March 6 top stories

It is March 6. Here are today’s top stories.

Facebook, Instagram and Threads back up after global outage

Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, went down for thousands of users on Tuesday, because of what the company called a “technical issue.” The outage was resolved within around two hours.

As many as 500,000 Facebook users had reported issues logging in or accessing the site as of mid-morning Eastern Time on Tuesday. Some users found they had been logged out of their Facebook accounts. Others got notifications on Instagram that “something went wrong” and their feeds could not be loaded.

Threads, Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X, also went down and showed users a popup that said “Something went wrong, please try again later” in place of their feed.

Just after noon ET, Meta said it had resolved the issue.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said on X, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

SpaceX launches 4 astronauts to the ISS for 6-month stay

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying three U.S. astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut, Crew-8, blasted off from Florida bound for the International Space Station (ISS) at 10:53 pm EST Sunday.

The Crew-8 mission will be in space for six months. They are to replace a crew of 7 people that have been there since August. Space is one of the few areas where the US and Russia continue to cooperate closely despite the war in Ukraine.

The International Space Station is about the length of a football field and the largest human-made object in space. It has been continuously maintained by the U.S.-Russian consortium including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

According to NASA, they plan to do various experiments–more than 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations that are to be conducted during the mission and scheduled to finish in mid August. One will involve growing artificial replicas of human organs in the low-gravity environment which is not possible on Earth.

The crew of four arrived at the ISS Tuesday morning, docking with the orbiting laboratory some 250 miles above the Earth. They floated into the ISS, wearing blue suits, and were greeted with hugs from Crew-7 in red shirts. The Crew 7 team is expected to depart the space station for a flight back to Earth about a week after Crew 8’s arrival.

[Shows video - CREDIT TO NASA]

Air Force employee charged with sharing classified intel on foreign dating website

David Franklin Slater (63), retired lieutenant colonel who worked as a civilian for a United States Command near Omaha, Nebraska which oversees the U.S. nuclear missile arsenal, is accused of illegally disclosing classified Pentagon secrets about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through a foreign dating website to a person he believed was a woman in Ukraine.

Slater was arrested on March 2 for conspiring to transmit and transmitting classified information beginning around February 2022 to April 2022.

According to the Justice Department’s press release, Slater had a top security clearance while working at the U.S. Strategic Command and received training on how to properly handle classified information.

Slater was communicating through the dating website with a person claiming to be a woman living in Ukraine. The person requested information from Slater, referring to him as her “secret agent” and “secret informant love.” The person asked, among several other overtures requesting classified information from Slater, “Beloved Dave, do Nato and Biden have a secret plan to help us?”

Slater was in court in Omaha Tuesday and has pleaded not guilty to charges. He faces a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000 for each count of conspiracy to transmit and the transmission of national defense information.

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Sen. Bob Menendez and wife hit with obstruction of justice charge in bribery case

New obstruction of justice crimes were added Tuesday to charges against Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife alleging that they accepted gold bars, cash and a luxury car in return for favors the senator carried out to assist three businessmen.

Prosecutors accused the couple of trying to cover up a bribe by making it look like a loan. In the process, they lied to their own lawyers, who in turn inadvertently misrepresented the arrangement to federal prosecutors.

The new indictment expands the charges from four to 18, and comes just two months before the couple and two New Jersey businessmen are scheduled for the trial on May 6.

Bob Menendez said, “I am innocent and will prove it no matter how many charges they continue to pile on.”

After his arrest last fall, Menendez (70), was forced to relinquish his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but said he would not resign from Congress.

See Alex for a report on the Super Tuesday primaries.

Super Tuesday: Trump and Biden to have rematch

Thanks, Callie.

Yesterday was Super Tuesday, which was a huge day in the presidential nomination process for both the Democratic and Republican parties with over a dozen states voting.

The results show that President Biden and former president Donald Trump won nearly all races. Biden got over 5 million votes in his Democratic contests and Trump got almost 7 million votes in his Republican contests.

Republican challenger Nikki Haley won only one state, Vermont, and will announce she’s dropping out of the race. Haley managed to get 2 million votes nationwide on Super Tuesday, but it’s nowhere enough to catch up to Trump.

So we’ll have a rematch of Biden and Trump for the 2024 election. This is assuming that Trump will still run into November despite his many legal cases.

Here are some other highlights from Super Tuesday.

In American Samoa, Biden lost his contest to a mostly unknown candidate named Jason Palmer. He is a businessman from Baltimore and campaigned remotely, using Zoom, and invested about $500,000 of his own money.

In Minnesota, more than 45,000 Democratic voters voted “uncommitted” as a form of protest against Biden’s pro-Israel policies in the war in Gaza. Axios said the protest votes are a small minority of the Democratic electorate but it could be critical to Biden’s hopes of maintaining his lead over Trump in the midwest.

In California, Rep. Adam Schiff (D) got enough votes in a senate contest to make it as one of the top two candidates during the general election in November. He will go up against Republican Steve Garvey. That’s all about Super Tuesday.

Thanks for that report. That is all the news stories for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light!

Facebook, Instagram and Threads back up after global outage:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/05/facebook-threads-and-instagram-are-down-for-some-users.html

SpaceX launches 4 astronauts to the ISS for 6-month stay:

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-spacex-crew-8-launches-to-international-space-station/

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=crew-8

Air Force employee charged with sharing classified intel on foreign dating website:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/air-force-employee-indicted-unlawful-disclosure-classified-national-defense-information

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13163913/PICTURED-Air-Force-contractor-David-Slater-accused-giving-secret-details-Russian-military-Ukrainian-girlfriend-dating-app-Facebook-likes-include-Russian-girls-twisted-babes.html

Sen. Bob Menendez and wife hit with obstruction of justice charge in bribery case:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/05/politics/bob-menendez-new-charges/index.html

Super Tuesday: Trump and Biden to have rematch