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WASHINGTON — Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the world.

In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.

At NASA, after repeated nudges by Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.

And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.

Musk, as the architect of a group he called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a chain saw to the apparatus of governing, spurring chaos and dread by pushing out some 100,000 federal workers and shutting down various agencies, though the government has not been consistent in explaining the expanse of his power. read more

With the drama around the first human spaceflight of the year behind it, SpaceX is back to the business of sending private customers to space.

The Fram2 mission headed by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur and three of his friends is targeting Monday, March 31 for liftoff from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A.

It would be the second human spaceflight of the year behind the Crew-10 launch for NASA from KSC earlier this month that set up the return of another Crew Dragon on the Crew-9 mission from the International Space Station.

That one brought home the Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams who were left behind on the station last year, and became the center of a national spotlight after President Trump and Elon Musk blamed the Biden Administration for leaving them up there for political reasons.

This next flight has a little less national attention, although it will be the first time humans have flown a polar orbit around the Earth.

The Fram2 crew completed training this week in California, and early this morning, the Dragon supporting their mission arrived at the hangar at pad 39A in Florida ahead of liftoff next Monday, March 31 pic.twitter.com/yDt8ihYqHI read more

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — When Nikelle Inman started a new job coaching first-generation college students, she looked forward to meeting with them one-on-one to talk about how to surmount obstacles and find resources to succeed.

Instead, she and her fellow success coaches at a community college in North Carolina spent a year mired in paperwork, tasked with reviewing applications from aspiring undergraduates. They never did get to meet with students.

“Admissions work kind of took over what we were supposed to do,” Inman, 34, said. “I felt disengaged with the position, more so because I just didn’t feel valued.”

It’s disorienting when a job turns out to be completely different than advertised or morphs into something we didn’t expect. But more U.S. workers have reported feeling disconnected from their organization’s purpose and unclear on how to meet expectations since the coronavirus pandemic changed the way we work, according to a new Gallup analysis. read more

ORLANDO — Detectives have recovered four diamond earrings two weeks after a man gulped down the Tiffany & Co. jewelry worth nearly $770,000 during his arrest on the side of a Panhandle highway, authorities said Friday.

The Orlando Police Department said the last of the four earrings stolen from the Tiffany at the Mall at Millenia in Orlando was recovered earlier this month from Jaythan Lawrence Gilder, 32, of Houston, Texas,

Three of the earrings were recovered two days before that, along with two other unidentified diamond earrings. Gilder was transferred from a jail to a hospital while detectives waited to collect the evidence, police said in a news release.

The four stolen earrings matched the serial numbers from the jewelry taken from the Tiffany store last month, detectives said.

According to an arrest affidavit, Gilder took the earrings and attempted to take a diamond ring valued in total at $1.3 million from the store.

Gilder was arrested Feb. 26 on charges of robbery with a mask and first-degree grand theft and is in custody at the Orange County, records show. Gilder was previously charged in a similar incident at a Tiffany store in Woodlands Township, Texas, from 2022. He also has 48 separate failure to appear warrants out of Colorado, according to his affidavit. read more

By James Royal, Ph.D., Bankrate.com

Nearly one-third of American adults (30%) who looked for financial advice in 2023 turned to social media, according to Bankrate’s Financial Security Survey. Younger Americans are even more likely than the average to seek out financial advice from social media, potentially setting them off in the wrong direction during their crucial early saving years, when they could get a jump-start on building wealth.

While social media may be a popular way to access low-cost financial advice, it’s a terrible resource for a number of reasons — here’s why.

1. Financial advice often comes from non-experts

Anyone — literally anyone — can claim to be a financial expert on social media and offer advice as they try to attract an audience. Having a presence on social media and declaring yourself a financial expert doesn’t make it so, however.

“Social media is flooded with misinformation,” says Jeff Busch, financial adviser at Elysium Financial in South Jordan, Utah. “So-called experts typically lack education and credentials to give such advice.” read more