in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math.

Manning is still an active duty soldier in the U.S. Army — having been placed on voluntary excess leave, rather than discharged — and, as such, could be swiftly and relentlessly punished for the slightest violation, despite technically being considered free.

For the US to designate HTS now would mean acknowledging that it supplied sophisticated weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles to "terrorists," and draw attention to the fact that the U.S. continues to arm Islamist militias in Syria.

At the same time he was exonerating Clinton legally while damning her politically, he was investigating the Trump campaign, about which he quite properly did not say a public word. And he authorized his agents to engage a former British intelligence agent to dig up dirt on candidate Trump and to pay him $50,000 for it. The story the agent dug up was so lurid and unbelievable that the FBI declined to make the payment.

But as Maccone told the crowd at Stanford, we do much better still if we set up a bridge with not one but two FOCAL missions. Put one at the gravitational lens of the Sun, the other at the lens of the other star. At this point, things get wild. The minimum transmitted power drops to less than 10-4 watts. You’re reading that right — one-tenth of a milliwatt is enough to create error-free communications between the Sun and Alpha Centauri through two FOCAL antennas. Maccone’s paper assumes two 12-meter FOCAL antennas. StarShot envisions using its somewhat smaller sail as the antenna, a goal given impetus by these numbers.