| Trump gives no timetable for Syria exit; wants to protect Kurds Posted: 02 Jan 2019 02:19 PM PST  Trump did not provide a timetable for the planned military exit from Syria, which he announced last month against the advice of top national security aides and without consulting lawmakers or U.S. allies participating in anti-Islamic State operations. The decision prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to resign. Trump said on Wednesday he had essentially fired Mattis, whose letter of resignation was seen as a sharp rebuke to the Republican president.
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| RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel Rebukes Uncle Mitt Romney for Criticizing President Trump Posted: 02 Jan 2019 12:08 PM PST  McDaniel reportedly stopped using her middle name - Romney - after assuming office last year.
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| Scientists think they know where the early universe’s dark matter has been hiding Posted: 02 Jan 2019 02:54 PM PST ![Scientists think they know where the early universe's dark matter has been hiding]( "Scientists think they know where the early universe's dark matter has been hiding") Most of the mass in the universe is made up of a kind of matter that none of us have ever seen. It's called "dark matter" and, despite being incredibly abundant, it's also extremely difficult to study. Decades-old calculations suggested that there is more dark matter around younger galaxies than the ancient ones from the early days of the universe, but then where did the dark matter we see today come from? A new study offers the answer. Past research suggested that galaxies we see nearby have more dark matter than those that are very distant. The farther away a galaxy is the farther back in time we're effectively looking, and scientists believed that those ancient galaxies didn't have all that much dark matter around them. As it turns out, that isn't the case. After studying some 1,500 galaxies, researchers led by Alfred Tiley of Durham University have determined that the amount of dark matter surrounding these huge collections of stars and planets is about the same as it ever was. Detecting dark matter around a galaxy can be tricky but it's made easier by calculating the gravitation effect that the matter has on its surroundings. We can't see dark matter in space because it doesn't reflect light, but it still exerts a gravitational pull, just like "normal" matter. By accounting for the size of a galaxy and the speed at which stars on its edges are moving, scientists can calculate how much dark matter is lurking on the fringes. This latest round of research, applied that same formula to many hundred galaxies both young and old. The scientists now believe that there's not much of a difference between the amount of dark matter around ancient galaxies when compared to much younger ones. However, as Live Science reports, the astronomy community isn't entirely on board with this new finding. The model that Tiley and his team used has been called into question, especially as it relates to measurements of distant high-mass galaxies which have been studied by others searching for dark matter. We'll have to wait and see how this all pans out but the results are certainly interesting and will no doubt further the conversation about where the universe's dark matter lies.
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| Now is time to cash in that $1.5B Mega Millions lottery ticket; mystery surrounds winner Posted: 02 Jan 2019 12:02 PM PST  The winning ticket for the Mega Millions drawing Oct. 23 was sold in Simpsonville, South Carolina. The winner has until April 20 to claim the money.
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| Australian man screaming at spider 'why don't you die?' triggers full police response Posted: 02 Jan 2019 04:42 AM PST  Police in Australia responded to reports of a man screaming "why don't you die?" by dispatching multiple units to a home in Perth. But officers were soon told to stand down when they found a man who "had only been trying to kill a spider", according to the police log published online. The alarm was raised when a passer-by heard a screaming child and a man repeatedly shouting. In a tweet on Wednesday morning Wanneroo police shared their account of the unusual incident. It cited the man's "serious fear" of spiders, and added that there had been no injuries at the scene apart from those sustained by the spider. The now-deleted tweet by Wanneroo police The tweet read: "Multiple police units responded lights and sirens to the incident this morning. Never a dull moment for the Police!" A police spokesman, Samuel Dinnison, said: "It's just one of those jobs where you go expecting to see one thing and see another." He confirmed the tweet was later deleted from Twitter because it pictured internal police communication systems and because "there were just some typos in it, things like that". The man was reported to have apologised "for the inconvenience" he had caused. A similar incident occurred in 2015 , when police in Sydney found a man screaming "I'm going to kill you, you're dead" at a spider in his home.
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| Pompeo, Brazil's new government target Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua Posted: 02 Jan 2019 09:43 AM PST  U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed supporting a return to democracy in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua with Brazil's new right-wing government on Wednesday, in a joint effort against what he called authoritarian regimes in Latin America. Pompeo and Brazil's Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo considered deepening cooperation in the region at a meeting in Brasilia following Tuesday's inauguration of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
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| Trump Sees His Leverage Dwindle as Shutdown Pushes Toward Third Week Posted: 03 Jan 2019 02:05 PM PST  The president made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room with border patrol agents on Thursday, hours after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, to make his case. "Without a wall you cannot have border security," Trump told reporters.
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| New Horizons isn’t done yet, and NASA is searching for its next target Posted: 03 Jan 2019 11:02 AM PST ![New Horizons isn't done yet, and NASA is searching for its next target]( "New Horizons isn't done yet, and NASA is searching for its next target") New Horizons gave NASA an amazing New Year's gift when it sent back gorgeous images of the distant Solar System object Ultima Thule, which we now know is the very first contact binary every visited by man-made spacecraft. It's been a fantastic few days for the New Horizons team, but the spacecraft is far from finished. Now, even as NASA scientists prepare to download a massive collection of data collected during the Ultima Thule flyby, the spacecraft's handlers are busy searching for its next target. The probe still has plenty of fuel to play with, and there's no shortage of interesting objects in the Kuiper Belt, which is packed with debris of varying sizes. As Space News explains, deciding on Ultima Thule took a lot of time and effort, as well as some help from the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. When picking Ultima Thule, the team weighed many different factors, including how interesting the object itself might be and the probability of making a safe pass. The good news is that New Horizons is equipped with an instrument designed specifically to spot objects that are far away. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager helped the New Horizons team aim the spacecraft in the ideal direction for a close flyby, but sending back those images take a long time. A new software change could allow the spacecraft to snap many different images, combine them, and then send them back as one, which would save time, but that system is still in its conceptual stage and not ready for prime time. NASA will continue to search for new objects that would be crossing near the current path of the spacecraft at the right time, but at the moment the future is still shrouded in mystery. For the time being, the New Horizons team will sift through the Ultima Thule data that will continue to trickle in for the next two years or so, but once they have decided on a new object to visit the hype will begin building once again.
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| A first class gaffe: Cathay to honour cheap ticket error Posted: 03 Jan 2019 01:59 AM PST  Scores of savvy travellers will be sipping heavily discounted champagne in first class recliners on Cathay Pacific flights this year after the airline agreed to honour tickets that were mistakenly sold at a fraction of their value. Airline and travel blogs went into overdrive on New Year's Eve after eagle-eyed shoppers noticed the carrier was offering first and business class tickets on its website from Vietnam to the United States and Canada for as little as $670. It took two days for Cathay to publicly acknowledge the error with the airline on Wednesday saying it would indeed honour the cheap fares.
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| Danish train crash toll up to 8 after more bodies found Posted: 03 Jan 2019 02:51 AM PST  COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Two more bodies have been found in the wreckage of a crashed train on a Danish bridge, raising the death toll to eight in Denmark's deadliest train accident in 30 years, police said Thursday.
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| ‘Black Girl Magic’: 17 black female judges elected Texas county swear in, make history Posted: 03 Jan 2019 05:51 AM PST  Officials believe this is the largest group of black female elected at the same time in Texas' largest county.
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| 'I won': Trump rebuffs criticism from incoming Senator Romney Posted: 02 Jan 2019 01:08 PM PST  Romney, who starts work on Thursday when members of the 2019-2020 Congress take office, suggested in a newspaper essay published on Tuesday that Trump had "caused dismay around the world" and said his presidency had "made a deep descent in December." "On balance, his conduct over the past two years ... is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office," said Romney in the Washington Post essay, reprising a strong critique of Trump that he voiced during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump responded with a tweet on Wednesday, noting Romney's failed 2012 White House bid and also taking a shot at former Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who has just retired from Congress and who has been one of the few Republican lawmakers to be openly critical of the president.
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| Saudi prosecutor seeks death sentences as Khashoggi murder trial opens Posted: 03 Jan 2019 03:32 PM PST  Saudi prosecutors sought the death penalty for five of 11 defendants charged with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as their high-profile trial opened in Riyadh on Thursday. The prosecution also said it was awaiting a response to two formal letters requesting evidence from Turkey, where Khashoggi was murdered inside the kingdom's Istanbul consulate on October 2 in a case that shocked the world. All 11 accused were present with their lawyers at the first session of the trial, it said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, without revealing their names or their alleged roles in the crime.
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| Apple’s China Trouble Makes Trump’s Trade War Harder to Defend Posted: 02 Jan 2019 08:58 PM PST  President Donald Trump's administration argues that the long-term gain from a trade war with China justifies short-term pain for consumers and investors. Apple Inc. on Wednesday lowered its outlook for first-quarter revenue after a larger-than-expected slowdown in demand from China and fewer upgrades to models of the iPhone. In a letter to investors, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said the company didn't expect growth in emerging markets to slow so sharply, especially in China.
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| Marine dies in shooting at barracks in Washington, D.C. Posted: 02 Jan 2019 07:53 AM PST  The fatal shooting of a Marine while on duty at a barracks in Washington, D.C., was being investigated as accidental, authorities said Wednesday.
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| Ohio Doctor Fired for Tweeting She'd Give Jewish People 'All the Wrong Meds' Posted: 02 Jan 2019 06:20 PM PST  The hospital said that no patients have reported being harmed by her work
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| Border clash was at least 2nd use of tear gas since November Posted: 02 Jan 2019 04:42 PM PST  TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Just after people raised their glasses to ring in the New Year, about 150 migrants gathered at a section of border wall in Tijuana to try to cross into the United States, many of them asylum seekers fed up with the long wait to have their claims processed.
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| PHOTOS: How many animals live at the London Zoo? Posted: 03 Jan 2019 06:28 AM PST  The yearly stock-taking sees staff at the Zoological Society of London facility work through all the herds and packs and flocks, from tigers and penguins to jellyfish.
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| Ultima Thule: First photographs taken by New Horizons spacecraft reveal distant world resembles snowman Posted: 03 Jan 2019 02:37 AM PST  Nasa has revealed the first photo of the distant world of Ultima Thule, the most distant object that humanity has ever explored. The tiny, icy object resembles a snowman in the photo, which is just the first of a whole host of data that the space agency hopes to receive back from its New Horizons spacecraft. The picture came after flight controllers said they had had success in the high-risk, middle-of-the-night encounter at the mysterious body known as Ultima Thule on the frozen fringes of our solar system, about four billion miles away in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt. Now they will work to download and look through all of the data sent back over that long distance, a process that could take years. "That image is so 2018... Meet Ultima Thule!" said lead investigator Alan Stern, doing little to hide his joy as he revealed a new sharper image of the cosmic body, taken at a distance as close as 17,000 miles with a resolution of 140 metres per pixel. "That bowling pin is gone - it's a snowman if anything at all," Dr Stern said during a Nasa briefing. "What this spacecraft and this team accomplished is unprecedented." These are the first colour images of Ultima Thule, taken at a distance of 85,000 miles, highlighting its reddish surface Credit: AFP Ultima Thule's surface reflects light about as much as "garden variety dirt," he said, as the sun's rays are 1,600 times fainter there than on Earth. The body is roughly 19 miles long and completes its own rotation in about 15 hours. Nasa dubbed the larger lobe Ultima, and the other, which is about three times smaller, Thule. "This is the first object that we can clearly tell was born this way" Stern said, instead of evolving as a sort of "bi-lobe." "This really puts the nail on the coffin now. We know that this is how these kinds of objects in many cases form." Alan Stern, with New Horizons team members Credit: AFP Around 4.5 billion years ago a cloud of frozen pebbles began to join forces, gradually forming two bodies - Ultima and Thule. Slowing turning, they eventually touched at each other at what mission geology manager Jeff Moore called an "extremely slow speed" - maybe just one to a few miles per hour. If such a meeting occurred between two cars in a parking lot, he said, no driver would bother writing it up. The lobes, according to Moore, are really just "resting on each other." "New Horizons is like a time machine, taking us back to the birth of the solar system," Moore said. "We are seeing a physical representation of the beginning of planetary formation, frozen in time." Carly Howett, another researcher of the mission, noted that "we can definitely say that Ultima Thule is red," perhaps due to irradiation of ice. The close approach came a half-hour into the new year, and three years after New Horizons' unprecedented swing past Pluto.
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| Giuliani calls for Mueller to be investigated for destruction of FBI evidence Posted: 02 Jan 2019 07:27 PM PST  President Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani weighs in on the latest Mueller investigation developments.
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| Florida McDonald's employee punches back in viral fight that started over straw ban Posted: 02 Jan 2019 08:14 PM PST ![Florida McDonald's employee punches back in viral fight that started over straw ban]( "Florida McDonald's employee punches back in viral fight that started over straw ban") A man who grabbed a St. Petersburg, Florida, McDonald's employee was arrested, police said. Video of the incident has over 2 million views on Facebook.
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| Pull-out from Syria changes nothing in US support for Israel: Pompeo Posted: 02 Jan 2019 09:19 AM PST  Brasília (AFP) - President Donald Trump's decision to pull American troops out of Syria "in no way changes anything" in terms of US support and protection of Israel, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday. Pompeo gave the assurance as he met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for talks in Brasilia on the sidelines of the inauguration of Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro. "The decision the president made on Syria in no way changes anything that this administration is working on alongside Israel," Pompeo said.
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| For Shanahan, a very public debut in Trump's cabinet Posted: 02 Jan 2019 03:56 PM PST  Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, sat silently at Trump's side, often expressionless, as television cameras rolled. Trump suggested that former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis - who abruptly resigned last month over policy differences with Trump - had been essentially fired and that Mattis had failed in Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents are becoming increasingly confident of ending the 17-year-old war on terms favorable to them. "I'm not happy with what he's done in Afghanistan and I shouldn't be happy," Trump said.
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| Oil Jumps as U.S. Equities Regain Ground, OPEC Output Declines Posted: 02 Jan 2019 01:00 PM PST  West Texas Intermediate oil climbed as well, erasing earlier losses brought on by disappointing manufacturing data out of China. Total volume traded Wednesday was about 20 percent above the 100-day average.
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| The 25 Best-Selling Cars, Trucks, and SUVs of 2018 Posted: 03 Jan 2019 11:43 AM PST |
| US fires tear gas across Mexico border to stop migrants Posted: 01 Jan 2019 10:50 PM PST  TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — U.S. authorities fired tear gas into Mexico during the first hours of the new year to repel about 150 migrants who tried to breach the border fence in Tijuana.
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| Husband surprises wife of 67 years with new engagement ring Posted: 03 Jan 2019 09:27 AM PST  After 67 years, it is still nice to know that you can still surprise someone
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| Dow posts small gain in volatile start to 2019 as weak Chinese data spark fears Posted: 02 Jan 2019 01:56 PM PST ![Dow posts small gain in volatile start to 2019 as weak Chinese data spark fears]( "Dow posts small gain in volatile start to 2019 as weak Chinese data spark fears") The Dow Jones industrial average began 2019 with a small gain. That increase followed an early plunge amid signs of a Chinese manufacturing slowdown.
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| Teen charged with murder after egg-throwing crash Posted: 03 Jan 2019 07:24 AM PST  A teenager faces a murder charge after an egg-throwing prank reportedly led to a car chase by an armed civilian and culminated in the teen driver crashing into a pickup, whose driver was pronounced dead at the scene. Gavino Garay reports.
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| Trump warns US government shutdown could last a 'long time' Posted: 02 Jan 2019 08:31 PM PST  US President Donald Trump met top Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday, but they failed to hammer out an agreement that would end a partial government shutdown over his demand for billions of dollars to build a border wall with Mexico. One day before Democrats take over the House of Representatives, Trump showed no signs of backing away from his insistence that Congress cough up $5.6 billion for his "beautiful" southern wall. Trump met behind closed doors at the White House with Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who will take over as speaker of the House on Thursday, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, but there were no indications any progress had been made in resolving the impasse.
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| Kurdish fighters pull out of flashpoint town: Syria's defense ministry Posted: 02 Jan 2019 08:20 AM PST ![Kurdish fighters pull out of flashpoint town: Syria's defense ministry]( "Kurdish fighters pull out of flashpoint town: Syria's defense ministry") A convoy of Syrian Kurdish fighters has pulled out of the flashpoint area of Manbij in northern Syria, close to territory controlled by Turkey, Syria's defense ministry said on Wednesday. Some 30 km (20 miles) from the Turkish border, the town occupies a critical spot on the map of the Syrian conflict, near the junction of three separate blocks of territory that form spheres of Russian, Turkish and - for now - U.S. influence. "According to information, approximately 400 Kurdish fighters have left Manbij so far," the Syrian defense ministry said.
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| Polish Central Bank Chief Is Questioned in Watchdog Scandal Posted: 03 Jan 2019 07:12 AM PST  The latest in a string of central bankers from emerging Europe becoming involved in legal probes, Glapinski has rebuffed calls to step down from opposition parties that are demanding a parliamentary investigation into bribery allegations against the former head of the Financial Supervisory Commission. In November, Latvia's anti-corruption bureau said it was carrying out a criminal probe involving central bank governor Ilmars Rimsevics.
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| Side of the moon you can't see 'is not dark, it's just far' Posted: 03 Jan 2019 05:04 PM PST  WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite the name of Pink Floyd's best-selling album, the side of the moon you can't see isn't always dark. But it is far.
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| Why China and ASEAN's South China Sea Negotiations Will Go Nowhere Posted: 03 Jan 2019 03:44 AM PST  Sovereignty issues created the original crisis and they are now undoing talks to create a Code of Conduct.
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| PETA responds to Tiffany Haddish's vow to wear fur till 'police stop killing black people' Posted: 03 Jan 2019 07:01 AM PST  PETA responded to Tiffany Haddish after the comedian said she wold wear animal fur every day until "the police stop killing black people."
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| Trump Says He 'Would Have Been a Good General' While Feuding With Generals Posted: 02 Jan 2019 01:39 PM PST  "I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?"
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| What next for Syria's Kurds? Posted: 03 Jan 2019 01:58 PM PST  Syria's Kurds have established an autonomous region during seven years of civil war, but the abrupt decision by their US ally to withdraw has thrown their political future into doubt. Kurdish-led forces control a large swathe of the country's north and northeast, some of it seized from the Islamic State group at the cost of heavy losses with backing from the US-led coalition. A US withdrawal could leave them exposed on two fronts, both to an attack by neighbouring Turkey and its Syrian proxies, and to a return of Damascus government institutions.
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| Wall Street drops more than 2 percent on slowdown fears Posted: 03 Jan 2019 01:30 PM PST  Stocks plunged on Thursday, with the S&P 500 down more than 2 percent, after slowing factory activity on the heels of a dire revenue warning from Apple.
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