"The experimental robot’s gangly, contortionist-bending legs are packed aboard a SpaceX supply ship that launched Friday, more than a month late. It was the private company’s fourth shipment to the space station for NASA and is due to arrive Easter Sunday morning."
The post began floating away from me during the day, sorry.
That means getting up to the space station may become a problem, no?
"Pro-Russian forces tighten political grip in Ukraine; Push to expand their territory in Ukraine paused" by Andrew E. Kramer | New York Times April 20, 2014
DONETSK, Ukraine — Just before the most important religious holiday of the year for both Ukrainians and Russians, the Orthodox Easter celebration on Sunday, pro-Russian militant groups have paused what had been the daily expansion of their territory in eastern Ukraine.
They have turned, instead, to consolidating political power over areas already under their control.
In a string of midsize mining and industrial towns that form the core of the area under pro-Russian militant control, centered on the town of Slovyansk, pressure mounted on political dissenters and the media in ways that are commonplace in Russia, but had not been in Ukraine until now.
Internet connections went dead on Saturday in Slovyansk, local news media reported, while Ukrainian television channels blinked off the air, replaced by Russian channels. Pro-Russian militants reportedly accomplished this by seizing a broadcasting tower.
Also in Slovyansk, local newspapers were not distributed after it became clear that at least some editors and reporters did not support the Russian-backed takeover of the town and intended to write critically about it.
The occupiers of government buildings in nearly a dozen cities in eastern Ukraine were preparing to celebrate Orthodox Easter at barricades outside the seized buildings, despite an international agreement for them to vacate the premises and turn in their weapons.
In Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, a cochairman of the self-appointed Donetsk People’s Republic, which is demanding broader regional powers and closer ties to Russia, vowed that insurgents will continue occupying government offices until the new pro-Western Kiev government is dismissed.
‘‘We will leave only after the Kiev junta leaves,’’ Pushilin told the Associated Press outside the occupied regional administration building. ‘‘First Kiev, then Donetsk.’’
Sounds good to me.
At the same time, Pushilin told Russia’s RIA-Novosti news agency that his group could take part in a nationwide roundtable on easing the crisis, which has been proposed by Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and candidate in the May 25 presidential election.
While the militants have vowed to ignore a diplomatic agreement reached in Geneva on Thursday by the United States, Russia, the European Union, and Ukraine, they halted the expansion of their territory last week.
That had given officials in Kiev some hope that a settlement was still possible, but the tightening of the separatists’ political grip appears to be a setback.
The insurgents say the Kiev authorities, who took power after pro-Russia Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in February, aim to suppress the country’s Russian-speakers.
The new government, which insists it is legitimate, says it is working on constitutional reforms that will give eastern regions a greater voice in governance.
Just haven g to insist such a thing proves they are not.
In another sign of pro-Russian forces’ consolidating politically, they announced Friday that Slovyansk’s elected mayor, who had waffled in her support of their armed seizure of the town and had then mysteriously disappeared, was in their hands and had not been seen in public because she was recovering from a medical operation.
The militants who a week ago overran Slovyansk’s City Hall first said the mayor, Neli Shtyopa, would continue in her position, but work in a separate building.
On Thursday, however, journalists who checked the new building, a dance hall, found it eerily empty except for a woman in a cloakroom, who said nobody had shown up to reestablish the old City Council. Soon enough, all pretense of allowing the elected local government to continue functioning vanished and then so did the mayor.
“She is with us,” Vyachislav Ponomaryov, who has declared himself the new mayor, the “People’s Mayor,” announced late Friday on a loudspeaker set up in front of City Hall, masked gunmen standing behind him.
“She’s in a normal condition,” Ponomaryov said, according to Donbass, an online news portal covering eastern Ukraine. “It’s just that yesterday she had a small crisis. She is recovering from an operation. She doesn’t feel well. She signed a letter of resignation.”
He said pro-Russian militants were protecting Shtyopa from the central government, as Ukraine’s domestic security service had opened a criminal case against her after she initially issued a statement in support of the armed men.
I translated it wrong?
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"Obama focuses updated Cold War approach on Putin" by Peter Baker | New York Times April 20, 2014
WASHINGTON — Even as the crisis in Ukraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.
This is what the war profiteers wanted!
Just as the United States resolved in the aftermath of World War II to counter the Soviet Union and its global ambitions, Obama is focused on isolating President Vladimir Putin’s Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah state.
And by doing such is isolating himself.
Obama has concluded that even if there is a resolution to the current standoff over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he will never have a constructive relationship with Putin, aides said.
Good thing he's gone in two years then.
As a result, Obama will spend his final 2½ years in office trying to minimize the disruption Putin can cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved and otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin in favor of other foreign policy areas where progress remains possible.
Related: New York Times Nostalgic For Cold War
Which is why I floated away from them long ago.
“That is the strategy we ought to be pursuing,” said Ivo H. Daalder, formerly Obama’s ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “If you just stand there, be confident and raise the cost gradually and increasingly to Russia, that doesn’t solve your Crimea problem and it probably doesn’t solve your eastern Ukraine problem. But it may solve your Russia problem.”
Looks neo-con to me.
The manifestation of this thinking can be seen in Obama’s pending choice for the next ambassador to Moscow. While not officially final, the White House is preparing to nominate John F. Tefft, a career diplomat who previously served as ambassador to Ukraine, Georgia, and Lithuania.
When the search began months ago, administration officials were leery of sending Tefft because of concern that his experience in former Soviet republics that have flouted Moscow’s influence would irritate Russia. Now, officials said, there is no reluctance to offend the Kremlin.
Just don't offend Israel.
Related: Iran Executes Jewish Rabbi
No reluctance to offend there, either.
In effect, Obama is retrofitting for a new age the approach to Moscow that was first set out by the diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947 and that dominated US strategy through the fall of the Soviet Union.
Then say goodbye to peace on this planet and a decent world. It has been an honor serving you, readers.
The administration’s priority is to hold together an international consensus against Russia, including even China, its longtime supporter on the UN Security Council.
Yeah, right. Good luck including China this time.
While Obama’s long-term approach takes shape, though, a quiet debate has roiled his administration over how far to go in the short term.
What long term? He planning on staying?
So far, economic advisers and White House aides urging a measured approach have won out, prevailing upon a cautious president to take one incremental step at a time out of fear of getting too far ahead of skittish Europeans and risking damage to still-fragile economies on both sides of the Atlantic.
I was told it was the Russians who would suffer!
The White House has prepared another list of Russian figures and institutions to sanction in the next few days if Moscow does not follow through on an agreement sealed in Geneva on Thursday to defuse the crisis, as Obama aides anticipate. But the president will not extend the punitive measures to whole sectors of the Russian economy, as some administration officials prefer, absent a dramatic escalation.
Related: US To Target Putin's Personal $40 Billion Stash
Deceived by the NYT yet again!
The more hawkish faction in the US State and Defense departments has grown increasingly frustrated, privately worrying that Obama has come across as weak and unintentionally sent the message that he has written off Crimea after Russia’s annexation.
What else can he do short of confrontation?
The prevailing view in the West Wing, though, is that while Putin seems for now to be enjoying the glow of success, he will eventually discover how much economic harm he has brought on his country.
The NYT admitting Putin has outplayed Obummer, and the economic harm charge makes one laugh.
Has Obummer discovered how much harm his policies have done?
Obama’s aides noted the fall of the Russian stock market and the ruble, capital flight from the country and increasing reluctance of foreign investors to expand dealings in Russia.
Some are, it is just not being reported by my propaganda press.
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Never mind getting to another world:
"It is a bit bigger and somewhat colder, but a planet circling a star 500 light-years away is otherwise the closest match of our home world yet discovered, astronomers announced Thursday."
Nothing but silence out there.
Time for it to be silent here. Good night, beloved readers.
