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Pope Francis delivered a powerful boost of support to the Palestinians during a Holy Land pilgrimage Sunday, repeatedly backing their statehood aspirations, praying solemnly at Israel’s controversial separation barrier and calling the stalemate in peace efforts “unacceptable.” Palestinian officials hailed Francis’ decision to refer to the “state of Palestine.” In its official program, the Vatican referred to President Mahmoud Abbas as the president of the “state of Palestine,” and his Bethlehem office as the “presidential palace.” He pointedly called Abbas a “man of peace.” ... “Coming to Bethlehem and flying to Bethlehem from Jordan shows solidarity with the Palestinian people,...

Chelsi Camp, 23, of League City, Tex., tried to protect her little girl from her boyfriend's pit bull before police arrived and shot the aggressive dog. The girl is still in critical condition

WASHINGTON (AP) — The president's advisers are warning that if lawmakers won't work with the White House, the White House will go around them. President Barack Obama makes his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Top White House aides say Obama will try to work with Congress where it's possible. But press secretary Jay Carney and senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer say the White House will take action with executive orders if needed. On ABC's "This Week," Carney says the White House will "bypass Congress where necessary." Pfeiffer tells "Fox News Sunday" that Obama, quote, "has a pen, and he...

A trick where boiling water is thrown in the air to instantly turn into snow in the bitingly cold US weather became a viral hit this week, as metereologists and TV reporters illustrated just how freezing it is in the polar vortex. But now it seems Americans are feeling the backlash of the stunt after trying it themselves in the -30 degree weather. The LA Times found that at least 50 people on social media complained that they or their friends were scalded by hot water on Monday and Tuesday. Others have posted photos of their injuries on Instagram, and...

DETROIT (WJBK) - An FBI agent almost shot a Detroit cop on Wednesday at a gas station while filling up. It wasn't the agent or the cop's fault. It was the cop's bosses, who came up with the lame brain idea to simulate a purse snatching and then invite a TV crew to film your reaction Detroit. The immediate supervisor of these cops had no idea this was happening until they called him. "The event takes place. The officer takes the purse, runs around the gas station. As he's running, an off-duty FBI agent is pumping gas. He witnesses the...

For the past week, Glenn Beck has been investigating a Saudi national once identified as a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombing. The story has taken a number of alarming twists and turns, but on his radio program Wednesday, Beck released some of the most interesting information yet. But first, here are a few background points on how the case developed: •A Saudi national originally identified as a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombing was set to be deported under section 212, 3B — “Security and related grounds” — “Terrorist activities” after the bombing •TheBlaze received...

We've seen an alarming number of stories about sex attacks on female travelers in recent weeks, from a Swiss tourist who was gang-raped in India to an American student who was raped in a van in Rio de Janeiro. It doesn't mean that women shouldn't visit foreign places or that no parts of those countries are safe. But women traveling in these areas should do so with extreme caution and a knowledge of the culture. We rounded up eight popular tourist destinations where women should be extra cautious, based on reports from Human Rights Watch, the State Department, and crime...

BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. — The ex-cop suspected in the killings of an officer and two others remained at large Friday as darkness fell over a mountain forest and police suspended their manhunt until Saturday morning. “Once it gets dark out there and the snow keeps falling and they have no air support, I don’t know how effective they would be in that situation,” spokeswoman Cindy Bachman of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said. Throughout Friday, more than 100 officers searched through fresh snow for clues to the whereabouts of Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33, a fired Los Angeles Police...

Ted Nugent, the 64 year old rock star and NRA board member, unloaded his opinion on current gun control measures, our elected leaders and gun free zones to the team at Guns.com while at the SHOT show. The SHOT show, being held this year in Las Vegas, is the nation’s largest shooting industry trade show with 60,000 attendees. Nugent is a gun rights quote machine. “If you want another Concord Bridge, I’ve got some buddies” “Anyone who questions the most basic fundamental right of self-defense is a dangerous, freedom threatening, scary person that we must beat down” On gun free...

CIA: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is 'not a documentary'By Alicia M. Cohn - 12/22/12 09:51 AM ET The head of the Central Intelligence Agency sent a memo to CIA employees on Friday informing them that the new movie "Zero Dark Thirty," about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, "is not a documentary." "The film takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate," CIA Acting Director Michael Morell wrote. The film, by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, has already achieved both Oscar predictions and controversy in Congress. The movie depicts the international search for the al Qaeda...

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned Wednesday the decision to build hundreds of homes in Jerusalem. At a meeting of the UN Security Council, Ban said he was "concerned" about the construction plans... He called upon Israel to "avoid this dangerous path."

College is hard enough without having to worry about serious crime. Yet crime is a reality on and around many college campuses. The FBI's Unified Crime Report identified 2,696 violent crime incidents and 87,160 property crime incidents on and around college campuses in 2011. We ranked the most dangerous colleges by averaging FBI crime data per capita from 2008 to 2011 for schools with enrollment over 10,000. Schools were ranked based on a combination of violent crime rank and property crime rank, with violent crime weighted four times higher. NOTE: Some people have objected to our use of FBI data...

Earlier, this year, a Mexican think tank — the Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice — released a study ranking the world's most violent cities in 2011, and the results were astonishing. The 20 most violent cities were all in Latin America. The USA had some alarming scores too, led by New Orleans at 21. Other dangerous cities were located in Africa. None of the top 50 was in Europe or Asia, despite great unrest in those regions. The ranking is based on murder rate per capita in 2011.

President Barack Obama is about to release or transfer 55 Gitmo prisoners, despite reports that the Libyan believed to be behind the killing of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was a former Guantanamo inmate transferred to Libyan custody.

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A hang-gliding instructor has apologized to the family of a young woman who fell to her death in an accident in Canada admitting he 'failed in a major way.' William 'Jon' Orders also said he was sorry for swallowing a camera memory card that contained footage of the young woman's last moments. He has appeared in a Vancouver court charged with obstructing the course of justice after he admitted swallowing the memory card of 27-year-old Lenami Godinez-Avila plummeting to her death. Digital Daily – subscribe to our daily newsletter Orders, 50, has vowed to give up hang gliding after saying...

Years of living dangerously off of the U.S. taxpayers’ dime have certainly served the Obama-Dunham family well, according to investigative journalist Wayne Madsen. Nevertheless, the downside for America is the Islamazation of Africa and Asia in a remarkable example of unintended consequences of foreign entanglements gone bad- very bad, indeed. A Wayne Madsen 32 page pdf file is opening up a Pandora’s Box of American foreign aid money dispensed wildly and broadly overseas. The reporter cites American dollars intended to buy starving villagers rice actually going to finance foreign military weapons purchases for various wars, conflicts, and insurgencies. Our tax...

<p>HOUSTON – A high-risk sex offender was on the loose Friday night after escaping from a Houston halfway house and discarding his GPS tracking ankle monitor, the Houston Chronicle reported.</p> <p>Michael Elbert Young, 42, climbed over a barbed wire fence at the Southeast Texas Transitional Center after last being seen around 9:50pm local time Thursday night.</p>

The boss has put together an extraordinary rundown of Obama administration leaks showing a trend that is sabotaging Israel’s ability to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. The trend is quite revealing because, as Richard Helms, former director of central intelligence, once explained to Michael Ledeen: “Leaks will stop the minute the top people want them to stop…I was ordered several times by a president to find the source of a leak. We found it every time. And most of the time it was his secretary of state or secretary of defense, or chief of staff, or some other very important...

As if there are any more reasons to show that Ron Paul should not be the GOP Presidential candidate, there is this bit from 2008 in which Paul endorses four(!) candidates for President, including the Marxist whack-job Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader. How unhinged to you have to be, intellectually, to endorse not only four people, but four whom also hold diametrically opposing views on the role of government. This alone shows that Ron Paul is not a serious thinker. In fact it shows him to be a reactionary flame thrower, willing to completely abandon principles when he doesn't get...