Deb

Christina Koch was a firefighter at the South Pole at -111°F before she ever applied to be an astronaut. That was maybe the fourth most interesting line on her resume. She grew up in North Carolina, got three degrees from NC State, and her first real job was building deep-space instruments at NASA. Then she left for Antarctica. Spent three and a half years bouncing between the Arctic and Antarctic as a research scientist, including a full winter at the South Pole base. That means going months without sunlight or fresh food, with a crew of about 50 people and no way out until flights resume. While she was down there, she also joined the glacier search-and-rescue team. After coming back, she went to Johns Hopkins and built instruments for two NASA missions (one of them is still orbiting Jupiter right now). She figured out how to start a tiny vacuum pump that NASA designed for a future Mars rover. Johns Hopkins nominated it for their Invention of the Year in 2009. Then she went back to the field. More time in Antarctica and a stretch up in Greenland. A government research station in northern Alaska, near the top of the world. Then she ran another one in American Samoa, near the equator. In 2013, NASA selected her from 6,300 applicants. Eight people got in. Her first space mission was supposed to be a normal rotation on the International Space Station, but NASA extended it. She ended up staying 328 straight days and orbiting Earth 5,248 times, covering about 139 million miles (roughly 291 round trips to the Moon). Up there, she ran over 210 experiments, including tests of cancer drugs in zero gravity and 3D printers that can build structures close to human tissue. Six spacewalks, 42 hours floating outside the station. She learned Russian for the training. She flies supersonic jets. Right now, Koch is on Artemis II, heading for a flyby behind the far side of the Moon. The crew launched on April 1 and is on track to travel about 252,000 miles from Earth, which would break the all-time human distance record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. That record has stood for 56 years, and it was set during a disaster that nearly killed the crew. Fred Haise, one of the Apollo 13 astronauts, is 92 now. He told Koch: "I heard you're going to break our record." Nobody had left Earth's neighborhood since December 1972. Koch and her three crewmates are the first in 53 years, and they are coming home at about 25,000 mph. That is faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever come back through the atmosphere.

Evidence in the Charlie Kirk assassination case against Tyler Robinson (per court filings, ATF/FBI reports, and public docs from multiple outlets like CNN, ABC, Guardian, Wikipedia summary): - DNA consistent with Robinson on rifle trigger, fired .30-06 casing, and 2 unfired rounds (grandfather's Mauser bolt-action from family home, 3.5 hrs away). - DNA on towel wrapped around rifle and roof screwdriver. - Texts to roommate: rifle drop point, retrieval plan, "left wrapped in towel," watching area; note under keyboard: "I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it." - Video of shooter on roof (palm/forearm prints, Converse footprint). - Implied confession to family; engraved ammo matching his apartment. Electronic data: volumes of texts, Discord activity, roommate messages with timestamps/metadata. Fabrication near-impossible: Defense gets full discovery/raw files; independent labs re-test DNA (multiple contributors noted, but consistent with him), verify phone carrier records, ballistics metadata, chain-of-custody logs. Coordinated fake across LE, ATF, digital forensics would collapse under expert scrutiny in open prelim/trial. Bullet fragment inconclusive due to fragmentation (ATF ongoing tests).

Gavin Newsom's wife attributes California's K-shaped economy to "the devaluation of all that we've feminized." “Everything that we’ve feminized in American culture — whether entire industries like education, health care, etc., or just attributes like empathy, care, and collaboration — because of the devaluation of all that we’ve feminized, we actually have this incredible inequitable system whereby socioeconomic mobility has never been as poor.” "With California, for example, being the richest and poorest state in our country, we know that we have a lot of work to do to ensure that every California resident achieves not just the American dream, but the California dream.”