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"Millsap is a calendar girl for the Bare Knuckle Babes (Miss May 2014), and on Saturday she served the Babes proudly by wrestling a 72-pound flathead catfish onto the banks of Oklahoma’s Lake Texoma."

BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhua) -- China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec) said on Saturday that it has completed the purchase of 50 percent of Chesapeake's share in its Mississippi Lime assets for 1.02 billion U.S. dollars. Chesapeake is the second-largest natural gas developer in the United States and its Mississippi Lime oil and natural gas assets are in northern Oklahoma. Sinopec signed the agreement with Chesapeake on Feb. 23 through its wholly-owned subsidiary Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration and Production Corporation. The deal means Sinopec acquires 425,000 acres (171,991 hectares) in the Mississippi Lime shale formation, with estimated proven and probable (2P) oil...

MIDWEST CITY, Oklahoma -- A man was shot and killed after he snatched a 2-year-old girl out of a shopping cart and held her hostage in an Oklahoma grocery store. The man removed the child from the shopping cart, held a knife to her and made crazy demands. Officers spent 30 minutes negotiating with the man. An officer shot the man in the head at point-blank range when he pulled the knife closer to the girl’s throat. “He thought the child was being harmed and stabbed at the time he did the shooting,” said Midwest Police Department Chief Brandon Clabes....

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)New pipelines are beginning to carry a glut of domestic crude from the middle of the country to Texas' Gulf Coast, boosting the fortunes of the area's big refineries and further fueling a decline in oil imports. Magellan Midstream Partners' Longhorn pipeline began shipping oil from West Texas to Houston in April—the first of at least seven pipeline projects that could send as much as two million barrels a day from oil-saturated choke points in Oklahoma and the interior of Texas to the largest concentration of refineries in the country. But domestic oil production is at such a high level...

SNIPPET: "Authorities in Ecuador are officially treating the disappearance of an Oklahoma City valedictorian as a kidnapping case, according to family members searching for the teen." SNIPPET: "Classen SAS graduate August Reiger went missing Sunday from a mountain near his Baños resort where he had been staying for the last week." SNIPPET: "The U.S. Embassy says it is in close contact with the Reiger family while the State Department continues to warn of the dangers in the area." SNIPPET: "The family tells supporters in Oklahoma City that roughly 150 people searched for August on Tuesday. Those close to August say...

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that a man can sue the state of Oklahoma over its license plates. The man, Keith Cressman, has argued that the state's standard license plate, which depicts a Native American shooting an arrow into the sky, goes against the separation of church and state, according to a report from Tulsa World. He sued a number of state officials in 2011. That lawsuit was initially dismissed in 2012 but has since been reinstated by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. According to Tulsa World, the court ruled that the image of Allan Houser's...

MOORE, Okla. (AP) -- Authorities say looters have come from as far away as New York and Virginia to steal from victims of last month's tornado in Moore, Okla. The Oklahoman reports ( http://bit.ly/18UQjGJ ) that police arrested one man from Elmhurst, N.Y., and two from Virginia on misdemeanor complaints of stealing copper wire, scrap metal and other items from homes destroyed by the May 20 tornado. Twenty-four people were killed.....

<p>This is about the best cliff notes version of the Obama regime ever.</p>

Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt has found an ingenious way to call a halt to the Obamacare project: Hold the federal government to the letter of that misbegotten law. His fight is a lonely one: While a majority of states signed on to the 2010 lawsuit opposing Obamacare on constitutional grounds, Oklahoma is standing largely alone today. It should not be. Its lawsuit challenging the IRS’s attempt to spend tax dollars and levy taxes without authorization from Congress speaks to a fundamental issue. Simply put, the executive cannot will into being a tax that Congress has not created through legislation...

Democrats are practically pleading with President Obama to sharpen his message. After successfully raising taxes on every working American at the beginning of the year, the progressive movement has suffered one debilitating blow after another. In March, many in the media laughed when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) declared conservatives were winning. But the rallying cry of collective action that rang throughout Obama’s second inaugural address now seems like more empty rhetoric, not an emerging reality. Still buzzed from their victory over Mitt Romney, Team Obama held the misguided belief they could convince Americans (not collectivists to begin with) that they...

Oklahoma had barely started clearing the rubble from a monstrous tornado two weeks ago when another rash of twisters plowed through this ill-fated swath of Tornado Alley. At least 16 people are dead across the state after a vicious storm tore through the area Friday evening, Oklahoma City Fire Chief Keith Bryant said Monday morning. That number may continue to rise. Authorities will resume their search Monday for six people still missing, including four who sought shelter in storm drains, Bryant said. [Snip] A trio of storm chasers who devoted their lives to hunting powerful storms died in the middle...

Tim Samaras had one passion in life: Tornadoes. He told The Weather Channel that when he was kid, his mother sat him down in front of The Wizard of Oz; he was immediately entranced by the violent, dark twister that tore through the landscape.Samaras went on to become one of the premier storm chasers in the country. He was an engineer who designed probes that captured information at the base of the tornado, the part that can destroy homes and buildings in seconds.The problem — and the exhilarating part — is that in order for those probes to work, they...

There are people in certain areas of the United States who know how we feel, living in Tornado Alley. The area earned has earned its name again, as multiple tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma. Five more people are dead after the twisters struck the Oklahoma City area Friday afternoon and night. I have sent an email to Charles Phipps, author of OK Politechs and coauthor here at Political Realities, as he lives in the Oklahoma City area. I'll update this post when I make sure he is okay. The power of these storms is amazing and nothing can seem to...

Windsor and Essex County donors have loaded a truck with 40,000 pounds of aid for Oklahoma City’s tornado victims, but red tape is keeping it in a Leamington parking lot. ---snip--- ...(US)customs supervisors, who originally told brokers working with the charity that the truck would fly through the border without trouble, changed their tune Thursday, Sauve said. “They were basically requiring endless documentation and approvals,” he said. ”We’re stuck with a truck with 40,000 pounds of food, totally full.”

<p>DEVELOPING: A massive tornado has touched down west of Oklahoma City where it has done damage and it is headed toward Oklahoma City.</p> <p>The National Weather Service has issued a tornado emergency for the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. Weather service forecaster Daryl Williams says the emergency issued Friday evening includes Oklahoma City and some suburbs.</p>

The name of the city crushed by a tornado is Moore, Okla.

Last year the Center for Disease Control called prescription painkiller addiction an epidemic in the country, identifying Oklahoma as leading the nation in both the addiction and related deaths. It is only fitting that the battle against such addiction in "Native America" be led by three tribal owned clinics, Absentee Shawnee Counseling Services, OKC; Keetoowah Cherokee Treatment Services, Tulsa; and Quapaw Counseling Services, Miami. Generally speaking, prescription painkillers are opiates. There are 14 Opioid Treatment Programs in Oklahoma certified by the Federal agency SAMHSA CSAT, including the Veterans Hospital in Oklahoma City. The importance of these OTPs revolves around SAMHSA's...

Coburn: Constituents link IRS audits to Mitt Romney donations By Daniel Strauss - 05/23/13 09:33 AM ET Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said Thursday his constituents have suggested they were audited by the Internal Revenue Service because they donated to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. Coburn made the charge during an interview on MSNBC. [Watch video] "What I would tell you, is our whistleblower side is lit up," Coburn said Thursday on the news channel. "And I got a phone call yesterday and one of the things I want to know is, everybody that contributed to Romney, I want to know...

Video from inside another school and updates.

Yes, climate change is happening. But it's hard to say that the tornado that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma -- or any given tornado, for that matter -- was influenced by climate change. Scientific research has not made a clear connection between tornadoes and climate change, said J. Marshall Shepherd, climate change expert and professor at the University of Georgia. There is currently a much better understanding of how climate change increases the risks of droughts, heat waves and precipitation, he said. There are also indications that changing patterns may influence the intensity of hurricanes. But as far as tornadoes: There's...