databases and sites have come under attack from locations inside Russia, fuelling suspicions that Russia is trying to undermine Macron’s campaign to help Marine Le Pen, his rival.

Moscow has rejected allegations of meddling, and on Thursday Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told a news briefing that the Macron campaign had refused to accredit the Sputnik news agency, the RT TV channel, and the Ruptly video agency for the first round of the French election, meaning they were unable to get proper access to Macron campaign events.

Sputnik and RT receive Russian state funding. RT is Ruptly’s parent company.

Calling the move “outrageous”, Zakharova said Moscow viewed the ban as “deliberate and bare-faced discrimination against Russian media by the presidential candidate of a state that has historically been vigilant when it comes to free speech.”

She called on the relevant French authorities and international organizations to ensure that freedom of the press was upheld in the second round of the presidential election, which is scheduled for May 7.

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, said on social media the Macron campaign was refusing to accredit her organization and the others for the second round as well however.

“So this is how gracelessly freedom of speech ends in a country which prides itself on its freedoms almost more than it prides itself on its Camembert and Brie cheeses,” said Simonyan.

President Vladimir Putin granted an audience to Le Pen in the Kremlin last month, bestowing a level of international recognition that had until then eluded her in the countdown to the election.

Le Pen has said she admires Putin and backs the lifting of the European Union’s economic sanctions imposed on Russia over its role in the Ukraine conflict.

The Kremlin says it is not backing any candidate in the election, which it says is purely a matter for the French people.

(Editing by Vladimir Soldatkin)

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Apr 27

NASA Just MacGyvered A Spacecraft To Fly Between Saturn And Its Rings

Posted in: Today's Chili

You can always count on NASA to jury-rig its way into a successful mission.

Its Cassini spacecraft just gave Earth another first in space exploration: It passed through the narrow gap between Saturn and its rings on Wednesday, then relayed stunning photographs of the planet’s atmosphere and invaluable data back to Terra.

But you can’t safely navigate an unexplored, potentially hazardous region of space without channeling MacGyver.

The gap between Saturn’s rings and the top of its atmosphere is only 1,500 miles wide, and Cassini was hurtling through at 77,000 miles-per-hour relative to the planet, according to NASA. Models suggested that Saturn’s ring particles still exist in that gap ― they would be small, “on the scale of smoke particles” but it wouldn’t take much to wreak havoc on sensitive technology that’s zipping along at Cassini’s speed.

So the space agency decided to use its high-gain antenna ― a 13-foot-wide dish that Cassini uses to communicate with Earth ― as a shield, turning it away from our planet as it protected the vessel. That meant that Cassini wouldn’t be able to make contact during a 20-hour window, while flying through uncharted space, using its only form of communication as a plow.

Of course it worked. Bad ass.

“No spacecraft has ever been this close to Saturn before. We could only rely on predictions, based on our experience with Saturn’s other rings, of what we thought this gap between the rings and Saturn would be like,” said Cassini Project Manager Earl Maize of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “I am delighted to report that Cassini shot through the gap just as we planned and has come out the other side in excellent shape.”

NASA’s Deep Space Network Goldstone Complex in California started receiving mission data from Cassini just after midnight Thursday morning. Cassini and its little buddy, the Huygens probe, has already gathered a laundry list of critical data from Saturn and its largest moon, Titan, which is “one of the most Earth-like worlds we’ve ever encountered,” NASA reports.

Eventually, NASA plans to dump Cassini in Saturn’s clouds before it collides with one of the planet’s 53 moons. Enceladus and Titan are thought to have a higher chance of supporting microbial life, and a collision with Cassini could pose contamination risks.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Apr 27

Acer unveils a slew of new Switch laptops and detachables

Posted in: Today's Chili

At the IMAX theatre in New York’s Lincoln Center, Acer CEO Jason Chen showed off his company’s upcoming back-to-school lineup of products, including new Switch laptops and detachables, as well as a fanless all-in-one. The new Swift 1 and Swift 3 lapt…

Apr 27

Acer is making yet another fitness wearable

Posted in: Today's Chili

After a series of underwhelming attempts at making fitness wearables that track uncommon metrics, Acer is at it again with its new Leap Ware watch. Not many details have been shared yet, but one thing the company was happy to mention? The Ware will m…

Hasta La Gadget!

NATO Confronts Turkey On Human Rights Concerns After Donald Trump Lets Them Slide