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The U.S. Embassy in Ghana is a large, secured office building in the bustling West African port city of Accra, but for a decade scammers convinced some folks that their humble two-story structure — without security fencing, U.S. military guards,… or Americans of any sort — was indeed the office of the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana. According to the State Department, Ghanaian and Turkish organized crime members operated the “embassy” three days a week, selling bogus visas and other government documents. While the building looks nothing like the actual embassy, the scammers did fly a U.S. flag outside and decorated...

President Obama officially ushered in the holiday season Thursday, lighting the National Christmas tree for the eighth and final time. Obama was joined at the annual tree lighting ceremony by First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughter, Sasha. The holiday celebration was hosted by actress Eva Longoria and featured a lineup of performances that included gospel singer Yolanda Adams, Chance the Rapper, The Lumineers and James Taylor.

It's expected to be the hot holiday gift of the season: Virtual reality headsets. It's a cool new experience but there's still a lot unknown about the technology, especially when it comes to kids. The headset completely immerses users in a new 3-D virtual world. "I felt like I was actually there." said one first-time user. "There's no age limit to this," said another virtual reality fan

Three months since the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics, the “marvelous city,” as it’s known, is unraveling.  The state of Rio is broke. It hasn’t been able to pay its bills since long before the games. A federal bailout kept police on the streets and hospitals open while Olympics tourists were in town. But now the money has dried up, and public employees aren’t being paid.

"@sdcritic: @HighonHillcrest @jeffzeleny @CNN There is NO QUESTION THAT #voterfraud did take place, and in favor of #CorruptHillary !" 9:21 PM - 28 Nov 2016

Rome (AFP) - An alert and chatty Italian woman, Emma Morano, on Tuesday celebrates her 117th birthday as the last known person alive who was born in the 19th century. Born November 29, 1899, she is the world's oldest living person and the secret to her longevity appears to lie in eschewing usual medical wisdom. "I eat two eggs a day, and that's it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth," she told AFP in an interview last month in her room in Verbania, a town in northern Italy on Lake Maggiore.

PATH workers are snoozing away huge chunks of their regular shifts, using nap time to rack up big overtime pay, The Post has learned. “Everybody sleeps,” an insider said. “Guys make big overtime by doing work for 40 minutes or an hour, then billing the Port Authority for four or five. That’s been going on for years.” The workers’ on-the-job dozing is under investigation by the PA inspector general, an agency spokesman said.

Ten people were shot, one of them fatally, in the crowded heart of New Orleans' French Quarter early Sunday, police said. Shots were fired at around 1:30 a.m. on the famous Bourbon Street at its intersection with Iberville Street, one block from Canal Street. Thirty police officers were already in the same block as part of extra patrols following the earlier Bayou Classic college football game and were able to respond quickly, Superintendent Michael Harrison told NBC station WDSU. "Shots rang out, we responded," he said, adding it was not clear what triggered the incident. Ten victims aged between 20...

Go to Google maps and search NYC Trump Tower. "Dump Tower" Use Bing instead?

Donald Trump is poised to win the state of Michigan after a razor-thin race, according to still-unofficial numbers released by the Michigan secretary of State Wednesday.  Each of Michigan’s 83 counties certified their vote tallies and submitted them to the secretary of State, showing Trump with a lead of about 10,700 total votes over Hillary Clinton, Reuters reported. The vote totals, which still need to be approved by the Board of State Canvassers on Nov. 28, show Trump received 2,279,543 votes to Clinton’s 2,268,839. 

Muslims across the United States feared they were being targeted for surveillance this week when they received automated polling calls asking them to press one if they identified as Muslim or two if they did not. Many worried President-elect Donald Trump was making good on his campaign promise to register all Muslims in the country or private citizens were laying the groundwork for a registry. The calls were in fact sent out as part of a survey by Emerge USA, a non-profit organization seeking to empower Muslim-Americans. The group created an algorithm to call Muslims for a poll on their...

Rio de Janeiro (AFP) - Maria Thereza Sombra may rely on Rio de Janeiro's police to keep her safe -- but in the grip of financial crisis they rely on the 82-year-old to supply them with toilet paper. Severe budget shortfalls in Brazil's recent Olympic host city have left police scrounging for equipment, fuel and even the most basic hygiene items. Hospitals are equally hard hit, compounding a deepening sense of insecurity in a city plagued by violent crime. Sombra said that ordinary citizens need to step in where the state is failing. "If the police have their hands tied...

EXCLUSIVE: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon‘s Michelle Yeoh is heading into the final frontier with Star Trek: Discovery.  Sources confirm to Deadline that the upcoming CBS All Access iteration of the fabled franchise will see Yeoh playing a Starfleet Captain.However, before you start mapping out the deck of the Discovery, sources close to the production tell us exclusively that Yeoh will actually be the leader of another ship. We hear that Yeoh has been cast as Han Bo and her ship is the Shenzhou. The Yeoh-run spacecraft is set to play a big role in Discovery‘s first season.

Federal regulators are warning railroad agencies nationwide to watch out for sleep apnea in train engineers. It comes after learning last week that the engineer in the fatal Hoboken train crash has the condition. The Federal Railroad Administration says it will issue a safety advisory this week for all railroads to screen and treat workers with sleep apnea.

A panel of three federal judges Monday struck down state house district maps drawn in 2001 by Wisconsin's Republican controlled legislature, finding the resulting districts so blatantly partisan that they denied Democrats a fair shot at electing candidates of their choosing. The case could now go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Democrats hope it will provide the justices a legal test that has for decades proven to be elusive — a way to tell how much partisanship is too much. "There is no question," said the 2-1 ruling, that the map drawn by Wisconsin's legislature "was designed to...

In 1920, for the first time, the Census Bureau counted more people living in urbanized America than in the countryside. This hasn’t been a rural nation ever since. Yet the idea of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian America has receded slowly despite demographic change. We still romanticize the family farm, though few of them exist anymore. We view even suburbia in pastoral terms — the “crab grass frontier,” as the historian Kenneth T. Jackson put it. And, as the recent Electoral College results make clear, we still live with political institutions that have baked in a distinctly pro-rural bias, by design. The...

North Carolina's gubernatorial race was undecided 10 days after the Nov. 8 vote and new allegations by the Republican incumbent's campaign about felons and dead people casting ballots could leave the outcome in limbo for weeks. Republican Governor Pat McCrory, trailing Democratic challenger Roy Cooper by about 6,300 votes according to the state elections website Friday afternoon, has not conceded. Under state law, Friday was the deadline for counties to certify their results. But challenges over the validity of hundreds of votes and reviews of provisional ballots were expected to delay the reports from many, if not all, of the...

Once or twice a year, a movie comes along that is not only an exciting piece of entertainment and a shining exemplar of cinematic craftsmanship, but also a resonant meditation on the human condition. Such a film is “Arrival,” the best movie to arrive in theaters so far in 2016. If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to get yourself to the multiplex right away and save for later the rest of this review, which will discuss details of the film’s beautifully realized, emotionally replete surprise ending. It might be the most awe-inspiring conclusion to a sci-fi movie...

Republican Trump, Donald J. 2,277,914 47.60%   Democratic Clinton, Hillary 2,264,807 47.33%  

Formal protests are now being filed in 11 additional counties to challenge potentially fraudulent absentee ballots cast for Roy Cooper and other Democrats, according to Governor Pat McCrory's campaign.A formal protest was filed with the Bladen County Board of Elections to challenge several hundred absentee ballots, alleged to be fraudulent on Tuesday. The initial evidence laid out in the protest suggests a "massive scheme to run an absentee ballot mill involving hundreds of ballots, perpetrated by and through the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC," a political-action committee funded by the N.C. Democrat Party and other prominent statewide Democrats.  In addition to...