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John Kerry, who is expected to be nominated as secretary of state later this afternoon, has made frequent visits to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Assad is now under fire for mass murdering his own civilians, as he fights an internal war to keep his position of power. Even Obama has called for Assad to go. In February 2009, Kerry led a delegation there to engage Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told visiting US members of Congress on Saturday that the United States should ‘move away from a policy based on dictating decisions.’ Assad's guests on Saturday included US Senator John...

Obama urges lawmakers to make one last try for fiscal crisis deal, leaves for Hawaii Published December 21, 2012 | FoxNews.com President Obama urged congressional leaders Friday to take one last shot at crafting a bill that can prevent tax hikes on middle-class Americans -- as he and virtually everyone involved prepared to bolt Washington for the holidays. The president, while optimistically claiming he would be back "next week" to handle a budget deal, was planning to board Air Force One with his family Friday evening for a holiday vacation in Hawaii. House Speaker John Boehner, who until several days...

NEW ORLEANS – A Louisiana woman ran afoul of police when she gave her neighbors an unusual holiday greeting, hanging Christmas lights in the shape of a middle finger. Sarah Childs was in a dispute with some of her neighbors in Denham Springs, just east of Baton Rouge, so she decided to send a message with her decorations. Neighbors complained and police threatened to arrest her, so she and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana sued the city. A judge ruled in her favor Thursday. "I imagine it will be back up before too long," ACLU of Louisiana executive...

The term fiscal cliff has hit the airwaves, print media, business reports, and articles. Not a minute goes by without these two words being thrown at the listener. But how many people really understand where the expression started and how it became so popular? “Judging by media coverage, the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ is the only thing driving the U.S. stock market these days. Unfortunately, a lot of the coverage is either alarmist, erroneous, or focused solely on the daily (or even hourly) micro-developments in the story,” a Dec. 4 article on the Motley Fool website states. The expression “Fiscal Cliff”...

Obama: Time to address American culture ‘that too often glorifies guns and violence’Charlie Spiering - Commentary Staff Writer Modified: December 21, 2012 at 6:35 am President Obama this morning issued a video response to a White House petition demanding more gun control – specifically mentioning America’s gun culture. **SNIP** “If we work harder to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, there would be fewer atrocities like the one in Newtown — or any of the lesser-known tragedies that visit small towns and big cities all across America every day,” Obama concluded.

After taking criticism for missing an October deadline, the Obama administration Friday released its list of proposed government-wide regulations that it plans to consider in the next year. The administration put out its notice, called the unified regulatory agenda, online around 3 p.m. on the Friday before Christmas, after most lawmakers had left town. The proposed rules cover everything from power plant pollution to health-care standards to workplace safety. Critics who accuse President Obama of being an overzealous regulator said the timing of the announcement was no accident. “President Obama has earned a permanent spot on the disclosure naughty list...

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Thursday that he had started discussions with leaders of the State Legislature about new gun control measures, and that he planned to propose a package of gun legislation in his State of the State address on Jan. 9. “There’s a big difference of opinion on these issues,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said in an interview on an Albany radio station. The New York Assembly, controlled by Democrats, has voted for a number of proposed gun control measures in recent years, only to have the legislation falter in the Senate, which has been controlled by Republicans....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Jim in Indianapolis. Hi, and welcome to the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Love your show. First of all, happy holidays to you, your staff, your loved ones, and listeners. RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. We all appreciate it. CALLER: I want to give you a quick background on myself. I'm a white male in my mid-thirties. I work sometimes six to seven days a week. I go to school full time. I have a wife and two small boys. The reason why I do all this is because I need to be a...

Energy: As the U.S. changes the balance of power by exporting some of its abundant natural gas resources, a Hollywood propaganda film debuts claiming the technology making it possible will poison America's small towns. 'Promised Land," a film that does nothing to alter Hollywood's stereotype of businessmen, particularly energy industry executives, as greedy plunderers of the planet, opens this week in selected theatres. The anti-fracking film is based on a not-true story about well contamination in a small Pennsylvania town with a healthy dose of junk science. As documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who is working on his own documentary, "FrackNation",...

Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele called the National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s press conference Friday “very haunting and very disturbing,” in the wake of the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. “I don’t even know where to begin. As a supporter of the Second Amendment and a supporter of the NRA — even though I’m not a member of the NRA — I just found it very haunting and very disturbing that our country now is talking about arming our teachers and our principals in classrooms,” Steele said on MSNBC immediately after...

U.S. on alert for Islamist ire to ‘Zero Dark Thirty’Film depicts harsh interrogation methods By Kristina Wong The Washington Times Thursday, December 20, 2012 **SNIP** Yet fears of a violent backlash against “Zero Dark Thirty,” which goes into wide release in the U.S. on Jan. 11, are swirling in some corners of Washington and appear to be accentuated by a public perception of a U.S. government consultative role in pre-production research for the film. Radical corners of the Muslim world have been known to fan the flames around perceived official U.S. involvement with material considered blasphemous, as happened this autumn...

During the second presidential debate of 2012, President Barack Obama said, “What I’m trying to do is get a broader conversation about how we reduce the violence generally. Part of it, is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.” You can bet he meant what he said. Obama has a long history of holding anti-Second Amendment views, despite portraying himself as pro-hunter and reasonable about gun control. A second term spells trouble for law-abiding citizens wanting to exercise their right to keep and bear arms: Obama is strongly opposed to concealed carry, has supported gun owner licensing...

Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyoncé Knowles are among celebrities campaigning for gun regulation in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. The stars feature in a new public service announcement against gun violence for Demand a Plan after 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults before turning the gun on himself at the Connecticut school last Friday. The one-and-a-half minute clip features the celebrity activists asking: 'How many more colleges? How many more classrooms? How many more movie theatres? How many more houses of faith?' before lawmakers tighten regulations. A cast of artists...

Federal agents no longer will scoop up jailed illegal immigrants who had been picked up by police for traffic offenses and other petty crimes, the nation's top immigration enforcer announced Friday. "We are changing who" we seek to detain and deport to focus more on serious criminals, said John Morton, the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Morton changed the national policy just as sheriffs around the Bay Area were rethinking their cooperation with the controversial federal Secure Communities immigration program, out of concern that it was leading to deportation of too many minor offenders. The shift responds to...

Rep. Dennis Baxley is suggesting a novel approach for preventing a repeat of the kind of shooting massacre that occurred last Friday in Newtown, Conn.: arm principals and teachers with guns.

HARROLD, Texas In this tiny Texas town, children and their parents don't give much thought to safety at the community's lone school — mostly because some of the teachers are carrying concealed weapons. In remote Harrold, the nearest sheriff's office is 30 minutes away, and people tend to know — and trust — one another. So the school board voted to let teachers bring guns to school. "We don't have money for a security guard, but this is a better solution," Superintendent David Thweatt said. "A shooter could take out a guard or officer with a visible, holstered weapon, but...

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may have affected humans for much longer than is currently believed. Alfred Roca, an assistant professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, thinks that the genomes of an isolated West African human population provide important clues about how the disease has evolved. HIV is thought to have originated from chimpanzees in central Africa that were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a retrovirus. "If you look at the diversity present across SIV in chimpanzees, it suggests that they have had it for tens of thousands of years," Roca...

President Obama urged congressional leaders to consider a scaled-back plan to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff" in a holiday plea for a debt-deal compromise. The president said that legislators should pass legislation on points where there was consensus — including extending Bush-era tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent of taxpayers, extending unemployment insurance and laying "the groundwork" for future deficit reduction. "That's an achievable goal that can get done in 10 days," Obama said. The plan, as described by the president, would leave unresolved issues like the looming defense sequester and the debt ceiling. The president said...

Homeowners in the Foxchase subdivision of Clermont have seen their packages disappear from their doorsteps and front porches as of late, suspecting a teeny thief was behind the pilfering. Tiffany Baggs had two packages go missing so she coordinated with her neighbor across the street, Tim Lebeda, and set up a camera and decoy boxes to bait the bandit. Their suspicions were confirmed when footage showed an 8-year-old girl walking up Baggs' driveway to the porch, looking at the door briefly and running off with the goods, according to a police report.

“She is in good spirits and could not be more excited about the announcement that I'm making,” Obama said. The president, hailing her contributions as a member of his "extraordinary" national security team, said she had wanted to be there for the announcement. "She’s looking forward to getting back to work,” he said.