In a goof gone viral, US Vice President Mike Pence touched something he should not have as he visited NASA headquarters, and his defense smacked of something his boss might do — blame somebody else.
Pence was at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Thursday for a speech to employees and also took a tour.
At one point Pence was guided to piece of gear with a sign that identified it as “critical space flight hardware” and a warning in bright, red capital letters: “DO NOT TOUCH.”
Photo: Reuters
Pence placed his left palm flat on it anyway, as cameras clicked away.
One of the people in the picture is US Senator Marco Rubio.
The rest is meme and tweet history.
Pence sent out a tweet on Friday in which he said he was sorry — a blurb with a US President Donald Trump-style exclamation point at the end — and joked that he, Pence, was not really to blame for ignoring the sign, which his hand almost touches.
“Sorry @NASA ... @MarcoRubio dared me to do it!,” Pence wrote.
NASA put out a tweet saying it was no big deal, that the hardware — a big piece of metal roughly the shape of a nuclear reactor cooling tower and part of a spacecraft-in-the-making called the Orion 3 — needed to be cleaned, anyway.
Pence put out another light-hearted tweet saying it was not the first time this happened: It featured his photo of NASA ignominy, but with a porcupine — not the space gear — graced by his hand. Of course, the original photograph went viral and many social media users were scathing in their criticism of Pence.
Pence supporters said the former were making a big deal out of nothing.
“Good to know our vice president has the self control of a sugar charged 3rd grader on a field trip,” wrote someone with the handle @KentoTFH.
“Again administration blaming someone else,” @PatStevens2 wrote, referring to Pence’s blaming of Rubio.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS