Redefining the GOP, Mercury in Transit, The Origins of Life

Coming up on today’s show:

• House Speaker Paul Ryan will meet with Donald Trump today, just days after the billionaire businessman and presumptive Republican nominee said that he’s not interested in unifying his party. Charlie Sykes, an outspoken critic of Trump and host of Midday with Charlie Sykes, a conservative talk radio show in Milwaukee, discusses the future of the GOP.

• Stargazers across the country are gathering to watch Mercury appear as a small black dot as it moves between the Earth and the Sun — the first time its made the march since 2006. Jason Kendall, an adjunct professor of astronomy at William Paterson University, has the details.

• On Monday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists will release a searchable database with information on more than 200,000 offshore entities involved with the Panama Papers. Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, explains what we can expect.

• In the past week, fast-spreading wildfires have burned over 350,000 acres of Fort McMurray, a boom town in the center for Canada’s oil sands region in Alberta. John Innes, dean of the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry and Forest Renewal B.C.’s chair of forest management, examines the extent of the damage, and the link between climate change and wildfires.

• Residents in Boulder, Colorado are divided over whether or not to become a sister-city with the Palestinian city of Nablus, which is located in the West Bank. Essrea Cherin, president of the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project, discusses the initiative, and why some Boulder residents are pushing back. 

• It takes an ambitious community college to educate prison inmates. As part of our Community College Challenge, The Takeaway visits Walla Walla Community College’s prison education program.

• We explore how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level with Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and author of “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself.”