December 2019

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and the media got an up-close look Monday at a huge, newly completed rocket for the program aimed at putting a man and woman on the moon as early as 2024.

Bridenstine was in New Orleans to see the first of the “core stage” rockets for NASA’s Space Launch System at the Michoud Assembly Center, where it was built for NASA’s Artemis program.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Arms control, Ukraine and Syria are headlining President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s meetings Tuesday with Russia’s foreign minister, who is making his first trip to Washington since May 2017.

Sergey Lavrov’s visit, however, was overshadowed by the introduction of Ukrainerelated impeachment articles by the House and Trump’s complaints about an internal Justice Department watchdog’s finding that the FBI was justified in opening an investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

(AP) - The Scripps National Spelling Bee will have fewer participants next year. Whether it will have fewer champions remains to be seen.

Six months after the bee ended in an unprecedented eight-way tie because organizers ran out of words that were difficult enough to trip up the best spellers, Scripps on Tuesday announced the first in a series of reforms to the competition. While bee organizers aren’t saying how they’ll come up with a more challenging word list, the bee is reducing the number of wild-card entrants, which ought to streamline an event that was becoming unwieldy.