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POINCIANA, Fla.,- Authorities in Florida said they arrested a man accused of stealing 166 steel manhole covers and attempting to sell them as scrap. The Polk County Sheriff's Office said Christopher Fink, 40, was arrested Thursday after the Toho Water Authority reported $22,000 worth of manhole covers missing Wednesday in Poinciana -- and Fink was caught attempting to sell the covers at local metal dealers, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported Friday. Fink was charged with felony counts of grand theft, dealing in stolen property and giving false verification to a secondhand metal dealer. The sheriff's office said more charges...

White House Condemns Court Ruling On 'Unconstitutional' Obama Appointments Spokesman says ruling heralded by Republicans' lawyers as 'stinging rebuke' to president is 'novel and unprecedented' 25 January 2013 The Obama administration is likely to appeal to the Supreme Court over its right to make direct appointments when Congress is in recess. Barack Obama breached the constitution when he bypassed Congress to make appointments to a labour relations panel, a federal appeal court ruled on Friday in a decision that was condemned by the White House as "novel and unprecedented". The judgement, from a three-judge panel of the US court of...

Hillary Clinton is likely suffering from double vision because she damaged her 6th cranial nerve in a fall a month ago, experts said. "The double vision could occur solely from her hitting her head - even a minor head trauma can do damage to the 6th cranial nerve," said Dr. Mark Kupersmith, Director of Neuro-Ophthalmology at St. Lukes-Roosevelt. Damage to the nerve also could have been the result of a blood clot she suffered later, he said.

Spouses Club Relents, Says Lesbian Army Wife Can Be 'Full Member' Ashley Broadway, left, is pictured with her wife, Lt. Col. Heather Mack and their 2-year-old son. By Bill Briggs Hours after same-sex Army wife Ashley Broadway was named Fort Bragg's 2013 “spouse of the year,” the on-base spouses club — that has for two months rebuffed Broadway's bid to join — fully reversed course and invited her "to become a full member," according to emails sent to NBC News and Broadway. The decision comes one week after the Association of Bragg Officers' Spouses (ABOS) extended Broadway — who is...

Church remembers St. Paul's companions, Sts. Timothy and Titus   By Benjamin Mann   Credit: Joe Thorn (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Denver, Colo., Jan 20, 2013 / 06:13 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Jan. 26, the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the liturgical memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, close companions of the Apostle Paul and bishops of the Catholic Church in its earliest days.Both men received letters from St. Paul, which are included in the New Testament. Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians also venerate the saints, but do not combine their commemorations. Instead, the Byzantine tradition remembers St. Titus on Aug. 25...

In an effort to cut defense spending, the Obama Administration plans to cut health benefits for active duty and retired military personnel and their families while not touching the benefits enjoyed by unionized civilian defense workers. The move, congressional aides suggested, is to force those individuals into Obamacare, Bill Gertz reported at the Washington Beacon. Gertz added: The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and...

Explanation: Moonlight illuminates a snowy scene in this night land and skyscape made on January 17 from Lower Miller Creek, Alaska, USA. Overexposed near the mountainous western horizon is the first quarter Moon itself, surrounded by an icy halo and flanked left and right by moondogs. Sometimes called mock moons, a more scientific name for the luminous apparations is paraselenae (plural). Analogous to a sundog or parhelion, a paraselene is produced by moonlight refracted through thin, hexagonal, plate-shaped ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. As determined by the crystal geometry, paraselenae are seen at an angle of 22 degrees or...

Atomic Kittens - German 400-Year-Old Weapons Manuscript Which Reveals Medieval Plans to Strap Bombs to Cats Dossier, called Fire Book, has drawing of animals strapped with explosives It also includes barrel bombs, grenades and anti-personnel ground spikes Document has been released in digital form by University of Pennsylvania Modern militaries have all manner of weapons at their disposal from nuclear submarines to heat-seeking missiles. But 400 years ago technology was rather more limited and armies had to make the very best of their resources - in whatever shape or form they may take. One such quest to steal a march...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kzT6X3_Bg9o

Making a prayer request for a dear relative who has been diagnosed with metastasizing cancer. Short of full recovery, I'm praying that his suffering is minimal. A fine Christian man, father & husband needs your prayer help.

Yay!! MORE POOR DEMOCRAT VOTERS! Anti-higher taxes activist Grover Norquist is joining an effort to convince conservatives to support statehood for Puerto Rico. Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, is scheduled to appear at a press conference with Luis Fortuno, the former Republican governor of Puerto Rico, in Washington to push statehood for the territory next week. The group organizing the effort is the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. “The group of conservative leaders will call on Congress to pass legislation to allow the people of Puerto Rico to decide their political future among non-territorial and constitutionally valid...

Police hunt for women after brawl at social services is caught on tape Police are on the hunt for four women who were caught on video in a massive brawl that broke out on line at a social services offices earlier this week in East St. Louis, Illinois. According to witnesses, the fight started over a disagreement between several women in line. In the video, you can see four women pushing, shoving and fists flying before security managed to separate the women. The women left before police arrived. But East St. Louis Police Chief Michael Floore says that doesn't mean...

I've made it easy for you to contact your New Mexico legislative representatives and TELL THEM TO OPPOSE a 'Sweeping Gun Control Measure In Santa Fe.' Use the following links/resources to: 1) find your New Mexico state senator and house rep and contact them via email, phone, and/or snail-mail; 2) use sample letter text; and, 3) contact every member of the New Mexico House Judiciary Committee because they're holding a public hearing Monday on the "Sweeping Gun Control Measure": 1) Find your reps' contact info Find your state house representative; and,Find your state senator 2) Use sample letter text I...

Defense Distributed's Cody Wilson Cody Wilson cheerfully describes himself as a crypto-anarchist. “Crypto” modifies “anarchist” in the sense not that it obscures it but that it points to a means: cryptology, code, communication, and technology as the last, best hope for a radical freedom. You meet a few anarchists, crypto and otherwise, hanging around on the fjords and isthmuses of the conservative continent, and like most of them, Cody is young, quick, bright, and vaguely terrifying. Or rather, what’s terrifying isn’t the dude — he’s quite pleasant — but the simultaneous casualness and precision with which he lays out the...

The Resistance Begins: New York Gun Owners Refuse to Register; “Largest Act of Civil Disobedience in State History” Mac Slavo January 25th, 2013 With emotions running high in the aftermath of the Newtown Sandy Hook shooting, politicians on the State and Federal level have begun introducing legislative actions to curtail access to firearms protected by the Second Amendment. In Missouri, parents may soon be forced to register firearms with their child’s school under threat of criminal penalties. In Massachusetts, another proposal would require storage of semi-automatic rifles at government approved storage depots. And, in the State of New York, congressional...

Apparently history was not a strong suit in college days for Barry Obama -- or his highly-paid speechwriters. In his 2,106 word aspirational tone poem from the Capitol steps at Monday's official inauguration, Obama called for many people to do many things and vowed a myriad of vows, already faded in the memory of millions -- as usually happens to inaugurals and State of the Union shopping lists. We published a complete address text and C-SPAN video right here. Among those 2,100 words, four shockers leapt out at the eyes and ears of many not in the American news media....

Creating gun laws is one thing, but convincing people to support them is something else. That was the job of Vice President Joe Biden on Friday, when he held a roundtable discussion on gun control in Virginia. CBS 2’s Mike Puccinelli reports new laws could be tough to sell at gun shows, like one held in suburban Rosemont on Friday. Organizers said it was the first gun show in Cook County in as many as 50 years. Gun shows have come under increased scrutiny since the school shooting massacre in Newtown, Conn., because in the vast majority of states, gun...

(CBS News) Republican Party leaders are searching for the way forward in the wake of an election they believed should have gone their way. Bob Schieffer, chief Washington correspondent and host of "Face the Nation," said on "CBS This Morning" that Republicans are still reeling from the defeat. He explained, "You started out with very high unemployment, you had an economy that was not in great shape. You had all of those signs, polls showing most people thought the country was headed in the wrong direction, and yet the Republicans lost, and I think they're just trying to figure out...

What does IHS stand for? The meaning of the Holy Name of Jesus   January 3rd, Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus In the Extraordinary Form, the feast of the Holy Name is of the “second class” (making it equal to Sundays throughout the year, complete with the recitation of the Gloria and the Credo), but in the Ordinary Form the memorial of the Holy Name was not even included in the calendar after 1970. Happily, the feast was re-instituted as an optional memorial by Bl. John Paul II – we should think that the Name deserves at...

(CNN) -- One of the most infamous defendants in U.S. trials of recent years took two big steps Friday toward clearing her name, and she vowed to "keep fighting." Florida's 5th District Court of Appeal threw out two of Casey Anthony's four convictions of lying to authorities as they investigated the disappearance of Anthony's 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. The appeals judges agreed with Anthony's argument that the multiple convictions amounted to double jeopardy. But the judges upheld the other two convictions.