Mercury poised for rare 'transit' across sun's face on Monday

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May 8, 2016

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Stargazers will have a rare opportunity on Monday to witness Mercury fly directly across the face of the sun, a sight that unfolds once every 10 years or so, as Earth and its smaller neighboring planet come into perfect alignment.

The best vantage points to observe the celestial event, known to astronomers as a transit, are eastern North America, South America, Western Europe and Africa, assuming clouds are not obscuring the sun. In those regions, the entire transit will occur during daylight hours, according to Sky and Telescope magazine.

But Mercury is too small to see without high-powered binoculars or a telescope, and looking directly at the sun, even with sunglasses, could cause permanent eye damage.

Fortunately NASA and astronomy organizations are providing virtual ringside seats for the show by live-streaming images of the transit in its entirety and providing expert commentary.

The tiny planet, slightly larger than Earth's moon, will start off as a small black dot on the edge of the sun at 7:12 a.m. Eastern (1112 GMT). Traveling 30 miles (48 km) a second, Mercury will take 7.5 hours to cross the face of the sun, which is about 864,300 miles (1.39 million km) in diameter, or about 109 times larger than Earth.

“Unlike sunspots, which have irregular shapes and grayish borders, Mercury's silhouette will be black and precisely round,” Sky and Telescope said in a press release.

The event will come into view in the western United States after dawn, with the transit already in progress. The show will end at sunset in parts of Europe, Africa and most of Asia.

NASA Television, available on the Internet, will broadcast live video and images from the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory and other telescopes. The show includes informal discussions with NASA scientists, who will answer questions submitted via Twitter using the hashtag #AskNASA.

Other options for armchair astronomers include:

– SkyandTelescope.com plans a live webcast with expert commentary, beginning at 7 a.m. EDT/1100 GMT.

– Slooh.com, which offers live telescope viewing via the Internet, will host a show on its website featuring images of Mercury taken by observatories around the globe.

– Europe's Virtual Telescope, another robotic telescope network, will webcast the transit at www.virtualtelescope.eu

Scientists will take advantage of Mercury's transit for a variety of science projects, including refining techniques to look for planets beyond the solar system.

“When a planet crosses in front of the sun, it causes the sun's brightness to dim. Scientists can measure similar brightness dips from other stars to find planets orbiting them,” NASA said.

Mercury's last transit was in 2006 and the planet will pass between the sun and Earth again in 2019. After that, the next opportunity to witness the event will not come until 2032.

(Editing by Frank McGurty and James Dalgleish)

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Trump changes tune on tax hikes for rich Americans

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May 8, 2016

By David Lawder and Lindsay Dunsmuir

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday he is open to raising taxes on the rich, backing off his prior proposal to reduce taxes on all Americans and breaking with one of his party's core policies dating back to the 1990s.

“I am willing to pay more, and you know what, the wealthy are willing to pay more,” Trump told ABC's “This Week.”

After effectively sealing the Republican nomination last week, Trump has used speeches and interviews to offer more details on his policy positions.

The billionaire real estate tycoon has said he would like to see an increase in the minimum wage, although on Sunday he told NBC's “Meet the Press” he would prefer to see states take the lead on that front instead of the federal government.

“I don't know how people make it on $7.25 an hour,” Trump said of the current federal minimum wage. “I would like to see an increase of some magnitude. But I'd rather leave it to the states. Let the states decide.”

Trump's call for higher taxes on the wealthy is a break with Republican presidential nominees who have staunchly opposed tax hikes for almost three decades. Higher taxes have been anathema to many in the party since former President George H.W. Bush infuriated fellow Republicans by abandoning a pledge not to raise taxes and agreeing to an increase as part of a 1990 budget deal.

Democrats, including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, have pressed for increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans for years.

Trump released a tax proposal last September that included broad tax breaks for businesses and households. He proposed reducing the highest income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 39.6 percent rate.

Pressed on the contradiction between his latest comments on taxes and the September tax plan, Trump said he viewed his original proposal as “a concept” and said he expected it would be changed following negotiations with Congress.

“By the time it gets negotiated, it's going to be a different plan,” Trump told ABC. He emphasized in separate interviews with ABC and NBC's “Meet the Press” that his priorities were lowering taxes on the middle class and businesses.

“The middle class has to be protected,” Trump told NBC. The rich are “probably going to end up paying more,” he said.

DEEP DIVIDE

Republicans remain deeply divided over Trump's candidacy, though he has pledged to try to unite the party ahead of its convention in July. Prominent party leaders such as Paul Ryan, the top Republican in the House of Representatives, have distanced themselves from Trump over his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Ryan, who has been a leading voice for the Republican party on budget issues for years and is currently the House speaker, has proposed a series of budgets that would cut taxes across the board.

Trump also has called for new tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports to the United States, a position that is at odds with the position on trade held by Ryan and many other pro-business Republicans.

Ryan, will who preside over the convention in Cleveland on July 18-21 where the party will formally nominate its candidate for the Nov. 8 presidential election, said last week he hoped to eventually support Trump. But he added, “I'm just not there right now.”

Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona also is undecided about Trump. Flake said he wanted to see Trump revise some of his positions, including the proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States.

“He's got to soften his position there,” Flake said.

Underscoring the party's divisions, Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and a Trump supporter, criticized Ryan for failing to endorse Trump. The conservative populist firebrand said she would work to defeat Ryan in his Aug. 9 primary race against a conservative businessman.

Clinton said she hoped to take advantage of Republican reticence over Trump to draw the support of party defectors.

“I am asking people to come join this campaign,” the former secretary of state told CBS. “And I've had a lot of outreach from Republicans in the last days who say that they are interested in talking about that.”

(Additional reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Caren Bohan, Digby Lidstone and Paul Simao)

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Canada wildfire explodes in size, approaches oil sands project

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May 8, 2016

By Rod Nickel and Liz Hampton

GREGOIRE LAKE, Alberta (Reuters) – A raging Canadian wildfire grew explosively on Saturday as hot, dry winds pushed the blaze across the energy heartland of Alberta and threatened to burn close to an oil sands project.

The fire that has already prompted the evacuation of all 88,000 people who lived in the city of Fort McMurray was set to double in size on Saturday, the seventh day of what is expected to be the costliest natural disaster in Canada's history.

Provincial officials praised evacuees for their patience and, in a sign of how long the crisis could drag on, said the cities of Calgary and Edmonton, many hundreds of miles to the south, were the best place to receive longer-term support such as medical care and emergency payments.

Firefighting officials said the inferno, propelled northeast towards neighboring Saskatchewan by high winds and fueled by tinder-dry forests, was set to double in size to 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres) – almost twice the size of Houston – by the end of Saturday.

Fort McMurray is the center of Canada's oil sands region. About half of the nation's crude output from the sands, or one million barrels per day (bpd), had been taken offline as of Friday, according to a Reuters estimate.

Officials said they expected the fire would burn up to the edge of a project operated by Suncor Energy Inc, but noted the site and others like it were resilient to fire damage.

“They are clear of vegetation and trees … they also have highly trained industrial fire departments that know how to respond to these incidents,” said Chad Morrison, the province's manager of wildfire prevention.

At least 10 oil sand operators have cut production due to evacuations and other emergency measures. [CRU/CA]

Syncrude oil sands project said it would shut down its northern Alberta operation and remove all personnel from the site due to smoke. There was no imminent threat from the fire.

Morrison told a briefing that firefighters started tackling the fire as soon as it was spotted south west of the city at 6 p.m. eastern (2300 GMT) last Sunday. The blaze is now expected to reach the border with Saskatchewan, some 50 miles (80 km) away, by the end of the day.

Cooler weather forecast for Sunday could then help keep the blaze under control, said Morrison, predicting that without substantial rain the fire might easily last for months.

The full extent of property losses in Fort McMurray has yet to be determined, but one analyst estimated insurance losses could exceed C$9 billion ($7 billion).

Alberta's Municipal Affairs Minister Danielle Larivee said the fire was still out of control and warned residents not to try to return.

“I know … how very hard it is to be patient and how difficult it is not to know so many things. I know what it's like to wonder what is left from your home,” she told the briefing.

More than 500 firefighters are battling the blaze in and around Fort McMurray, along with 15 helicopters and 14 air tankers, the Alberta government said.

Police escorted another convoy of evacuees out of the oil sands region north of Fort McMurray on Saturday, on a harrowing journey through burned-out parts of the city and billowing smoke.

Around 25,000 residents who initially went north found themselves cut off in overcrowded conditions. Larivee said she hoped the entire group would have been moved south by the end of Saturday.

Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ruins, but most evacuees fled without knowing the fate of their own homes. The majority got away with few possessions, some forced to leave pets behind.

Stephane Dumais, thumbing through his insurance documents at an evacuation center, said he has thought about moving away.

“To me that's like giving up on my city,” he said. “As long as it takes to rebuild it, let's work together. It's not going to be the same as it used to be.”

Quite how quickly Fort McMurray can recover is unclear. Earlier in the day Alberta premier Rachel Notley said the city's gas had been turned off, its power grid was damaged and the water undrinkable.

Later on, Scott Long of the Alberta emergency management agency said planning had started for residents to return once the city was safe.

“There is no timeline on that but I am not looking at months,” he told the briefing later on Saturday.

(Additional reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Writing by Jeffrey Hodgson and David Ljunggren; Editing by James Dalgleish and Diane Craft)

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Brazil Senate committee votes for Rousseff to stand trial

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May 6, 2016

By Maria Carolina Marcello and Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) – A Senate committee recommended on Friday that Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff be put on trial by the full chamber for breaking budget laws, moving a step closer to the likely suspension of the leftist leader from office next week.

Despite renewed promised by Rousseff on Friday to resist her removal, her chances for staying in office are dimming. Her departure would come at a time when a majority of Brazilians are against Rousseff because of an economic recession and a massive corruption scandal that has exposed wrongdoing by ruling party officials.

The full Senate is expected to vote to put her on trial on Wednesday, which would immediately suspend Rousseff for the duration of a trial that could last six months. During that period, Vice President Michel Temer would replace her as acting president.

The upper house committee voted 15-5 to accept the charges against Rousseff, which involve budget irregularities that critics say masked budget problems while she ran for re-election in 2014, and her opponents are certain to muster the simple majority needed to begin a trial.

“I will resist until the last day,” Rousseff said at an event where she announced the delivery of low-cost housing. The president said she would not resign because she committed no crime, and called her looming ouster a “coup d'etat.”

If the Senate convicts Rousseff, by a two-thirds majority vote to oust her, Temer would serve out the remainder of Rousseff's second term through 2018.

Local newspaper surveys say the opposition has 50 of the 54 votes needed, with many of the 10 undecided senators likely to favor her ouster.

Rousseff has struggled to survive politically in the face of Brazil's biggest ever corruption scandal and its worst recession since the 1930s. Her removal would mark an end to 13 years of leftist rule by the Workers Party that began in 2003 under her mentor, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

While Rousseff is not directly accused of corruption, Brazil's top prosecutor has asked for her to be investigated for obstructing justice in the kickback scandal that has engulfed state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA and fueled Brazil's political crisis.

In a separate initiative launched by the opposition, Rousseff's 2014 re-election campaign is being investigated by an electoral court for alleged funding with bribe money.

At Rousseff's presidential palace Friday, officials had glum faces and appeared resigned to the end of her administration.

One aide denied they were packing up already, but added: “No doubt, we have to start organizing things.”

Echoing the sense of an administration that has run out of time, no reporters showed up for a news conference called by Women Affairs Secretary Eleonora Menicucci, a close Rousseff aide. She ended up speaking only to a government television camera.

Rousseff's supporters on the Senate committee have called for annulment of the impeachment proceedings because the man who launched them last year, lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, was himself removed from office on Thursday by the Supreme Court for obstructing the investigation of corruption accusations against him.

The top court has so far dismissed all government requests to halt the impeachment proceedings.

Workers Party Senator Lindbergh Farias said the ouster of Rousseff was aimed at undoing Lula's work to help the poor, and at rolling back workers' benefits, privatizing state companies and aligning Brazil's foreign policy closer to the United States.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Maria Carolina Marcello; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Frances Kerry)

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Republican House Speaker Ryan not ready to support Trump

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May 6, 2016

By Emily Stephenson and Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top elected Republican, Paul Ryan, said on Thursday he was not ready to endorse Donald Trump, a sign of the challenges the party's presumptive presidential nominee faces rallying the Republican establishment behind his White House bid.

Ryan, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said conservatives wanted to know if Trump shares their values.

“I hope to support our nominee, I hope to support his candidacy fully,” Ryan said on CNN. “At this point, I'm just not there right now.”

Trump, who has built a huge following with an anti-establishment message, shot back at Ryan in a statement.

“I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan's agenda. Perhaps in the future we can work together and come to an agreement about what is best for the American people,” he said.

The Republican National Committee, under pressure to unify the party or face an electoral rout in the Nov. 8 election, said Ryan and Trump were expected to meet soon. It added that “only a united Republican Party will be able to beat Hillary Clinton.”

“We respect Speaker Ryan's opinion and believe that since the primary ended early we will have time to unify. We anticipate the two meeting soon to begin to help unite the party,” said RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters.

Trump's last remaining rivals in the Republican race, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich, dropped out this week, clearing the New York billionaire's path to be picked as the presidential nominee. He will likely face Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, in the Nov. 8 general election.

Many Republicans have grappled this week with whether to support Trump, who has deviated from the party line on trade and upset the party establishment with offensive comments about women and immigrants. Trump on Thursday announced a new campaign finance chairman in response to questions about his readiness for a general election race.

TAKING ON CLINTON

Trump, speaking to thousands at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on Thursday night, sharpened his criticism of Clinton, the kind of tactic that some Republican strategists believe will help unify the party.

He blasted Clinton for saying recently she would impose clean-energy policies that would put coal miners out of business. He put on a hard hat presented to him by the state's coal miners' association and made a shoveling motion.

“And for those miners, get ready: You're going to be working your asses off,” he said.

In a sign some Republicans are rallying around Trump, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, whose family has helped bankroll the anti-Trump group Our Principles, is set to endorse Trump on Friday when the candidate visits Omaha.

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2016 nomination, told CNN he now supported Trump as well.

Ryan criticized Trump in December for proposing to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States and knocked him in March for failing to denounce white supremacist groups during a television interview.

The House speaker, who was the running mate of Republican 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a harsh Trump critic, said he hoped the party would be unified by this summer but that the pressure was on Trump to do that.

“He won fair and square,” Ryan said of Trump, acknowledging his own policy differences with the New York billionaire businessman. He added: “If we don't unify all wings of the party, we're not going to win this election.”

Ryan repeatedly denied interest in running for president this year despite attempts to draft him by some in his party. He has been putting together a policy plan for House Republicans to campaign on, which he says will be released before the convention in July.

CAMPAIGN FUNDRAISING

Trump on Thursday began shifting focus from the bruising primary campaign to the general election. He has largely used his own money for his primary fight but plans to follow the more typical path of raising money from outside sources for the general election to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama.

He named his campaign finance chief on Thursday – Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner who is chief executive of private investment firm Dune Capital Management and with whom Trump worked in a business capacity in the past.

Mnuchin has a long history of political donations, including to Clinton. Since 1998, Mnuchin has given about $71,000 to Democrats, compared with about $37,000 to Republicans. Republicans have questioned Trump's loyalty to the party because he also donated to Democratic candidates in the past.

U.S. Representative Renee Ellmers, a Republican from North Carolina who has endorsed Trump, told Reuters the campaign would begin raising money for the party.

“They are going to start understanding and realizing that in order to grow this operation, they will need to grow funds, not only for him and for the campaign to beat Hillary Clinton, but for the Republican Party itself,” Ellmers said.

Historically, political parties have depended on their nominees to raise money in order to fund their other operations, including working to elect members of the House of Representatives and Senate.

One key worry for Republicans has been that their candidates for Congress and other elective positions could suffer with the divisive figure of Trump at the top of the ticket.

Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, said Ryan gave lawmakers in his party cover to steer clear of Trump in their re-election campaigns.

“He is positioning the Republican conference and giving Republicans a message they can hold onto,” Bonjean said.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland in Charleston, W.V., Doina Chiacu, Megan Cassella, Jason Lange, Ginger Gibson and Richard Cowan in Washington, and Richard Leong in New York; Writing by Emily Stephenson; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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Wanna know why Donald Trump will win?

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Wanna know why Donald Trump will win?

by Outlaw Morgan

This guys nails it on the head. The liberals have destroyed America only so they can get richer, and stick it to true Americans. The Democrats have conned the Blacks and Latinos for years, saying they are they party for them, when in reality they destroy black lives, destroy cities like Chicago and Detroit, and enslave blacks and Latinos by making the dependent on the government handouts! Wake up you Liberals! You have got it backwards, only the Republicans can turn it around for you. Trump maybe the middle of the road conservative/Liberal, but he is far better than any Democrat in the past 50 years! He isnt going to pander to the Republican party and their cronies either! Wake up! Trump is NOT a racist! Illegals in the US are criminals, period. THey have NO RIGHT TO INVADE AMERICA! They have no right to take American Jobs! They are NOT American Citizens!

Wanna know why Donald Trump will win the US Presidential Race?

Judge Jeanine: What's wrong with putting America first?

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Judge Jeanine: What's wrong with putting America first?

Reaction to Donald Trump's foreign policy address has people in an uproar! Well this people can go and shove it. If you dont like it, move!

I love how the judge socks it to you in a no-nonsense way, and tells it like it is!

America is for Americans!

DO YOU AGREE? Then share this Post!