These three things will change the world today.
1. Nasa unveils new findings
Today, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), the US space agency will hold a press conference in Washington.
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It is expected to announce a “discovery beyond our solar system” and “new findings on planets that orbit stars other than our sun, known as exoplanets”.
Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa headquarters, Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Michael Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium are some of the prominent researchers who will speak at the briefing.
The conference begins at 6pm London time. You can watch it live via Nasa TV.
2. Fed releases minutes
The US Federal Reserve (Fed) will release the minutes of its first meeting of 2017 later today, which saw officials vote to leave interest rates unchanged after raising them in December.
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By GlobalDataEconomists will be looking out for clues as to whether the Fed decides to raise rates again and how the central bank might shrink its balance sheet.
Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester said that she would be comfortable raising rates if the economy maintained its current performance in a speech in Singapore on Monday.
“The dollar was pushed up by the Fed talk, but its upside (was) heavy in the Asian session, due to factors including Japanese companies’ seasonal repatriation,” said Mitsuo Imaizumi, chief currency strategist at Daiwa Securities, a Japanese investment bank.
“We’re all waiting for the minutes, to see if members talked about reducing the Fed’s balance sheet,” he said.
The next Fed meeting will take place in mid-March.
3. Irish PM Enda Kenny steps down
Irish prime minister Enda Kenny is expected to give his Fine Gael parliamentary party a timeframe for his resignation from his post today.
Kenny is likely to stand down shortly after meeting president Trump in Washington for the annual St Patrick’s Day shamrock presentation.
The abrupt end to Kenny’s six-year leadership comes amid an ongoing controversy surrounding the case of Maurice McCabe, a police sergeant who made allegations of misconduct against his colleagues.
This sparked a backlash from senior officers, who allegedly conspired with another state agency to wrongly smear him as a child abuser.
Leo Varadkar, the gay son of an Indian immigrant, is the favourite to replace Kenny and become Ireland’s next prime minister.
