Watch: Banding the Brown Pelican – dcw50.com

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Louisiana Wildlife experts just finished the 2020 banding season at Queen Bess Island north of Grand Isle. The newly restored island a Louisiana Gem and Brown Pelican rookery was dedicated in February. Now, 8000 pelicans call Queen Bess home.

Under the cover of darkness and a slight rain, a small group of wildlife experts arrived at the island to finish this years banding season. Caitlin Glymph of CPRA says, It was amazing when we saw it in February but the amount of birds we saw then as opposed to now is pretty incredible.

Three-hundred-fifty pelicans were banded over three nights. The banding process is simple.

Todd Baker of Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries states, You are going to grab the bill, put the body of the bird under your arm, and cradle it like this and have the bill in other hand.

Once secure, a metal band and color banding will be put in place. This will allow researchers to track and monitor these Brown Pelicans. The team took other measurementsbill and wing size, age, and gender.

Paul Link, North American Waterfowl Management Plan Coordinator,Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries, We banded birds out here last year pre-restoration and then again this year hoping to see the response to see if the birds are coming back utilizing the same habitat.

A Brown Pelican banded in Waveland, Mississippi in 2010 was recently identified on Queen Bess Island.

If you see a banded bird or pelican, you can send a report towww.reportband.gov. You will receive a Certificate of Appreciation for helping out.

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Watch: Banding the Brown Pelican - dcw50.com

Bryant on testing concerns: ‘We’ve got a big hill to climb’ – Comcast SportsNet Chicago

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Kris Bryant announced last Tuesday that hed landed in Chicago, holding his infant son in his arms on the flight over. That same day, he went through intake screening. He wasnt scheduled to undergo his second round of COVID-19 testing until Sunday.

Im not trying to be insensitive by any means because theres a lot of people out there struggling who need tests, the Cubs third baseman said. I genuinely want that to come across. But at the same time, MLB created this lab and did all this stuff to be able to run a season. I know theres going to hiccups, but you just cant hiccup with this.

Bryants frustrations were echoed across the league on Monday. The Astros, Nationals and Cardinalsall cancelled workouts Monday while waiting for test results. The Angels and Diamondbacks also navigated delays. The As postponed their first position player workouts on Sunday, also due to testing complications.

Click to download the MyTeams App for the latest Cubs news and analysis.

According to a league release, over 95 percent of intake testing had been conducted, analyzed and shared with all 30 Clubs by Monday afternoon. MLB expects the remaining tests to be completed by the end of the day. Those who had finished testing are scheduled to be tested every other day from here on out.

Our plan required extensive delivery and shipping services, including proactive special accommodations to account for the holiday weekend, MLb said in a statement. "The vast majority of those deliveries occurred without incident and allowed the protocols to function as planned. Unfortunately, several situations included unforeseen delays. We have addressed the delays caused by the holiday weekend and do not expect a recurrence. We commend the affected Clubs that responded properly by cancelling workouts.

The Cubs, who had not announced any positive COVID-19 tests as of Monday evening, havent faced the same testing scares as some other teams have. But manager David Ross said he voiced his concerns to the league, advocating for more frequent testing and a quicker return on the results.

Its definitely new for everybody, Ross said, so you want to try to give Major League Baseball a little bit of slack in some areas because were all needing some slack in some areas, but I think the protocols they have in place are for a reason and we need to get these tests done.

MLB converted a lab in Utah, which had previously handled Minor League Baseball drug tests,into a COVID-19 testing facility in preparation for the season.The 2020 Operations Manual that the players signed off on promises that players will be tested every other day during Summer Camp and the season. Albert Almora Jr., like Bryant,said he went through intake testing on Tuesday and had his second round of testing Sunday.

So, it was a big gap in between, he said. A lot of guys werent happy with that. As careful as you may be, (the virus) an invisible thing that you have no control over even if you do all the right things. Its tough. Its something that we have to overcome, and hopefully it gets better. I know theyre all working their kinks out, but hopefully we can get this straight away and get the testing that were promised.

Fixing the testing process, Almora predicted, would ease some players worries about playing this season. Players likeAlmora and Bryant are concerned that they could COVID-19 home to their families. Bryant said hes not considering opting out, but hed thought about it before.

I wanted to play this year, Bryant said, because I felt that it would be safe and I would feel comfortable. But honestly, I dont really feel that way, which is why Im trying to keep my distance from everybody and wear my mask just so we can get this thing going.

If MLB does reach Opening Day -- and the way Bryant sees it, it would be "foolish" to not include that "if" -- the regular season adds a host of new concerns.

"Youre traveling and youre in an airplane, in your hotel, youre getting room service, who knows what people are doing?" Bryant said."Especially on the other teams too; youve got to rely on everybody in this whole thing. I think if we cant nail the easy part, which is right now and just our players, weve got a big hill to climb."

Bryant, a former Cubs MLBPA representative, said he was ashamed of how publicly MLB restart negotiations played out. Now, he thinks so much time was spent on economic talks that health-and-safety discussions were rushed.

It was a mess, Bryant said. And it still kind of is a mess, and hopefully we can find a way to repair that and fix things and get back on track.

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Bryant on testing concerns: 'We've got a big hill to climb' - Comcast SportsNet Chicago

Comet NEOWISE shines in stunning photos from the International Space Station – Space.com

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Astronauts caught a stunning natural light show this weekend from a comet that has been dazzling skywatchers on Earth as well.

That streaker, called Comet NEOWISE or C/2020 F3, first came on the scene at the end of March. At that point, the icy lump was quite faint in our skies, and astronomers weren't sure that would change. But as time has passed, the comet has brightened immensely, tantalizing skywatchers even after they were disappointed by two other recent comets that faded away.

"Last night's fireworks, for real. Because Science," NASA astronaut Bob Behnken said in a tweet posted from the International Space Station on Sunday (July 5), the day after Americans celebrated the Fourth of July with artificial firework displays.

Related: Comet NEOWISE could give skywatchers a dazzling show this month. Here's what to know.

One of Behnken's colleagues on board the orbiting laboratory, Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner, also photographed the comet, with its tail in stark brightness against the blackness of space seen over the glowing blue atmosphere of Earth.

Vagner commented particularly on Comet NEOWISE's stunning tail, the distinctive feature of comets compared to their rockier counterparts, asteroids. A comet's tail is formed by the sun's radiation pushing dust out of the fuzzy blob surrounding the comet as its ice warms and turns to gas.

Right now, Comet NEOWISE requires a good pair of binoculars to catch sight of in most locations, and skywatchers aren't sure yet whether the icy hunk will become so stunningly bright that it and its tail will be easily visible to the unaided eye. But the comet should dazzle throughout the month of July surrounding its closest approach to Earth, which occurs on July 22.

Both Vagner and Behnken will remain in orbit long enough to watch that close approach from space. Behnken, who arrived aboard the first crewed SpaceX Crew Dragon on May 31, is scheduled to return to Earth with his NASA colleague Doug Hurley in early August. Vagner and two other astronauts will remain in orbit until October.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Comet NEOWISE shines in stunning photos from the International Space Station - Space.com

Counting the Infected – The New York Times

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michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today: For months, the U.S. government has been quietly collecting information on hundreds of thousands of coronavirus cases across the country. My colleague, Robert Gebeloff, on the story of how The Times obtained that data.

Its Wednesday, July 8.

Robert, you live in a corner of The Times, the data team, that Im not sure most people understand all that well. So when the pandemic starts, how do you all respond?

So, by training, my goal is to find stories that can best be told through data, which is not every story, but theres a lot of stories out there. So if you go back to early March, the pandemic is starting. And I know that our job as The New York Times is to really get our arms around whats going on and, by that, to start collecting the data that is starting to come out about cases and deaths around the country. So my colleagues set up a team of people across different departments whose primary job would be to monitor all the states, all the major counties, and gather the information and start to build a database. Start to say, were getting information from New York over here and California over here, but lets put it into one database just for the purpose of tracking where the cases were, where the deaths were.

Youre saying its not coming out on a national level. Theres no big clearinghouse thats going to hand you data every day about exactly where the virus is all across the country.

Correct. And at that point, we assume that some kind of federal system may be in the offing, but we werent going to wait for it. And part of our report every day, youll see on our website, are maps showing where the cases are, where new cases are, where deaths are, where the new hotspots are. That all emanated from these early days of creating this ground-level system for being able to collect this data.

And I wonder if you can take me into the process of that a little bit. I mean, what does it look like? Where exactly is the information coming from?

Well, its really like a hive of activity. I mean, thats the way I like to think of it. You have, at any given time, a team of clerks, reporters, editors, all assigned to monitor what gets announced in various parts of the country. So at one moment, you could have somebody wrestling with new data that was put out by California and trying to get it into a format that matches our data standards. And you could have somebody in Mississippi confused about whether the new data announced is cumulative, or is it new cases for the day? And often, that involves basic reporting of going back to the state and asking questions. Then, while all this is going on and people are collecting this data, we have other people trying to put the data into context. Its, you know, truly this whole new full-time operation just devoted to trying to track what is really happening with the pandemic and to do some surveillance on the national picture.

Right. This sounds very tedious, incremental. You know, gathering up tiny bits of data, cleaning it, making sure it all lines up not sexy.

It is not sexy at all. You know, when youre data journalists, the fun part is doing what we call the queries asking questions of the data and seeing what it shows. But we all know, like, job one is to make sure your data is good. Otherwise, the questions you ask wont mean anything.

Hmm. And what do you begin to learn through this data?

Right. Part of what my personal job is to do is to look at this data and try and help understand what it tells us. So, for example, one of the early findings we had when we were looking at the pandemic in March was it seemed to be hitting mostly in big cities New York, New Orleans, Detroit.

Seattle.

Seattle. It seemed to be in places with a lot of population density. But there was also another class of place that seemed to be popping up. And it was resort counties places with ski resorts. And so that led us to this insight that it wasnt just population density, that there are other possible explanations for why places got hit. Then, as the weeks went on, we began to see the fill-in, what I call the fill-in, which is there were all of these new counties that were starting to get cases. And so by having this record, what we were able to then report is there are now hundreds of rural counties getting their first cases. And, you know, how were they preparing? And how were they talking to people? And then, another thing weve been monitoring is there seems to be this ideological difference or at least there has been about how serious a problem is it. How soon should government reopen or allow businesses to reopen? And

Right. Kind of a red state-blue state divide over shutting down and reopening.

Right. But our reporting showed that there was this additional element involved, which was, for the first six to eight weeks of the pandemic, there were hardly any red counties with high infection rates. And most of the hard-hit places were in blue counties. And so we were able to raise the specter of, if you live in a place that doesnt have first-hand experience with the virus, you dont have your emergency rooms being overflowed. Maybe that also contributes to your belief that, you know what, we should open the economy. This is not worth shutting down the economy for.

Right.

And all of these types of stories are, again, driven by the idea that in the first place, we had good county-level data that we couldnt get anywhere else. That allowed us to look at the world through these different prisms and ask different questions about how the pandemic was playing out.

Mm-hmm. Youre laying out clear examples of why data like this is important and what it lets us understand. But Im curious what the limitations of this kind of a database are. What does it not tell us?

Yeah. So think of it this way. A data set we think of like any other source that were going to interview. And we think of what might this source be able to tell us about something. And so we think of questions that were going to ask the source. So the problem became we had this data set, and we knew where the cases were and the deaths were, but we couldnt ask it any other questions. We couldnt ask, who were the people actually becoming infected in these counties? Were they old? Were they young? Where they rich? Were they poor? Were they front-line workers? Were they white? Were they Black? Were they Latino? So all these questions we had we couldnt really ask the data set we had.

So what did you end up doing?

So, along the way, we learned that the C.D.C. actually had some information that would be helpful in this, in that every time a person was confirmed to have a coronavirus infection, the local health agency would fill out a report that would have characteristics of the case the person, the age, the race. And the form actually asked dozens of questions. You know, was the person at work? Was the person staying home? What were the symptoms? And that these forms ultimately ended up at the C.D.C.

Hmm.

And if we could get our hands on this data, we could ask a lot more questions about how this pandemic is playing out. And so we decided to approach the C.D.C. and request access.

And heres why we needed that data. So many people in this country are getting sick. So many people are dying. And our job is to try and explain, who is it that is getting sick? Who is dying and why? And if we had any chance of getting answers to those questions, we need the best data. And if the C.D.C. had the data, we wanted to get a copy ourselves.

And so how do you go about trying to get it?

Well, in this case, we ended up suing them.

Well be right back.

So, Robert, why did The New York Times sue the C.D.C.?

So suing the C.D.C. sounds very dramatic. But in fact, many, many times in the course of a year, we go to court to establish our rights to get public information. Its somewhat more routine than most people would realize. And sometimes its because the government out and out refuses to give up the information. But in this case, it was more to do with the timing. Without going to court and putting pressure on the agency, we were looking at the prospect of waiting months to get our hands on this information.

Right.

But by going to court, it sort of put the clock on. And we had the agencys full attention.

And so what ends up happening once this clock is ticking and a judge is looking over the shoulders of the C.D.C.?

So the C.D.C. tells us that they will comply. They just need to do a little more research as to what they can possibly produce, taking into consideration the privacy of people who are in the database and stripping out personally identifiable information. But ultimately, the day comes where they say, OK, New York Times, here is a database of 1.45 million cases

Wow.

that we have collected from state and local authorities. And we were then free to have a new interview subject and be able to ask it a whole lot of more interesting and detailed questions.

Right. I mean, this quite literally sounds like the motherlode of data on this pandemic in the United States.

Well, in many ways it was. What we were able to see from this was detailed information about individuals who had become infected and died. And for each individual, we were able to look at their age, the county they lived in, their race and their ethnicity. And that is far more information than we had before. And in the end, we ended up being able to break down cases for nearly 1,000 counties covering more than half of the U.S. population.

And this number 1.5 million Americans how big a proportion of all cases of the virus is that?

So for the time period covered by the data it was all cases through the end of May it was about 88 percent of all cases that we had some information about.

So when you get this massive data dump, what do you do? What do you find?

So when we finally had our hands on this data, we were checking what types of information were included, how complete the information was, and just looking at the data in many different ways to see what it could tell us. And eventually, three main trends emerged.

And so what were those trends?

So the first was just how pervasive the racial disparity was with this pandemic.

Mm-hmm.

Whatever knowledge people had that African-Americans and Latinos were becoming infected at a higher rate, a lot of that was tied to big cities that had released data. But what we found is that this racial disparity pervades everywhere, whether you go from cities to suburbs, even into rural places.

Huh.

In fact, any place we found where there was a significant African-American population, almost all of them, African-American infection rates were higher than the rate for Whites. Same thing with Latinos. Any place we found where there was a significant Latino population, for almost all of them, the infection rate was higher for Latinos.

Hmm.

The second big takeaway is what is driving these racial disparities. So most of the earliest explanations of the racial disparity were focused on death rates. And one of the explanations for the disparities in death rates that is commonly offered is something called comorbidities the idea that African-Americans might be dying at a higher rate because they were more likely to have preexisting conditions or to be in poorer health to begin with. But in our analysis, we focused mostly on the actual infection rates. And the reason for that is that gets us out of the question of whether comorbidities is driving it and puts us more on the question of who is most at risk to become infected in the first place. And so when we see disparities in the infection rates, we can then raise the question of, why are people in certain groups more likely to become infected?

Mm-hmm.

And that led us to looking at, where do people work? Where do people live? And what is their housing situation? And if you look at where people work and look at what the data shows, it shows that African-Americans and Latinos in the U.S. are far less likely to have the kind of job where you can do it at home. They are more likely, instead, to have a job in the production sector, in a factory or in the service sector. All of that combined would increase your risk of becoming infected. And with housing, what we found is that Latinos in particular are far more likely to live either with more people in the household or with less space in the household, both of which would also increase the odds of a person might become infected.

So the second discovery very much helps understand the first. There are kind of structural issues around how Black and Latino Americans work and live that contribute to this racial disparity in the pandemic.

Thats correct. And the third takeaway from this is what you learn by looking at the pandemic through the prism of age.

Hmm.

Right now, most of what we know about the disparity is all cases of people of all age groups. And thats how the rates are calculated. But if you realize something about this pandemic, its that older people are far more likely to get sick and die.

Right.

And in the U.S. right now, the older population is very disproportionately white, non-Hispanic.

Huh.

So if you dont account for age, youre by definition almost understating the disparity. So what we did what some epidemiologists call age adjusting is looked at infection rates across age groups. And when you look at, say, what the infection rate is for people who are in their 40s or in their 50s, the disparity is much bigger than youll ever see in numbers without age adjustment.

So when you accounted for the fact that so many older people have died from the coronavirus, and that the older population in this country skews white, you found that the racial disparity actually gets even greater.

Correct. In fact, if you look at some of the younger age groups, the death rate for Latinos is about 10 times higher that for whites.

Wow.

Now, the caveat to that, of course, is youre much, much less likely to die at those age groups. But its still, among the people who do die in those age groups, its very heavily Black and Latino.

Mm-hmm. I mean, these insights, once again, seem to highlight just how important it is to have this kind of information. Because from what youre saying, we have been, in some sense, misunderstanding the racial disparities of this virus the causes of the racial disparities because we havent had access to this data.

Well, at minimum, you could say we didnt know the extent to which these problems existed. And getting data like this helps us sort of define what the ground truth is about how this pandemic is playing out. That being said, theres still a lot more that we would like to know.

Mm-hmm.

The database had 1.45 million records. And it had, for each record, more than 100 columns or 100 pieces of information. Most of those were blank. And that leaves us in the dark about a lot of questions that wed like answered, like how many people are contracting the virus at work? Or how many are getting it from traveling or being at bars? So still a lot of room for improvement. And hopefully, knowing what can be done, the power of having this data to answer questions will help inspire the C.D.C. to collect the information better.

Mm-hmm. And perhaps release it more quickly. I have to think that suing the C.D.C., getting this data and reporting out these insights on race has increased pressure on the federal government to make this information more available. Is that true?

I would like to think so. There is still some mystery as to what will ultimately happen. Our case is still pending. The status is, the C.D.C. at this point believes they satisfied our request.

Right.

Our lawyers are still investigating whether or not there was more information that should have been released or more types of information. And, you know, once that is resolved, the question will be what does the C.D.C. do going forward. And a lot of people, in reaction to the story that published, were asking me, do you think theyll just start posting this on their own? And I would think that whether or not the information is complete, its still better than anything else out there. And so hopefully we will see more of this type of information made public.

That would definitely be beneficial to not just us, but to researchers around the nation and the world to have access to more complete and better information. But until that happens, were going to keep doing what weve been doing.

Were going to go out every day, go to every state and collect data on coronavirus cases and deaths.

Rob, thank you very much.

Thanks, Michael.

On Tuesday, the latest updates to The Timess database found that the virus has infected more than 3 million Americans and has killed more than 130,000 of them. Globally, it recorded nearly 12 million infections and nearly 542,000 deaths, including 65,000 in Brazil, where the countrys president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly downplayed the pandemic and avoided wearing a mask, announced that he had tested positive for the virus.

Well be right back.

Station, this is Houston. Are you ready for the event?

Hello, Houston. Were ready for the event.

38 days ago, NASA and SpaceX launched two U.S. astronauts into space on a mission to the International Space Station, where they joined a fellow American. It was the first time that a manned spacecraft has left American soil in nearly a decade.

The New York Times, this is mission control Houston. Please call station for a voice check.

On Tuesday, I spoke with the three U.S. astronauts now aboard the space station.

Hello, New York Times. New York Times, this is the International Space Station. How do you hear us?

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who arrived a few weeks ago, along with Chris Cassidy, who has been there since April.

We hear you loud and clear. How do you hear us?

We hear you loud and clear as well. Good afternoon. Welcome aboard, and were happy to talk to you.

Of course, their time in space is precious. And so NASA gave us six minutes on the dot.

If I might boldly call you by your first names Doug, Chris and Bob thank you very much for making time for us. I wonder if you can start by telling us exactly where you are in space, relative to us right now.

Well, while I kick things off, Bobs going to pull up our mapping program. Right at the moment, we didnt have it on the computer. Sorry about that. But were orbiting 250 miles above the Earth. And it looks like we are abeam of Baja California, just a little bit out into the Pacific Ocean.

Mm-hmm. So over America the U.S.-Mexico border.

Right. Yeah. Were just over the Pacific Ocean. We just past California heading south.

If youll indulge me for a minute, I want to talk a little bit about feelings. Knowing I was going to be talking to you, I have been thinking a lot about this moment back on Earth and wondering, with so much turmoil here, and you looking down on all of it from such a distance, what that feels like to look down on a planet thats truly in the midst of some really challenging, tumultuous times.

Well, it certainly is challenging to hear, either by secondhand or when we get the opportunity to see some news up here, all the turmoil thats going on. The challenges with the pandemic and the strife in the cities and all the different challenges that people are going through on a day-to-day basis. It is you know, emotionally it does take a toll on us, certainly. And I think the other thing that really resonates with me, personally, is just when you look out the window, when you see the planet below, you dont see borders. You dont see this strife. You see this beautiful planet that we need to take care of. And hopefully, as technology advances and as this commercial space travel gets going, more people will get that opportunity. Because I think if you get the chance to look out the window from space and look back on our planet, it will change you. It will change you for the better. And youll realize that this is one big world, rather than all these different little countries or cities or factions that we have on the planet. And I think it will make it a better place.

Well, thats really interesting. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that, because in the time since I believe youve all last been in space, there actually have been changes on Earth. You know, major ice shelves have broken off in Antarctica. Huge fires have swept across Australia, California. The Great Barrier Reef has essentially died. And when you look down at Earth, can you actually see some of those changes to the Earth, compared with when you last saw it?

Well, I think one of the things that we see from up here is that the Earth is not a stagnant place. It continues to change, whether its a fire, whether its the seasons, whether its different things happening further out. You know, we just saw a comet become visible in the predawn era. So its definitely a lot of things happening with the Earth and

Wow.

that continuous change.

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Counting the Infected - The New York Times

A Piece of Swiss Technology Goes to the International Space Station – Press Release – Digital Journal

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Swiss heat flux sensing technologies are helping to advance space exploration

ZURICH-July 9, 2020- (Newswire.com)

greenTEG is a Swiss company collaborating with engineers all over the world, providing them the best heat flux sensors for their experiments and applications. Up to now, hundreds of labs all over the world are using a sensor from the company. Recently, greenTEGmade one step forward, supplying a space mission with sensing solutions for the first time. A tiny piece of Swiss technology helping to advance space exploration!

Several weeks ago, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency launched the H-2BF9 rocket, carrying an automated cargo transfer vehicle, the HTV9. It supplies the International Space Station with 6.2 metric tons of cargo, supplies, and experiments.

The HTV9 successfully arrived at the ISS on May 25, 2020. During the automatic docking of the cargo ship, the WLAN Demo experiment was performed. It aimed to transmit the video of the monitor camera during HTV docking via Wi-Fi to acquire the automatic docking technology of the next generation of HTV-X (the next generation of cargo ships built by the Japanese Space Agency). Besides, it aims to contribute to the development of HTV-X by mounting a heat flux sensor built at greenTEG and measuring the thermal influence from the HTV propulsion system.

greenTEGs sensors were chosen for this experiment because they combine the top sensitivity of energy transfer with robustness. They can withstand space-like conditions, as shown during this space mission.

We would like to congratulate all those involved in this space mission for this huge success. We hope that this successful launch and arrival to the ISS will be followed by many more in the following years. At greenTEG, we will gladly continue to support space exploration with our sensing solutions, as well as hundreds of other research projects all over the world.

greenTEG is a spin-off from the ETH in Zurich. Founded 11 years ago, it excels in the production and development of heat flux sensors for R&D and OEM purposes, as well as wearables for workforce protection, with clients all over the world. Its excellence has been recognized by several innovation prices and project awards during the last years, including Innosuisse, Venture Lab, and Climate KIC.

For more information, please contact

Holger Hendrichs, VP of Marketing and Sales

Email: Holger.Hendrichs@greenteg.com

Website: http://www.greenteg.com and http://www.corebodytemp.com

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A Piece of Swiss Technology Goes to the International Space Station - Press Release - Digital Journal

Looked Like I Was Walking Into A Space Station: Thrill-Seekers In New Jersey Flock To Six Flags Great Adventures Reopening – CBS Philly

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JACKSON, N.J. (CBS) Fridays hot weather did not stop thrill-seekers from flocking back for Six Flags Great Adventures reopening. Season pass holders and members were welcomed back Friday with significant changes made in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Coronavirus precautions have changed a lot at Great Adventure, but one thing that remains the same? The long lines.

First things first, everyone gets a temperature check.

It kind of looked like I was walking into a space station with a giant thing aimed at me, Tristan Souza said.

REOPENING GUIDE: Current COVID-19 Guidelines for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware

Not everyone is happy with all of the changes.

Its really [thumbs down] in my book, Anthony Fuschino said. I dont like it.

And like always, lines galore.

Were going in the fast pass line because theres a two-hour wait right now for Nitro, Constance Licata said.

Even in the hot summer temps masks are required, unless you take a break in one of the designated areas.

We have eight designated spots where you can sit socially distanced with your groups, from other groups and take off your mask, Megan Werts, a communications supervisor, said.

None of this changes the excitement some are feeling.

I like the Joker because it makes me feel like Im going in 15 different directions at once, Karissa Clark said.

Download The New And Improved CBS Philly App!

The Joker didnt disappoint. Too bad for Justice League Battle for Metropolis fans, that ride is currently closed. Not only is it indoors, but there are also too many touchpoints for the newly-formed cleaned team to get to. They are, however, making sure the rest of the grounds are sanitized.

If youre planning on visiting any theme park, get used to new protocols, including social distancing on rides.

Although it seems like a long wait to get in, park employees say theyre only at 25% capacity, way less than the governors 50% mandate.

To ensure that everyone is social distancing so far, Werts said. That may increase as were gradually increasing our attendance.

The park was open for the season pass holders and members on Friday. On Saturday, its all-access for the public. Remember, you first have to make a reservation.

The normal July 4th fireworks have been canceled. The park is only open until 7 p.m., at least for July.

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Looked Like I Was Walking Into A Space Station: Thrill-Seekers In New Jersey Flock To Six Flags Great Adventures Reopening - CBS Philly

NASA Photos: Here are 5 breathtaking pictures captured in the first half of 2020 – Republic World – Republic World

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For centuries space has been a subject of intrigue. Since the medieval period, the desire for space exploration hasdominated human minds.And the Space Agency NASA has become the torchbearer of this desire since its inception in 1958. The satellites installed by the space agency NASA areat work round the clock and arelooking deep into the universe and capturing some of its best-hidden secrets in pictures. Read on to find 5 of the most breathtaking NASA photos from the first half of 2020.

Read | Fireworks from space: Fascinating images of comet NEOWISE as seen from space & Earth

On May 13, 2020, the astronauts at the International Space Station snapped the image of a typhoon in the South Pacific Ocean. The image looks surreal with the blue colour of oceans seeping through the thick blanket formed by dense white clouds. The image has now been added among other NASA Space Photos. Apart from the crew of the International Space Station, there are many Earth-observing satellites which are used for tracking the formation and movements of the potentialhurricanes and other tropical stormswherever they occur on the planet.

Read |Here's how you can check what space looked like on your b'day through APOD and Hubble

In the above picture, one can witness the galaxy NGC 5907 stretching wide across the image. The outstretching and luminous galaxy is 50 million light-years away from Earth. It appears mysterious with an elongated line of stars and dark dust spread all across its length and breadth.

NGC 5907 is also known as the Knife Edge Galaxy and is categorised by scientists as aspiral galaxysimilar to our own Milky Way. The breathtaking image has been captured from NASAs Hubble Space Telescope.In the image, the beautiful spiral arms of the Knife Edge galaxy arent visible as we are viewing its edge-on. Thus it looks like the rim of a plate. This image was posted on NASA Photos gallery on June 26, 2020.

Knife Edge lies in the northern constellation ofDraco. It might not be visible in the photo but many sinister-looking streams of stars circle around this galaxy. Scientists believe that the remnants of a smalldwarf galaxy which was violently torn apart by the Knife Edge galaxy and merged with it over 4 billion years ago.

Read |Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission: NASA shares 7 things about the Red planet expedition

The above NASA photo features a waning gibbous Moon. Gibbous Moon is that phase of the moon in which its illuminated part is greater in proportion to its semicircle but its still less than a circle. As per NASAs official website, the waning gibbous moon was captured image is captured right above the Earth's horizon on June 7, 2020, but was posted on June 10, 2020. The picture was captured by the International Space Station which was orbiting over the Atlantic Ocean at the time and had just off the coast of the African nation of Angola.

Read |NASA adds more safety fixes for Boeing's crew capsule

On June 26, 2020, veteran NASA astronautsBob BehnkenandChris Cassidyconducted their first of two spacewalks. Their purpose was toswap batteries and upgrade power systems present on theInternational Space Station's Starboard-6 truss structure. Astronaut Behnken appears hard at work while still maintaining his balance firmly. The spacewalk was a massive six-hour and seven-minute excursion. The two astronauts conducted their second spacewalk on July 1, 2020, to complete the upgrades that were initiated in the previous one.

The picture of this Planetary Nebula was posted on NASAs official website on June 23, 2020. Acting as nuclear fusion engines, most stars live unperturbed lives for hundreds of millions to billions of years. But these calm celestial objects turn crazy towards the end of their life. Some of them can turn into crazy whirligigs. They might even puff off shells and jets of hot gas that can travel several light years far. This image features NGC 7027 which resembles ajewel bug or maybe an insect with a fantastically a colourful metallic shell.

While Hubble first spotted this planetary Nebula in 1998, recently, NGC 7027's central star was identified for the first time by usingHubble's unique abilities.These near-ultraviolet observations will help scientists to understand how much dust actually obscures the star and perhaps also how hot the star really is. NGC 7027 is approximately 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus and also from Earth.

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NASA Photos: Here are 5 breathtaking pictures captured in the first half of 2020 - Republic World - Republic World

Huge UFO, 25 times the size of Earth spotted near Sun, claims UFO hunting enthusiast Scott C Waring – Zee News

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New Delhi: UFO hunting enthusiast Scott C Waring has claimed that he has spotted evidence of a huge UFO, 25 times the size of the Earth, near the Sun.

I caught a giant black orb exiting our sun on SOHO images today. The images are actually from June 27, but are still seen as current for some unknown reason. The black sphere is over 25X the size of the earth and sits there for a few hours before it shoots away, the self-proclaimed UFO hunter wrote in the blog ET Database.

Waring, analysed images from NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, stated in his blog that this is certainly one of the biggest spheres seen near our sun in a while.

Now its certainly possible that this is sun mantle material that is being pushed out, but if so...is should be glowing an still burning to some degree, but its not. So there is a big chance that his black sphere is actually a alien ship or space station that was occupying a hollow space within our sun and then was seen exiting. I call it hollow sun theory, and it answers a lot of our burning questions of why UFOs are seen around our sun and leaving our sun so often, he added.

Waring had previously claimed that he has spotted evidence of an engine on Mars, adding that the engine belonged to aliens who once lived on the Red Planet. Waring said that he succeeded in spotting the engine while analyzing an image of the Martian surface snapped by the camera fitted on NASA's Curiosity rover.

The object spotted on Martian surface looks like a long, cylindrical metal object and according to Waring, the apparent device is not only evidence of advanced aliens, but it also shows that the technology of aliens was much developed than ours.

Waring called it as the elusive "proof" that aliens are for real.

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Huge UFO, 25 times the size of Earth spotted near Sun, claims UFO hunting enthusiast Scott C Waring - Zee News

Review: ‘Collective Gravities,’ By Chloe N. Clark – NPR

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"My lover first tells me that he is turning into a chart on a Tuesday." So begins "Thematic Cartography," one of the most curious and compelling entries in Collective Gravities, the debut collection of short stories by Chloe N. Clark. In it, one lover cares for another who is succumbing to the eeriest disease: the gradual appearance of line graphs and snatches of text across his skin. As the disease progresses, so does the mystery of its incomplete information. It's an exquisite study of how humans continually evolve in an attempt to complete each other, and the way our bodies and identities, in today's digital reality, can feel like aggregations of data.

Love isn't the main subject that Collective Gravities dwells on, but it's a major one. "Between the Axis and the Stars" is a science fiction story that traces a love triangle between "Jumpers" and their "Voices," two types of workers in outer space whose intimate, life-or-death reliance on each other becomes far more than professional. In one sense, it's a clever spin in the contemporary notion of work spouses; in another sense, it wrings raw heartache out of the substance of the unknown. "We can send people to the stars, but we can't understand their brains," says the main character, a woman balancing two lovers against a backdrop of the cosmos. The narrative ping-pongs in stark juxtaposition between a space station and rural Iowa, and the ending hurls them together in a lung-crumpling punch.

Work spouses aren't the only relevant romantic topic that Clark tackles. In "Bound," a group of scientists navigate a crumbling marriage and conflicting attractions all while trying to find the source of, and cure for, a mysterious pandemic. Saying that the story is a prediction of the coronavirus crisis might be a stretch, but it's certainly a premonition. And it cuts to the bone of what millions of people are going through right now: The desperate question of how to maintain connection in an age of separation, and certainty in an age of the unknown.

Like Kelly Link channeling Ray Bradbury, Clark has a flair for grounding the extraordinary in the ordinary and making sweet music of the dissonance.

The book counterweighs love with loss, and "Like the Desert Dark" strikes a breathtaking balance between the two. As a near-future tearjerker involving space research and parallel universes (make that "alternate planes"), it's a neat slice of science fiction. But as the drama of a father coping with the loss of two scientists he loves his daughter and his wife it's transcendent. Like Kelly Link channeling Ray Bradbury, Clark has a flair for grounding the extraordinary in the ordinary and making sweet music of the dissonance. Zombies abound in the outrageously titled "They Are Coming For You, So You Better Run, You Better Run, So You Can Hide," but Clark modulates the campy tropes something far more poignant and cutting. After the brunt of the zombie apocalypse passes, life goes on, but the scars remain. And what we consider to be civilization begs for a reckoning.

Clark's scale isn't always so grand. "So This" is a four-page sketch of a woman whose adoption of a dog named Catnip underscores the loss of her unnamed baby girl. The story's only resemblance to speculative fiction comes in the form of an underwater dream she shares with Catnip, a dip into magical reality that brings her blurry grief into sharp focus. While some stories, such as "So This," benefit from their brevity, others flash by a bit too quickly to fulfill their promise. In "Thematic Cartography," Clark's mention of the real-life inventor of the statistical graph, William Playfair, feels like the setup for a more detailed look at his pioneering work not to mention how that milestone might parallel the strange tale of a lover morphing, Kafka-like, into the kind of chart that Playfair devised. But that tempting thread is left dangling unsatisfyingly in the story's rush to arrive at its haunting conclusion. Mostly, though, Clark's tendency to err on the side of concision is a smart choice, granting her vignettes the ghostly impression of images faintly glimpsed and people aching to more fully exist.

Collective Gravities takes its name from "The Collective Gravity of Stars," one of the book's most stunning stories. Callie is a young woman who has always felt the Earth spin beneath her feet, like a "teacup ride." No one believes her, so as a girl she learned to hide it. But after a debilitating accident, she's forced to revisit the possible reasons for her uncanny sense of planetary movement and the ensuing revelation is as small and quiet as it is ecstatically profound. In the same sense, all the gently weird and sadly wonderful stories in Collective Gravities house bright, gemlike epiphanies. Together they beam.

Jason Heller is a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the new book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded. He's on Twitter: @jason_m_heller

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It’s the month of Mars! 3 Red Planet missions set to launch in July – Space.com

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July is the month of Mars.

Three missions are poised to launch toward the Red Planet this month, including NASA's car-sized Perseverance rover, which will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and cache samples for future return to Earth.

The action will start next week, if all goes according to plan. The United Arab Emirates' (UAE) first-ever interplanetary effort, the Hope Mars mission, also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, is scheduled to launch on July 14.

Related: NASA's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance in pictures

The Hope orbiter will reach Mars in early 2021, then use three science instruments to study the Red Planet's atmosphere, weather and climate from above. The probe's observations should help researchers better understand Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold, desert planet we know today, mission team members have said. That transition was driven by the stripping of Mars' once-thick atmosphere by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun.

The Hope spacecraft was built by the UAE's Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University and the University of California Berkeley. And the project is breaking ground for more than just the UAE: Hope is the first planetary science mission led by an Arab-Islamic nation.

China will follow with a landmark launch of its own a little more than a week after Hope takes flight. On July 23, China's first-ever fully homegrown Mars mission, known as Tianwen-1, is scheduled to lift off atop a Long March 5 rocket. (China put a piggyback orbiter called Yinghuo-1 aboard Russia's Mars mission Fobos-Grunt, which got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its November 2011 launch.)

Tianwen-1 is an ambitious project that consists of an orbiter, a lander and a 530-lb. (240 kilograms) rover that's the size of a small golf cart. Chinese officials have remained characteristically tight-lipped about the mission they still haven't publicly announced a final landing site for the lander/rover pair, for example but these robots' scientific gear suggests that Tianwen-1 will conduct a broad reconnaissance of the Martian environment.

The orbiter sports six instruments, including a high-resolution camera, a magnetometer and a mineral spectrometer, which will allow mission team members to determine the composition of surface rocks. The rover also has six instruments, including a weather station, a magnetic field detector and a ground-penetrating radar, which could spot subsurface water ice down to a depth of about 330 feet (100 meters).

If Tianwen-1 is successful, China will become just the third nation, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to land a spacecraft on Mars. And that epic touchdown may lead the way to even bigger things in the near future: Chinese space officials have voiced a desire to mount a Mars sample-return mission, which could perhaps launch as early as 2030.

Related: Occupy Mars: History of robotic Red Planet missions (infographic)

The United States and Europe also plan to bring pristine Red Planet material to Earth, and that project will really get up and running with Perseverance's launch. The 2,315-lb. (1,050 kg) rover, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30 and land inside Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

Perseverance will use its seven onboard instruments to characterize the geology of Jezero and search for signs of ancient Mars life in the rocks of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) crater, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago.

The six-wheeled robot will also collect and cache several dozen samples from particularly promising study sites. This material will be recovered and brought to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031, in a campaign conducted by NASA and the European Space Agency. Scientists in labs around the world will then scrutinize the Mars material in great detail, looking for signs of life and clues about the planet's evolutionary history.

Mars 2020 also aims to lay groundwork for crewed missions to the Red Planet, the first of which NASA wants to launch in the 2030s. For instance, like the Tianwen-1 rover, Perseverance is outfitted with ice-hunting ground-penetrating radar. And another of the NASA rover's instruments, the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere, which is 95% carbon dioxide by volume. ("ISRU" stands for "in situ resource utilization." NASA is big on acronyms, in case you hadn't noticed.)

MOXIE isn't Mars 2020's only technology demonstration. A 4-lb. (1.8 kg) helicopter called Ingenuity will journey to the Red Planet on Perseverance's belly. After touchdown, Ingenuity will drop free and make a few short test flights in the Martian sky the first-ever aerial exploration of a world beyond Earth.

If Ingenuity is successful, future Mars missions could commonly incorporate helicopters, NASA officials have said. Such rotorcraft couldserve a variety of purposes, from scouting out promising study sites for rovers to exploring hard-to-reach areas such as caves or steep-walled craters.

Hope, Tianwen-1 and Mars 2020 all must get off the ground this summer or be put in storage for more than two years, because Earth and Mars align favorably for planetary missions just once every 26 months. And the current launch window isn't open for very long; Mars 2020's closes on Aug. 15, NASA officials have said. (The mission's window originally opened on July 17, but several technical issues have pushed things back to July 30.)

One Mars mission hoping to launch this year has already been packed away until 2022. The life-hunting rover Rosalind Franklin, part of the European-Russian ExoMars program, encountered parachute problems and several other issues that could not be resolved in time for a 2020 liftoff.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Firm to offer balloon rides from Alaska to the edge of space – WITI FOX 6 Milwaukee

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earths surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planets atmosphere.

Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune, The Anchorage Daily Newsreported.

The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium.

Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey.

Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will support Alaska tourism.

You will have people from around the world who want to come to Alaska and see the northern lights from the edge of space, Lester said.

Alaska Aerospace and Space Perspective will test and refine spaceport operations and secure spaceflight licenses from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Space Perspective plans to complete an unmanned test flight from the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida next year.

Passengers will begin with a two-hour ascent to about 19 miles (31 kilometers) above Earth. They will then be able to post on social media about the experience or send data.

Neptune then makes a two-hour descent under the balloon and splashes down, where a ship retrieves the passengers, along with the capsule and balloon, Alaska Aerospace said.

Capsule recovery would occur in the waters around Kodiak Island and the Aleutian Island chain, depending upon the seasonal wind patterns.

The balloon design is derived from technology NASA has used for decades to fly large research telescopes, Space Perspective said.

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Firm to offer balloon rides from Alaska to the edge of space - WITI FOX 6 Milwaukee

Celebrating 60 years of Marshall Space Flight Center | Military Scene – Theredstonerocket

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On July 1, 1960, the technical and administrative core of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency became Marshall Space Flight Center. The transfer of this experienced group provided the young agency with a solid foundation in propulsion expertise. Sixty years of historic leaps and strides later, Marshall is celebrating its milestone anniversary with a look back at some of its most iconic accomplishments.

I could not be more proud to be part of the history Marshall has made, Marshall Director Jody Singer said. The world has witnessed us achieve 60 consecutive years of discovery, exploration, and victories for all of humankind. Celebrating these achievements reminds us of all the groundbreaking history still to come from the Marshall team.

In its first decade as a NASA center, Marshall worked on the Mercury-Redstone rocket that carried the countrys first astronaut, Alan Shepard, into space. Propulsion remained a focus area as the team developed the Saturn I, Saturn IB, and the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo Program. Science also formed a considerable part of Marshalls accomplishments, through the development and launch of three Pegasus satellites and several balloon flights of the 36-inch aperture optical system Stratoscope II.

The 1970s saw the five final flights of the Apollo Program, including three expeditions via the Marshall-developed Lunar Roving Vehicle which allowed astronauts to expand the amount of science conducted on the lunar surface for the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. This second decade also included the United States first space station, Skylab, whose three crewed missions provided NASA with critical insight on living and working in space. The end of the decade expanded the centers role in the development of scientific missions with the Marshall-managed High Energy Astronomy Observatory Program, including the launch of three large low-Earth orbiting satellites known as HEAO 1, 2, and 3.

Marshalls third decade, the 1980s, saw a continuation in propulsion work for humanitys first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle including the development of the shuttles main engines, solid rocket booster and external tanks. Space shuttle Columbias STS-1 mission ushered in three decades of operations in low-Earth orbit through 135 missions, including scientific experiments and payloads. Marshall also built upon its extensive microgravity research capabilities as the team developed systems for the Spacelab program including the Hubble Space Telescope, which continues to reshape humanitys view of the universe.

In the 1990s, while continuing work to refine the shuttle propulsion systems, Marshall took a giant leap forward in microgravity with the development and operation of several new research programs known as Astro, the International and U.S. Microgravity Laboratories, and the U.S. Microgravity Payloads. Marshall engineers also explored the limits of propulsion technology through advanced transportation systems. Throughout the decade, Marshall scientists helped rewrite understanding of gamma rays with the Burst and Transient Source Experiment for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The decade culminated with the launch of both the first U.S. module for the International Space Station and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The 2000s involved continued development of the space station, space shuttle programs, and propulsion systems including systems associated with the Ares crewed rocket. Marshall gained even more experience helping astronauts live and work in space with the development of the Destiny Laboratory, which supports a wide range of experiments and studies contributing to the health, safety, and quality of life for people all over the world; the EXPRESS racks, multipurpose payloadracksystems that support and store research experiments; and the Microgravity Science Glovebox, which provides a safe, contained environment for research with liquids, combustion and hazardous materials in microgravity conditions. Marshall continued its role in understanding the universe and fundamental physics with oversight of the Gravity Probe B satellite, Gamma Ray Burst Monitor space telescope and Hinode satellite.

In the 2010s, the space station continued to serve as both a proving ground for environmental control systems and an exceptional platform for scientific experiments. Marshall built upon a legacy of propulsion excellence with the development of the agencys most powerful rocket to date, the Space Launch System. This advanced vehicle will launch a new era of human exploration beyond Earths orbit to the Moon and later on to Mars through the Artemis program.

Six decades of Marshall history includes an impressive number of extraordinary achievements in both human spaceflight and scientific discovery, Marshall Historian Brian Odom said. Those accomplishments now form the core capability that the center will employ as it continues to make vital contributions to programs like Artemis and the Human Landing System, and a whole range of astrophysics missions. The center has certainly made its mark in the evolution of space exploration, and we still have so much more to contribute.

As Marshall enters its next decade of operation, the team is leading NASAsSpace Launch System and Human Landing System programs, key elements of Artemis. The team is preparing to return American astronauts to the Moon by 2024 and establish a sustainable human presence on the lunar surface by 2028. Lessons learned on and around the Moon will lead to the next giant leap sending astronauts to Mars.

Editors note: Taylor Goodwin, an ASRC Federal/Analytical Services employee, supports the Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications.

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GGPoker’s $5 Million WSOP Season Giveaway is the Biggest in the History of Online Poker – Pokerfuse

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GGPoker has unwrapped the details of the much-awaited WSOP Season Giveaway promotion which is set to run until the end of August.

In what the company is touting as the biggest giveaway in the history of online poker, over $5 million in WSOP tickets is being given away over nearly two months to celebrate the first running of the WSOP 2020 Online bracelet series on the GGPoker platform.

This substantial amount of money to be given away is split into six different kinds of promotions covering all types of game formats supported on GGPoker.

Be it cash games or Spin & Gold (the operators lottery-style Sit & Go), from Holdem to Omaha and Short Deck to All-In or Fold, there is something for every type of player.

Every day, GGPoker is offering up to $90,000 in WSOP tickets. The promotion kicked off on July 6 and runs until August 30.

Sign up to GGPoker today and enjoy a generous Welcome Bonus!

Note that these promotions are in addition to the already announced new WSOP special Welcome Bonus giving away $100 in free WSOP tickets, the $2 buy-in WSOP edition Spin & Gold and a micro stakes satellite series WSOP Silk Road both giving away WSOP tickets.

Rush & Cash is GGPokers fast-fold cash game variant in which players are moved to a new table as soon as they fold, and for the next two months, GGPoker is offering $1.4 million in extra rewards in this action-packed format.

Here is how it works. Players earn special points for every action they take: call, bet/raise or insurance: 1, 2 and 3 points are earned respectively every time one of these buttons is hit. They earn 10 points if they win a cash drop pot and double points during Happy Hours that run every day between the hours of 10 pm and midnight Pacific Time.

At the end of the day, the top 20 to 100 players (depending on the stakes) at each of the 7 different stakes for both Holdem and Omaha share a total of $25,000 in WSOP tickets.

These leaderboards reset daily.

GGPoker is also running a similar leaderboard promotion for Holdem and Omaha cash game players. Players earn points for each raked hand. Points are determined at the stake they are playing and they earn double points during Happy Hours.

Towards the end of the day, top performing players earn a share of $20,000 in WSOP tickets for both Holdem and Omaha cash game variants.

In total, over $2.2 million is being awarded in these giveaways.

Sign up to GGPoker today and enjoy a generous Welcome Bonus!

Players who prefer playing jackpot-style Sit & Gos (GGPoker calls them Spin & Gold) are in luck as GGPoker is running a special Spin & Gold leaderboard with $10,000 in daily prizes.

The promotion couldnt be any simpler. Players just need to play on the Spin & Gold tables and start earning points to climb the daily leaderboard. They earn points based on the buy-in level and how well they played at those tables.

Players earn 1.5x points during Happy Hours (between the hours of 22:00 to 24:00 Pacific Time).

There is a leaderboard for each of the eight Spin & Gold buy-ins awarding anywhere between the top 15 to 100 players.

A total of $600,000 in WSOP tournament tickets is being given away over the two months.

If putting too much volume is not your style, then you would probably be pleased to see the daily $10,000 Flipout promotion. In this promotion, all players have to do is play 100 All-In or Fold hands in a single day at the stake level that corresponds to the freeroll they are trying to enter.

Once they do that, they automatically qualify for a Flipout tournament where the prizes are awarded in a random fashion. The higher the stakes of AoF hands they play, the bigger the Flipout tournament they get entered into.

In total, $550,000 in WSOP tickets is being given away between now and August 30.

Players who love playing Short Deck get a daily leaderboard promotion as well.

$300,000 in WSOP tickets is to be given away across nine different leaderboards representing all buy-in levels available on GGPoker, meaning there is $5000 per day across the leaderboards to be won.

To take part in this promotion, players must play on the Short Deck cash game tables where they will earn points for every raked hand. Again, the points earned will be determined by the buy-in level they are playing at. Points are worth 1.5 times during Happy Hours.

WSOP online bracelet events on GGPoker kick off on July 19 and run until September 6. 54 bracelets are up for grabs with some events offering massive guarantees. The $5000 Main Event is the biggest highlight, guaranteeing $25 millionthe biggest ever in the history of online poker.

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GGPoker's $5 Million WSOP Season Giveaway is the Biggest in the History of Online Poker - Pokerfuse

Canterbury returns to 24/7 hours of operation, poker is back today – SW News Media

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Canterbury Park has expanded its hours of operation back to 24/7 and will bring poker back to its card casino, according to a press release. The card casino, which was already offering table games such as black jack since June 15, will initially offer Texas Hold Em.

It is time to start dealing poker again, and with the experience we have gained running table games, we are extremely well prepared, Vice President of Card Casino Operations Michael Hochman said in a statement.

Canterbury suspended all operations in mid-March due to COVID-19. On June 15, the card casino opened to table games with added safety precautions, including the reduction of the number of players per table and acrylic shields.

Face masks are required of all employees and players. Poker will operate with the same measures in place, with a maximum of six players per table. Poker chips will be sanitized on a daily basis and decks of cards rotated out of play regularly, the release stated.

Disinfecting is a constant process that we take very seriously. The acrylic barriers weve designed offer another layer of protection for both our team members and our guests, Hochman said. Well have a bottle of hand sanitizer on top of every dealer button on every single table.

While not yet scheduled, Hochman is planning a return of poker tournament play in August. All operations are subject to Minnesota Racing Commission approval.

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Canterbury returns to 24/7 hours of operation, poker is back today - SW News Media

Battle for India Online Poker Championship 2020: Who will win the crown? – Sportskeeda

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News

Modified 09 Jul 2020, 11:56 IST

Poker is a game that requires a lot of inferencing abilities coupled with determination to act with resolution. This is a game that amalgamates the world of statistical inference and common sense reasoning.

The online version of the game has been an essential cog to take it another step further. And to set the bar even higher, the much awaited online poker tournament India Online Poker Championship (IOPC) is all set to commence from 9 July and run until the 26th of the same month on spartanpoker.com

Every new edition of the competition brings about the scope to make it grander and this time too, the IOPC will be doing something unique. The 2020 edition will be creating history by bolstering its winning price with a precious Crown and a jaw-dropping INR 25 crore GTD. O

nly the greatest of the lot the one who puts to use his/her ability to infer statistically as well as make quick decisions will be able to wear the crown while also being showered with cash.

This edition of the competition will have 113 tournaments, with buy-ins starting from INR 550 and going up to INR 1.05 lakh.

Every year, The Spartan Poker constantly pushes boundaries and creates new standards with never-seen-before GTD and Crowns to keep the players spirit high. The two weeks of action will be jam-packed, and will give the players a huge chance to hit the jackpot.

Commenting on the announcement, Mr. Amin Rozani, Co-founder & MD of The Spartan Poker said, In these challenging times, we are constantly identifying opportunities to make online poker an efficient platform where a player uses his high intellect and instincts to be in the right spot at the right time. We are pleased to announce the itinerary of the second edition of our flagship tournament, India Online Poker Championship, with the highest GTD till now. With a mission to make IOPC the best online platform in the world, we are dedicated to bring a lot of excitement to the table and inspire poker players through higher GTDs and prestigious Crown. The overwhelming response from the players across the country has been our motivation to strive and make IOPC a better experience every season. I am confident that our initiative will help players to be their best and expand horizons in this mind sport.

After the huge success of the previous edition of the tournament, Spartan has improved the gaming experience with the highest GTD ever. On top of that, IOPC has coalesced the scintillating Millionaires - including Millionaire United INR 1.5 Crore GTD, Millionaire Legends INR 1.5 Crore GTD and The Crown Main Event INR 3 Crore GTD - much to the delight of the players.

The participant who has a strong understanding of statistics and probability along with incredible intuition about how things work practically will be the one to win the competition and become the king of poker.

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Bill filed to expand live poker in New Jersey – Online Poker.net

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Staff Writer, July 7, 2020 7:58 pm

Atlantic City Casinos may have just reopened following their lengthy COVID-19 imposed, but a new bill filed in New Jersey last week could see their monopoly on live poker come to an end.

Republican Assemblyman Ronald Dancer filed A4365 last week that, if made law, would allow New Jersey horse racing tracks to open poker rooms. Under current New Jersey state law poker rooms are only allowed in the eight casinos located in Atlantic City.

Dancers bill declares that The legislature finds and declares that the card game poker is a game of skill and bluff and, therefore, is not a form of gambling that is restricted by the provisions of the New Jersey Constitution.

If this is the case, then a referendum would not be required to allow poker rooms to open at New Jersey horse tracks.

The bill also states The Division of Gaming Enforcement will have jurisdiction over poker at racetracks and will promulgate rules and regulations establishing the rules of the game, providing for the licensing of racetrack permit holders to conduct poker, and establishing standards for the size and arrangement of poker rooms.

Two horse tracks in the state, Meadowlands Racetrack and Monmouth Park recently reopened for the first time since being forced to closed due to the pandemic. Both tracks have legal sportsbooks on site, but not poker.

Allowing the tracks to host poker rooms is seen as a way to increase revenue after the tracks took an economic beating during the pandemic closure. Even if the bill were to pass, which many in the state think is highly unlikely, poker rooms would not be able to open until social distancing measures currently in place are fully relaxed.

Even if the bill becomes laws the horse racing tracks would not be allowed to enter the online poker industry the same way Atlantic City casinos have. The bill does not include making concessions for the horse racing tracks to offer online poker.

The rest is here:

Bill filed to expand live poker in New Jersey - Online Poker.net

‘It Would Have Changed the Game’ — An Oral History of ChipTic, Part 2 – PokerNews.com

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July 09, 2020Mo Nuwwarah

At the 2012 World Series of Poker, a shiny new product received its public unveiling. Players and fans the world over were introduced to a program with revolutionary potential. It could track the chip ebbs and flows of every player in a tournament while also serving as the back end operating system to run said tournament. It promised the ability to change the way poker tournaments were followed, with players and fans interacting at the stroke of a few keys.

That product was ChipTic. And it proved to be a colossal failure.

This is the oral history of ChipTic, from those who experienced it first-hand and witnessed that failure three former employees, two members of WSOP staff and two poker media members who watched it implode. The interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. All titles are dated to 2012.

Be sure to read Part 1 here.

Behind the scenes, things were off to a slow start. Though the ChipTic team, by now including dozens of employees set to work on the WSOP floor, had arrived before the start of the series, an immediate launch proved unfeasible when an early attempt to implement the system failed.

And not everyone was excited for the program's arrival.

Donnie Peters (former PokerNews editor-in-chief): Heading into the 2012 WSOP, we were preparing for the summer and doing the live coverage. I was heading the team and we kind of got word of this thing. We didn't know what it was called. We just heard there was some new technology that was gonna be brought forward that was going to revolutionize poker coverage.

I'm not gonna sit here and say I was not worried. I like to think I wouldn't be doing my job if I wasn't worried about these things. I wasn't sitting at my desk freaking out because my job is gonna be rendered obsolete. Part of me looked at it as, "This is the shot in my ass this year to drive the team to be the best they can be."

Staff side, I won't name names but we always had our guy on the WSOP staff that we could go talk to. Not a lot of them seemed too thrilled. It wasn't so much having to use the system. It was just the fact that it was thrown into the middle of the WSOP.

Doug Shrader (ChipTic employee): The dealers were wary at first as they should be. It was a foreign object basically dumped on them by a company that nobody knew and with the vision that they didn't quite understand. Also you're handing them more responsibilities that they aren't used to doing on a day-to-day basis. A lot of dealers were worried they're going to make a mistake and didn't want to be reprimanded.

Andy Tillman (WSOP dealer): It was an additional thing we didn't really look forward to because it was one more thing we had to do, busting players in and out getting used to a new system. It was just an extra thing added on to the workload. Now we've got to be looking down and potentially missing bets, missing action, everything else we're supposed to pay attention to. No, it was not received very well at all.

Donnie Peters: They have thousands of dealers focused on being the best dealer they can which is a tough job in and of itself. And now they have to add in this technology on the fly and that's going to be difficult for them. So that was a bit worrisome.

"All the tablets kept freezing. You couldn't bust a player. It was super-duper laggy."

Charlie Ciresi (WSOP tournament director): I remember us trying at the WSOP and it not working and they said the Wi-Fi was bad. [ChipTic founder John Beveridge] paid a shit-ton of money to increase the Wi-Fi better routers and that kind of stuff.

Dan Carpenter (ChipTic operations director): We put all the tablets on the tables. All the tablets kept freezing. You couldn't bust a player. It was super-duper laggy.

Eric Brewstein (ChipTic corporate relations specialist, in a 2012 interview with QuadJacks): We were looking to get launched in the first week. Obviously with any new technology, you're gonna run into some hiccups as you come down and learn. Getting everything together takes a little bit of time.

Dan Carpenter: We bought three access points, one in each room. The tablets weren't talking to the access points. Had something to do with the firewall, the tunneling, I don't know. We were delayed a week because the tablets weren't updating properly.

Andy Tillman: The players were were irritated. It wasn't too bad at first but when it seemed like everything was put on hold for it, you could see by the minute they were getting aggravated. It throws off the entire day's schedule for everything.

Charlie Ciresi: I was really reserved on the size of the fields with something that has not been experimented much on. You just don't go to the WSOP with thousands and thousands of players.

Donnie Peters: Being able to see the chip counts on the screen and around the tournament room, that was cool. But the technology was slow. [The tablets] were dying or they weren't working. A player would move from Table 1 to Table 10, the dealer would forget to clock them in. The dealer would forget to punch them into the tablet.

The players are always vocal. There was definitely some angst. I think a lot of them thought it was cool but the days that followed, when they realized it wasn't working properly and it was slowing things down...it just seemed like it wasn't gonna work. Any time you slow a poker tournament down, players are gonna get ticked off.

Dan Carpenter: We spent the better part of two weeks getting it back. We were running a fake tournament at 6 a.m. when there was nobody there. Finally, we got it stable.

WSOP Tournament Director Jack Effel voiced over a short promotional video for ChipTic for the 2012 WSOP.

Jack Effel: For the first time, you can follow anyone in the tournament. For the first time, you can follow everyone in the tournament. Poker's now interactive from the table, from the rail and from your home.

ChipTic went live once more on June 22, 2012.

Eric Brewstein: We've circled the wagons the last couple of weeks, got our ducks in a row, got very confident in what we're doing and we're launched. We're not in a rush. This is hopefully gonna change how poker's moving forward. It's a marathon, not a sprint. We'll open up the floodgates for players and observers tomorrow at noon.

Charlie Ciresi: Chiptic brought along a very, very, very large staff. They were all in blue shirts, they were everywhere.

Donnie Peters: All of a sudden it just kind of launched one day. There was no press release all of a sudden this thing is here. People running around in blue shirts rolling around carts. They had kind of hijacked all of the TV monitors to display the leaderboards. It was pretty in your face.

Mickey Doft (PokerNews reporter): What I remember was they had people out there with tablets counting chips. But when it's people doing chip counts, I'm wondering are they any good with chip counts? I've been doing this for four years and I've never seen any of these people. I had my doubts.

Al "AlCantHang" Rash (ChipTic employee): I did an interview with Dan Carpenter. He was my main contact. He brought me in as one of the guys who was wandering the floor making sure the tablets and everything were working. I was also taking care of the cards system, the table breaks and balancing. I was part of the crew walking the floors and if the dealers had a problem with the tablets or messed something up, they would yell out to us, we would run over with a backup tablet and we would log that into the table and swap it out with the non-working one and try to keep it at seamless as possible.

When it was rolling, it was really cool. I was sitting at the laptop and as soon as nine seats emptied, you hit a button and it would redraw the players from a table and send them to the empty seats. It was really slick, it was really smooth.

It seemed to me the weakest chain was getting all the dealers on board to add a step or two to their regular process that they've been used to their entire career: checking players in and busting tables. If we had a dealer that wasn't getting it, you could have an empty seat for a long time. That seemed to be the kink in the system. For the most part, as long as everyone was on top of everything, it was really slick.

Mickey Doft: How is a computer system going to track a gigantic no-limit hold'em field? There's so many things that happen. Sometimes it'll be 15 minutes before the dealer gets anybody's attention that there's an empty seat at their table. What if one serious situation comes up that requires a lot of attention?

Dan Carpenter: It worked for probably three or four events. It worked and it was awesome. Then, we tried to run a 4,000-player tournament on a Saturday.

Carpenter's memory may have been a tad off, but there was a $1K event on a Sunday that drew just shy of 3,000 runners that he likely remembered as the moment when ChipTic first faltered in high-profile fashion.

Al "AlCantHang" Rash: It exploded. I never actually heard in the back end what actually happened. But, they lost track of something in the system and from what I recall, there were tables getting broken that shouldn't be broken.

Mickey Doft: At some point, the floor staff was waiting for ChipTic to print seat assignments for a table that was breaking. It just wasn't working. Staff was like, "We have to move these players." ChipTic was like, "Hold on, we'll get it working." Floor staff was like, "No, we can't wait."

Charlie Ciresi: We're breaking 10 tables a minute in these giant-sized fields and it just couldn't keep up to speed. I just went to Jack [Effel] and said, "We have to stop this. It's just not working."

Dan Carpenter: Two minutes before break, the tablets started freezing. We had 60 open seats. We said, "Wait for break, wait for break!"

Al "AlCantHang" Rash: I worked with Charlie for a decade or more at different places. Literally that was the only reason Charlie ever yelled at me. He screamed at me and told me to get these tablets off his tables with a few chosen words in there.

"He screamed at me and told me to get these tablets off his tables."

There was compounding things and Charlie just said, "Get off my floor. We'll talk tomorrow."

It was a pretty spectacular failure.

Dan Carpenter: They pulled it and they put out seat cards. They pulled it and said it was too unreliable. Unfortunately at that point, the company had spent millions of dollars designing this thing.

About a week later, ChipTic was back on the WSOP floor for the inaugural $1,000,000 Big One for One Drop. The seat tracking functionality was on ice.

Dan Carpenter: Basically, we were following the size of the pots and we were updating peoples chip counts manually so people could watch the leaderboard.

Mickey Doft: I don't remember ChipTic doing anything for One Drop the first day. Day 2, I remember them. My main memory was it got to dinner break and there were two tables left.

This was my fifth summer. The way I had stood out previously was during breaks I'd spend my time counting chips. Dinner break of the One Drop, you've gotta get the chip counts. It's the biggest event ever at this point.

Donnie Peters: They had that hiccup and now they're coming into the One Drop. This is the biggest and best. Are they gonna be able to do this?

Going into it, it was always our plan to have Mickey do chip counts. Mickey takes his job as serious as anyone I've ever seen. The kid's relentless and he's extremely good at what he does.

Mickey Doft: I remember specifically Antonio Esfandiari, he was chip leader, and his stack was an absolute disaster to count. I remember getting on my knees and getting ready to count and recount from different angles. And I remember the ChipTic people just leave. They went on their dinner break. Which I found weird, it's the perfect time to get accurate chip counts.

Donnie Peters: For him, it was kind of like a challenge. He's done it so long and he's so good at it, he's finding ways to motivate himself.

Mickey Doft: Towards the end of the dinner break, Guy Laliberte gets back and sits in his seat. He's looking at the ChipTic chip counts and I could see on his face, he knows it's not right. So I said to him, "Guy, ChipTic, they didn't stay for dinner break. But go to PokerNews.com and everything's updated there for you."

Donnie Peters: It's the best players in the world and super-rich businessmen so if they're complaining, the officials are gonna take notice.

Mickey Doft: The next day, while the final table was going on...I noticed ChipTic wasn't around. At some point I asked Seth [Palansky], "Are they still doing anything?" He said, "No, ChipTic's done."

Al "AlCantHang" Rash: I just packed my ChipTic polo in my bag and went back to being a regular poker guy in the Rio.

I got an email. It just says, "As you know, ChipTic has ceased operations at the WSOP, and as a result your services are no longer required." That was July 10. I did get paid, though.

I really thought they had something, especially tying it into the Bravo system. As long as the system was used correctly, I thought it was spectacular.

Dan Carpenter: I took it really, really bad for awhile there. I had a pretty good reputation in Vegas after running the DeepStack Extravaganza for so many years. These were my friends that I convinced to quit their very lucrative jobs. It was the No. 1 room in Vegas at that time. I felt responsible. Luckily, everybody landed on their feet.

Donnie Peters: I think a lot of its elements were good and could be used even to this day. The way it was rolled out was probably a big detriment to their success. You can't just throw something into the WSOP. It's like hiring someone the week before and then throwing them in. You need to train things up, you need to load test everything. There's a whole ton of things that I think they just didn't think about logistically and it hurt them.

Charlie Ciresi: I pushed the product quite a bit because I believed in it, I believed it was good for the game. The concept behind it was definitely very beneficial for poker.

To be honest with you, the reason deep down inside, I will always believe this...they had used BlackBerry tablets. I think thats the reason they failed. If they came in with brand new iPads, I think you'd still see ChipTic. I truly believe that.

I think we would see it if we did implement it on a Circuit event. Not Hammonds, Cherokees, Choctaws for at least a year and slowly implement it to the bigger events. I've got 20 years of tournament experience and I 100% believe that. But the hardware, I believe, was the main issue at the time.

Doug Shrader: Problem is, once the idea was thrown out, competition was coming and it was coming fierce. So they needed to be first to market and that was the only shot at making this thrive. They had the opportunity to go for it, and if you have that you've got to do it.

If we can get the WSOP, everyone else will follow suit. It made sense. If you can get the largest poker entity in the world to say, "Yes, we're using ChipTic software technology," who is gonna follow suit? Everybody.

I think it was just the stars weren't aligned. If I had to pick one thing why it didn't quite pan out, it boils down to the software. The thing that was lacking was the software just couldn't handle the traffic they thought it could.

Al "AlCantHang" Rash: There were a lot of things that stuck around that were clearly great ideas. Clearly, the chip counts updating from the players was a great idea. PokerNews has an app, WPT has their app.

Andy Tillman: I actually think now that I've looked at systems that do similar things, it was too far ahead of its time. Partypoker uses kHold'em doing everything through mobile devices used by the floor staff. In Rozvadov, they use a system that they developed called Zeus. The system seems to work well but it has its own dedicated server and internet set up. It's a front end through back end program. Registration through payout. How we do seat cards now, there's a bluetooth printer like a little POS system. It has a lot of similarities that has a lot of the same ideas.

"We were gonna be the next big thing. And then, we just weren't."

Charlie Ciresi: I worked with a French guy I knew who designed a very similar software to ChipTic. I did a Triton event in Jeju and that's the software that I used. You're talking about 20 player fields but it worked flawlessly. ChipTic was before it's time.

Dan Carpenter: Oh, it was way ahead of its time. It was the most impressive software I have ever seen in my 24 years running poker tournaments. It was truly astounding software. We run Poker Atlas at Encore which has a lot of the features but nothing from the players' side. (Editor's note: Carpenter now runs the Encore Boston Harbor poker room.)

I really, desperately wanted to bring this product to the world. I'm telling you man, it would have changed the game similarly to the hole cam.

Doug Shrader: I think the vision was there. Because it was uncharted territory, it was hard to wrap people's heads around the fact that this could be the future.

Take Napster. Napster could be the Spotify of today. They could be Apple Music, Pandora. Those wouldn't exist if people understood what the wave of the future was: streaming music off of devices. Sometimes, the pioneers get smoked. Sometimes, the pioneers go down to be billionaires. Look at Amazon. For years, it never made a single dollar. But Jeff Bezos continued with more rounds of funding and look at it today. They're taking over the world. They had the people and investors who saw the vision. Unfortunately, we only had a finite amount of money and when the money was gone, the company was gone.

Dan Carpenter: We were planning on launching at all the WSOP stops. We were gonna go to Europe, we were gonna go everywhere. I still can't believe the company got where it did and crumbled.

Doug Shrader: You miss 100% of the shots you don't take and I believe ChipTic had that same mentality. They took their shot and they missed. We had the WSOP wrapped around our finger. We were gonna be the next big thing. And then, we just weren't.

Lead photo courtesy of Dan Carpenter.

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'It Would Have Changed the Game' -- An Oral History of ChipTic, Part 2 - PokerNews.com

‘Make-or-break moment’: Trump heads to New Hampshire for campaign rally amid sagging polls, coronavirus fears – USA TODAY

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President Donald Trump rejected the Supreme Court ruling and declared that the subpoenas of a New York prosecutor for the billionaire presidents tax records was "a political witch hunt the likes of which nobody's ever seen before." (July 9) AP Domestic

WASHINGTON President Donald Trumps last political rally showed the risks of campaigning in the age of coronavirus.

His rally in New Hampshire on Saturday could be a test run for how those type of big campaign events will go forward in the future if they go on at all.

This rally is really a make-or-break moment for Trump, said Dan Eberhart, an energy company executive and GOP fund-raiser. This needs to be a success to prove out the strategy that in this kind of COVID environment, these kinds of rallies still have legs, still have purpose and that this type of campaigning can continue.

Trumps New Hampshire rally, which will be held at an airport hangar at the Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, comes as the president is trying to recharge his struggling campaign amid a recent spike in coronavirus cases and as polls show him trailing the presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, in November.

Trump heads to New Hampshire still shadowed by questions over what went wrong at his rally last month in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Even amid lingering concerns over the coronavirus pandemic, campaign officials hyped up that event and boasted that they had received requests for 1 million tickets. Turnout was far smaller than expected, with just 6,200 people showing up and leaving Trump addressing a lot of empty seats in a 19,000-capacity arena.

Whats more, eight campaign staffers on the advance team and two Secret Service agents who worked in Tulsa ahead of that event tested positive for coronavirus. Tulsas top health official said Wednesday that the rally and the protests that accompanied it likely contributed to the citys recent surge in coronavirus cases.

COVID-19 concerns: Doctors worry about coronavirus risks at Trump's New Hampshire rally

President Donald Trump campaigns in Toledo, Ohio, on Jan. 9, 2020.(Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

The event on Saturday will be only Trumps second in-person rally since much of the country went into lockdown over coronavirus. But it comes as the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. have topped 3 million, more than 133,000 Americans have died from the disease and as the U.S. continues to set a daily record of new cases.

The Trump campaign said it will distribute face masks at Saturdays event and will encourage attendees to wear them, even though Trump himself has resisted wearing a mask in public.

In New Hampshire, the rally has raised red flags for many local officials concerned about the potential spread of coronavirus from the event. A handful of Portsmouth officials want to mandate that face masks be worn by people attending the event, but Mayor Rick Becksted doesnt favor such a mandatory policy and says the city has no jurisdiction over the federally owned land where the event will be held.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has said it is imperative attendees at the rally wear masks but that he wont mandate them. Sununu has said he plans to meet Trump at the airport when he arrives, but that he wont attend the rally.

Holding political rallies while much of the nation is concerned about coronavirus poses real risks for Trump, said David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

He is a visual reminder of the coronavirus as he speaks, McLennan said. Hes speaking in front of big, often unmasked crowds and sometimes not-so-big crowds at a time when everybody is paying attention to these (coronavirus) numbers to some degree.

That being said, Im not sure the president has any other tools for his campaign. Hes kind of between a rock and a hard place in that thats what he did in 2016 to great effect.

Off to Texas: Donald Trump plans to travel to West Texas for campaign fundraiser despite COVID spike

Supporters listen as US President Donald Trump speaks during a Students for Trump event at the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona.(Photo: SAUL LOEB, AFP via Getty Images)

Trump is trying to replicate the campaign formula that worked well for him in 2016, said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire.

The old saying is campaigns are ultimately reflections of the candidate, Scala said. I think for the candidates own morale, he feels the need to be out and about and doing these sorts of things that served him well the last time he ran for office.

Trump lost New Hampshire to Democrat Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes. A poll last month by St. Anselm Colleges New Hampshire Institute of Politics showed him trailing Biden in the Granite State by 7 points.

But while a campaign rally will help fire up Trumps base and provide him with a made-for-television moment, it is unlikely to move other voters into his camp and might even turn off suburban voters, Scala said.

In New Hampshire, his real dilemma right now is in the prosperous suburbs, where you find a lot of college-educated voters who are well off, Scala said. They likely still have their jobs and so forth, but they are anxious about whats happening and what will come.

What some fear will come along with the rally is a spike in coronavirus in a state that has fewer than 6,000 reported cases.

Living in New Hampshire feels a bit like living in a bubble because in the state the numbers of cases is very low and the number of hospitalizations is low, Scala said. All of the metrics point in the right direction. But for a New Hampshire voter looking around the country, we feel very much like an island.

So for the president to come in does feel a bit like its impinging on that bubble. There are all of those concerns of what he brings with him. People come in from out of state. Will it cause a spike in cases? It will raise the anxiety level at a time when a lot of people are understandably very anxious.

Tax decision: Trump, Democrats both hoped for big political wins in Supreme Court decision on taxes. Neither got one

Regardless, Trump needs a robust turnout on Saturday to reboot his campaign and move on from what happened in Tulsa, Eberhart said.

The rallies are a barometer of voter sentiment, the living embodiment of Trumps slumping popularity, he said. If the New Hampshire crowd is anemic, it sends the signal to donors that public support for the president is subpar and that they may be throwing good money after bad. He needs a full house and a raucous crowd to recharge his re-elect campaign.

If he doesnt get that, he needs to find another way to reach voters, Eberhart said.

The Tulsa rally was widely panned by the media, he said. If the same happens in New Hampshire, he cant hold a third and a fourth (rally) and just have it continue to pull down the campaign. Its just not going to work. (The campaign) has to rebound or he has to completely shift to some other way of campaigning.

Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS.

Contributing: Hadley Barndollar of seacoastonline.com

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'Make-or-break moment': Trump heads to New Hampshire for campaign rally amid sagging polls, coronavirus fears - USA TODAY

Head back to the farm (or ranch) with these films and documentaries – Bend Bulletin

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Farming and ranching are ingrained in American DNA . Farmers have worked the soil and raised the stock that feeds the country throughout history, before and after colonization. The modern ideals of farming harken back to simple times and quiet lives. But farming can be anything. It can be loud, revolutionary, quirky or traditional as these movies depict.

A still from Babe (1995).

Babe (1995) A piglet named Babe narrowly escapes his fate at the Christmas dinner table when his farmer decides to show him off at the next years fair. Babe then befriends the farms herding dog and realizes that he too can heard the sheep. A fun family movie about finding yourself and finding family that ultimately won Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy and was even nominated for several Oscars including Best Picture, winning one for visual effects which beat out Apollo 13. Not bad for a talking pig. Stream it on HBO Max/Go or rent it from Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube.

John Chester in a scene from The Biggest Little Farm (2018).

The Biggest Little Farm (2018) Stunningly filmed, this compelling documentary showcases the lives of husband and wife, John Chester (who also directed) and Molly Cunningham (who is also credited as a cinematographer), who pack up their lives in Santa Monica and move to a barren 200 acre farm outside of Los Angeles because their adopted dog wouldnt stop barking when they were away. So two people, who know nothing about farming and have gargantuan dreams of sustaining both livestock and a variety of produce document their journey from city slickers to all-out farmers, with a lot of help of course. Luckily they make no grand attempts to make themselves out to seem more knowledgeable than they are, and instead throw the credit for their eventual successes to their mentor Alan York. It will give you serious garden envy. Stream it on Hulu or rent it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube.

From left: Fred MacMurray, Percy Kilbride and Claudette Colbert in a scene from "The Egg and I" (1947)

The Egg and I (1947) Based on the memoir of the same name and set in Washington (albeit ambiguously) the comedy stars Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray as Betty and Bob MacDonald. On their wedding night, Bob informs Betty that hes quit his cushy job and bought them a derelict chicken farm in the country. It being the 1940s she happily goes with it, not asking questions. In fact, she sticks with him through much more than any sane modern woman would. She slowly shows her strength as she proves that she can make their ramshackle house a home for a while anyway. Fair warning there are many antiquated notions of what women should be/do and some racist depictions of Native Americans that were common in films of the era. Stream it on Hoopla or rent it from Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube.

Dolores Huerta in a scene from Dolores (2017).

Dolores (2017) A documentary on Dolores Huerta who, along with Cesar Chavez helped organize the farmworkers strikes in the 1960s and 70s. No doubt Chavez name has become synonymous with the movement to unionize the workers, but Huerta has equal footing with him. She fought gender bias as well as racism throughout her decades of activism, forgoing a traditional role in her household to raise her 11 children. Now 90 years-old, she continues to work speaking out for injustices through her organization. The documentary is typical when dealing with historical figures but it unveils a part of history that isnt as talked about outside of California or the Southwest (Im a millennial, raised in Bend and I hadnt heard about the United Farm Workers movement until I was in my late 20s) and the woman that is often missed when speaking about it. Stream it on OPB (with Passport) or rent it from Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in "Giant" (1956).

Giant (1956) A sprawling epic story of a family over three generations starring Rock Hudson as Texas cattle baron Bick Benedict, Elizabeth Taylor as his wife Leslie, and James Dean as cowboy-turned-oil magnate Jett Rink. When Bick marries Leslie a Maryland socialite and brings her home to Texas, Jett is smitten and creates tension between the him and the macho rancher. When Bicks sister dies and leaves Jett with a modest parcel of land, Jett strikes oil and the twos rocky relationship turns to rivalry. Over the course of about thirty years we see these two men grow old, showcasing both Hudson and Deans acting chops along the way. Taylor is also a force in her portrayal of Leslie, refusing to kowtow to many of the more feminine sensibilities that women of the day may have had to face. The film also features in a somewhat surprising subplot involving Bicks bigotry towards the local Latino community and how he grows more tolerant over time due to his wifes and sons influences. Stream it on HBO Max or rent it from Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube.

John Peterson in a still from "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" (2005)

The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2005) Farmer John Peterson inherits a farm from his father, who inherited it from his father. But while the farm was always in Petersons blood, the longing for free expression also coursed through his veins. In this documentary that follows Peterson through his childhood into adulthood and through bankruptcy, dealing with local intolerance toward his expressive lifestyle and eventual rise to become a highly sought after organic farmer hosting a popular Chicago CSA in the early 2000s. Stream it on Kanopy or Hoopla or rent it from Amazon Prime.

From left: John Ireland, John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in "Red River" (1948).

Red River (1948) Stubborn rancher Thomas Dodson (John Wayne) dreams of owning the biggest herd in Texas. He is aided by his old friend and trail hand Groot (Walter Brennan) and his kind of adopted son Matthew (Montgomery Clift in his first film). The three along with a brood of ranch hands start a perilous journey from the ranch north to Missouri. Along the way tensions run high after long miles, cattle stampede, death and other hazards leading the men to butt heads over what should be done. Its one of the best Westerns of all time and features the best yee-haws recorded on screen. Its worth noting that, as with most Westerns of the era there are racist depictions of Native Americans. Stream it on Starz or rent it from Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube.

From left: Alexander Godunov, Harrison Ford and Viggo Mortensen in a scene from Witness (1985).

Witness (1985) A young Amish boy named Samuel (Lukas Haas) witnesses a brutal murder while traveling with his mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis), to visit his aunt in Philadelphia. When the detective investigating the murder, Book (peak Harrison Ford), discovers that a corrupt cop is the murderer, he is shot and takes Rachel and Samuel back to their Amish community, where he recuperates and eventually falls for Rachel and she for him. The quiet Amish life depicts farming and even a quintessential barn raising that Book takes part in after the community discovers hes quite the carpenter (like Ford himself). The film was criticized in the Amish community for being untrue to their way of life and that its popularity would lead to their communities being overrun with tourists. This led to the governor of Pennsylvania agreeing not to promote future films from shooting in Amish communities. Rent it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.

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Singapore GE2020: Singaporeans in UK among first to cast ballot, out of 6570 overseas voters – The Straits Times

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Singaporeans living in the United Kingdom were among the first to cast their votes in this year's general election.

The Singapore High Commission in London opened its doors at 8am (3pm Singapore time) yesterday, but a queue of about 15 people had already formed 10 minutes earlier outside the building in the Belgravia area of the city.

Voters were standing at least 2m apart from one another, in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Poll letters issued to registered overseas voters listed instructions to wear a face covering and to keep a safe distance from others.

One of the first few in line at 7.45am was Mr Zack Ho, 28, who moved to London for work last year. The auditor from Aljunied GRC, who was voting overseas for the first time, said it is good that the GRC is keenly contested.

"It keeps (politicians) on their toes, with residents watching whether they deliver their promises after each election."

Singapore Management University exchange student Darren Choy, 24, who is from Hougang SMC, flew to London from Moscow to cast his ballot.

"I have been quite interested in politics since I was young, and this is the first time I get to vote, so I feel that it is important to be a part of this process," he said.

According to the Elections Department, there are 6,570 registered overseas voters in this election, up from 4,868 in 2015.

But a glitch in the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority's system, for which the authority apologised last Saturday, means that another 101 overseas Singaporeans will not get to vote this time though they had applied to do so.

London is one of 10 overseas polling stations, which are in places with a significant number of Singaporeans. The rest are in Beijing, Canberra, Dubai, Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo and Washington.

Voting in Dubai, London and the United States took place yesterday as overseas polls must not close later than the close of polls in Singapore.

Its #coolingoffday in Singapore but voting is a day ahead in London. I might be wrong, but we might just be the first...

Posted by Anthony Chen onThursday, 9 July 2020

Polls likewise opened at 8am (8pm Singapore time) in Washington, and voters showed up with masks firmly on their faces and red passports in hand.

All overseas polling stations have put in place measures to ensure the health and safety of voters and election officials amid the pandemic.

All voters were required to wear masks, sanitise their hands and don plastic gloves when collecting a ballot paper. Election workers also donned face shields and gloves.

First in line were Jurong GRC voters Peter Chou, 47, his wife Sharon and their 12-year-old son Sebastian, who set out from their Virginia home at 3am to beat the traffic into the nation's capital.

"It's a very important responsibility for citizens to cast a vote. We're casting a vote for the next generation, for my son's generation. It's not just casting votes but setting the correct foundation for the next generation," said Mr Chou, a postgraduate student in healthcare.

His impression of the election was that it was "more emotionally charged, because of the pandemic and also the economic situation in Singapore is a little on the rough side".

Scientist Faezzah Baharom, 31, said that what grabbed her attention about this election was the energy of the youth, which she said was different from when she was in Singapore 10 years ago.

"It's good to know that young people care about Singapore," said the Tampines GRC voter.

"I don't know if it's partly due to the influence of social media and people are aware of what's happening in the US for example, but it's good to know that people are discussing racial equality and things like that in Singapore too."

First-time voter Luk Yean, a data analyst at a healthcare policy company, said it was his democratic right and responsibility to vote.

The 25-year-old added: "The pandemic was one of the main concerns I have, but the future leadership of the country is very important, and this election is going to go a long way in deciding that."

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Singapore GE2020: Singaporeans in UK among first to cast ballot, out of 6570 overseas voters - The Straits Times