Rep. Kristi Noem: Ministering My ‘Biggest Job’ in Washington (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

She has been called the “Sarah Palin of the Prairie.” But South Dakota Congresswoman Kristi Noem is blazing her own trail in Washington.

She’s making her mark not just within the Republican Party but in the kingdom of God, too. And she’s had to overcome many challenges along the way.

Taking the Lead

For Noem, home is on the range, or more specifically, on her South Dakota farm, which is a world away from her duties on Capitol Hill. She feels total peace here and is just an ordinary mom.

“I am 100 percent convinced God created me to be a mom,” Noem told CBN News at her home in Castlewood, S.D. “Every other job that I have or duty that I have is just extra things that He’s put on my plate.”

Those extra things have kept her busy since her election to Congress in 2010. She’s clearly a GOP up-and-comer. She made big news from the beginning when she was chosen to be part of the GOP leadership team, a rare honor for an incoming freshman.

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Christian Photog Who Refused to Shoot Gay Wedding Finds Widespread Support

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Photo Credit: Charisma News

Photo Credit: Charisma News

Prominent libertarian supporters of redefining marriage are among the parties that filed briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court Friday in support of a New Mexico photographer who declined to use her artistic expression to communicate the story of a same-sex ceremony. Also supporting the photographer in the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) case are 18 other professionals in her industry and attorneys general from eight states.

In August, a concurrence accompanying the New Mexico Supreme Court’s ruling against Elane Photography said that the owners, Jon and Elaine Huguenin, must abandon their freedom as “the price of citizenship.” Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys asked the U.S. Supreme Court last month to review the case.

“The First Amendment protects our freedom to speak or not speak on any issue without fear of government retaliation,” says ADF senior counsel Jordan Lorence. “All Americans should oppose unjust laws that force citizens—under threat of punishment—to express ideas against their will. As those who filed supportive briefs in this case understand, a government that forces any American to create a message contrary to her own convictions is a government every American should fear.”

The Cato Institute and legal scholars Dale Carpenter and Eugene Volokh filed one of the friend-of-the-court briefs. Wedding photographers from across the country and state attorneys general from the states of Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia filed the other two briefs.

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2013 Was Banner Year for Putting Abortion Practitioners Out of Business

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Photo Credit: LifeNews

Photo Credit: LifeNews

This year was a banner year for abortion-related discipline. Several abortionists came to the attention of regulators due to complaints and publicity from Operation Rescue, which took their complaints to medical boards, health departments, and even to the Federal Election Commission and into court to shut down shoddy or illegal abortion businesses.

“We are especially excited when one of our complaints, or a situation that we helped uncover results in closed clinics and disciplined abortionists. That always means that innocent lives will be saved,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue.

The Eastern Seaboard has been most active during 2013 in disciplining abortionists who endanger women and break the law.

Maryland led the nation in abortion-related discipline with actions against the licenses of five abortion providers and the closure of at least three abortion clinics – all affiliated with the notorious New Jersey abortionist Steven Chase Brigham.

Brigham, who Operation Rescue has worked for years to expose, has also experienced trouble with regulators in his home state of New Jersey, where a complaint has been filed by the Attorney General’s office that is attempting to permanently revoke his last remaining medical license. Brigham is accused of illegally starting late-term abortions at his office in New Jersey, then transporting women to Maryland to complete the abortions, even though he has no medical license in that state. He also is accused of falsifying medical records to hide his abortion crimes and lying about his lack of malpractice insurance by providing a false certificate from a fraudulent insurance company in the Bahamas, which was previously closed for insurance fraud.

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Steve Stockman Campaign: For Small Donation, Receive “Official Obama Barf Bag”

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon

Photo Credit: Free Beacon

2014 Senate candidate Steve Stockman has an offer you can’t refuse: Donate $10 to his campaign and receive “the official Obama Barf Bag.”

“Dear liberty patriot, Obama’s socialism makes me sick!” Stockman’s campaign website declares. “And I have the barf bag to prove it!”

Rep. Stockman (R., Texas) promises to send donors one barf bag for every $10 they donate. The paper vomit receptacles prominently feature President Barack Obama’s face, with “NO 2” next to it.

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Soldier Saved on Battlefield by Rosary – Just Like his Great-Grandfather

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Photo Credit: EASTNEWS

Photo Credit: EASTNEWS

Guardsman Glenn Hockton, 19, asked for a rosary to take with him before being deployed to Afghanistan on a seven-month tour of duty with the Coldstream Guards in Helmand Province.

He bent down to pick the rosary up when it fell from his neck and then realised he was on a landmine.

Guardsman Hockton had to remain standing where he was for 45 minutes while his colleagues successfully attempted to rescue him.

His great-grandfather Joseph Sunny Truman also credited a rosary with saving his life when he survived a bomb blast after he was captured while serving with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in the Second World War.

Guardsman Hockton’s mother Sheri Jones, from Tye Green, Essex, said she was physically sick when her son rang to tell her of his ordeal.

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It Was Warm Back Then: Vikings Could Navigate, Colonize the Arctic During Medieval Times

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Pauline Askin

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Pauline Askin

The possibility that global warming might contribute to Arctic development isn’t anything new. America’s first European visitors, the Vikings, were able to reach and colonize the northernmost reaches of the continent due to the lack of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean during Medieval times when the earth was going through a warming period.

The Viking era came well before the Industrial Revolution — when humans began burning large amounts of fossil fuels which some scientists say causes global warming — and suggests that there are strong natural climate forces that have a profound effect on the extent of Arctic sea ice coverage. However, this is not a new theory — it was discussed as far back as the 19th century.

According to an 1887 newspaper article entitled “Variations in Climate,” Scandinavian Vikings were able to sail through the Arctic Ocean and establish colonies in the “highest north latitude” of Greenland and North America centuries before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. These colonies, however, were abandoned by the Vikings due to “the increasing cold.”

“On the contrary, the formation of ice increases annually if the winters are strongly cold, long and dark,” wrote Alexander Beck in 1887. “The reverse of that state of things is found by calculations for the year 1122 A.D., and it is precisely at that time we find the Danes and other Scandinavian nations going through the Arctic open seas.”

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Police Militarization is Not Inevitable: 58 Percent Think It’s Already Going Too Far (+video)

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Photo Credit: Twitter

Photo Credit: Twitter

Americans, it seems, have had enough police militarization, with the latest Reason-Rupe poll finding a full 58 percent of respondents believing that the use of drones, military weapons, and armored vehicles by local police departments as already going “too far.” That includes a full 60 percent of both Democrats and Tea Partiers. Opposition is under 50 percent among non-Tea Party Republicans.

Policing in the United States has seen rapid militarization, fueled by the war-like mentality that comes with the “drug war,” as well as by the abundance of military surplus available to local police departments from the federal government, especially since 9/11. The military gear ends up at agencies across the country, from New York to Wyoming. Earlier this year, the Defense Department even sent “free” (original cost to taxpayers: $658,000 each) mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles to 500 local police departments; vehicles the Pentagon didn’t think the military needed are now being used by local police forces. Disturbingly, an ACLU FOIA request revealed one police department, that of Concord, New Hampshire, cited the presence of Free State Project and Occupy New Hampshire activists as domestic terror threats for which the military vehicles were necessary. Concord had spent some time trying to get the feds to cover the cost of a military vehicle, and ended up getting at least the one for “free.”

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Mystery Illness in Texas Kills Half of Those Infected (+video)

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Mystery illness claims 4 lives in Montgomery County

Officials with the Montgomery County Health Department are on a mission to find out more about a mystery flu-like illness.

So far, half of the people who have come down with it have died.

According to the health department, all of the patients have had flu-like and/or pneumonia like symptoms. However, all of them have tested negative for the flu.

There have been eight confirmed patients ranging in age from 41 to 68. Four of those patients have died.

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Mother says mystery illness transformed son into dying patient in days

The mother of the youngest of eight confirmed cases of a mystery illness in Montgomery County is sharing her son’s story.

Dathany Reed, 41, wasn’t feeling well on Thanksgiving. He called out sick from his job at the Golden Corral and went to see doctors at Conroe Regional Medical Center.

Odessa Reed says doctors sent her son home with several prescriptions.

She said her son was admitted to the hospital’s emergency room the next day and ended up on life support.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Odessa Reed. “How can you talk to a person one day, and they say, I’m not feeling good, and the next day, that person is on life support.”

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Soros Claims Broken Leg, Wants Delay in Court Tiff with Ex

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Due to a broken leg, George Soros has asked for a delay in giving a deposition in his long-running legal battle with his former Brazilian girlfriend.

The billionaire investor’s lawyers were in court Tuesday to seek a postponement in the case brought by Adriana Ferreyr, the former actress who is suing Soros for $50 million, claiming he reneged on a promise to buy her a $1.9 million apartment on the Upper East Side. ­

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‘Superbugs’ Found Breeding in Sewage Plants

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Photo Credit: Yi Luo/Nankai University

Photo Credit: Yi Luo/Nankai University

Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo. Joint research by scientists from Rice, Nankai and Tianjin universities found “superbugs” carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater disinfected by chlorination.

They found significant levels of NDM-1 in the effluent released to the environment and even higher levels in dewatered sludge applied to soils. The study, led by Rice University environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez, appeared this month in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. “It’s scary,” Alvarez said.

“There’s no antibiotic that can kill them. We only realized they exist just a little while ago when a Swedish man got infected in India, in New Delhi. Now, people are beginning to realize that more and more tourists trying to go to the upper waters of the Ganges River are getting these infections that cannot be treated. “We often think about sewage treatment plants as a way to protect us, to get rid of all of these disease-causing constituents in wastewater.

But it turns out these microbes are growing. They’re eating sewage, so they proliferate. In one wastewater treatment plant, we had four to five of these superbugs coming out for every one that came in.” Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been raising alarms for years, particularly in hospital environments where public health officials fear they can be transferred from patient to patient and are very difficult to treat.

Bacteria harboring the encoding gene that makes them resistant have been found on every continent except for Antarctica, the researchers wrote. NDM-1 is able to make such common bacteria as E. coli, salmonella and K. pneumonias resistant to even the strongest available antibiotics. The only way to know one is infected is when symptoms associated with these bacteria fail to respond to antibiotics.

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