Singapore News Channel, Singapore News Network

WASHINGTON (WJLA) � A high school student interning at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt this past summer discovered a bit more than how the employees there take their coffee. He discovered a planet.

Wolf Cukier’s job, after he finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA�s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TESS has four cameras, which each take a full-frame image of a patch of the sky every 30 minutes for 27 days, NASA says. Scientists use the observations to generate graphs of how the brightness of stars change over time.

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After President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to take out Iran�s secretive Quds Force commander, Qassem Suleimani, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said the president should have asked for permission from Congress before conducting the airstrike.

�The Administration has conducted tonight�s strikes in Iraq targeting high-level Iranian military officials and killing Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani without an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Iran. Further, this action was taken without the consultation of the Congress,� she said Thursday night in a statement.

She also said �The full Congress must be immediately briefed on this serious situation and on the next steps under consideration by the Administration, including the significant escalation of the deployment of additional troops to the region.�

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Although they were considered radical at the time, American suffragists were unrelenting in their efforts to transform our country�s politics and empower women with the right to vote.

The year 2020 marks the centennial of their victory in that battle, and while it is an occasion to celebrate, it is also a reminder that we must continue the work of these early feminists.

In addition to voting rights, suffragists championed abolition, equality in education, equal pay for equal work, and the right to life for the unborn.

Unlike many radical feminists of the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century, these women realized that abortion does not empower women. In honor of these suffragists, the theme for the 47th annual March for Life is �Life Empowers: Pro-Life Is Pro-Woman.�

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A majority of Americans agree that the unequal distribution of income and opportunity in the U.S. has gotten to be too much.

Economic inequality in the U.S. is rising. It has increased exponentially since the 1980s, according to a new Pew Research Center report on the topic. In 1980, the households that ranked in the top 10% of earners had about nine times the income as those in the bottom 10% of earners. In 2018, the top 10% of earners had about 12.6 times more than households at the bottom. That’s a 39% increase, according to Pew.

Those demographic changes have become a rallying cry for several politicians seeking the Democrat presidential nomination, so it’s no surprise that more Democrats see this as a major issue than Republicans. About 78% of those who identify as Democrats say there’s too much economic inequality, while about 41% of Republicans agree, according to the Pew Research Center survey.

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[And ‘economic equality’ is a tenet of what form of government? –Editor]

CIA director Gina Haspel foresaw the Iranian missile attack on two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. troops but said that killing Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was worth the risk.

The New York Times published a detailed look at the hours leading up to Wednesday’s strike, in which Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles toward targets in Iraq. No one was hurt or killed in the incident, which U.S. officials believe was a result of intelligence received before the strike took place.

According to the Times, Haspel told President Donald Trump days before Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week that taking him out and dealing with the expected retaliation from Iran posed a lower threat than leaving him alive to plot more attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

What’s more, Haspel said that Iran would likely respond to Soleimani’s killing by sending a barrage of missiles at Iraqi military bases � which is exactly what happened Tuesday night.

Haspel also said that a world without Soleimani � who led Iran’s elite Quds Force, which handles military and spying operations in foreign countries � would lead to a more stable situation in the Middle East.

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SINGAPORE: Iran’s missile attack
on military bases housing United States troops in Iraq did not intend
to kill, said Middle East expert James Dorsey hours after the incident
on Wednesday (Jan 8) on CNA’s Asia Tonight.

Iranian forces
fired missiles at military bases housing US troops in Iraq on Wednesday
in retaliation of the killing of an Iranian general. US President Donald
Trump had

Baptist church congregants in North Carolina reportedly tackled a man who they say attempted to force his way inside during services last Sunday.

“He was reaching back in his pants and I just felt like he had a gun or ill intent, and at that point, I knew I could not let him back inside,” Macedonia Free Will Baptist Church member Kevin Toler, told WXII-TV.

Toler and another church member brought the suspect, identified as Christopher Bennett, to the ground in the incident caught on surveillance video outside of Vanceboro, N.C.

Bennett was arrested by Craven County deputies who used a taser on him, WITN-TV reported. Officers said he continued to be combative and seemed to be under the influence of drugs.

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https://www.foxnews.com/us/north-carolina-church-members-tackle-man-trying-to-force-his-way-inside

Related: https://careers.un.org/lbw/jobdetail.aspx?id=127453

Booze is out and �sober curiosity� is in as people around the world participate in Dry January and voluntarily abstain from alcohol for the month.

Whether it�s for a New Year�s resolution or for health reasons, Americans have jumped aboard the Dry January bandwagon, which originated in Britain.

�What a better time than right after the holidays, which is traditionally a very boozy time of year for people, to sort of have a reset,� said Laura Silverman, a Rockville, Maryland, resident who launched BoozeFreeInDC.com and has led a sober lifestyle for 12 years.

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