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Trump Wins Election In Rural Oregon—With Two Votes
Jun 30, 2023,06:50am EDT
Former President Donald Trump won an election to serve on the board of a rural fire district in Oregon after receiving two write-in votes, the Salem Statesman Journal reports—though as someone who doesn’t own property in the area, it’s unlikely the ex-president will be able to take on the role.
KEY FACTS
Trump earned two write-in votes to be a board member in the Hubbard Rural Fire Protection District, a seven-mile district in western Oregon that’s home to 5,000 residents.
No candidate formally ran for the position, and election records show Trump was one of five candidates to earn two votes, out of 25 ballots cast in total during the election on May 16.
The Statesman Journal reports the ex-president then won a tiebreaker based on multiple rolls of 12-sided dice, which took place on June 23 and was first reported Tuesday by the publication.
The Marion County Clerk’s office told the Statesman Journal the fire district will now have to determine whether Trump would be eligible to hold office, which is unlikely, given that the candidate must live or own property in the district.
Since Trump doesn’t live in the district, officials will see if any of the other candidates who earned two votes would want the job, local fire chief Michael Kahrmann told KOIN 6, though Central Oregon Daily News reports Trump will be asked about taking the position.
Trump’s presidential campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
The fire board will next meet on July 12, which is when it will determine who will fill the position that Trump won. If no other candidates who earned two votes are interested in the role, the board will appoint someone to fill the vacancy, the Statesman Journal reports.
SURPRISING FACT
Election records show Trump also earned two votes to serve on the board of the nearby Marion County Fire District in the county’s local election, though he was beat out by other candidates in that race. Among the other write-in candidates for that role were Smokey the Bear, Snoop Dogg, Snoopy, actor Timothee Chalamet and Mickey Mouse, who earned six votes.
KEY BACKGROUND
While he didn’t formally announce his candidacy for the fire district board, Trump is running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 and is so far the clear frontrunner. A FiveThirtyEight average of 2024 polls finds 51.7% of GOP voters support Trump in the primaries as of June 29, far ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s polling second at 23.5%, despite the former president’s recent federal and state indictments. The Oregon election marks the first government role that Trump has been elected to since 2016, after President Joe Biden beat him in the 2020 presidential race. Trump protested that election was “rigged” and mounted an extensive legal effort to overturn the results—which overwhelmingly failed—and there is no evidence to support his claims of widespread election fraud.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/06/30/trump-wins-election-in-rural-oregon-with-two-votes/
Saturn’s Rings Shine in Webb’s Observations of Ringed Planet
June 30, 2023
On June 25, 2023, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope turned to famed ringed world Saturn for its first near-infrared observations of the planet. The initial imagery from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) is already fascinating researchers.
Saturn itself appears extremely dark at this infrared wavelength observed by the telescope, as methane gas absorbs almost all of the sunlight falling on the atmosphere. However, the icy rings stay relatively bright, leading to the unusual appearance of Saturn in the Webb image.
This image was taken as part of Webb Guaranteed Time Observation program 1247. The program included several very deep exposures of Saturn, which were designed to test the telescope’s capacity to detect faint moons around the planet and its bright rings. Any newly discovered moons could help scientists put together a more complete picture of the current system of Saturn, as well as its past.
This new image of Saturn clearly shows details within the planet’s ring system, along with several of the planet’s moons – Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys. Additional deeper exposures (not shown here) will allow the team to probe some of the planet’s fainter rings, not visible in this image, including the thin G ring and the diffuse E ring. Saturn’s rings are made up of an array of rocky and icy fragments – the particles range in size from smaller than a grain of sand to a few as large as mountains on Earth. Researchers recently used Webb to explore Enceladus, and found a large plume jetting from the southern pole of the moon that contains both particles and plentiful amounts of water vapor – this plume feeds Saturn’s E ring.
Saturn’s atmosphere also shows surprising and unexpected detail. Although the Cassini spacecraft observed the atmosphere at greater clarity, this is the first time that the planet’s atmosphere has been seen with this clarity at this particular wavelength (3.23 microns), which is unique to Webb. The large, dark, diffuse structures in the northern hemisphere do not follow the planet’s lines of latitude, so this image is lacking the familiar striped appearance that is typically seen from Saturn’s deeper atmospheric layers. The patchiness is reminiscent of large-scale planetary waves in the stratospheric aerosols high above the main clouds, potentially similar to those seen in early Webb NIRCam observations of Jupiter.
When comparing the northern and southern poles of the planet in this image, the differences in appearance are typical with known seasonal changes on Saturn. For example, Saturn is currently experiencing northern summertime, with the southern hemisphere emerging from the darkness at the end of a winter. However, the northern pole is particularly dark, perhaps due to an unknown seasonal process affecting polar aerosols in particular. A tiny hint of brightening towards the edge of Saturn’s disk might be due to high-altitude methane fluorescence (the process of emitting light after absorbing light), emission from the trihydrogen ion (H3+) in the ionosphere, or both; spectroscopy from Webb could help confirm this.
Missions like NASA’s Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, the Cassini spacecraft, and the Hubble Space Telescope have tracked Saturn’s atmosphere and rings for many decades. These observations from Webb are just a hint at what this observatory will add to Saturn’s story in the coming years as the science team delves deep into the data to prepare peer-reviewed results.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/06/30/saturns-rings-shine-in-webbs-observations-of-ringed-planet/