Am Fine, Tweets Deepika Padukone After Fire In Her Mumbai High-Rise

 On Saturday afternoon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer had an encounter with a woman with an iPhone. She didn't want a selfie. When Shree Chauhan, a former elementary school teacher who is avowedly not a supporter of President Donald Trump, spotted Spicer at an Apple store in the D.C. area, she decided to ask the press secretary some questions "since he doesn't like the press," she wrote on Twitter.

"I wanted to speak truth to power," Chauhan said in a Medium post about the incident that was extremely political and far from polite.

In the video Chauhan posted on Twitter, she can be heard asking Spicer, "How does it feel to work for a fascist?" He answers, "We have a great country." Chauhan persists. "Have you helped with the Russia stuff? Are you a criminal as well? Have you committed treason, too, just like the president?"

Throughout the 50-second back and forth, Spicer, wearing a dark blazer, a button-down shirt sans tie and a concrete smile, attempts to gently rebuff Chauhan while also shopping for his gadgets, thanking the Apple store employees and shaking the hand of another customer. But there was one comeback that stood out.

As Chauhan continues to ask about Russia, Spicer interjects, "Such a great country that allows you to be here."

In her Medium post, Chauhan, who is of Indian heritage, characterized that response as threatening and racist.

"Think about the sheer audacity of Mr. Spicer to say that to my face with a smile, knowing that he is being recorded on video and the position of power he holds in our government. I am still stunned by the boldness of having my citizenship threatened on camera," wrote Chauhan, who added that she has been on the receiving end of online harassment since posting about the Spicer encounter on Saturday.

The go-to insult? "They tell me to leave the country. They have told me to go back to where I came from," she wrote. "To which my snarky reply is often, 'Go back where? New York?'"

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but Trump seemed to allude to the incident in a Monday morning tweet:

"It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives. Be nice, you will do much better!"

(Chauhan, who works in education policy, is not a member of the media.)

This is the second time a White House staffer has been confronted in public by a citizen critic. Last month, Omarosa Manigault felt so harassed by two women inside a Nordstrom store in Virginia that the White House communications director was escorted to her car by security.

How NASA Found India's Chandrayaan, 'Lost' For 8 Years: Foreign Media

No one had heard from Chandrayaan-1 since Aug. 29, 2009. That's when the pioneering moon orbiter - the first lunar probe ever launched by the Indian Space Research Organization - abruptly went silent just 312 days into what was supposed to be a two-year mission.

The orbiter has been missing ever since. It's no bigger than a refrigerator and difficult for Earth-based telescopes to discern given the moon's nighttime glow, making the craft hard to track down. Plus, the moon's lopsided topography - riddled with mascons, or areas of dense material with higher-than-average gravitational pull - makes satellites' orbits incredibly unpredictable.

But the silent, stealthy Chandrayaan-1 couldn't evade powerful radio telescopes. Scientists at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California's remote Mojave Desert and at the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia worked together to detect the long-lost orbiter by sending out radio waves in its direction and listening for the echoes that bounced back.

"To be declared lost and then found after eight years is a great accomplishment," Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, the former ISRO chair who helped conceive the moon mission, told the Times of India.

The search technique, developed by researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is a new one. Capitalizing on the fact that Chandrayaan-1's orbit takes it over the moon's north pole, they used Goldstone's largest antenna to direct a powerful beam of microwaves toward the spot they expected the probe to be. The antenna is usually used to communicate with spacecraft much farther away - it's still in touch with the Voyager 1 probe way outside the solar system. But it could also be applied much like a police officer's radar gun.

When the microwaves struck Chandrayaan-1, they bounced back toward Earth, where the Green Bank radio telescope was listening. During four hours of observations, Green Bank detected two blips that resembled the signature of a small spacecraft. That timing matched the period of Chandrayaan-1's orbit. The data also provided information about the spacecraft's speed and distance from Earth, which could be used to update projections of its orbit, and subsequent radar observations confirmed the new calculations.

The researchers used the same technique to find NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter - an easier task because the LRO is still operational.

But this could be just the beginning of interplanetary radar investigations. The void between planets is filling up with human-made spacecraft, and it's only going to get more crowded. If scientists want to prevent potentially devastating collisions, they're going to need a powerful system to keep track of everything.

"Ground-based radars could possibly play a part in future robotic and human missions to the moon, both for a collisional hazard assessment tool and as a safety mechanism for spacecraft that encounter navigation or communication issues," according to a NASA statement.

Oh, Robert Kelly. We've been there. All of us, and many of us more than once.

The evolution toward more flexible work schedules, and the ability to work from home, can be a lifesaver. It can also totally sink people who are trying to maintain some sort of separation between what passes for a professional persona and the 24/7 business of parenting.

Kelly, a professor and an expert on international relations, found himself struggling with domestic matters this week when, during a Skype call to discuss South Korea with BBC One, his two children burst in behind him. Hilarity ensued, and a woman frantically dashed in to retrieve the kids. The video has gone viral, in part because who can't relate?

Former Washington Post colleague Frank Ahrens shared the video on Facebook and quipped "Pro tip: If you're doing a video interview at home and have small children, lock the door." Ahrens, the father of two girls, including a 4-year-old who is very interested in her daddy's activities, said later in a message that he quickly realized a lock wouldn't work.

"I have come this close to the same thing happening to me in academic interviews and client video calls, but thankfully never on a global media platform, like this poor chap," Ahrens said. "At first I thought it was a no-brainer that he should have locked the door, but then I realized what would happen in my case if I locked the door: (pounding) 'Daddy! Daddy! Who are you talking to? Daddy! Can I have my orange juice?!' (more pounding). Pick your poison."

"This has happened to me several times," said Kristin Shaw, who posted an anecdote about her own trials on Facebook, linking to the video. "Just the other night, I was on a video conference with a client at about 9 p.m. and suddenly he stopped and said, laughing, 'There is a child behind you.' "

Shaw's 7-year-old son was standing behind her, staring, waiting for her to acknowledge him. After her client spotted him, her son insisted on saying hello. And so they waved to each other and "I shuffled my little one back to bed."

Audrey Murphy, a Manassas, Virginia, resident and mom of twin boys said that once, when she was on a call with the vice president of her company, the boys demanded to know if he had a dog and a pool. When he said yes, Murphy said, the boys invited themselves over for a play date.

Jennifer Carstens, a mom of one in Woodbridge, Va., worked from home doing medical transcription when her daughter was young. She found that she couldn't get anything done while her daughter was awake, so she would be up working until 3 a.m. some nights. Who needs sleep anyway?

And it's not limited to human kids; pets can cause awkward moments as well. Susan Lacefield, a mother of two who works from her home in Massachusetts, was on a conference call with a couple of co-workers once when her cat, who was sitting under her chair, started loudly hacking up a fur ball.

"There was a couple of minutes of uncomfortable silence until I explained what was happening," Lacefield said in a message. She said she purposely schedules interviews for when her kids aren't at home or makes sure her husband is around to run interference.

Some parents go into those work-from-home days with a strategy all mapped out. Mari-Jane, who is one half of The Post's On Parenting blog, and her husband write down a dozen or more activities on strips of paper, then have the kids, now 12 and 10, draw them out of a hat periodically throughout the day to keep them occupied. Sadly, it's only moderately effective at keeping the howling and haranguing to a minimum.

We've seen neighbors locked in their cars on conference calls while the kids played nearby with a sitter. Amy, the other half of On Parenting, has on many occasions reassured people she's interviewing that she doesn't mind the crying kids and barking dogs on the other end of the line because hey, she's interviewing them about parenting, right?

Of course, there are cringe-worthy moments in that video. The attempt at brushing the kid aside and assuming no one would notice (perhaps). And the mortified caretaker in the background, embarrassingly trying to get the kids out of the room. We wonder how things are going in that household right now.

BBC Man, you're all of us. In other words: You're a human, living in 2017.

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Video link:
http://wapo.st/2mJM7cl