There was a time, long ago, when public education was free. In the state of California, the University of California, or UC, system was signed into existence in 1868 The original charter stated that “for the time being, an admission fee and rates of tuition such as the Board of Regents shall deem expedient may be required of each pupil; and as soon as the income of the University shall permit, admission and tuition shall be free to all residents of the state. You hear that? Free to “all residents of the state!” A system that began as free now costs in-state students almost $30,000 per year to attend a UC school. For out-of-state students, the price can be as high as $50,000 per year. While I don’t have time to expand on this right now, something has to change.
Anyway, here’s what you missed in the news yesterday.
Houston, We Made It!
At long last, NASA’s InSight, the newest Mars rover, successfully landed on the Red Planet late Monday afternoon, pulling off the first Mars landing since August 2012. According to NBC news, InSight will spend the next couple of hours cleaning its camera lens from the “Mars crud” sitting on it, and unfurl its solar arrays, after all of which is completed, NASA engineers will spend the next several months preparing InSight to begin collecting data.
“There’s a reason engineers call landing on Mars ‘seven minutes of terror. We can’t joystick the landing, so we have to really on the commands we pre-program into the spacecraft. We’ve spent years testing our plans, learning from other Mars landings and studying all the conditions Mars can throw at us. And we’re going to stay vigilant till InSight settles into its home in the Elysium Planitia region.”
–Rob Grover, Lead for InSight Landing
Wait, That’s Actually A Thing?
One of my favorite phrases to casually throw at situations is “martial law is now in effect.” For those of you unfamiliar with what this concept is or means, allow me to iterate this to you. To put it as simply as humanly possible, martial law is when the military fully takes over the governing authority of a given area or region. When martial law is declared, this is typical because all hell has broken loose and the weaponized military must step in to restore balance to the force. As an abstract concept, this sounds incredibly cool and meant for a Michael Bay film, but Ukraine’s Parliament voted Monday to actually declare martial law, and that’s really frightening.
The martial declaration comes after an attack a day earlier by Russian forces who captured several Ukrainian naval vessels, leading several sailors wounded, according to The New York Times. Nikki Haley, the ambassador from the United States publicly denounced Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian ships by calling it “arrogant.”
“As President Donald Trump said many times, the United States would welcome a normal relationship with Russia, but outlaw actions like this one continue to make that impossible.”
–Nikki Haley, United States UN Ambassador
