About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 2020)
8A Weekend Edition - August 1-2, 2020 The Times, Gainesville, Georgia | gainesvilletimes.com NATION Astronauts pack up for rare splashdown in SpaceX capsule NASA via Associated Press This image made available by NASA astronaut Bob Behnken on Friday, July 31, shows him inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the International Space Station. SpaceX and NASA plan to bring Behnken and Doug Hurley back Sunday afternoon, aiming for splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida Panhandle. BY MARCIA DUNN Associated Press CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Two U.S. astronauts about to make the first splashdown return in 45 years said Friday they’ll have sea sick bags ready to use if needed. SpaceX and NASA plan to bring Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken back Sunday afternoon in the company’s Dragon capsule, aim ing for the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida Panhandle. Flight con trollers are keeping close watch on Hurricane Isaias, expected to stick to Florida’s east coast. Hurley said if he and Behnken get sick while bobbing in the waves awaiting recovery, it won’t be the first time for a crew. Astro nauts returning in the early 1970s from Skylab, NASA’s first space station, did not feel well following splashdown, Hurley noted. Feeling sick “is the way it is with a water landing,” he said dur ing the crew’s final news confer ence from the International Space Station. This will be SpaceX’s first splashdown with astronauts on board, ending a two-month test flight that began May 30 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center — the first launch of a crew from the U.S. in nearly a decade. The capsule has been docked at the space station since May 31, allowing Hurley and Behnken to chip in with space- walks and experiments. Hurley said the emergency and other equipment has checked out well aboard Dragon, dubbed Endeavour. Launch and ren dezvous went flawlessly, “so we expect nothing different for the splashdown,” he said. Their departure leaves three on board, one American and two Russians. After splashdown, it will take an hour or so before the capsule is hauled by crane onto a SpaceX recovery ship, where the hatch will be opened and the astronauts will get out. Flight surgeons will be among the dozens of the recovery team members. The plan is for the Dragon to undock from the space station on Saturday, a day before splash down. The prime target is off the coast of Panama City, half way between Tallahassee and Pensacola. “We won’t leave the space sta tion without some good landing opportunities in front of us, good splashdown weather,” Behnken told reporters. “We could stay up here longer. There’s more chow and I know the space station pro gram’s got more work that we can do.” Like launch, the ride back will be essentially automated, with the crew and flight controllers inter vening only if necessary. Behnken has an extra rea son to bring this Dragon back in good shape. Following refurbish ment, the capsule will fly again next spring with a crew of four — including his wife, NASA astro naut Megan McArthur. SpaceX’s next astronaut flight is targeted for the end of September. Behnken said even before his launch, they had an inkling she would be assigned to a SpaceX flight. NASA announced the news this week. “And of course, I’ll have a lot of tips for her,” he said. Hurley is married to recently retired NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg. NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing for U.S.-based crew trans port after the space shuttles retired in 2011. Russian rockets were the only way for astronauts to get to the space station until SpaceX became the first private company to launch humans into orbit two months ago. Boeing’s first crew flight isn’t expected until next year. Officials seek limits on ‘habitat’ locations for imperiled species BY MATTHEW BROWN Associated Press GERALD HERBERT I Associated Press A gopher frog sits at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans in Sept. 2011. Federal wildlife officials are proposing limits on what can be declared as “habitat” for imperiled plants and animals. The proposal to be announced Friday, July 31, and obtained in advance by The Associated Press would for the first time define “habitat” for purposes of enforcing the Endangered Species Act, the landmark law that has undergirded species protections efforts in the U.S. since 1973. 3 charged in Twitter hack, Bitcoin scam BY DAVID FISCHER Associated Press MIAMI — A British man, a Florida man and a Florida teen were identified by authorities Friday as the hackers who earlier this month took over Twitter accounts of prominent poli ticians, celebrities and technology moguls to scam people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin. Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was arrested Friday in Tampa, where the Hillsborough State Attor ney’s Office will prosecute him as adult. He faces 30 felony charges, according to a news release. Mason Sheppard, 19, of Bognor Regis, U.K., and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, were charged in California federal court. In one of the most high-profile security breaches in recent years, hackers sent out bogus tweets on July 15 from the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebri ties Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked. The tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address. “There is a false belief within the criminal hacker community that attacks like the Twit ter hack can be perpetrated anonymously and without consequence,” U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson for the Northern District of Califor nia said in a news release. “Today’s charging announcement demonstrates that the elation of nefarious hacking into a secure environment for fun or profit will be short-lived.” Although the case against the teen was also investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew War ren explained that his office is prosecuting Clark in Florida state court because Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in financial fraud cases such as this when appropriate. He added that Clark was the leader of the hacking scam. “This defendant lives here in Tampa, he com mitted the crime here, and he’ll be prosecuted here,” Warren said. Security experts were not surprised that the alleged mastermind of the hack is a 17-year-old, given the relative amateur nature both of the operation and the hackers’ willingness after ward to discuss the hack with reporters online. “I think this is a great case study showing how technology democratizes the ability to commit serious criminal acts,” said Jake Williams, founder of the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec. “I’m not terribly surprised that at least one of the suspects is a minor. There wasn’t a ton of development that went into this attack.” Williams said the hackers were “extremely sloppy” in how they moved the Bitcoin around. Williams said it did not appear that the three used any services that make cryptocurrency dif ficult to trace by “tumbling” transactions of mul tiple users, a technique akin to money laundering. He also said he was conflicted about whether Clark should be charged as an adult. “He definitely deserves to pay (for jump ing on the opportunity) but potentially serving decades in prison doesn’t seem like justice in this case,” Williams said. Twitter previously said hackers used the phone to fool the social media company’s employees into giving them access. It said hack ers targeted “a small number of employees through a phone spear-phishing attack.” “This attack relied on a significant and con certed attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems,” the company tweeted. After stealing employee credentials and get ting into Twitter’s systems, the hackers were able to target other employees who had access to account support tools, the company said. The hackers targeted 130 accounts. They managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inboxes of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven. Twitter said it would provide a more detailed report later “given the ongoing law enforce ment investigation.” BILLINGS, Mont. — The Trump administration is moving to restrict what land and water areas can be declared as “habitat” for imperiled plants and ani mals — potentially excluding locations that species could use in the future as cli mate change upends ecosystems. An administration proposal obtained in advance by The Associated Press and publicly released Friday would for the first time define “habitat” for purposes of enforcing the Endangered Species Act, the landmark law that has dictated spe cies protections efforts in the U.S. since 1973. A final decision is expected by year’s end, with broad implications for how lands are managed and how far the gov ernment must go in protecting plants and animals that could be sliding toward extinction. Democratic lawmakers and wildlife advocates said the proposal ignores shift ing threats to wildlife and plants due to climate change and habitat loss. It follows other steps under Trump to scale back or alter endangered species rules, including lifting blanket protec tions for animals newly listed as threat ened and setting cost estimates for saving species. Legal observers said the Republican administration’s two-sentence definition of habitat would limit what areas the gov ernment can designate as critical to a spe cies’ survival. Its declaration that habitat includes areas with “existing attributes” appears to rule out land or water needing restoration work or sites that could become suitable in the future as climate change forces species to relocate, said J.B. Ruhl with Vanderbilt University Law School. “To me, they are clearly trying to rule out restoration and climate change,” Ruhl said. He added that a court would likely agree that the government’s definition was reasonable, even though he does not think it is good policy for dealing with cli mate change. Jonathan Wood with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents landowners opposed to having species protections forced upon them, said the government’s proposal would rightly restrict what areas could be designated as habitat. He said that would force the govern ment to concentrate on sites more suit able for conservation work, instead of infringing on private property rights. Others warned that it would seriously hobble restoration efforts, by confining struggling species to small patches of pris tine land and blocking restoration work that could expand their range. The northern spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest, which depends on old growth forests, offers a prime example, said Noah Greenwald with the Center for Bio logical Diversity. Much of the bird’s historic habitat was logged. “But it will become old growth for est again one day if we protect it. So does WASHINGTON — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been discharged from a hos pital in New York City and has returned home, the Supreme Court said Friday. The court said Ginsburg, 87, is doing well, two days after undergoing a mini mally invasive procedure on Wednesday to “revise a bile duct stent” at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The stent had originally been placed last August, that not count as habitat?” Greenwald asked. “If we want to recover species, we have to restore them to more larger portions of their historic range,” he said. Friday’s proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service comes in response to a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving a highly endangered Southern frog — the dusky gopher frog. Trump administration officials said the proposal would apply to relatively few cases and provide “more consistency” and “more transparency” for private landowners, companies and states. They would not specify what types of land or how much could be excluded under the definition, or give immedi ate details on which species could be impacted. “The Supreme Court recently held that an area must be ‘habitat’ in order to be designated as ‘critical habitat’, and we are now seeking public comment on how best to define that overarching term,” said wildlife service assistant director Gary Frazer. In the gopher frog case, a unanimous court said the government had to decide what constitutes suitable habitat for the 3 l / 2 -inch-long frogs before it could desig nate some of those areas as “critical habi tat” for the species, which survives in just a few ponds in Mississippi. The dispute arose after the Fish and Wildlife Service designated 1,500-acres of land and ponds in neighboring Louisiana when Ginsburg was treated for a cancer ous tumor on her pancreas. The procedure is common and was done to minimize the risk of future infec tion, according to her doctors, the court said in a statement. The procedure follows another one ear lier this month at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to clean out the stent. Gins burg had gone to the hospital after experi- as critical habitat for the frog even though none lived there. Attorneys for the landowner, timber company Weyerhaeuser Co., called that an unjust land grab. But environmental ists said designating the land as critical was necessary to keeping the frog from disappearing. The proposed definition says habitat includes “places that a species depend upon to carry out one or more life pro cesses,” such as breeding or eating. If the definition had been in place prior to the dispute over the gopher frog, the government might have been forced to limit its critical habitat designation to the ponds only, and not the surrounding land, said Wood. “It gives a standard which we’ve been lacking for the past 45 years to guide criti cal habitat designations,” he said. “You won’t have the free-roaming critical habi tat designations like you would have in the Weyerhaeuser case.” The Trump administration ultimately withdrew the Louisiana critical habitat designation in a settlement. Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Demo crat, said if the Friday’s proposal had been in place decades ago, iconic species such as the bald eagle would not have recovered widely, and instead would be limited to scattered patches of land. “The purpose of the Endangered Spe cies Act is to help endangered species flourish and expand back into their for mer habitat.” said Grijalva, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. encing fever and chills and was treated for a possible infection. Ginsburg, the oldest justice on the nine- member court, announced on July 17 that she is receiving chemotherapy for a recur rence of cancer. The liberal justice, who has had four earlier bouts with cancer, said her treatment so far has succeeded in reducing lesions on her liver. Associated Press Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg released from hospital
