MarkWhittington writes The Washington Post reported that the NASA portion of the president’s 2016 budget proposal is basically status quo though it does provide further funding for a mission to Europa. A Europa probe is near and dear to the new chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA, Rep. John Culberson. However, the $18.5 billion budget proposal also funds the asteroid redirect mission, which has come under increasing fire from both Congress and the scientific community. The Houston Chronicle suggested that the final spending bill will be considerably different once congressional Republicans get through with it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Obama’s 2016 NASA Budget Status Quo, Funds Europa Mission
Bryce writes: Four years since the last major Inkscape release, now news is out about version 0.91 of this powerful vector drawing and painting tool. The main reason for the multi-year delay is that they’ve switched from their old custom rendering engine to using Cairo now, improving their support for open source standards. This release also adds symbol libraries and support for Visio stencils, cross platform WMF and EMF import and export, a native Windows 64-bit build, scads of bug fixes, and much more. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Google Earth Pro , the premium version of Google’s popular Google Earth service, is now free. Google sliced the price from $400 a year, so this is a pretty solid deal. If you like to make 3D measurements or create HD videos of virtual trips around the world, I’d jump on this. You can download the software key directly from Google and start an online global journey. Read more… 
August, 13, 1944. The British 8th Army occupies Florence. The Allies finally break out of Normandy. Meanwhile, somewhere in the south of Tuscany, a soldier writes this encrypted message and hides it inside a bullet. In 2015, someone found it and deciphered it. It was the end of a hilariously absurd story. Read more… 
Jay-Z is buying the Scandinavian music streaming company Aspiro—which currently runs to music services—for $56 million, in a bid to take on Spotify. Read more… 
According to a story from the UK edition of Vice (a story which, I hasten to add, relies on a source named ‘K2’ and should therefore be taken with the requisite gallon of salt), drug dealers in the fair city of Birmingham have turned to dumphones in an attempt to evade the police. Read more…