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LOST IN SPACE: NASA Regains Contact With ‘Dead’ Solar Mission.

A signal from the long-lost spacecraft, called STEREO-B, was detected Sunday evening (Aug. 21) by NASA’s Deep Space Network, a collection of space tracking stations that follows the agency’s space missions across the solar system and beyond. NASA scientists had kept vigil for STEREO-B, making monthly searches for the probe until it phoned home Sunday at 6:57 p.m. EDT (2257 GMT).

Right now, it’s unclear how healthy the spacecraft is after drifting in space for nearly two years. NASA lost contact with it on Oct. 1, 2014, after commanding a reset from Earth. The spacecraft’s twin, STEREO-A, is still working normally.

“The STEREO Missions Operations team plans further recovery processes to assess observatory health, re-establish attitude control, and evaluate all subsystems and instruments,” NASA officials wrote in a statement.

Evidently the spacecraft became disoriented, and as a result can’t keep its solar arrays directed at the sun for long enough to recharge its battery.

Or it could be the beginning of a real-life sci-fi horror movie.

THERE’S A HELL OF A GOOD SOLAR SYSTEM NEXT DOOR . . . LET’S GO! Proxima Centauri b confirmed! Potentially habitable planet orbits the star next door.

LEFTY COLUMNIST: When Trump Asks Black People What They’ve Got to Lose, He Has a Point.

Donald Trump has a point. When he asks black voters what the hell they have to lose, he misses nuances and conflates things that shouldn’t be conflated. But he has a point.

And we are the living proof of his point here in Dallas. Last week the three African-American members of the Dallas school board killed a program aimed at saving the lives of poor black inner-city kids in Dallas. Their votes against a tax hike aimed at enriching inner-city schools were perfectly in line with local and national Democratic Party postures that oppose school reform as a threat to teacher tenure.

Call it the “Teachers’ Jobs Matter” movement.

The nature of the movement was reflected clearly in last-minute anti-school-reform revisions to the national Democratic Party platform that successfully rolled back reform goals set by President Obama. Shavar Jeffries, president of Democrats for Education Reform, said the revisions, “inexplicably allowed the process to be hijacked at the last minute.

Read the whole thing.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Olympic Athletes Are Electrifying Their Brains, and You Can Too.

GOSH, WHO KNEW? Richard Roeper: My fellow Lefty Critics Graded Lady Ghostbusters on a Curve.

THIS ISN’T NEW: An Unconventional Cardiologist Promotes a High-Fat Diet.

FROM MY UT COLLEAGUE MAURICE STUCKE AND ARIEL EZRACHI OF OXFORD: Is Your Digital Assistant Devious? As much as its creators can manage, I suspect.

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS EXPECTING: Wedding planner vouches for Seahawks QB Russell Wilson’s bizarre obsession with gender neutral bathrooms.

DEALS GALORE in the Amazon Baby Store.

SCIENCE. Obama Energy Czar: Actually, Fracking Is Pretty Good For The Environment.

“The natural gas boom, in particular, has led to the displacement of high-carbon coal with low-carbon natural gas producing fewer emissions,” [Energy Secretary Ernest] Moniz reportedly said during the Seattle field hearing.

Since the Environmental Protection Agency’s advisory board published a study earlier this month debunking the widespread claim that fracking contaminates drinking water, environmentalists have attempted to double down — claiming that the study didn’t have enough scientific evidence in it to back up its findings. Moniz’s testimony at last week’s hearing was meant to dispel these criticisms and confirm to the public that fracking doesn’t just drastically reduce the cost of energy, it also helps the environment.

The science is settled.

HMM: First randomized trial shows IVF culture media affect the outcomes of embryos and babies. I think early development has a bigger effect than we know.

ELI LAKE: Why Obama Let Iran’s Green Revolution Fail.

Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support.

Solomon reports that Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement’s supporters. “The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon writes. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

Well, that’s because he didn’t want the mullahs overthrown.

KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANTS! John Oliver Destroys Underprivileged Students.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: We are all surrounded by filth all the time.

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED. Perfect: ‘Sausage Party’ Lesbian Taco Character Riles Up SJWs:

Have a progressive headache yet? It may help to note that Salma Hayek was not, in fact, playing a Hispanic woman. She was playing a taco.

It’s food, for crying out loud. Delicious food. (And yes, I’m craving tacos right now. Don’t judge me.)

Autostraddle goes on to note that in general, they try to make sure that all writers share a trait with a character, or something along those lines.

The reality is that this mea culpa illustrates where SJWs priorities really lie: making sure that superficial features are treated as our most important characteristics, not our souls.

Your DNA equals your worth. Sounds like fascism to me.

Well, yes. I know somebody who wrote a whole book on that topic.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Hillary hosted dinner for foundation donors — including an alleged Iran-sanctions violator.

Ed Morrissey:

Remember Walter Pinchuk? His name came up last year in an ongoing series of exposés regarding influence-peddling at the State Department through the Clinton Foundation. The steel tycoon got some face time with a “top Clinton aide” to argue on behalf of the Moscow-backed Yanukovich government in Ukraine, the Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger reported last October. The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Nicholas did a deep dive on newly released e-mails from the State Department to discover that Pinchuk didn’t just get face time with an aide while donating big bucks to the Clinton Foundation — he got Hillary Clinton to host an official State Department dinner in June 2012 for Pinchuk and other foundation donors:

While she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton hosted a dinner involving Clinton Foundation donors, including a Ukrainian businessman who had given money to the organization and who had retained a lobbyist to arrange State Department meetings.

The dinner attended by Victor Pinchuk four years ago was mentioned in a new batch of State Department emails obtained by the conservative group Citizens United through public records requests and released on Tuesday.

The Clinton campaign has tried to make hay of Donald Trump’s supposed sympathies for Vladimir Putin through the now-dismissed Paul Manafort. This shows a much more corrupt tie to Putin’s allies, and the danger is not just in regard to Russia. As Newsweek reported in April 2015, Pinchuk allegedly violated sanctions on Iran even while Hillary feted him.

THERE’S MORE: Emails Show Clinton Foundation Donor Reached Out To Hillary Clinton Before Arms Export Boost.

The email exchange about Bahrain shows the Clinton Foundation’s top executive Doug Band in 2009 asking Clinton’s State Department aide Huma Abedin to set up a meeting between Clinton and Crown Prince Salman, who had recently been named the deputy supreme commander of Bahrain’s armed forces. Band referred to Salman as a “good friend of ours.”

Abedin told Band that Clinton had initially rejected a previous request for a meeting with Salman because “she doesn’t want to commit to anything for thurs or fri until she knows how she will feel.” Soon after, though, Abedin told Band that the State Department was now offering Salman a meeting with Clinton.

Salman has directed $32 million to a Clinton Foundation program, and the Kingdom of Bahrain has donated up to $100,000 more. As Bahrain money flowed into the Clinton Foundation, State Department documents showed that between 2010 and 2012 the Clinton-led State Department approved $630 million worth of direct commercial arms sales to Salman’s military forces in Bahrain. That was a 187 percent increase from the period 2006 to 2008, and the increase came as Bahrain was violently suppressing uprisings.”

But don’t worry, because Hillary has promised to stop taking foreign money — after she’s won election.

SHALOM, Y’ALL! Israel and Texas: A Growing Alliance, says Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush.

Well, I’m rather fond of both places. Read the whole thing.

BREAKING: American University in Kabul under attack: Gunmen storm campus packed with students as explosions are heard and victims tweet from inside ‘I’m wounded and girls cry, please help us’

Photojournalist Massoud Hossaini is live-tweeting from inside.

NO. WAY. U.S. and Europe Say Assad May Have Kept Some Chemical Weapons.

TRUMP SUPPORTERS AT VIRGINIA RALLY: Don’t Retract a Thing!

WELL, GOOD: Trump Intensifies Attacks on Clinton Foundation.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN AFGHANISTAN IN KABUL UNDER ATTACK: “CBS News’ Ahmad Muktar reported that several American professors and possibly hundreds of students are inside, though many have appeared to escape through emergency doors. Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer Massoud Hossaini tweeted that he and others are trapped inside the school. Hossaini tweeted that he heard shooting and an explosion.”

Reporting on today’s news, the Washington Free Beacon adds, “American University in Kabul was shuttered earlier this month after gunmen kidnapped two foreign professors, one American and one Australian, close to the campus in the capital of Afghanistan on Aug. 8. The campus reopened three days after the incident.”

Developing.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1203.