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Ruth King

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To the Moon! SpaceX to Launch Israeli Lunar Lander (and More) on Thursday By Elizabeth Howell

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.space.com/spacex-to-launch-israeli-moon-lander.html?utm_source=notification

SpaceX will launch an Israeli robotic lunar lander during the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launch tomorrow (Feb. 21). If the lander succeeds, this will be the first privately funded moonshot to reach the lunar surface.

The lander, called “Beresheet” (in the beginning), will launch at 8:45 p.m. EST (0145 GMT, Feb. 22) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. You can watch the launch live on Space.com courtesy of SpaceX or directly through SpaceX’s webcast page or on Facebook via the lander’s creators.

The Beresheet lander is a joint venture between Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL — one of the participants in the Google Lunar X Prize, which challenged companies to land spacecraft on the moon — and Israel Aerospace Industries, the country’s largest aerospace and defense company. [Israel’s 1st Moon Lander: SpaceIL’s Beresheet Lunar Mission in Pictures]

While the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize challenge ended with no winner in 2018, several participating companies said they are continuing work on their concepts. The SpaceIL project will be the first of those designs to launch, and Israel now has a shot at becoming the fourth country to land a robotic probe on the moon — after the former Soviet Union, the United States and China.

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Taiwan’s president says military threat from China is growing ‘every day’ By Chris Mills Rodrigo

By on February 20th, 2019

https://thehill.com/policy/international/china/430732-taiwans-president-says-military-threat-from-china-is-growing-every

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen says in a new interview that the threat of military intervention from China is growing “every day.”

Tsai warned in an interview with CNN released Wednesday that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s increasingly assertive foreign policy is a risk for all Asian nations.

“If it’s Taiwan today, people should ask who’s next?” she said. “Any country in the region, if it no longer wants to submit to the will of China, they would face similar military threats.”

Taiwan, which sees itself as a sovereign state with its own democratic government, is considered by China to be a breakaway province.

The Chinese Communist Party has long pushed for reunification, but Tsai and her pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party continue to push back on reunification under Beijing’s terms.

Tsai said earlier this year that Taiwan would not accept a “one country, two systems” solution to the dispute.

“I want to reiterate that Taiwan will never accept ‘one country, two systems.’ The vast majority of Taiwanese public opinion also resolutely opposes ‘one country, two systems,’ and this is also the ‘Taiwan consensus,’ ” she said in a New Year’s address.

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Life-saving gene therapies are here — we need to get them to patients By Liam Sigaud

By on February 20th, 2019

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/430737-life-saving-gene-therapies-are-here-we-need-to-get-them-to-patients

For decades, scientists around the world have dreamed of medical interventions to repair or replace defective genes in a targeted way. Today, that vision is becoming reality for an ever-growing number of debilitating and deadly diseases thanks to breakthroughs in gene therapy technology. But if millions of Americans are to benefit from these advances, our health care system needs to adapt.

Up to 4,000 diseases (including certain types of cancer, cystic fibrosis, and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s) are rooted in genetic mutations that prevent cells from working properly. About 25-30 million Americans live with a rare medical condition, the majority of which are thought to be related to a genetic defect. By fixing the underlying causes of genetic disorders, gene therapies have the potential to deliver cures for these patients.

Progress has been swift. In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first three gene therapies for use in the U.S., and dozens more are completing the review process. Last month, FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb predicted that by 2025, “the FDA will be approving 10 to 20 cell and gene therapy products a year based on an assessment of the current pipeline and the clinical success rates of these products.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Radically Transforming the Nation: Our Politicized Schools of Education by Jay Schalin

By on February 20th, 2019

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/02/radically

If somebody wanted to fundamentally transform a society to its roots, where would he or she start?

The most logical starting point would be education. And if there were one part of the educational system that would produce this transformation most broadly, effectively, and efficiently, it would most likely be at our schools of education that train teachers for the K-12 classroom. That’s where ideas from the rest of academia are inserted into the curriculum for elementary and high school students, and where politically unsophisticated young people are turned into classroom teachers. Control the schools of education, and the education system will eventually be yours to forward your political agenda.

Remarkably, that is just what has happened in this country. Over 100 years ago, when our education schools were just starting up or growing from two-year normal schools to university status, Progressive educators set out to transform the nation into one that was based on social science theories, collectivism, and central planning.

How successful were they? Several years ago, I started an investigation into how politicized education schools have become. Today, the Martin Center is releasing the results of that investigation in a new report, titled “The Politicization of University Schools of Education.”

The report’s main conclusion? That schools of education may very well be radicalized beyond anything imagined by the early Progressives.

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Our Woefully Politicized Education Schools By George Leef

By on February 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/our-woefully-politicized-education-schools/

A book that happened to catch my attention long before I was working in the field of higher-ed policy was Rita Kramer’s 1991 Ed School Follies. In it, she showed how many of America’s schools of education — the training grounds for future teachers — had been overrun with leftist ideology. And how do things stand 28 years later?

No better and probably worse is the answer.

The Martin Center’s Jay Schalin has just written a study on the politicization of ed schools and he discusses it in today’s article.

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Pompeo Denies ‘ISIS Bride’ Request to Return to U.S. By Jack Crowe

By on February 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pompeo-denies-isis-bride-request-to-return-to-u-s/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that an Alabama woman who fled to Syria to join ISIS in 2014 is not a U.S. citizen and, as a result, is not entitled to return to the U.S. with her 18-month-old son, as she had hoped to do.

“Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States,” Pompeo said in a statement. “She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States. We continue to strongly advise all U.S. citizens not to travel to Syria.”

Muthana, 24, was taken to a refugee camp in northeast Syria by Kurdish forces after escaping ISIS territory.

An attorney representing Muthana’s parents claims she is a U.S. citizen despite the fact that her father was serving as a Yemeni diplomat when she was born in New Jersey, which, according to the State Department, means she is not entitled to birthright citizenship.

Muthana’s son was fathered by one of the three ISIS fighters she was married to during her time in the caliphate. In a 2015 tweet, she urged Americans to carry out domestic terror attacks.

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Reihan Salam poised to bring Manhattan Institute to new highs

By on February 20th, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/02/19/reihan-salam-poised-to-bring-manhattan-institute-to-

Our favorite think tank, the Manhattan Institute, just got a new president: the brilliant, heterodox writer Reihan Salam.

Born and bred in Brooklyn and a graduate of the city’s public schools, he’s an excellent choice to lead the nation’s top institution for right-of-center urban policy.

And, as a writer who for more than a decade has been leading the push to refocus the Republican Party on the needs of less-affluent Americans, he’s also a perfect pick for the challenges of the Trump era.

Executive editor at National Review and a contributing editor at The Atlantic and National Affairs, he’s eager to engage not just conservatives but the whole range of US society — exactly the proper attitude for a righty in this town.

An advocate for families and the working class, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, he’s guaranteed to bring an independent cast of mind to tired debates, while maintaining MI’s support for free markets and intellectual excellence.

Salam, 39, will succeed Larry Mone, who led the Manhattan Institute through 24 years of enormous growth, solidifying its role as a national leader in public policy and positioning it as the premier home of “quality-of-life conservativism.”

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Why it’s so hard to revoke the citizenship of terrorists By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 20th, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/02/19/why-its-so-hard-to-revoke-the-citizenship-of-terrorists/

What allegiance does the United States owe to our enemies when they are our own citizens?

More than we should.

The question arises due to the case of Hoda Muthana, a young woman born in Alabama, the daughter of Yemeni immigrant parents.

As too often happens, the impressionable young Muslim was drawn, in her teen years, into fundamentalist Islam. This ideology — commonly called “radical Islam,” but more accurately labeled “sharia supremacism” — teaches that Muslims have a duty to impose and spread Islamic law throughout the world. It fuels violent jihadism and other aggressive Islamist strategies, pressuring governments and societies to concede to fundamentalist Muslims the right to live autonomously — i.e., to adhere to sharia whenever it conflicts with domestic law.

This is a profoundly dangerous concession. Sharia supremacism is anti-American and anti-Western. It systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims; it rejects our notions of equality, freedom, and privacy. Basically, it is counter-constitutional.

The result in Muthana’s case was dire. She fled to Syria to join the Islamic State terrorist network — the ISIS caliphate. And she was all in, calling for violent jihad against the West and the annihilation of the United States in ISIS recruiting messages on social media. “Spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them” — that is what she called for her fellow radicals to do to her fellow Americans.

Though just 24 years old, Muthana is on her third marriage, her first two husbands having been ISIS militants killed fighting American and other armed forces. She has an 18-month-old son, born of her second marriage, to a jihadi killed in Mosul.

She was captured by Kurdish forces and is now living in a refugee camp in Syria. Naturally, she is expressing remorse and pleading that she be permitted to return with her son to her family in Alabama.

Clearly, she is not a sympathetic case. Nevertheless, she has a right as an American to be admitted back into the United States.

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‘Crazy Andy’ McCabe thinks ‘it’s possible’ Trump could be a Russian spy By Rick Moran

By on February 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/crazy_andy_mccabe_thinks_its_possible_trump_could_be_a_russian_spy.html

Just how far off the deep end has anti-Trump hysteria taken former and current FBI and Justice Department officials? The former acting director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, who opened a federal investigation on the president of the United States to discover if he fired former FBI Director James Comey at the request of Vladimir Putin, still says “it’s possible” Donald Trump is a Russian spy.

The Hill:

“I think it’s possible. I think that’s why we started our investigation, and I’m really anxious to see where [special counsel Robert] Mueller concludes that,” McCabe said when asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if Trump could be a Russian asset.

The comment comes after McCabe admitted he opened an investigation into whether Trump was acting at Moscow’s behest after the president fired former FBI Director James Comey, adding that none of the top eight congressional leaders objected when he briefed them in 2017.

He also revealed last week that senior officials discussed the possibility of removing Trump under the 25th Amendment and that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosensteinoffered numerous times to secretly record his conversations with the president.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

12 Of The Craziest College Classes In America, All Subsidized By Your Tax Dollars It’s no wonder figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rocketed straight out of liberal institutions and onto the national stage with proposals like the Green New Deal—they’re doing exactly as they were taught. by Spencer Brown

By on February 20th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/20/12-craziest-college-classes-america-subsidized-tax-dollars/

It’s a common understanding that America’s colleges and universities are thick with leftist professors, administrators, and young progressives-in-training who pay through the nose for a “higher” education. But what exactly makes up an education today? As someone who’s been on dozens of embattled liberal campuses in the last two years, I’m still surprised by the absurd courses offered at the institutions people around the world consider to be elite.

Yes, the situation on campus is worse than most people think: Classes teach students about “Unsettling Whiteness” and “Latinx Sexual Dissidence.” Karl Marx and his failed ideas are propped up by aging academics who believe their socialist hell should be imposed on us all. The free market is written off as the flawed experiment of cisgendered white men.

It’s no wonder figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rocketed straight out of liberal institutions and onto the national stage with proposals like the Green New Deal—they’re doing exactly as they were taught. The courses listed in “Comedy & Tragedy,” a report we compile annually at Young America’s Foundation, provide a lens through which recent campus controversies may be better understood.

Deplatforming conservatives, student riots in response to guest speakers, safe spaces, and therapy alpacas are all inspired by the intersectional, victim-obsessed curriculum taught to the rising generation. A list of the 12 most bizarre and politically correct courses, presented with their original descriptions, is below. The full report is available here.

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