Tag Archives: political action

By Adrienne LaFrance 21 hours ago

In this age of big surveillance and miniature satellites, there is an idea that—once we are able to track everything around us—the magic and mystery of the universe will be replaced with data, knowledge, and understanding.

Yet it often seems like the deeper we get into the world around us, the more we realize how little we actually know. A mountain of data may promise us answers, but first you have to sift through the questions.

The latest evidence: A YouTube video that’s circulating and shows what looks like a human figure standing on the surface of the moon.

Sure enough, go to Google Moon and find the coordinates (27° 34′ 12.83” N, 19° 36’21.56 W) and you’ll see it, too. Here’s a screenshot I took (I added the red arrow):

Google Earth/NASA

It’s been a generation since humans ruled out the possibility of life on the moon—let alone a giant humanoid just chilling on the lunar surface. So, uh, what is that thing? NASA, which has checked the image against its trove of images from the same location, is shrugging it off.

“We have other images that do not show any imperfection so most analysts believe the image reflects nothing more than a tiny piece of debris on the lens,” spokesman Robert Jacobs told me. (And in a follow-up email: “Believe me, if there was a man on the moon, we’d be recounting our own astronauts to make sure we got them all back from Apollo and then telling everyone else!”)

Fair enough. The rational explanation, after all, is quite often the best one.

And yet there’s something about the image that lingers. In a vast landscape of shameless Photoshopping and Internet hoaxes, and at a time where most people have long since given up on the Loch Ness Monster and the Cottingley Fairies, there’s still that little tug of wonder—misplaced, though it may be.

Just think: We can zoom in on actual photographs of the actual moon from our unbelievably sophisticated handheld computers. But it’s the smudge of dirt on a camera lens that makes people marvel at the depths of what we still don’t know.

Read Wait, Is That a Human on the Moon? on theatlantic.com

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Weekly Address: America’s Resurgence Is Real

12/20/2014 Nativegrl77

Weekly Address: America’s Resurgence Is RealIn this week’s address, the President reflected on the significant progress made by this country in 2014, and in the nearly six years since he took office.

This past year has been the strongest for job growth since the 1990s, contributing to the nearly 11 million jobs added by our businesses over a 57-month streak. America is leading the rest of the world, in containing the spread of Ebola, degrading and ultimately destroying ISIL, and addressing the threat posed by climate change. And earlier this week, the President announced the most significant changes to our policy towards Cuba in over 50 years.

America’s resurgence is real, and the President expressed his commitment to working with Congress in the coming year to make sure Americans feel the benefits.

Watch the President’s Weekly Address now.

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A Look Back at 2014As 2014 winds down, President Obama stopped by the press briefing room in the White House yesterday to offer his thoughts on what the past year has meant for the country.

“I said that 2014 would be a year of action and would be a breakthrough year for America,” he said. “And it has been.”

If you missed the President’s news conference, check it out here:

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Charting a New Course on Cuba

The United States and Cuba are separated by no more than 90 miles of water, but an ideological and economic barrier has hardened between our two countries for the past 50 years. On Wednesday, however, President Obama announced historic new steps to chart a new course in our relations with Cuba.

“Today, America chooses to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future — for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere, and for the world,” he said.

Take a deep-dive into the President’s historic actions at WhiteHouse.gov/Cuba-policy.

On Monday, the President traveled to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey to offer his thanks to the U.S. military members and families stationed there and across the world for their service to our country.

“The message I’m here to deliver on behalf of the American people is very simple,” he said. “It’s just to say thank you.”

The President also marked an important milestone: After more than 13 years, we are finally bringing a responsible end to America’s war in Afghanistan.

When the President took office, we had nearly 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of this month, we’ll have fewer than 15,000 in both countries. Over the course of six years, we have brought home 90 percent of our troops. And this month, Afghans will take full responsibility for their security.

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Don’t miss the final story in our Product of Mexico series: Children work the fields

12/19/2014 Nativegrl77

Dear Readers:Meet Alejandrina. She was 11 when Los Angeles Times journalists first began reporting her story. Alejandrina, a little girl who likes lip gloss and longs to go to back to school, works 14 hours a day picking chile peppers for a farm that supplies a U.S. distributor.

Mexican law requires workers to be at least 15, but Alejandrina is among an estimated 100,000 children younger than that who work the fields. As she told The Times: “I work because we don’t have any money and we need money to eat things.”

Times reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti tracked Alejandrina’s nomadic existence for a year. Read her story, which is also the story of so many others: Children harvest crops and sacrifice dreams in Mexico’s fields

This marks the fourth and final piece in our Product of Mexico series, an investigation into conditions on Mexican farms that supply Americans with much of our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and other produce.

We’ve told readers about unbearable conditions at labor camps and taken them into Bioparques, a supplier to Wal-Mart and one of Mexico’s biggest tomato exporters, where Mexican officials found workers held captive. We’ve examined company stores, where a lack of price tags and big mark-ups leave many farmworkers trapped in a cycle of debt.

I want to thank all of you for reading this important series and sharing it with others. Here’s a sneak peek at a video coming Monday that features Marosi and Bartletti talking about the reporting behind this eye-opening series.

Davan Maharaj, Editor

P.S. We’ve created some extra content available only to our subscribers. Bartletti, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist whose interest in photography dates back to his service in Vietnam, has covered Mexico for decades. He shares some of his best photos and memories of what it took to capture the images.