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
