Houston: Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, currently in space floating around in zero-gravity, voted for US presidential polls by absentee ballot. Sunita, along with flight engineer Kevin Ford, exercised her franchise in July while stationed in Russia even before heading up to the station aboard Soyuz ships launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome.
The other four members of the station's current Expedition 33 crew are all non-Americans - three Russian cosmonauts and one Japanese space ace. For several years now, adventurers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been able to cast their votes via encrypted e-mail. Voting facility is available to those in the ISS with the help of to a digital ballot provided by Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The provision was envisaged by a 1997 Bill passed in the state of Texas, home to most of the NASA astronauts. The Bill allowed registered voters to digitally beam their ballots back down to Houston. After filling out the form, "they send it back to Mission Control," says NASA spokesman Jay Bolden. "It's a secure ballot that is then sent directly to the voting authorities," says Bolden.
Various US astronauts have cast their ballots from orbit in various past elections, and NASA has a procedure for such cases, brought in at the behest of Texan politicians keen to capitalise on publicity around space-going voters likely to be resident in the Houston area. When the bill was passed, David Wolf, then aboard Russia's Mir space
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New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the well-received biography of President Barack Obama called the 'The Bridge', talks to CNN-IBN's Amrita Tripathi on the US Presidential campaign and the absent cover image of Obama in the magazine's latest issue. ...
11:10 AM, Oct 10, 2012
London: Google CEO Larry Page was again absent from a company meeting that raised concerns about his health and how it will affect the internet giant, a media report said. Page missed the company's quarterly earnings conference call Thursday. He has also not been at any of Google's public events in the last month and skipped the annual stockholders meeting, the Daily Mail reported. The company only said he has...
05:04 PM, Jul 22, 2012
Tunis: Tunisia's deposed president will be tried in absentia next week on charges of embezzlement and drug trafficking, an official said on Tuesday. The June 20 trial, the first of many for a range of charges - will be open to the public, said Justice Ministry spokesman Kadhem Zine El Abidine. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali could face between five to 20 years in prison if convicted. Ben Ali ruled...
01:11 AM, Jun 15, 2011
Contemporary journalists Neelesh Misra and Rahul Pandita, one fine day, decided to pursue the rigorous quest of reality. Travelled into the hearts of India's battle zones, and dug out the vulnerability that stopped the revenue collectors from frequenting those places since, wait, Akbar's reign. The remote corners of the country which yearn for some form of authority, official surveillance, or at least a frame of management are given lemons in...
05:40 PM, May 19, 2011
Union Minister, Azlagiri, has created quite a stir by absenting himself from parliament. ...
02:43 PM, Apr 25, 2010
An HC petition in says KL Bishnoi did not appear for his practical exam. ...
09:11 PM, Jan 02, 2010
Kerala govt has sent them showcause notices through the media. ...
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