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tv   Key Capitol Hill Hearings  CSPAN  July 17, 2015 8:00pm-10:01pm EDT

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including michelle obama. and a little after 9:00 the national archives of kansas city shows how the united states used proper propaganda to get female female -- people -- to join the military during world war ii. >> nasa discusses the newest finds from the new horizons to pluto and then we talk about the talks of who shot down the malaysian plane a year ago and then we talk about criminal justice reform efforts. nasa scientist held a news briefing to discuss the latest findings of the new horizons spacecraft that took the first images of the dwarf planet pluto and its moons.
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this is an hour. >> good afternoon, welcome to nasa head quarters in our nation's capital. i am dwayne brown from nasa's office of communications. following july 14th's fly-by the research team has been sharing the findings with the world. today, they have more. this mission has been embraced by the entire world of all ages. the numbers with multi media, social media, the internet radio and tv is in the billions. we want to shout out to the john hopkins physic laboratory for
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the unforget- meeting this week. we will open to up to social media here and on the phone lines. social media is absolutely exploding with this mission. follow the conversation at #plutoflyby. if you have questions send them in to #asknasa. and all of the information you have been hearing, you will hear today, and in the weeks and months will be online at www www.nasa.gov/newhorizons. jim green is up first director of planetary science at nasa
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head quarters. alan stern, new horizons principle investigators at the southwest research institute in bolder, colorado. brandon gladstone, co investigator at southwest research in san antonio. fran begenal, new horizons coinvestor at university of colorado, bolder and jeffrey moore new horizons at aims research center in california. with that turn it over to you dr. green to kick osus off. >> thank you, dwayne. we will talk about the fantastic discoveries about the heart of pluto. but before starting that i would like to talk about the heart of
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the new horizons' mission. first, i want to thank apl for all of the work they did for making this happen. there are kinds ofthis that have been done from them. apl hosted a fabulous event that many attend personally but million millions attended on the internet. the heart of new horizons is beating and beating well and still was put on and produced by the department of energy. one of our major government partners and they enable us to move out into the solar system and on the trajectory to leave.
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if i can have our first graphic, here we see new horizons past pluto. this is through the solar system you can get access through to the web. as you can see it is more than two million miles away from pluto. for ten years, or nearly ten years the new horizons team was also talking about each day being closer to pluto and now each day we are further away from pluto. here is where it comes out that it is important to remember and that is it is this time we will get the data from the fly-by. we have only received 1-2% of the data by next week we will have as much as 5-6 percent. some of the discoveries you will hear about today have only been the tip of the iceberg and the few percent we have been able to get done since the ent encounter
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occurred on tuesday. let me turn it over to dwayne to introduce our next speaker. >> alan good free throw it. all who doesn't n introduc we're happy andour our ent am we've had the communicat exploration an about how ar system this we but i th pluto of a so ofitself. really all that nt recognize team membe. quite number of f the new horizons ssion m, they wo to be ause ] th [applause]
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>> we have and i would like to recognize new horizons mission educators who are in the audience. if you would stand up to be recognized. [applause] >> and i would like to recognize one of the science team collaborators who came over from europe. some of you may know dr. brian may. dr. brian? [applause] >> i am the guy, i am one of those people who have been following your every move. it is thrill to be here and what an amossazing achievement.
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you have inspired the world. >> thank you. [applause] >> while you enjoy this beautiful eye candy, the pollute charon system is revealed in color by new horizons and you see a binary planet. enjoy the view while i tell you a little news about new horizons. the spacecraft is doing very well. as jim said we are little over two million on the far side of pluto, the spacecraft is performing according to plan. we exited the nine-day close approach encounter load yesterday. we are in the first of our departure science load. so we are looking back at the planet and looking at the night side and doing various experiments and spending our time down linking data. we have been downloading a lot of data. so we have big news. and i expect we will have more big news next friday when we downloaded even more.
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i will have to tell you, i am a little bias but i think the solar system saved the best for last. i am going to show you some things here. i will start off with a little news. if i can have the next time stamp or graphic here. let's see if we can bring it up. there it is. okay. that is not very many pixels but that is pluto's satellite nix in the first well resolved image. let's set our expectations properly. as little as three months ago we didn't have pictures of pluto this good. this is twice as many pixels and the best earth base views of pluto we are able to determine nix's size, 25 miles across able to measure the brightness between charon and pluto.
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we are looking down the pole of an elongigated object and it is as twice as narrow in one direction as it is long. we will have more to say more more about nix when we get more images on the ground. i will move to the next time stamp. this is an overlay of data from the ralph insturument that identifies the carbon monoxide rich planet that was obserb served from earth. that is a new product overlayed with contours. you can see the peak is on the side of the heart there. you can see it is pretty
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concentrated spatially and we are not sure we understand the origin of that. there could be a source region there or another explanation. but either way it catches our eyes because across the rest of this disk there is no other carbon monoxide concentration or anything like this. we already know that. it is a special place on the planet. randy will shortly show you some pretty profound results concerning the atmosphere. in fact the first results we will share and fran shows you the detection of escaping ions from pluto and jeff will talk about new terrains high resolution photo. have a look at the icy frozen plains of pluto. who would have expected this kind of complexity? and this scene is essentially ad
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adjacent to the mountain ranges. you can see the stark contrast. jeff will show you more. i will show you a graphic. it is a flyover made as if your eye was 25 miles over pluto and we can start that flyover of far away mountains in the belt. if they could call that up i think you will enjoy seeing it. if you can lower it probably can't lower it given the television. is that graphic available? the animation? we cannot see it back here. there it is. what you are looking at is a scene that is about total width of 250 miles across and 400 kilometers and they soar like
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the rocky mountains here in the united states. the second flyover is over the plain i showed you that we are informally calling sputnick. this is giving you a scale of the features you are looking at. really beautiful surfaces and we will see a lot more of this. this is 400 meter per pixel imagery and by next week we will have more than twice as much. the three frames we have been able to share by the end of the day we will share with you as well covering her terrains. i think i will turn it over to andy gladstone. >> thanks alan. if we could go to the first time stamp and i will show you what the atmosphere team is looking at. we have had to wait until we got past pluto and we are looking back toward the sun to get the
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best data set. this shows you on the left an animation of what it is like when pluto goes in front of the sun as seen from the on the right show you two plausible models for pluto's atmosphere and we show you the data coming down. each one of those points is ten seconds. but we get for every point on there we get a whole spectrum. and on the way out if we flip it you see the green line going back to exactly the same spot so the atmosphere is suymmetric and it is more consistent with the red line that is more stagnant. we eliminated the glimpse of the data that shows a couple model we were content with. the next slide shows you and
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this is how the count went from the beginning on the left to the end on the right. we see the atmosphere all the way to the ground. from earth that inner circle around the post of pluto is the highest you can see from earth and they cannot see to the ground. they can only see 30 miles from the surface. we see out to a thousand miles above the surface. you can see this is not a straight simple curve. it drops picks up and has another bend and picks up again at the highest altitude that is nitro nitrogen, the pain component, and lower down methane kicks in and lower down where it is steepest that is heavier hydro carbon absorbing the sun light. each point on this graph will be
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a spectrum of colors in the ultra violet light we get the signal from and we are looking forward to getting that data in a month or two. but right now it is already able to do science with it. but that nitrogen atmosphere has pluto so small it escaped into space and fran will tell you what it does out there. >> we have nine and a half years of this flight to pluto to think about what we will see with the plasma instruments. and we have seen all sorts of things. we haven't got all of the data down like the other experiments and we are looking forward to getting it down. but in the mean time let me tell you about what we think is happening: . we know the atmosphere is nit jo nitrogen and we thought it was
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escaping because the gravity is weaker and we know it is going away. what we think is happening is that the subtle wind coming from the sun, the protons and electrons that are charging out, eventually crash into and interact with the escaping atmosphere and that this will then produce, we suspect a shot upstream. maybe it is not quite so stark. we know that there is an up stream amount of nitrogen and that is energized by the solar wind and careried away by the solar winds. what happens and this graphic you are looking at gives you a sense of what we think happened
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is that as it escaped the atmosphere is ionized and picked up by the solar wind and the size of the interaction spills out beyond the scale of the satellite. we have flown through this and the next slide shows you what we think it is happening. that swath detected the ionized molecules molecules. what we behind pluto is a tail. an ion tail of the atmosphere that is being pulled away and carried away in the solar wind.
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when we get the data back in august we will get to quantify and the team put that together and we will be able to quantify that escaping atmosphere. what we think it is based on models and a pretty good guess, is about 500 tons per hour of material that is escaping. we know it is about one ton per hour and this more because of the weaker gravity on pluto. if you add it up over the age of pluto schillings this is going to be equivalent lnt to something on the order of 1-9,000 feet and that is a
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substanial mountain of nitrogen ice that is being removed and escaping into the atmosphere. and alan stern is working with another to predict what this will do and they have a prediction paper. but they will look at the geology. i am still reminding myself to take deep breaths. the landscape is astounding. let's go back to this picture we talked about a few days ago with a global view and remind ourselves the view shows some surfaces of pluto are craters and relatively ancient or several millions of years old. where wherea other regions, such as the interior of the heart shows no craters and shows it is
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younger. and this tells us pluto's experienced a long and complex history. there are active land form creating processes operating in the current tie. some of the craters appear and there are parts of pluto's crust that have been fractures and there have been forms. higher resolution images show craters have been eroded away. so erosion is operating on the surface of pluto.
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here you can see the province which are located in the lower left there is extensive large scale pitting. you can see in the lower right and there is young plains that make up the northern half of the image. by the way this image is oriented north to south. it is in the unsent data. here is name. as a mission before, we decided to name this after the first artificial satellite launched into space and creating the space age and that is after the person who went up to mount everest. and is the first to person from
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nepal to have a name in the solar system. let's look at the region in the middle of sputnik here. i decided to call this not easy to explain terrain. this is the frozen plains of pluto. when you look at this plains you can see we have discovered a vast crater-less plain. for convenience, we tried to think about it in various types of geological metaphors i will get to. it could not be over a hundred million years old and still being shaped by geological
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processes. you can see things as small as half a mile across. let's talk about the things we see in this scene. let's go to the next slide. the surface is broken into segments you see listed on the slide. they are 12-20 miles across. they are borded by shallow troughs and some of the them do have what appears to be dark stuff. much more enmatic are these clusters of mills i think you can see pointed out in the upper right of the grandma -- frame. they trace out the shape that in
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circle the polygons. the hills are higher than the surrounding terrain. we don't have a value for that. but this is part of a bigger picture we took. when we get the data we can tell you how high and how they were shaped and it will go a long way to tell us what created the hills. we have, speaking of the hills, we suspect it may have been pushed up but alternatively a different explanation is they are erosion resistant knobs that are standing out as the surface is being massive leo -- eroded and lowered. you can see they are popping up or emerging from an erosion lowering process lowering the
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entire plains. in the terrain in the lower right, i think you can see polygons seem to be etched there. this is tentive because of the artifacts in the first batch down to the ground. the compression will receive the same images about compression and i think the issue of whether that is indeed vast scenes of pitts will be verified in a straightforward way. similar things can be seen on glaciers here on the earth. on tupluto the erosion mechanisms had to be when the ice turns from solid to gas and frozen
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carbon dioxide does on earth is similar. what do the features tell us about sputnik? they are size of confection occurring with methane and nitrogen driven by the heat of pluto itself. you look at the boiling pot of oat meal. alternatively, these polygons could be mud traps and created by the materials. we have various ways to test ideas which we will be using and reporting in scientific papers. we will learn more about the features and terrains in higher resolution that is on the spacecraft coming down in the
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next few months. this is just a pure coincidence that you know the face of face this. this is going to be really fun. may i have the next slide? let's look northwest of the one we looked at. there you go. okay. so, these dark smudges appear to be a line running from the upper left to the lower right and may have been produced by wind blowing across pluto's icy surface. this is what is called wind
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streaks produced when wind cause erosion or dep riivation material behind obstacles and we don't know what they are yet. alternatively and this is more of a guess they might be plume deposits like seen on neptune's satellite. if the plumes exist, they have not been spotted yet. so this is not an announcement of plumes or guyseysers on pluto but why we have looking for them. these are thirl dayearly dayoffss of the analysis. this is the preliminary stage of the investigation. we are entertaining the widest
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range of hypothesis. i will pass it back to dwayne now. >> thank you. let's give the team a round of applause. [applause] >> we will start at nasa head quarters with the media in the audience, and see if we have questions from on bridge and social media. wait for the mike. raise your hand. >> steve young with astronomy magazine. we heard about this being the tip of the iceberg. can you quantify how much data you have on the ground versus
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how much is on the spacecraft waiting to come down? what is the difference in those images when we see the uncom uncompressed version? >> we have 50 giga bytes made 50 days before the closest approach. and that is the full amount we will store through the end of this month. all of that comes to the ground with less compression and no noise. we can eccelerate the ability to put noise. some compressing 10-1 or better.
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we will send home an effort to get everything to the ground that can be compressed by september and that takes 10-12 weeks. we currently have less than one of those 50 gigabits. >> eric can with science magazine. my question is for randy. you mention you think you ruled out the turbulent model for the atmosphere and think is more stagnant. what is the indication were that via transport of materials or affects on what you are seeing with the wind streaks? is this an atmosphere that blows around all of the time or maybe not so much?
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>> good question. we still don't have a good measure of the lower atmosphere where it is very complicated. the atmosphere we think all of the atmosphere on pluto is com compressed into a thin layer where the winds can be up to a few meters per second and those numbers are good enough to loft particles off the surface of micron size. it is not consistent even with the sluggish atmosphere to move it around. we thing it is fine. >> frank with aviation week. at this point, have you learned anything that will help you understand what happened on the surface of pluto as it goes through its long orbit? >> we understood the physics of
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multiply transport coupled with atmosphere escape very well for a long time but we have not had the boundary conditions to be able to run those models in a way we would like to because we don't know for example, we have not known until now, the details of where the bright areas are and where the darker ones are and that can relate to the way areas heat up. particularly those areas devoid and having higher swings. in the coming months we will see maps come to the ground and they will make tremendous input to imform us how to run the models of the real pluto and we will be in a data rich environment. new horizons loop was selected to make comprehensive answers about this. the planets pole vector is
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tilted over and very high. even higher than uranus. it is a pretty complex situation. we know how to model it and once we get the data on the ground we will get spectacular results showing not just what happens around a 248 year orbit but along time scales. i am for example interested in how the volatiles transport around the planet and whether material moves around the planet to actually or potentially bury structures or be removed from structures so we see them at different times in pluto's seasonal cycles. the climate cycles have very long periods in some cases. everybody is aware of the 248 year orbital cycle. but the pool vector circulates over a four million year cycle.
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so running these models is going to be fascinating and we will have the data on the ground to hammer the nail on the head. >> i am going to go to the phone lines. there is lots of media from all over the world trying to ask questions and i want to try get to as many of you as possible so limit your questions to one. we will go to phone lines, social media and come back here. on the phone line nbc news alan boil. this might be for alan. just looking at the terrain and potential for plumes can you say anything further about whether this is triton like terrain? what sorts of similarities do you see to what folks have seen on tritan?
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>> first of all, we are not announcing we have seen plumes in any way. as far as comparing to triton is the sad story is there was no new horizons encounter. the data set we have for triton is about -- the best images we every took of triton the best circumstances were only just as good as the pictures we have shown you so far and all of the images that we have shown you, and the contrast for the middle resolution pictures compared to the good stuff we have not seenurate -- seen yet. having said all of that not only do people see activity plumes on tritan it appeared to
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be covered with a number of dark aligned markings that were read as wind streaks. so to the extend we can compare our good data with tritan data and the best data was not over the wind street terrain we think they are compareableable. >> it probably worked well to speak to the comparative differences with the detection of mountain ranges. >> for many years since the 1970's people wondered whether the young evolved terrains you see on the giant icy moons were made that way because of tidal heating where the moons interact with themselves and the body
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they orbit around. so people see moons of jupiter you will have a process called torpedo. the answer is obviously they be active. pluto is every bit as geologically active as any place in the solar system. this answers a fundamental question about are ice wordlds able to do their own right or depended on the planets they orbit around. >> pete spots is up next. christian science monitor. >> thank you very much. i think this is for dr. moore. one of the detailed questions when you were talking about the height of the hills in the trenches being above the surrounding terrain.
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that the trench terrain or the in interior of the polygons. and do you know the height of the hills? >> the height of the hills appear and this is not quantitative data, but appear to be a little higher than the surface represented by the polygon. we don't have direct measurement measurements of shadow. we will receive data six or seven times the higher resolution. it is harder to talk about the height of the hills that we can answer explicitly in the next few months. >> ken crammer up next. >> great results. congratsulations. my question is about the poll
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poly poly poly polygon. or theydiffere >> t that when large elsewh in the surface that is most reminiscenthe rface we are at >> the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere of mars. it did land near the arctic of mars. having said that we are entertaining two explanations and i think right this second we may talk to the science team and they weekly favor the idea of some form of internal convection
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may be responsible. the process could be more analogy of the process operating on mars. just too early to say. three more calls on the phone and then social media and back it the audience. dave moose from business insider >> this is for jim and maybe alan. you mention the beating heart of new horizons. there is only so much of that coming from plutonium 238. how is this limiting the crunch? >> currently, we have our
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plutonium that is being managed by the department of energy. we have a fair amount of it. 17 or so kilograms is available that can be used right away. we have been given approval by congress but we are generating plutonioum 238 and that is good news. there is a process that has been created to take it radiated with neutrons and the reaction that
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is stored. we will good to be stewards of the planetary program for many decades to come. we have adequate reserve of platonium on the ground and making it late this decade and early next on a regular bases. >> kelly beaty science telescope e e. >> do you see anything in the alice or rex data to suggest charon has an atmosphere? >> we don't have the data yet. we believe they will be coming in the next three to five daysismdays. we will get back to you. >> mike walls.
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>> are crater rates lower than they are closer to the sun because of the different ball game out there? >> well the way we estimate that that. we obviously study the belt down to the few tens of kilometers and by looking at the crater records of saturn and looking at the numbers and objects and distribution objects in the belt there have been several studies which derived what the approx approximation is. we can tell if the surface is
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old or young it is harder to tell you if it is intermediate age. we think and under the crater rates well enough to say you see a surface with no craters and that is difficult to under how it could be older than a hundred million years. >> the first question is how do we know pluto's atmosphere is escaping? what is the measure? >> we have not measured it yet. it is currently based on under
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understanding the gravity of pluto is weak and we expect to to be escaping. we know methane is there and that is a greenhouse gas that absorbs sunlight. it is the energy deposition of sun light that is giving the sunlight to escape. it will compare to the alex and rex team. >> jason asks what kind of material could be responsible for pluto's dark stain? organics? >> want to guess?
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>> why not. the least crazy idea which i think we are working on and i think it would be determined by the eradiation of methane which can be eradiated as particles in the atmosphere slowly rain down to the surface and the streaks of the impact turning out to be wind streaks are particles that fall on the ground and the wind sweeps them along and they get caught behind in the prevailing winds. >> one more and back here. >> lots of questions about
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elevation. this is from george who said will the data collected be sufficient to create pluto and charon elevation maps? >> absolutely. the surface you can see in the picture on the screen that is still up we will have although they will be at the same resolution, top graphic maps for both worlds. >> okay. i want to thank our social media audience. we will answer the question and get them in at #asknasa. let's come back here. let me see your hands out here. let's go here and we will talk our way this way. name and affiliation. >> steven park with space
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flight. i know you are not prepared to make an announcement about giz geysers and plumes are there indirect means of finding this? >> there might be. but i am old fashion and i want to see unambiguous evidence something is rise up to the atmosphere. if we see it don't worry, we will come tell you about it. >> alan for a long time you have been a proponent and supported by the amateur processing community and realties released the raw images but they were halted this morning. i am wondering if you continue to that? >> we intend to continue to release the images.
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however, as we are winding down from the peak of activity after the intensive fly-by activities we will move to weekly removals and that is a manpower thing and we't the a the really to in tfall. before y t week or of t things we ma tamateur co knows is we'rturn the d a othe will be a it is we'repping haring i notsendingmages to the ingust and er. ll again a will aly basis and you le to countkea clock. morequ
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eric an more out. hand sencegain. w tellw it >> maybe we can bring up the image of the carbon muox nide rich terrain in the middle of the heart. >> how did that get there? could it be from above or within? and if you cannot say now how will you approach the two things and their differences? >> we brought along the team lead will grundy in the audience because we thought we might get a question. we know this is thick enough to maybe the absorbtion or veneer but it could be a deep layer. >> you only need is centimeter
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and how that artacts is -- interacts is the trick. how it combines we don't know and we will need detailed modeling. i like the scenario of up welling from below but we are not near proving that. >> randy, i was wondering if you can tell me if you see outlines of structure for the profile? >> it tells us where one is leaked out and the other picks up. we know how extended the atmosphere is from the structure. might be cooler than we thought. but we will get that later.
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>> okay. well, ladies and gentlemen folks watching from all over the world, the pluto story is just beginning. you can follow the conversation on all of the nasa social media accounts and go to nasa.gov/newhorizons. i want to thanks folks for joining us and witnessing history. we have another press conference coming up next friday tbd. thanks for joining us. science never sleeps. [applause] >> on the next weekly journal, daniel halbert discusses developments in the 2016 race for president. and former under secretary of state for arms control and international security looks at what is in the iran nuclear agreement, how it will be implemented and the impact on
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the middle east. and as always we will take your calls and you can join the con variation on facebook and twitter. washington journal live at 7 a.m. eastern. the cspan city tours across the country to learn more about the literary life of lexington, kentucky. >> in the mid-1940s if you asked who is a bright shining star in american politics on the national, someone who is governor or senator, a lot of people would say ed richard of kentucky. he was one of the people who worked in the white house in his early 20's. he seemed destined for great
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things. came back and was indicted for stuffing a ballot box. >> and we visit ashland. >> clay's original home had to be torn down and rebuilt. it fell into disrepair and his son found it could not be saved. he rebuilt on the original foundation. what we have is a home that is essentially a five part federal style home as henry clay with italian details and architecture and an added layer of astetic details added by henry clay's granddaughter and great grand
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daughter. >> one noryear ago, the malaysian plane was shotdown killing everyone on board. we talk about who is responsible and the affect on the conflict between the ukraine and russia. >> good morning. thank you were coming today. we have quite a program for you. we have colleagues here from "the new york times" and from the monitoring situation in ukraine. from on the belly group in england and cutting teeth.
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we are here to talk about the shoot down of the malaysian plane last year on july 17th. i remember the day because within 20 minutes of the shoot down of the airliner i saw something in the media that fsb colonel put up some satisfaction of a shoot down of a quote unquote military plane. and of course as there were no reports of a shoot down of a military plane it was clear what happened. i was in berlin a week and a half after that and i learned a new phrase i was was preparing
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to go that meant people who understand sympathetically putin and his policies. you were told you feel the residue, and we discuss the aggression in eastern ukraine. but a high german official someone who worked in moscow with me in the mid-80s said to me the german public was becoming concerned about what was going on surrounding the remains of the airliner. the reports, if you will recall of the looting of the bodies, the fact that the bodies were left in place for days and days and in fact weeks, and she said
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to me if this is how the authorities there, meaning the folks in charge and the russian occupyied parts of russian control parts of ukraine if that is how they treat their deaths how do they treat their livings? and that is whiy this was a turning point in the war of undering about the kremlin led aggression in ukraine's east. i will introduce the moderator of the events today. she is a russian-american journalist and blogger who works at the new york times magazine. i recall encountering her not personally, but in writing and things she wrote in the new republic, but he has written and
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worked for foreign policy and the new yorker and her articles are in the columbian journal review "washington post," forbes, and elsewhere. >> thank you for inviting me. i think we can remember where we were a year ago and we're all feeling it is hard to believe it is only a year. the first images we saw that day were horrifying with bodies reining down on this village that was already part of an active war zone and then the news got more horrifying with the looting of the bodies and medaling with the crime scene. a year later it seemed like a
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game-changer at the time that the something so horrible couldn't -- and seemingly random couldn't change the course of events in the conflict in ukraine. a year later the situation looks profoundly different. i would argue the event helped shape european resolve to get behind more robust sanctions and that coupled with pecipitous economic decline in russia throws the conflict in place. i think russia was willing and ready to go further in eastern ukraine to hack a land route to crimea and instead we have this strange conflict, this no man's land and no body want this this region anymore and i feel the
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conflict can be traced back to a year ago when people were flying home or on vacation were shot out of the sky. it has been as we know part of a fight over basic facts and what happened, and we will hear from speakers today whose work has and diligence has tried to keep the focus on what happened rather than a muddying of the waters and diving into the no mans land. ...
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>> >> in the area with
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separatist control territory with the ukraine to deal locate the images and videos to compare their location with open source by google street and satellite you meant of the controlled territory that the separatist had a book on that particular day. the video produced shows the missile system with one missing the day after the attack headed back to russia. september last year i started to do some investigation for what we produce it is the privilege
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to work on those competitors and to discover from russia to come from a specific minister a. this is the first images i could fight on instagram but it shows the end of june last year there were as large vehicles ended had books in a. so more and more videos in different areas but this led
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me to find an interesting eight video so odd facebook last year it was interesting because there was of book similar to what we saw in the image that was similar and from what we know the russian military with the marx said for me to find this image that it came from instagram and just zero -- up polluted by a local
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unwittingly that it takes place so to make comparisons from there you see the image from russia of the right of the 17th of july. aunt never is smirking such as the remnant of a number hit shows this is the same book that comes from russia. it was particularly useful. that led to the union said russia will use the save area code it is possible to
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go and find for the russian and shoulders of military units to look for the profiles of their soldiers but there was license plates and on the page that this would come from it is an important link to show it was verified by the first chronological video it could uncover and it was possible
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to look at certain servicemen and their images to show there was a link am looking at all of these similarities over the tracks of the book to confirm what had to present it was the same vehicle. mrs. mower the wives and mothers of russian natural -- soldiers but this meant
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to recover more videos to show that the unions had gone there at that time. went looking closely it was impossible to find images within the column in this section they took place and have been to so in the end we could build up chronological our -- happened with the exact
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route by the convoy that allowed us to then after the attack and then going back to the unions after the attack. so i feel tremendously privileged to recover this from the narrative of what happens on that day. thank you so much. [applause] >> they use so much -- we're
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trying to connect to a group from berlin that has put out the rest. >> we are on. >> thanks for inviting me. first of all, i would like to explain what we were trying to do do as a nonprofit investigative newsroom. we are funded by a german federation created as say a legacy.
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so our investigation is in the public interest, we do stories and there is something important to say where the readers will say i did not know that and we try to create a positive impact for change. when restarted this story what is in the public interest? we thought this was because there is a war going on in eastern ukraine and was accompanied by a war of words so we thought what we should try to do is fact check the information to put together information that people could rely on. so we started to review
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statements by their russian and ukraine government and investigators common dado, said the german government that is based in germany. and looked for the fact that everybody agreed on and surprisingly if that was shot down by the ground to air missile that had to be a type of missile initially built in the soviet union and russia and u.s. government said if it is ground to air it had to read the ukrainian government to agree on that. so we are looking for different information but we
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discovered something very strange with our investigation. and realized we had institutions with a strong reputation we have to look at a fairly new internet web site en the information that was put out there was to a large degree more useful because they made their data very transparent. one of the first things i did was visit the netherlands and how are you
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putting this together? he pulled out a tablet with the keyboard and started to do the different stuff to put his information together. very quickly i realize we have to take him seriously so we put him on the same pedestal as the other institutions and decided - - decided the weaknesses that people are prone to say anything of the internet but with the fact checking we began to look at what
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everybody was saying. first of all, they put out two different versions. with the air to air missile. but basically and the americans said they just had intelligence information that they believed in. because we would like to fact check this ourselves. so we will look at other sources of information we
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did the similar stuff and we ended up downloading the entire web site as a social media website we just downloaded the entire one. recollected up profiles and put them into a database which included the e-mail addresses of the soldiers we could call and e-mail so that would add value to the story. and when also began to look at the military logic and that was something we thought was missing why are those missiles there? we talk to military experts with the investigators with the satellite pictures and
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he said you don't need to tell me this. he is an officer and a lieutenant colonel and he said we don't go anywhere either is a basic rule of military combat strategy that tanks cannot protect themselves from air attack unless they have ground to air missiles.
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so we began to look at that what are their strengths and relearned the russian version is to differentiate between friendly aircraft and anti-aircraft except anything that it is russian is friendly or whether civilian were the enemy they all look the same. talking to air traffic controllers they go into our room and they just stand there to get that three-dimensional images of the sky around them then with the person that was in
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front of them to say i got it. but people have been trained in the soviet union and ukraine that they only have 40 seconds. because you cannot have that operating system more than 30 seconds because of the precise location. they began to tell us about the wild west with a tank on the bottom they note that they looked at each other and do never shoots first has a much better chance of surviving. so you have a situation with very little time where you
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have opposing interest. em there is very little time to make a decision. and we came to the conclusion that it cannot clearly differentiate that looked like enemy planes. and people had to make better decisions quickly became to the conclusion was bound to happen at some point whether in three weeks before or five weeks after but it wasn't the situation that would lead to a
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disaster at some point. then we started to look how did they make decisions? we had to look at this because when we were talking to other people with the defense brigade we heard these decisions were only made by officers but those have for years at a military college basically they are engineers. and normal -- normal soldiers are not allowed to fire them. i think one had four months of training even before he was allowed to drive one of the trucks.
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so these are very technical systems also those who run the systems have to work very closely together you have different units with the launch ramp mounted on the back and river systems on the back of the tank and you have a control center within the tank with other trucks and vehicles of have to coordinate together. so this is an activity from a bunch of separatist fighters who have not been trained -- have been trained for months. and also the military logic that if you have a team
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dedicated to his training for years and you know, they are extant -- expensive and wives are at stake in space outsourced that to people who don't have the trading and those who would rather say and weighed rather visit my mother is a lot. this is something you don't outsource because this is the life of the mission and that is important to the general idea to send people into the war zone. we are able to comfortably conclude that this could only have been run by regular soldiers and when we were fact checking and other information we were finding
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the information from the u.s. government like the ukrainian government and the russian government both agreed that that a launch platform that we were looking at was actually in the region they disagreed on the exact location but they agreed within 30 kiloliters of one another the launch ramp was within the region. and then we went to the location and were able to determine that the location site was actually correct. we also talked to separatist leaders who told us that they needed air defense
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systems because of the fighting going on there. . .
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we found people that were able to tell us they saw an object that looks like an airplane but did not have any windows and other things they were telling us. one person was able to say the missile that destroyed we also posted this interview on our website so that people can look and see exactly what he was saying. we also found one of the civilian separatist leaders basically take us inside the mind of the person who youhe said was firing a missile. he said this was the ukrainian soldier who waswas firing a grand air missile.
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the closer you got to watch site for more separatist leaders said it was a grand air missile. nobody would say it wasn't the ground air missile these everybody knew. this one civilian leader said the soldier was sitting there. he was right. he only had a few seconds to make a decision. is it an enemy is it not? is it friend, is it fell? and finally he decided to shoot it. he claimed this was a ukrainian soldier. but why a separatist leader would have a conversation with the ukrainian soldier, he was in a position because he was one of the senior civilian people in the area to have
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said i want to report what exactly happened. we never got to the bottom of whether a story is true, but it fit in with what the military people are talking to the same about what they thought had happened. i'm not going to go and all of the stuff that he was talking about. we basically looked at the sites and found what he was saying about them was true. wetrue. we also looked at other sites and found that the russian said there was a missile launched from they're or at least we were able to determine. we talked to the people but no one had seen what the russia's report was they're.
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so what we basically tried to do was get feet on the grounds to actually go and talk to people is much as possible part to talk to people outside of the ukraine but also in the ukraine to try and pieces together is much as possible, and then we try to put the information out as transparently as possible. if you go to our website you can see the great majority of the information is available to be downloaded, pictures, videos, audio. it's all they're for people who want to fact check us. we invite anybody who wants. the exact address we will be found. anybody else can go and talk to the people like we did. that's the way you have to verify was going on. i thinki think i will finish up here.
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thank you very much for listening. >> thank you so much for joining us all the way from berlin. i would likei would like to say a few words about the particular group. i think our great examples journalism, investigative journalism work together. these reports are available for you to pick up right outside. they were able to cheer locate the positions of the watch site, just the movement of the group and able to complement the work, send people on the ground of verify information. and these three reports together provide an incredibly compelling piece of evidence of what actually happened on the ground and who was behind the shoot down. now i would like to ask michael to come up. michael
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is a spokesperson for the osc for one of the 1st responders on the ground last year during the shoot down and i would like to remind all of you watching online to join the conversation with #. with that please. >> thank you very much for that kind introduction. i introduction. i would like to thank the organizers for inviting us here today. it's a privilege. i also want to start off by taking a brief moment to pay tribute to the families of the victims. just a few minutes ago the special monitoringa special monitoring mission came to a standstill. we took a moment of silence at exactly 4:20 p.m. 9:20 a.m. here to commemorate the 298 lost souls.
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excuse me. also in a statement today issued for per chief ambassador, he said that this tragedy into the lives of 298 people most of whom left to do scar on her loved ones in the netherlands, malaysia, australia and all over the world. this is a stark reminder of the heavy toll borne by civilians in armed conflict. the memory of the victims will stay and remind all of us of our important task to contribute to normalize the situation in ukraine. we're just going to pause for a moment. three or four minutes of video from canadian broadcasting corporation done by a dear friend and one of canada's best investigative journalists who is one of the 1st on the scene on july 17 and 18th command i think it's
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a good setup for the work of the special monitoring mission did. i will be back after the video. >> the wreckage was still smoldering with a small team from the osce after. michael butcher, a ukrainian canadian was thrust into the heart of the disaster to observe and report back to 57 countries including57 countries including canada team ended up doing much more. no other officials arrive for days. he became the eyes and ears of the world. we crossed paths many times. we finally found a place and time to reflect. >> michael, you have been here almost daily for more thanten days. what stands out for you amongst your observations
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about what happened? >> what really hits you is a people's lives have been tragically and abruptly interrupted. a lot of people on the plane on the way to vacation. the other day i found a peace of literature that looks like it was being carried to a news conference. the saddest thing i think i saw was a note written by someone to themselves. one of the things i want to do is have a good vacation not, budget but have a good time. i mean stuff like that really stays with you. if i can say on a personal level we have become almost
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intimately familiar with the site. we look close up a personal belongings. if the.out some differences. for example, don't -- going almost daily to the cockpit has been the dark part. we 1st arrived the horrifying stench of death. the carpet appears to be slammed down into the earth bring much intact. over the days we have seen that peace of carpet spread out. day two i believe it was they were many in uniform hacking at it. they could have been involved. we don't know. i was in the past three days, it has been spread out even more. the other striking thing, of course we arrived today after they're were a lot of bodies lying there exposed to the elements. it was a horrifying scene for just horrifying. >> no one was sure who was in control of the bodies left in the fields too long. finally they were collected
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and placed in refrigerated train cars for transport. >> the site was difficult but the train was cold and lonely quex: lonely and dark. the duck the duck fringing -- forensic experts, they did the best that they could to increase the level of dignity if we can even put it that way. it is very difficult. very difficult indeed. the one thing that has powers through this is knowing where doing this for the families. in the conflict over they're is no security, anything we could do to provide some semblance of order that no bodies of the loved ones but there belongings and documents to back was really
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important. ♪ the days of them on. we have seen horrific things that i would not talk about anyone else. >> more time than anyone debris. over 35 square kilometers. reeling from a recent kidnapping. all of this in the 1st three months on the job. >> to use of back sometime and wonder how you landed in this spot? >> i do. you know, i do go back to ukraine. a been here many times. i sometimes feel like they never be the same again. >> thank you for watching the. it still sends a chill back to watch some of those images. the full report is available online if you want to have a
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look. now, in the statement by ambassador i just read he did mention the heavy toll borne by the civilian population. i think it is important to give you a quick snapshot of the current security situation in eastern ukraine as reported by our monitors. excuse me. violence continues unabated, and the situation has deteriorated. heavy weaponry continues to be moved around and utilized this is really a stark
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statistic. in the past week alone almost 2000 explosions of been recorded by our monitors. by the way we have file photos. also alsophotos. also our monitors on the ground, monitoring the movement and use of heavy weaponry. monitoring logistic capabilities of rebel groups involving more concentration of ammunition and military vehicles close to what appears to be a functioning railway station. as most of most of you know, we have drones, unmanned aerial vehicles. they notice a large concentration of military hardware and around the areas. you know, we're talking about things like main battle tanks and sophisticated weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles. also they're are many challenges cooperating in such a conflict zone. over. over the past few weeks have been subject to systematic jamming of our video and gps
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and we are talking about sophisticated military grade jamming. also in terms of people on the ground we will we have been observing is the so-calledthat the so-called bpr and lpr have seemed not really able to provide basic human and societal needs. for example, the judicial system seems dysfunctional people wandered attention have to wait to be seen. now, our colleagues in the un have been doing a fabulous job in terms of trying as best they can to document the toll on the civilians. the numbers are stark and horrifying. the latest numbers indicate, 7,000 have been killed since the conflict began. and that number does include
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the victims. in terms of the number of people injured almost 17,000. hard to believe some 2.3 million people have been uprooted since the conflict began in april 2014 this is an important number because he year ago ukraine had virtually no displaced people. now ukraine is in the top ten countries in the world with the largest number of displaced people. amid all of this people's livelihoods have been affected has industry and commerce is choked and access to supply and markets are being cut off. we are reporting finding ourselves in the situation at checkpoints frontline. people are forced to wait hours and sometimes days at checkpoints that are subject
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to frequent showing and close to areas are mine. another huge enormous problem is the lack of water, constant shelling in many towns along the front line is when the water pipes we have been active recently in an area north of dpr control where we have been able to arrange for daylight cease-fires which in turn has allowed access for repair workers and others to get the water flowing again which is potentially benefited two and a half million people. now, i mentioned a bit earlier the that earlier the challenges to the mission command we continue to face unacceptable restrictions on the freedom of movement on both sides. yet the specialyet the special monitoring mission to ukraine remains the main
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international astronomical around and we we will continue to conduct our impartial monitoring. we have been extended to march of next year. we have been present without interruption on both sides since inception and we will continue to do so. wewe have around 500 monitors from over 40 different participating states. now, just shifted quickly one of the latest developments, in indevelopments, in late june the mission was informed the investigation team had to discontinue its mission temporarily due to lack of access in the areas controlled by the lpr. up until then the special monitoring mission and the facilitating access for investigators. we facilitated access for as
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the photos indicate repatriation of human remains for personal belongings and her comfortably. it was on november 14 where recovery work began. they are back in the netherlands and being reconstructed. going back togoing back to exactly one year ago today mission was undressing 24 hours after the pointer. it came down. it was a horrific scene or parts of the aircraft were still smoldering, bodies laid out in the field and there was no perimeter security. the 1st is regrettably difficult. we 1st arrived we were greeted by a small group of rebels who really seem trying to intimidate us and restrict access. fortunately in the days after the access to improve
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and we were able to facilitate access to experts from ukraine malaysia, ukraine, and the netherlands it was during his 1st few weeks we reported to the 57 participating states andand by extension the world. in reports the spot reports and countless media interviews. we held media scrolls of press conferences out of the side of the crash. and because the ukrainian media and principal could not access areas of rebels controlled we held many remote briefings give. by
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the way the lack of access for ukrainian journalists journalists is very much a plate of the state and rebel controlled areas. i want to note that where the plane came down and whether railway station was, up until then it was a no go zone. the reason is it is exactly the same area where our colleagues were kidnapped. they were held for a month and fortunately were released unharmed and unconditionally just a few weeks before may 17 came down. the other.i wanted to many of you have heard of the trilateral contact group group that includes senior representatives from ukraine , the russian federation and the umc and this group regularly by video link communicates with the rebel groups.groups. and on the evening after may 17 the trilateral contact group actually did meet and was able to speak by video link. and whatand what was agreed
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upon at that time, quite important equipment to secure the site of the crash, to provide safe access for rescue teams for national and international investigators have a special monitoring missions and to cooperate with competent ukrainian authorities, practical questions in the course of the rescue operation. again,operation. again, we felt very privileged to have been they're at the right time and to do the work that we did. i just wanted to read a quote from the dutch foreign minister december 20142014 said that without the efforts of the umc the netherlands would never have been able to make so much progress in the patriot human remains, personal belongings and records from the flight. now, i also want to say that -- i will end with this if i can our personal note.note.
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this crash this disaster, as any disaster touches us in different ways. the crash site working there for weeks was very heart wrenching the things we saw in january i have the privilege of meeting one of the relatives for the 1st time. a very young talented, impressive young man called jordan whether. his uncles on the flight. when thomas was a spokesperson for the world health organization. like myself,. like myself, a former journalist and around my age. he was about to turn 50. fun-loving, love to travel. and his nephew, jordan, appeared in a bbc documentary and spoke very highly of his uncle who by
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the way was on his way to that aids conference in melbourne. i just wanted as a tribute to glenn and also to the other relatives on the plane just read a couplea couple of lines of what his twin sister tracy had to say to him. glenn, they're was no uncle brother like in the world. it was the most generous kind person, always thought of others 1st. he loved life and was doing what he does best, traveling. there is not a bad word to say. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you so much. thank you for joining us today. i no it was not easy to beat in his 1st few days and hours on the ground in eastern ukraine.
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and people like michael and other investigative journalists risk their lives to be in his own report what is happening on the ground and set the narrative and changed the narrative, the conflict in ukraine in the narrative that the media has been trying to put forth ever sense. i would like to.out that these investigative groups investigative journalists have been tracking the forgeries, photoshop images and revealing the truth behind this terrible tragedy. i would like to ask them to come back up to set the stage and for last two speakers. >> so, as was mentioned the investigations that have been done have been unprecedented in the sense that usually these kinds of jobs are tracking satellite imagery tracking troop
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movements on the movements of military material happened behind closed doors and we get the report at the end. this is an experiment being replicated in front of our eyes. you are seeing this investigation unfolded real-time very transparently the thing is that you look at the information space ever since the 1st day people knew exactly what happened and then quickly the political narrative or the need for political narrative and both sides tended to again what they thought happen all wanted to think. in that sense the work of the people have been extremely important and not just constantly bringing the narrative back not to whether or not satellite imagery was doctored or not
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but bodies in the field following a peoples roofs to guidebooks children's books, luggage, just constantly just constantly bringing us back to the very real human cost. s he said one of his reports that this tragedy brought the conflict that everyone was trying to sweep to the side of there consciousness to the doorstep of the international community to realize they had to do something about it and pay attention because it did in a strange and bizarre way a year ago affect them as well. i'm going to introduce the award-winning documentary journalist who spent the last year, more than a year doing frontline reporting for vice out of give doing absolutely incredible work, indispensable work.
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>> thank you. i just wanted to tip my hat to all the people who did a lot of the investigations that made it possible for us to understand what is happened. initially we came out they're and were just reporting what we were seeing on the ground. it was terrific, but it took all of those investigations going to the corrective and journalists from the guardian and the telegraph all of the other newspapers out they're really put in a lot of work in the piecing it together for us to have an understanding and now we do have an understanding. and i want to say that i have not done any kind of investigation on a little myself, but what we did do
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-- and i remember the moment it became clear that a plane had come down in eastern ukraine. i was on the train from kiev it was one of those young guys. a very modern train. you don't feel like your in any part of the world. sitting there with internet reading your twitter feed. there is something that came down about a plane crashing and someone said it was a malaysian flight. one of those september 11 comments because at 1st it just seems so outrageously ridiculous that i thought somebody was making a joke about the previous malaysian airline of the disappeared. earlier that morning rebels announced that they found ukrainian transport plane. i felt someone was making a sick joke. but quickly we realized quickly realized that this was a real incident and channel all of our resources to get down as quick as possible and spend
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the next few days there. but again this was just on the ground reporting commander told us what was happening, but it did not tell us the whole back story. it never done an investigation like that. the only sort only sort of little piece that we have been able to add to the general understanding of the whole story, we have been able to confirm one of the spu recordings that the ukrainian security services made of one of the rebel leaders. those dark peoples republic flag i called kaysix and. a leader reported by the security services, and it is hard to no what you can trust the stuff being put out they're on you

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