To reprise her 'Karate Kid' role in 'Cobra Kai,' Tamlyn Tomita had some ground rules

Travellers will be barred from returning to illegal sites for a year

Travellers will be barred from returning to illegal sites for a year under a Government crackdown to be announced in the New Year. Police will get powers to prosecute travellers if they return to a specific site within 12 months, a quadrupling of the time limit from the current three months. Those who breach the law will face up to three months in jail and fines of up to £2,000. It is part of an overhaul of the legislation to prevent illegal encampments which ministers say cause communities “significant distress.” The reforms, part of the Police Powers and Protection Bill due in the New Year, will give councils powers to direct travellers to authorised sites in neighbouring council districts. Currently, police are banned from moving travellers to sites outside the council area where they have camped. Police will also be able to act sooner as the threshold for intervention will be dropped from six illegally parked caravans to two. It follows widespread complaints from MPs and residents about trespassing, noise and anti-social behaviour. It is estimated there are some 23,000 traveller caravans in England, of which 14 per cent are parked on unauthorised sites. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is expected to make good a manifesto commitment to give police new powers “to arrest and seize the property and vehicles of trespassers who set up unauthorised encampments, in order to protect our communities.” This will be done by making it a criminal offence for travellers to intentionally trespass on private land when setting up an encampment. The change was campaigned for by Ms Patel when she was a backbench MP alongside Alok Sharma, now the Business Secretary, and John Whittingdale, a culture minister. Mr Sharma said: “My view is clear – the law needs strengthening and trespass needs to be made a criminal offence. “This is the case in the Republic of Ireland and we need this change here. It will deter illegal encampments as the individuals concerned will understand they will face criminal law sanctions, rather than civil ones, right from the start.” The civil sanctions for fly tipping, which leaves farmers having to pay tens of thousands of pounds to clear up dumped rubbish, and squatting in commercial premises are expected to remain unaffected by the changes. The proposal to criminalise trespass was first mooted by the Tories in the party’s 2010 general election manifesto. “The vast majority of travellers are law-abiding citizens – but illegal sites often give an unfair, negative image of their community and cause distress and misery to those who live nearby,” said a Government source. “There is a widespread perception that the law does not apply to travellers and that is deeply troubling.” The moves are being opposed by traveller organisations who claim they are more about electioneering than tackling any perceived problem. The Friends, Families and Travellers (FFT) charity said that even the police did not believe the new criminal powers were necessary. Responses to the Government’s consultation obtained by the charity under freedom of information (FOI) legislation, showed that 75 per cent of police responses indicated their current powers were sufficient and/or proportionate. Additionally, 84 per cent did not support the criminalisation of unauthorised encampments, and 65 per cent said lack of site provision was the real problem. Abbie Kirkby, advice and policy manager at FFT, said the proposed laws would make the lives of Gypsies and Travellers a misery. She said: “The evidence we have collected shows that the Home Office are deliberately ignoring police views on unauthorised encampments. The timing of the consultation made it clear that the Government’s motive was to use Gypsies and Travellers to gather votes at election time.”

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Nancy Pelosi's Home Reportedly Vandalized With Pig's Head and Fake Blood

Protestors targeted the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on New Year’s Eve to send a message about the dire economic hardships facing so many Americans.

Was That a Dropped Call From ET?

Nobody believes it was ET phoning, but radio astronomers admit they do not have an explanation yet for a beam of radio waves that apparently came from the direction of the star Proxima Centauri."It's some sort of technological signal. The question is whether it's Earth technology or technology from somewhere out yonder," said Sofia Sheikh, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University leading a team studying the signal and trying to decipher its origin. She is part of Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million effort funded by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire investor, to find alien radio waves. The project has now stumbled on its most intriguing pay dirt yet.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesProxima Centauri is an inviting prospect for "out yonder."It is the closest known star to the sun, only 4.24 light-years from Earth, part of a triple-star system known as Alpha Centauri. Proxima has at least two planets, one of which is a rocky world only slightly more massive than Earth that occupies the star's so-called habitable zone, where temperatures should be conducive to water, the stuff of life, on its surface.The radio signal itself, detected in spring 2019 and reported on earlier in The Guardian, is in many ways the stuff of dreams for alien hunters. It was a narrow-band signal with a frequency of 982.02 megahertz as recorded at the Parkes Observatory in Australia. Nature, whether an exploding star or a geomagnetic storm, tends to broadcast on a wide range of frequencies."The signal appears to only show up in our data when we're looking in the direction of Proxima Centauri, which is exciting," Sheikh said. "That's a threshold that's never been passed by any signal that we've seen previously, but there are a lot of caveats."Practitioners of the hopeful field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, also known as SETI, say they have seen it all before."We've seen these types of signal before, and it's always turned out to be RFI -- radio frequency interference," Dan Werthimer, chief technologist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, who is not part of the Proxima Centauri study, wrote in an email.That thought was echoed by his Berkeley colleague Andrew Siemion, who is the principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen. "Our experiment exists in a sea of interfering signals," he said."My instinct in the end is that it will be anthropogenic in origin," he added. "But so far we can't yet fully explain it."So there's nothing to see here, folks. Until there is. Notwithstanding claims of biosignature gases on Venus and tales of UFO sightings collected by the Pentagon, the discovery of life -- let alone intelligence -- out there would be a psychological thunderclap of cosmic and historic proportions.False alarms have been part of SETI since the very beginning, when Frank Drake, then at Cornell and now retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz, pointed a radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, in 1960 at a pair of stars, hoping to hear aliens' radio waves. He detected what seemed to be a signal. Could it be this easy to discover we are not alone?It turned out to be a secret military experiment.Sixty years later we are still officially alone, and SETI as an enterprise has been through the wars economically and politically, even as technology has enhanced humanity's ability to comb the nearly infinite haystack of planets, stars and "magical frequencies" on which They might be broadcasting.Breakthrough Listen was announced with much fanfare by Milner and Stephen Hawking in 2015, sparking what Siemion called a renaissance."This is the best time to be doing SETI," he said.The recent excitement began April 29, 2019, when Breakthrough Listen scientists turned the Parkes radio telescope on Proxima Centauri to monitor the star for violent flares. It is a small star known as a red dwarf. These stars are prone to such outbursts, which could strip the atmosphere from a planet and render it unlivable.In all they recorded 26 hours of data. The Parkes radio telescope, however, was equipped with a new receiver capable of resolving narrow-band signals of the type SETI researchers seek. So in fall 2020, the team decided to search the data for such signals, a job that fell to Shane Smith, an undergraduate at Hillsdale College in Michigan and an intern with Breakthrough.The signal that surprised the team appeared five times April 29 during a series of 30-minute windows in which the telescope was pointed in the direction of Proxima Centauri. It has not appeared since. It was a pure unmodulated tone, meaning it appeared to carry no message except the fact of its own existence.The signal also showed a tendency to drift slightly in frequency during the 30-minute intervals, a sign that whatever the signal came from is not on the surface of Earth but often correlates with a rotating or orbiting object.But the drift does not match the motions of any known planets in Proxima Centauri. And, in fact, the signal -- if it is real -- might be coming from someplace beyond the Alpha Centauri system. Who knows?The subsequent nonappearance of the signal has prompted comparisons to a famous detection known as the "Wow! Signal" that appeared on a printout from the Big Ear radio telescope, operated by Ohio State University in 1977. Jerry Ehman, a now retired astronomer, wrote "Wow!" on the side of the printout when he saw it after that fact. The signal never appeared again, nor was it satisfactorily explained, and some people still wonder if it was a missed call from Out There.Of the Proxima signal, Siemion said, "There have been some exclamations, but 'wow' hasn't been one of them."Asked what they were, he laughed."Initially there were perplexed reactions from folks, but it settled down quickly," he said.Over a period of 24 to 48 hours at the end of this October, he said, the mood shifted from inquisitive and curious to "very serious scientific detective work."Sheikh, who expects to get her doctorate this coming summer, is leading the detective work. She got her bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, intending to go into particle physics, but found herself drifting into astronomy instead. She first heard about the Breakthrough Listen project and SETI on Reddit while she was looking for a new undergraduate research project."I would say we were extremely skeptical at first, and I remain skeptical," she said about the putative signal. But she added that it was "the most interesting signal to come through the Breakthrough Listen program."The team hopes to publish its results early in 2021.The Parkes telescope -- which once relayed communications to the Apollo astronauts -- is notorious for false alarms, Werthimer said. In one recent example, he said, astronomers thought they had discovered a new astrophysical phenomenon."It was very exciting until somebody noticed the signals only appeared at the lunch hour," he said. They were coming from a microwave oven.Over the years SETI astronomers have prided themselves on their ability to chase down the source of suspicious signals and eliminate them before word leaked out to the public.This time their work was reported by The Guardian. "The public wants to know; we get that," Siemion said. But, as he and Sheikh emphasize, they are not nearly done yet."Frankly, there's still a lot of analysis that we have to do to be confident that this thing is not interference," Sheikh said.Part of the problem, she explained, is that the original observations were not done according to the standard SETI protocol. Normally, a radio telescope would point at a star or other target for five minutes and then "nod" slightly away from it for five minutes to see if the signal persisted.In the Proxima observations, however, the telescope pointed for 30 minutes and then moved far across the sky (30 degrees or so) for five minutes to a quasar the astronomers were using to calibrate the brightness of the star's flares. Such a large swing might have taken the telescope away from whatever the source of the radio interference was.If all else fails, Sheikh said, they will try to reproduce the results by replicating the exact movements of the Parkes telescope again on April 29, 2021."Because," she said, "if it's actually coming from Proxima, then maybe they would like send a hello once a year or something like that. But it's more likely that there's some sort of yearly event that happens at the visitor center, or something like that, that causes an environmental effect that doesn't happen the rest of the year."The Proxima signal could be destined to pass into legend like the Ohio State Wow! Signal, but in SETI, there is always another day, another star.It's been fun, Sheikh said, even if the Proxima signal ends up being interference. "This is extremely exciting, no matter what comes out of it."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Congress (finally) passed new stimulus checks — here's when to expect yours