WASHINGTON (AP) — A billionaire Facebook co-founder says he is giving $20 million to help defeat Donald Trump, calling the Republican presidential candidate divisive and dangerous and his appeals to Americans who feel left behind “quite possibly a deliberate con.”

By contrast, Dustin Moskovitz says Democrats and their nominee, Hillary Clinton, are “running on a vision of optimism, pragmatism, inclusiveness and mutual benefit.”

Moskovitz wrote about the contributions in a Thursday night posting on the website Medium.

 

Opuk (AFP) - Under a blazing sun, Sukhoi jets zoomed across the sky and dropped explosives, as Russian warships sailed right up to the shore.

And beyond on a dusty steppe, paratroopers made a mass landing while ground forces ignited a wall of fire with napalm.

This display of military might took place Friday in Crimea as Russia showcased its ground, marine and air forces in the biggest exercises held on the strategic peninsula since its 2014 annexation from Ukraine.

"On such a scale and with the deployment of different force groupings, such drills are being held for the first time," defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told journalists.

Watching the drills at the Opuk training range on the Black Sea coast of eastern Crimea were Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov as well as Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov.

"This training range is the biggest on the Crimean peninsula, which allows for such exercises to be held," said Konashenkov, adding that it had been used by Russia before the peninsula's annexation.

The Crimean drills were part of Caucasus-2016 exercises held across Russia's southern regions with some 12,500 troops, the defence ministry said.

The drills involved warships, aircraft and tanks, with Moscow firing its S-300 missile systems, while the more advanced S-400 systems were used earlier in the Caucasus-2016 exercises that began on September 5 and reached their finale on Friday.

"Strategic drills... are essential to military training in Russia in 2016," Konashenkov said, "with a focus on different troops working together."

In Crimea, the exercises simulated an attempted invasion by a major force.

- 'No politics ' -

But Konashenkov insisted to journalists: "You should not twist this into anything -- there's no politics."

The drill was planned last year and is not related to the current heightened tensions with the West, he said.

Nevertheless such flexing of Russia's military muscle sent out a clear message that any real attack on Crimea will be fought off.

The drills also come about a month after President Vladimir Putin accused Kiev of sending a group of saboteurs into Crimea, saying Ukraine was "practising terror."

Two Russian officers were killed in clashes on the frontier but Ukraine denied any involvement.

"The troops really are training here to make sure that everything is guaranteed -- security is ensured," Konashenkov said.

"Crimea is protected now, it was protected yesterday and it was protected a year ago," he stressed.

"Crimea is part of Russia and the country protects it like any other region."

During Caucasus-2016, "the troops were set the task to fight off every kind of aggression," the defence ministry spokesman said, adding the drills included blocking and disarming illegal rebel groups.

The drills also worked on manoeuvres learnt in Syria, he said, including creating artificial ridges to allow troops to move around in a flat landscape.

"The military showed good skill level," chief of staff Gerasimov said after the exercises.

 

Europe is starting to get twitchy about the "bromance" between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, especially after U.S. politician heaped more praise on the Russian president Wednesday.

Speaking at the televised Commander-in-Chief Forum hosted by NBC News on Wednesday, Trump said the Putin, who he has praised several times in the past, was a "far more" capable leader that U.S. President Barack Obama. He also defended Putin's leadership style, support for the Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad and the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

"The man has very strong control over a country," Trump said of Putin. "It's a very different system and I don't happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader."

The comments caused a stir both in the U.S. and Europe. Russia and its leader are still viewed warily in both regions despite an awkward military alliance trying to combat the militant group calling itself Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Putin's decision in 2014 to annex Crimea from Ukraine and its role in a pro-Russian uprising in Ukraine prompted the U.S. and Europe to impose economic sanctions on Russia which are still in place. NATO has also deployed troops to the Baltic region and Eastern Europe to deter Russia from further military provocations (which have included intrusions into European waters and airspace) or, in the unlikely and worst case scenario, invasions.

Europe's media reacted on Thursday to Trump's warm comments about Putin with a mixture of skepticism, disbelief and nervousness over where the relationship could leave Europe should Trump come to power.
 

Most U.K. newpapers carried coverage of Trump's praise of Putin with the country's left-leaning Guardian newspaper saying it was continuation of the "so-called bromance" that has blossomed between the men.

"Trump again lavished praise on Vladimir Putin, pledging a new era of US-Russian cooperation – something both Obama and George Bush attempted and failed to achieve after U.S. and Russian interests diverged," the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman wrote.

"Despite months of Russian military demonstration in Syria that Vladimir Putin's objective is to suppress Bashar al-Assad's domestic resistance, Trump claimed that Russia wished to defeat Isis "as badly as we do". Putin might be a dictator – Trump waved away moderator Matt Lauer on this point – but he had "very strong control."

The BBC noted on its online coverage of Trump's remarks at the forum that his praise of Putin, in contrast with Obama's performance in office, "came on the same day the chief of the Pentagon accused Russia of sowing the seeds of global instability."

The BBC's Washington correspondent Anthony Zurcher said Trump had also "found new and interesting ways to show his tenuous command of policy details and shower questionable praise on a U.S. rival (Putin)."

Despite NBC's moderator running through a list of Putin's more controversial actions ("He's also a guy who annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine, supports Assad in Syria, supports Iran, is trying to undermine our influence in key regions of the world, and according to our intelligence community, probably is the main suspect for the hacking of the DNC computers") Trump responded that President Obama was just as bad.

"Do you want me to start naming some of the things that President Obama does at the same time?" Trump asked.

Trump's comments were not lost on continental Europe either with most large European news outlets remarking on Trump's continued approval of Putin. German daily Der Spiegel led with Trump's "praise for Putin" and said the U.S. businessman-turned-presidential hopeful had "emphasized once again his closeness to Russia" during the forum.

Meanwhile Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on Trump's "controversial" remarks about Putin and said Trump showed no signs of disassociating himself from the Russian leader, an observation also made in the French press.

-NBC's Benjy Sarlin and Alex Seitz-Wald contributed reporting to this story.

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(An illustration of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.NASA)
The funny thing about the discovery of Proxima b — the closest planet to our solar system, which is also rocky, Earth-size, and potentially habitable — is that nobody has actually seen it.

Astronomers know it exists because they've seen its gravity tug on and "wiggle" Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star that it orbits.

But no telescopes in space or on the ground, nor any in serious stages of planning, can directly photograph Proxima b.

It's very distant at 4.2 light-years away from us. Also, its "year" lasts only 11.2 days — an orbit too tight to pick out a planet from the blinding glare of a star.

However, a photograph isn't necessary to ask the most important question about Proxima b, a world that Scientific American has (optimistically) deemed "the Earth next door": Does it have an atmosphere, or is it an airless, barren wasteland like the Moon?

Two researchers at Harvard believe that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2018, could get the job done in record time, and by merely sampling the star system's light.

"It would only take [11 days'] worth of observing time," Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, told Business Insider.

"With the light we detect, we can ask if this world looks like a bare rock. If it doesn't, there might be an atmosphere, and there might also be an ocean, which life requires," says Loeb, who co-authored a pre-print study on arXiv with Laura Kreidberg, a Harvard astronomer who studies exoplanet atmospheres.

How to sniff out Proxima b's atmosphere

(An artist's depiction of Proxima b.Planetary Habitability Laboratory/University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo)
 

Proxima b orbits Proxima Centauri in a Goldilocks-like habitable zone, where the strength of light is just right to melt water.

However, its close distance to the star — just 4 million miles away, or roughly 17 times as far as the Earth is from the Moon — comes with a worrisome consequence.

Astronomers think Proxima b is tidally locked like the Moon, where one side of the world always faces Earth. But instead of always facing the Earth, one side of Proxima b always faces its star: awash in permanent daylight, the other side trapped in an endless cold night.

If Proxima b does have an atmosphere, though, says Loeb, it'd not only circulate warmth from the day side to the night side, but also prevent the planet's water from boiling off into space.

(What a tidally locked habitable Proxima b might look like, also called an "eyeball Earth." A ring of habitability could exist between the day and night sides.Beau.TheConsortium/Wikia (CC-BY-SA))
"We basically asked ourselves, 'what would a tidally locked Earth look like if you put it right next to Proxima Centauri?'" he said. "Clouds, wind, and water make that question complicated," he added, but said you could at least tell if it's a bare rock or is circulating heat using air.

"On Earth, at least a third of the heat is redistributed by the ocean and atmosphere," Loeb said.

He believes the trick to ruling out an atmosphere is to focus on infrared light — the same "color" of warm, invisible light that our bodies constantly emit.

When a rocky planet is warmed up by a star, it absorbs sunlight and re-emits it as infrared light. Yet rocky planets emit a different kind of infrared light than is given off by stars like Proxima Centauri.

And it just so happens that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is specially designed to observe infrared light.

So instead of trying to photograph a tiny planet in a flood of visible light, JWST may only need to hunt for specific wavelengths of infrared light in the glare.

"When we look at the Moon, it shows different phases illuminated by the sun. If you imagine planet going around the star, we'd see different phases of the planet," Loeb said. "Past the star, we'd see its day side. In front of the star, we'd see its dark side. As Proxima b moves around the star over 11.2 days ... we'd see the temperature or 'color' of the planet changing with time."

If Loeb and Kreidberg's hypothetical observation reveals that the dark side of Proxima b isn't as cold as it should be, that would mean an atmosphere may be hugging the planet — and redistributing warmth to the night side.

If it doesn't, Proxima b may be a bare, lifeless rock.

Whatever the results, they'll be crucial: Red dwarf stars outnumber all other types of stars in our Milky Way galaxy by four-to-one.

"Situations like this must be common," Loeb says. "If you turn one stone and find a bug, there must be others around."

'It's not something we can guarantee'

(The James Webb Space Telescope's gold-plated mirrors undergo cryogenic testing.Ball Aerospace)
 

Although Loeb and Kreidberg's research has not yet been peer-reviewed, two leading scientists we contacted said it's "very promising work," "a good study," and "the best proposal on the table so far" — despite a number of uncertainties and hang-ups.

Ed Turner, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, told Business Insider that the study makes a lot of "ideal" assumptions about Proxima b.

"We've spent decades trying to figure out our own world's atmosphere, in terms of global warming and climate change. And now we're talking about studying an alien world," said Turner, who has worked with at least seven major observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope. "But the basic idea seems like a good one."

He said the biggest snag with Loeb and Kreidberg's method is that we don't yet know the inclination or "tilt" of Proxima b's orbit around its star.

"This assumes we're not looking down on the planet," Turner said. If that's the case — and we can only see its north or south pole — JWST wouldn't get clear day- and night-side views, or the evidence required to prove an atmosphere exists. "It's statistically unlikely, but possible."

And even if the method does work, Turner noted it couldn't tell you much about the atmosphere. The planet might be cozy like Earth, or a blazing hellhole like Venus (which has an atmosphere that's 90 times thicker) — and no one would be the wiser.

Mark Clampin, an exoplanet scientist at NASA and a project scientist for JWST, said the idea is "exciting," but emphasized the fact that NASA needs to get the tennis court-size telescope off the ground first.

"The telescope's instruments were designed in a time when we weren't doing these kinds of observations, so we'd really be pushing the limits of what can be done," Clampin told Business Insider. "We have to understand how the detectors perform in space. Until we can launch and fly JWST, it's not something we can guarantee."

Nevertheless, Clampin said he is "ready to take a shot at Proxima b with JWST" and that it's now the observatory's "target number-one."

Both Turner and Loeb said timing is also a legitimate concern, given years of delays with JWST — the telescope was originally supposed to launch in 2011.

(A laser on Thirty Meter Telescope will help the observatory take space-quality images.TMT)
If the project sees further delays, monster telescopes like the European Extremely Large Telescope or Thirty Meter Telescope could pick up the slack.

But no such colossal observatory is slated to open for the next 10 years, give or take a couple of years.

"JWST could give something we can chew on for a decade, until those telescopes come online," said Loeb.

Loeb's obsession with Proxima b — and the presence of its atmosphere — goes well beyond your standard flavor of scientific curiosity.

"I'm trying to encourage my friends to buy property on Proxima b," Loeb said, joking. "[W]e'll either destroy our own planet, or a natural catastrophe like an asteroid will. And if that doesn't [kill us], the sun warming us too much will."

With the help of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, he's working on Breakthrough Starshot, a project that hopes to laser-propel "nanocraft" toward the Proxima Centauri star system sometime in the next 20 to 30 years.

"A spacecraft equipped with a camera and various filters could take color images of the planet and infer whether it is green (harboring life as we know it), blue (with water oceans on its surface) or just brown (dry rock)," Loeb previously told Business Insider.

  If there's anything we've learned from scouring thousands of planetary candidates over the past decade, it's that finding life beyond Earth is an intensive search. We've got observatories in space and observatories on the ground. We've got plenty of evidence of rocky planets in the habitable regions of their respective stars. What we're missing, though, is information about these planets' atmospheres. Is there oxygen or other life-friendly elements?

A group of astronomers now hope to fill this gap in our knowledge. They are raising money for a nearly $4 million project called the Polarized Light from Atmospheres of Nearby ExtraTerrestrial Systems (PLANETS) telescope. If funding, site approvals ...