Assange: Snowden is ?healthy and safe?; has applied for asylum in Ecuador, Iceland

An Edward Snowden banner is displayed in Hong Kong. (Kin Cheung/AP)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange confirmed on Monday that Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor accused of espionage for leaking information about U.S. surveillance programs, is in transit and headed to Ecuador to seek asylum.

"Edward Snowden left Hong Kong on the 23rd of June bound for Ecuador via a safe pass through Russia and other states," Assange told reporters on a conference call. "Mr. Snowden has submitted an asylum application to Ecuador and possibly to other countries."

The WikiLeaks legal team has been assisting Snowden's applications for asylum in Iceland and has aided his efforts to do the same in Ecuador at Snowden's request. Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks representative, has been traveling with Snowden.

Snowden and Harrison "are healthy and safe ... and they are in contact with their legal teams," Assange said. Later, during a Q-and-A session, Assange declined several times to offer further details regarding their location.

"We are aware of where Mr. Snowden is. He is in a safe place, and his spirits are high. Due to the bellicose threats coming from the U.S. administration, we cannot go into further details at this time," Assange said, adding that Snowden is traveling with "a refugee document of passage" from the Ecuadorean government.

Assange suggested Snowden and Harrison's travels have been noteworthy. "In relation to their travel out of Hong Kong?that is a fascinating story that I'm sure one day will be told," he said.

Questions remain regarding whether WikiLeaks is planning to publish leaked material from Snowden.

Assange has lived at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London under asylum for over a year as he seeks to avoid extradition to Sweden to be questioned over alleged sex offenses.

He declined on Monday to directly address questions about publishing information from Snowden. "Of course, WikiLeaks is in the business of publishing documents that are suppressed by governments," he said.

Assange spent much of Friday's hour-long call expressing opposition to what he views as unfair U.S. policies on whistle-blowers?a term Assange uses to describe Snowden.

"Edward Snowden is not a traitor. He is not a spy. He is a whistle-blower who has told the public an important truth," Assange said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/assange-snowden-healthy-safe-applied-asylum-ecuador-iceland-165626424.html

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Ohio air crash shows risks, thrill of wing walking

A stunt plane loses control as a wing walker performs at the Vectren Air Show just before crashing, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and the stunt walker instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Thanh V Tran)

A stunt plane loses control as a wing walker performs at the Vectren Air Show just before crashing, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and the stunt walker instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Thanh V Tran)

Flames erupt from a plane after a stunt plane crashed while performing with a wing walker at the Vectren Air Show, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and the wing walker instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Thanh V Tran)

A wing walker performs at the Vectren Air Show just before crashing, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and the stunt walker instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Thanh V Tran)

Flames erupt from a plane after it crashed at the Vectren Air Show at the airport in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and stunt walker on the plane instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Dayton Daily News, Ty Greenlees)

This photo provided provided WHIO TV shows a plane after it crashed Saturday, June 22, 2013, at the Vectren Air Show near Dayton, Ohio. There was no immediate word on the fate of the pilot, wing walker or anyone else aboard the plane. No one on the ground was hurt. (AP Photo/WHIO-TV)

CINCINNATI (AP) ? Risking death every time they go to work, wing walkers need courage, poise, a healthy craving for adrenaline and, most importantly, they need to be meticulously exacting with every step they take on the small planes that carry them past dazzled crowds at speeds up to 130 mph.

Jane Wicker fit that bill, her friends and colleagues in the air show industry said Sunday.

Wicker, 44, and pilot Charlie Schwenker, 64, were killed Saturday in a fiery plane crash captured on video at a southwestern Ohio air show and witnessed by thousands. The cause of the crash isn't yet known.

Jason Aguilera, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator leading the probe into the crash, said Sunday that it was too early to rule anything out and that the agency would issue its findings in six months to a year.

Wicker, a mother of two teenage boys and recently engaged, sat helplessly on the plane's wing as the aircraft suddenly turned and slammed into the ground, exploding on impact and stunning the crowd at the Vectren Air Show near Dayton. The show closed shortly afterward but reopened Sunday with a moment of silence for the victims.

The crash drew attention to the rarefied profession of wing walking, which began in the 1920s in the barnstorming era of air shows following World War I.

The practice fell off the middle of the 20th century but picked back up again in the 1970s. Still, there are only about a dozen wing walkers in the U.S., said John Cudahy, president of the Leesburg, Va.-based International Council of Air Shows.

Teresa Stokes, of Houston, said she's been wing walking for the past 25 years and does a couple of dozen shows every year. The job mostly requires being in shape to climb around the plane while battling winds, she said.

"It's like running a marathon in a hurricane," Stokes said. "When you're watching from the ground it looks pretty graceful, but up there, it's happening very fast and it's high energy and I'm really moving fast against hurricane-force winds."

Stokes, an aerobatic pilot before becoming a wing walker, said she was attracted to performing stunts because of the thrill.

"It is the craziest fun ride you've ever been on," she said. "You're like Superman flying around, going upside-down doing rolls and loops, and I'm just screaming and laughing."

John King, pilot and president of the Flying Circus Airshow, where Wicker trained, said the most important qualities of wing walkers are "strong nerves, a sense of adventure and a level head."

He said they tell people who are interested that it'll take a year of training before they'll be allowed to walk on the wing of an airplane in flight.

"We give them an opportunity to walk on a wing down on the ground without the engine running," he said. "Then we start up the engine. And if that doesn't spook them, OK, we taxi around the field and that's when it gets bumpy. If they do that successfully, the next time they do it is in the air."

He described Wicker, of Bristow, Va., and Schwenker, of Oakton, Va., as "ultimate professionals."

"I don't know of anyone who could have done any better than what they were doing," he said.

In one post on Wicker's website, the stuntwoman explains what she loved most about her job.

"There is nothing that feels more exhilarating or freer to me than the wind and sky rushing by me as the earth rolls around my head," says the post. "I'm alive up there. To soar like a bird and touch the sky puts me in a place where I feel I totally belong. It's the only thing I've done that I've never questioned, never hesitated about and always felt was my destiny."

She also answered a question she said she got frequently: What about the risk?

"I feel safer on the wing of my airplane than I do driving to the airport," she wrote. "Why? Because I'm in control of those risks and not at the mercy of those other drivers."

An announcer at Saturday's event narrated as Wicker's plane glided through the air.

"Keep an eye on Jane. Keep an eye on Charlie. Watch this! Jane Wicker, sitting on top of the world," he said, right before the plane made a quick turn and nosedive.

Some witnesses said they knew something was wrong because the plane was flying too low and slow.

Thanh Tran, of Fairfield, said he could see a look of concern on Wicker's face just before the plane went down.

"She looked very scared," he said. "Then the airplane crashed on the ground. After that, it was terrible, man ... very terrible."

From 1975 to 2010, just two wing walkers were killed, one in 1975 and another in 1993, Cudahy said. But since 2011, three wing walkers have died, including Wicker.

In 2011, wing walker Todd Green fell 200 feet to his death at an air show in Michigan while performing a stunt in which he grabbed the skid of a helicopter. That same year, wing walker Amanda Franklin died after being badly burned in a plane crash during a performance in South Texas. The pilot, her husband, Kyle, survived.

FAA spokeswoman Lynn Lunsford said the agency is often asked why wing walking is allowed.

"The people who do these acts spend hours and hours and hours performing and practicing away from the crowd, and even though it may look inherently dangerous, they're practiced in such a way that they maintain as much safety as possible," he said. "The vast majority of these things occur without a hitch, so you know whenever one of them goes wrong and there's a crash, it's an unusual event."

___

Associated Press writer Verena Dobnik in New York contributed to this report.

___

Follow Amanda Lee Myers on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AmandaLeeAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-06-23-Air%20Show%20Crash/id-9e8f038214f74f869c66843e076db14d

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The humanities are in crisis | Opinion | The Seattle Times

A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Over the past decade, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third.

Most people give an economic explanation for this decline. Accounting majors get jobs. Lit majors don?t. And there?s obviously some truth to this. But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.

Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence?s phrase, ?the dark vast forest.?

This was the most inward and elemental part of a person. When you go to a funeral and hear a eulogy, this is usually the part they are talking about. Eulogies aren?t r?sum?s. They describe the person?s care, wisdom, truthfulness and courage. They describe the million little moral judgments that emanate from that inner region.

The humanist?s job was to cultivate this ground ? imposing intellectual order upon it, educating the emotions with art in order to refine it, offering inspiring exemplars to get it properly oriented.

Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn?t want to offend anybody.

To the earnest 19-year-old with lofty dreams of self-understanding and moral greatness, the humanities in this guise were bound to seem less consequential and more boring.

So now the humanities are in crisis. Rescuers are stepping forth. On Thursday, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released a report called ?The Heart of the Matter,? making the case for the humanities and social sciences. (I was a member of this large commission, although I certainly can?t take any credit for the result.)

The report is important, and you should read it. It focuses not only on the external goods the humanities can produce (creative thinking, good writing), but also the internal transformation (spiritual depth, personal integrity). It does lack some missionary zeal that hit me powerfully as a college freshman when the humanities were in better shape.

One of the great history teachers in those days was a University of Chicago professor named Karl Weintraub. He poured his soul into transforming his student?s lives, but, even then, he sometimes wondered if they were really listening. Late in life, he wrote a note to my classmate Carol Quillen, who now helps carry on this legacy as president of Davidson College.

Teaching Western Civ, Weintraub wrote, ?seems to confront me all too often with moments when I feel like screaming suddenly: ?Oh, God, my dear student, why cannot you see that this matter is a real, real matter, often a matter of the very being, for the person, for the historical men and women you are looking at ? or are supposed to be looking at!?

?I hear these answers and statements that sound like mere words, mere verbal formulations to me, but that do not have the sense of pain or joy or accomplishment or worry about them that they ought to have if they were truly informed by the live problems and situations of the human beings back there for whom these matters were real. The way these disembodied words come forth can make me cry, and the failure of the speaker to probe for the open wounds and such behind the text makes me increasingly furious.

?If I do not come to feel any of the love which Pericles feels for his city, how can I understand the Funeral Oration? If I cannot fathom anything of the power of the drive derived from thinking that he has a special mission, what can I understand of Socrates? ... How can one grasp anything about the problem of the Galatian community without sensing in one?s bones the problem of worrying about God?s acceptance?

?Sometimes when I have spent an hour or more, pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and exhausted. I think it works on the student, but I do not really know.?

Teachers like that were zealous for the humanities. A few years in that company leaves a lifelong mark.

? , New York Times News Service

David Brooks is a regular columnist for The New York Times.

Source: http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2021243269_brookscolumnhumanitiesxml.html

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For Sharpest Views, Scope The Sky With Quick-Change Mirrors

Before And After: These near-infrared images of Uranus show the planet as seen without adaptive optics (left) and with the technology turned on (right).

Courtesy of Heidi B. Hammel and Imke de Pater

Before And After: These near-infrared images of Uranus show the planet as seen without adaptive optics (left) and with the technology turned on (right).

Courtesy of Heidi B. Hammel and Imke de Pater

It used to be that if astronomers wanted to get rid of the blurring effects of the atmosphere, they had to put their telescopes in space. But a technology called adaptive optics has changed all that.

Adaptive optics systems use computers to analyze the light coming from a star, and then compensate for changes wrought by the atmosphere, using mirrors that can change their shapes up to a thousand times per second. The result: To anyone on Earth peering through the telescope, the star looks like the single point of light it really is.

The reason the atmosphere blurs light is that there are tiny changes in temperature as you go from the Earth's surface up into space. The degree to which air bends light depends on the air's temperature.

With adaptive optics systems, telescopes on Earth can see nearly as clearly as those in space. What's more, you can build bigger telescopes on Earth than can be sent into orbit. The bigger the telescope, the smaller and fainter the objects it can see.

"Adaptive optics has really revolutionized so many fields of astronomy," says Andrea Ghez, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles. But such systems did not start out as tools for astronomers. "It was part of the strategic defense thinking of the nation, of what we could do to get better images of what was out in space," says Robert Duffner, author of The Adaptive Optics Revolution: A History.

During the Cold War the United States became concerned that the Soviet Union might be developing weapons that would be put into orbit. "The Air Force was interested in using telescopes on the ground to look up through the atmosphere to get clearer images of space objects ? mainly satellites and missiles," says Duffner.

Adaptive optics technology sharpens images by changing the shape of telescope mirrors up to 1,000 times per second. Here, the planet Uranus is seen without (left) and with adaptive optics.

Courtesy of Heidi B. Hammel and Imke de Pater

Adaptive optics technology sharpens images by changing the shape of telescope mirrors up to 1,000 times per second. Here, the planet Uranus is seen without (left) and with adaptive optics.

Courtesy of Heidi B. Hammel and Imke de Pater

The Air Force had other ideas for adaptive optics besides looking at satellites. One of them involved shooting down missiles.

The notion was to aim a laser beam from the ground toward a relay mirror in space. "The mirror could then deflect the laser beam and send it to an incoming missile," says Robert Fugate, a scientist with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M.

The hitch with such a plan, Fugate says, was that the atmosphere would smear out the laser, diluting its destructive power. Adaptive optics offered a solution. You can think of it as the reverse of compensating for the atmosphere in a way that makes starlight appear to be a single point. In this case, instead, the scientists would smear out the laser light so the countering distortions in the atmosphere would then bring it back to a narrow beam. That was the theory. In practice, the system was never built.

In 1991, the military agreed to declassify most of the work it had been doing with adaptive optics, so astronomers could take advantage of what the Air Force had learned. In the last two decades, the technology has brought some remarkable achievements.

"One of the most exciting recent ones is the study of planets outside our own solar system," says UCLA's Ghez. "Just 15 years ago, we didn't know about any planets around stars outside our sun. Now, not only do we know about them, but we can take a picture of them with this technology."

The technology is also valuable for looking at objects closer to Earth. "It's really interesting to look at planets within our own solar system. We send satellites out to study these planets in detail. And yet if we can point a telescope from the ground at these planets, like Saturn, or the moons of Jupiter, we can study them in equal detail to what the satellites might be doing," says Ghez.

She doesn't study planets. Ghez studies the giant black holes that exist in the center of galaxies. Adaptive optics has blown that field wide open, too. "You can actually see the stars that reside right around the black hole, and you can see matter falling into the black hole thanks to this technology," she says.

This pair of images of the Galactic Center, the rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy, shows how adaptive optics technology can sharpen a telescope's view.

Courtesy of the Keck Observatory

There's just one problem. For adaptive optics to work, you need a bright enough star to make the corrections on. So, until recently, if you wanted to explore a patch of sky with no bright star, you were out of luck. But scientists have figured out a work-around ? they create artificial stars using a laser. "We shine a laser up into the atmosphere, and there's conveniently a very thin layer of sodium atoms up at 90 kilometers," Ghez says. "And this laser can stimulate those atoms to shine like a star. And then we can look at that star ? that artificial star ? and make the corrections."

The use of adaptive optics is also transforming vision research. Austin Roorda is at the optometry school at the University of California, Berkeley, and says that the cornea, lens and fluid inside the eye distort light, just as the atmosphere does. By analyzing that distortion, he says, scientists can use optics to "un-distort" the light, so the cells at the back of the eye no longer appear blurry during eye exams.

Adaptive optics could let a doctor see individual damaged cells at the back of the eye, Roorda says, and offer an important new tool for diagnosing and treating eye diseases like macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. And there's more, he says. "We may have a tool that will allow us to measure the efficacy of a treatment, [and] that may slow the degeneration of those cells, and even restore those cells' function."

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/24/190986008/for-sharpest-views-scope-the-sky-with-quick-change-mirrors?ft=1&f=1007

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