Warren launches US Senate campaign with Mass. tour (AP)

BOSTON – Harvard Law professor and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren officially launched her Democratic campaign for the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, hoping for a chance to take on Republican Sen. Scott Brown in next year's election.

Warren, who greeted commuters at a subway station in Boston before embarking on a tour of the state, cast herself as fighter for the middle class, saying she's "stood up to some pretty tough folks over the past few years."

"There's been a lot of very powerful interests who have tried to shut me down, squeeze me, push me sideways and so far it just hasn't worked," Warren said. "I'm willing to throw my body in front of a bus to try to stop bad ideas that are going to be harmful to the middle class."

Warren was heavily courted by Democrats hoping to win back the seat long held by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy. Democrats are also trying to hold onto their narrow Senate majority by ousting Brown.

Warren was tapped by President Barack Obama last year to set up a new consumer protection agency, but congressional Republicans opposed her leading the office. She returned to Massachusetts this summer.

Supporters say her image as a crusader against well-heeled Wall Street interests and her national profile will give her candidacy muscle, though she's never run for political office.

Some Democrats, including Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, have voiced skepticism about how strong a candidate she will be, given her lack of political experience.

Warren said she knows she has to make her case in a crowded primary if she wants a chance to challenge Brown next year.

Brown political adviser Eric Fehrnstrom called Warren's entrance into the race evidence of a "crowded, long and divisive Democratic primary."

"In the meantime, people are hurting and they are looking for work. Scott Brown is going to keep his focus on creating jobs, keeping taxes low, and getting spending and debt under control," Fehrnstrom said.

Republicans have already branded Warren as a liberal academic from Cambridge whose Harvard ties put her out of touch with working families. They've also mocked her as an outsider whose roots are in Oklahoma where she grew up and not Massachusetts.

Democratic leaders are banking that her national profile will help her raise the money needed to topple Brown, who has more than $10 million in his campaign account.

A recent Boston Globe poll showed Brown as the most popular major politician in the traditionally Democratic state. Brown shocked the political establishment by beating Attorney General Martha Coakley in last year's special election to succeed Kennedy. He was a little-known state senator who cast himself as a moderate, an average guy with his trademark barn coat and pickup truck. He once posed as a Cosmopolitan magazine centerfold.

Other Democrats already announced include Setti Warren, no relation to the consumer advocate, the first-term mayor of the affluent Boston suburb of Newton and the state's first popularly elected black mayor; City Year youth program co-founder Alan Khazei; immigration attorney Marisa DeFranco; state Rep. Tom Conroy; Newton resident Herb Robinson; and Robert Massie, who unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor in 1994.

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Associated Press writers Andrew Miga in Washington and Bob Salsberg in Boston contributed to this report.

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Rick Perry launches presidential bid (Reuters)

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – Rick Perry, the conservative governor of Texas, declared himself a candidate for president on Saturday, shaking up the race for the Republican nomination to face Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012.

Perry made the announcement in a statement issued shortly before he was to address a gathering of conservatives in South Carolina to launch his campaign.

"It is time to get America working again," Perry said in the statement. "That's why with the support of my family and an unwavering belief in the goodness of America, I declare to you today my candidacy for president of the United States."

The three-term Texas governor has touted a record of job growth in Texas and also is known as a strident critic of federal power and an opponent of abortion rights and gay marriage. He is considered a strong fundraiser.

Opinion polls indicate Perry enters the race close on the heels of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the early front-runner to win the 2012 Republican nomination.

The announcement by Perry, who has made his deep Christian faith a big part of his public image, came one week after he led a seven-hour religious rally in Houston to pray for America, a nation he described as "in crisis."

In remarks posted before his speech on his campaign's website, Perry said, "As Americans, we believe freedom is a gift from God, and government's prime function is to defend it. We don't see the role of government as a nanny state, and we recognize there is no government money that wasn't once earned through the sweat and toil of private citizens."

Perry sharply criticizes the Obama administration in the remarks.

"That's why we object to an administration that sees its role as spending our children's inheritance on failed economic theories that have given us record debt and left far too many unemployed, threatening not only our economy, but our security. Our reliance on foreign creditors and sources of energy not only compromises our national sovereignty, but jeopardizes our national future," Perry said.

OUTSIDER'S POLITICAL RESUME

Perry is a staunch conservative with a Washington outsider's political resume and a pro-business record of job growth during more than a decade as chief executive in Texas.

That is a potent blend in a party dominated by social conservatives and followers of the conservative Tea Party movement, and in a campaign that likely will focus heavily on the lagging U.S. economy and stubbornly high unemployment.

Perry has been sharply critical of the federal government and caused a stir in 2009 when he openly pondered his state's secession from the United States.

Raised on a west Texas farm, Perry has never lost an election. After a stint in the Air Force, he rose through the ranks of Texas politics from the House of Representatives to agriculture commissioner, lieutenant governor and then governor in 2000 when Bush left for the White House.

Perry could draw comparisons to George W. Bush, the last Texas governor in the White House, raising the possibility of "Texas fatigue" among voters. The two men and their staffs have a sometimes strained relationship, made worse in recent years by Perry's criticism of heavy government spending during Bush's presidency.

Perry could have a strong regional base as the only southern governor in the race, but could find it difficult to win over a broader electorate with fresh memories of Bush, who left office unpopular among many Americans.

Perry's critics say job growth in Texas has been fueled by the energy sector and trade with Latin America, not Perry's policies, and was just as strong at times under previous governors. They also note many of those jobs were low-wage, and the Texas record also includes heavy cuts in education, low levels of public service and high rates of uninsured.

Perry's candidacy could steal support from conservative Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, replacing her as Romney's top rival and potentially bridging the gap between the party's establishment center and right-wing activists.

(Reporting by Harriet McLeod; Editing by Will Dunham and Tom Brown)

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NASA launches spacecraft on 5-year trip to Jupiter (AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A sun-powered robotic explorer named Juno rocketed away Friday on a five-year journey to Jupiter, the solar system's most massive and ancient planet.

Hundreds of scientists and their families and friends watched from just a few miles away, cheering and yelling, "Go Juno!" as the NASA spacecraft soared into a clear midday sky atop an unmanned rocket.

"It's fantastic!" said Fran Bagenal, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who is part of the project. "Just great to see the thing lift off."

It was the first step in Juno's 1.7 billion-mile voyage to the gas giant Jupiter, just two planets away but altogether different from Earth and next-door neighbor Mars.

Juno is solar powered, a first for a spacecraft meant to roam so far from the sun. It has three huge solar panels that were folded for launch. Once opened, they should each stretch as long and wide as a tractor-trailer. Previous spacecraft to the outer planets have relied on nuclear energy.

With Juno, scientists hope to answer some of the most fundamental questions of our solar system.

"How Jupiter formed. How it evolved. What really happened early in the solar system that eventually led to all of us," said Juno's chief investigator Scott Bolton, an astrophysicist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

Bolton said Jupiter is like a time capsule. It got most of the leftovers from the sun's creation nearly 5 billion years ago — hence the planet's immense size — and its enormous gravity field has enabled it to hold onto that original material.

Jupiter is so big it could hold everything in the solar system, minus the sun, and still be twice as massive. Astronomers say it probably was the first planet in the solar system to form.

Juno will venture much closer to Jupiter than any of the eight spacecraft that have visited Jupiter since the 1970s. Juno represents the next step, Bolton said.

"We look deeper. We go much closer. We're going over the poles. So we're doing a lot of new things that have never been done, and we're going to get all this brand-new information," Bolton said.

The $1.1 billion mission — which will end with Juno taking a fatal plunge into Jupiter in 2017 — kicks off a flurry of astronomy missions by NASA.

Juno's liftoff appeared to create more buzz than usual, given the hiatus in human launches from the United States — the space shuttle program ended two weeks ago. NASA's long-term goal is to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the mid-2030s.

There are a few special passengers aboard Juno, though.

Attached to the probe are three little Lego figures specially made of space-grade aluminum. They represent the Italian physicist Galileo, who discovered Jupiter's four biggest moons; the Roman god Jupiter; and his wife Juno, for whom the spacecraft is named.

If all goes well, Juno will go into orbit around Jupiter's poles — a first — on July 4, 2016.

The oblong orbit will bring Juno within 3,100 miles of the cloudtops and right over the most powerful auroras in the solar system. In fact, that's how the spacecraft got its name — Juno peered through clouds to keep tabs on her husband, Jupiter.

Juno will circle the planet 33 times, each orbit lasting 11 days for a grand total of one year.

With each orbit, the spacecraft will pass over a different longitude so that by mission's end, "we've essentially dropped a net around the planet with all of our measurements," Bolton said. That's crucial for understanding Jupiter's invisible gravity and magnetic force fields, he noted.

Radiation is so intense around Jupiter that Bolton and his team put Juno's most sensitive electronics inside a titanium vault — an armored tank, as he calls it.

Juno's experiments also will attempt to ascertain the abundance of water, and oxygen, in Jupiter's atmosphere, and determine whether the core of the planet is solid or gaseous.

After Juno, next up is Grail, twin spacecraft that will be launched next month and go into orbit around Earth's moon. Then comes Curiosity, a six-wheeled, jeep-size rover that will blast off for Mars at the end of November in search of environments conducive to life.

All the upcoming astronomy probes show "we still continue an exciting group of missions," said Colleen Hartman of NASA's science mission office. Robotic missions "have a role to play in how humans explore the universe, and so it's important that, in fact, both these sides of the house do well."

Juno bears nine instruments, including a wide-angle color camera, JunoCam, that will beam back images that the public can turn into photos.

The spacecraft also bears a small Italian-supplied plaque honoring Galileo. It shows his self-portrait, as well as his description of observing Jupiter's moons, in his own handwriting from 1610.

Unlike many other NASA missions, this one came in on cost and on time. It's relatively inexpensive; the Cassini probe launched in 1997 to Saturn, by way of Jupiter, cost $3.4 billion.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/juno

Southwest Research Institute: http://missionjuno.swri.edu

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Bachmann launches 2012 presidential bid (Reuters)

WATERLOO, Iowa (Reuters) – Rising Tea Party conservative Michele Bachmann leaped into the Republican 2012 presidential nomination race on Monday, saying the country cannot afford four more years of President Barack Obama's handling of the economy.

"Make no mistake about it, Barack Obama will be a one-term president," Bachmann, a member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota, said in announcing her candidacy with a blistering critique of the Democratic President.

Bachmann, 55, is attempting to establish herself as the conservative alternative to front-runner Mitt Romney among a crowded field of Republican candidates.

She was buoyed by a Des Moines Register poll on Saturday that showed her only one percentage point behind first-place Romney among Republicans in Iowa. The Midwestern state holds the first contest on the road to her party's presidential nomination.

Bachmann's challenge will be to gain the trust of voters beyond hard-core conservatives. While she may play well among social conservatives who dominate politics in Iowa, her future is far more uncertain in other parts of the country.

Her announcement speech, accompanied by rock music as traffic noise roared from a nearby highway, was full of rhetoric against Obama, memories of her Iowa childhood years and her rock-solid devotion to conservative principles of low taxes and low government spending.

Rather than taking shots at her Republican rivals, Bachmann urged voters to make a "bold choice" and pick her. She focused her energies on Obama's handling of the economy, still suffering from 9.1 percent unemployment.

'SUPPORT A FAMILY'

"We cannot afford four more years of millions of Americans who are out of work and are not making enough in wages to support a family. ... We cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama," she said to loud cheers from the crowd.

A former tax lawyer, Bachmann is the head of the Tea Party caucus in the House and is a fiscal hawk, as well as a strong critic of gay marriage and abortion.

The Tea Party is a loosely organized conservative political movement that emerged after Obama took office in 2009.

Her recent political rise shows the power of Tea Party fiscal conservatives who rose to prominence in last year's congressional elections, partly due to voter worries about the budget deficit, estimated to be $1.4 trillion in 2011.

Tea Party Republicans are pushing hard for steep spending cuts in bipartisan talks to avoid a debt default.

Bachmann will be vying with conservative rivals such as former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty in Iowa, where social conservatives play a major role in Republican politics. Pawlenty took a hit with a poor 7 percent showing in the Des Moines Register poll.

Despite the poor economy, Obama still heads most polls against Republican rivals in the 2012 election.

Bachmann quoted Obama as saying in February 2009 that if he did not get the economy growing in three years "there's going to be a one-term proposition."

"Well, Mr. President, your policies haven't worked, spending our way out of the recession hasn't worked, and so Mr. President we take you at your word," she said.

Her strong performance at a New Hampshire debate two weeks ago has given her a boost and prompted Republicans to take a second look at Bachmann, who is a mother of five children and has provided foster care for 23 others.

The crowd in Waterloo, where Bachmann was born, included ardent supporters and undecided voters who came to hear what she had to say.

"I'm looking for someone who can deliver on what she says, someone whose words and actions line up," said Jennifer Green of West Des Moines. "She's a little bit outside the box, she's a little bit different, different, and I think that may be what we need. And it would be cool to have a woman president."

Bachmann's presence in the race could dampen the chances that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will make a late entry into the campaign, since their messages resonate with the same conservative voters.

Unlike Palin, Bachmann holds public office.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Washington)

(Editing by Paul Simao)

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Outspoken Bachmann launches White House bid (AP)

WATERLOO, Iowa – Outspoken tea party favorite Michele Bachmann cast herself as the "bold choice" for the Republican presidential nomination as she formally kicked off her campaign Monday in her Iowa home town.

Outside a sun-splashed historic mansion in Waterloo, Bachmann told a crowd of more than 100 family members, friends, supporters and others that she is waging her campaign "not for vanity," but because voters "must make a bold choice if we are to secure the promise of the future."

The three-term Minnesota congresswoman railed against the Democrat she hopes to oust — President Barack Obama.

"We can't afford four more years of Barack Obama," she said.

Bachmann steered clear of specific proposals she'd advance as president, a day after suggesting that the concerns over averting a debt crisis were "scare tactics" that could be solved by paying only the interest on U.S. obligations while lawmakers work on a deal to cut spending as part of a new debt ceiling. The idea has been dismissed as unworkable by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

She reminisced about her childhood in a Democratic household — and her own volunteer work for Democratic President Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign. But she made clear her allegiances long ago shifted, stressing her tea party connections.

"The liberals, and to be clear I am not one of those, want you to believe the tea party movement is just the right wing of the Republican Party," she said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

As a new Iowa poll this past weekend signaled she'll be a force in the state that opens the Republican nomination contest, Bachmann hopes to reshape the GOP field and how she's viewed by voters. After the formal Iowa kickoff, she planned to shift her focus to New Hampshire and South Carolina, other early voting states with traditions of separating the viable contenders from the political also-rans.

Bachmann, 55, has many wondering if the edgy side that turned her into a conservative star will be the one she shows on the presidential campaign trail. Her say-anything approach has earned her a loyal following but also plenty of guff from detractors who see her as a fringe politician prone to missteps.

In March, she famously flubbed Revolutionary War geography. She told a group of students and conservative activists in Manchester, N.H. "You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord." Those first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire. She later admitted she made a mistake.

For this campaign, she has surrounded herself with no-nonsense veterans of national politics, some of whom have deep ties to the political establishment Bachmann typically eschews.

Striking a less contentious tone, Bachmann told the Iowa crowd.

"Our problems don't have an identity of party, they are problems that were created by both parties," she said, adding, "Americans aren't interested in affiliation, they're interested in solutions."

Bachmann's unswerving style provides a sharp contrast with the more measured way of 2012 rivals, such as former Govs. Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Others vying for the nomination are ex-Sen. Rick Santorum, Texas Rep. Ron Paul and businessman Herman Cain.

Possible late entrants include Texas Gov. Rick Perry and 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

A Des Moines Register poll published Sunday showed Bachmann and Romney far out front of the others in Iowa.

Some at Monday's event said they were giving her a hard look and could see supporting her at February's caucus.

Marv Dillavou, a firearms salesman, said he's not ready to commit to a candidate but likes what he's seen from Bachmann.

"I'm happy to see a serious female candidate. She's very accomplished," Dillavou said. Critics, he added, "make too much of every word, every innuendo gets blown out of proportion. It's good that she speaks her mind."

Cedar Falls retiree Terrye Kizlyk was also impressed.

"She speaks from here," Kizlyk said, pointing to her heart.

Bachmann's political climb has been swift, brushing off a school board race defeat just 12 years ago and moving rapidly from Minnesota's state Senate to Congress. In Washington, Bachmann vaulted to prominence by trying to block and now promising to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law. She has also tangled with GOP House leaders over her concerns they are too timid on federal spending cuts.

She's staunchly conservative on social issues, too, calling for more abortion restrictions and constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage.

In her latest national introduction, Bachmann has played up a softer side by highlighting her role in raising five children and 23 foster kids. But she's also gone hard at Obama, laying federal debt and deficits at his feet and accusing him of pushing the nation toward socialism.

Dubbing herself a "constitutional conservative," Bachmann said she would bring a vastly different philosophy to the White House.

"I don't believe that the solutions to our problems are Washington centric, I believe they are every American centric," she said.

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Obama launches technology partnership to spur jobs (Reuters)

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Friday launched an initiative to develop new U.S. manufacturing jobs by teaming government up with companies and universities to invest more than $500 million in advanced technologies.

Obama, who must ease high U.S. unemployment to be confident of winning a second White House term in elections next year, visited Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to launch the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, aimed at fostering a new generation of U.S.-made high-technology products.

"This partnership is about new cutting edge ideas to create new jobs, spark new breakthroughs, reinvigorate American manufacturing today. Right now," the Democratic president told an audience of around 200 in a robotics laboratory.

The initiative does not involve new government spending and Obama, who is fighting Republicans to raise the U.S. borrowing limit, emphasized the need to curb the country's deficit and debt, while investing in its future.

"If we want a robust growing economy we need a robust growing manufacturing sector," he said. "I ran for president to get us back to where we need to be. I have a larger vision for America."

The White House says major new technologies in the past were commercialized into vast industries with the help of government-university-company partnerships, including telephones, jet engines and the Internet.

It hopes for similar achievements by speeding development of new technologies such as next-generation robotics, advanced composite materials and bio-manufacturing.

The program will leverage existing federal funds and future federal departmental budgets to invest with industry some $300 million to jump-start domestic manufacturing capabilities seen as critical to U.S. national security. Initial public-private investment areas include batteries, composites, metal fabrication, biotechnology and alternative energy.

STRUGGLING ECONOMY

Obama is rolling out the initiative as the U.S. unemployment rate remains at a stubbornly high 9.1 percent and initial claims for state unemployment benefits are ticking higher after months of decline.

The U.S. economy is struggling to gain traction against high energy prices, a still-depressed housing market, tight credit conditions and headwinds from Europe's debt crisis.

Until recently, one of the economy's brightest spots had been manufacturing, which had powered the recovery from the 2007-2009 recession, the country's longest and deepest since the 1930s. Manufacturers have added about 129,000 jobs so far this year.

But manufacturing no longer has a dominant role in the U.S. economy, accounting for about 11.7 percent of gross domestic product and roughly 9 percent of total employment.

"We have not run out of stuff to make. We've just got to reinvigorate our manufacturing sector so it leads the world like it always has," Obama said. "We've launched an all-hands-on-deck effort."

The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, to be led by Dow Chemical Co Chairman Andrew Liveris and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield, also aims to invest more than $100 million to help enable U.S. companies to discover, develop, manufacture and deploy advanced materials twice as fast as they are capable of today.

A further $70 million will be made available to support research into next-generation robots -- those that can work alongside human operators on the factory floor, in hospitals, on battlefields and in space.

The Department of Energy will leverage existing funds and future budgets with an initial goal of investing $120 million to develop manufacturing and processes to reduce energy consumption in manufacturing.

Other manufacturers initially involved in the program will be Allegheny Technologies Inc, Caterpillar Inc, Ford Motor Co, Corning Inc, Honeywell, Intel, Johnson and Johnson, Northrop Grumman, Procter and Gamble, and Stryker Corp.

The universities initially involved in the program will be MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.

(Additional reporting by Lucia Mutikani; writing by David Lawder; editing by Mohammad Zargham)

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