Great Lakes Ice Cover Spreading Rapidly; See Which Lake Set a New Record

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Photo Credit: NASAIce continued to build this past week on the Great Lakes due to the cold air and temperatures staying below freezing, and Lake Superior’s new record shows it.

The lake is 92 percent frozen, toppling a 20-year-old record of 91 percent set on Feb. 5, 1994. That statistic helped total Great Lakes ice cover soar, and we can expect to see more form in coming days.

The air temperatures this past week averaged around five degrees below normal for the Great Lakes area. This amount of deviation from normal means it was a fairly cold week.

As of February 5, 2014, the entire Great Lakes system is now reportedly covered 77 percent with ice, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Last week at this time the ice cover was 66 percent. The 77 percent ice cover now still lags behind 1994, when the entire Great Lakes system had an average ice cover of 84 percent on February 5. This data is according to Jia Wang, physical oceanographer at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Center in Ann Arbor, MI.

Let’s look at each individual lake…

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Most Of North Texas City Without Gas Service Or Heat (+video)

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Photo Credit: euthman/flickrTexas Gas Service (TGS) was forced to shut down the gas supply to the entire city of Jacksboro Thursday. Most businesses and residents had no heat, on a day when temperatures struggled to get out of the teens.

The lack of services affected adults and children. The Jacksboro Independent School District even sent students home early and businesses closed all over town.

“I felt the cold breeze right in my face,” recalled Jacksboro resident Ana Karen. “There’s nothing to do [now] but, somehow keep warm.”

Trucks were bringing in compressed natural gas (CNG) to supply the small city hospital, senior living center, warming shelter and emergency operations center.

City manager Mike Smith said gas service started repeatedly turning off and on early Thursday morning. With pilot lights going out, there was a risk for gas buildup inside of structures. TGS notified the city it would have to shut off service completely.

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Another Jobs Report Disappoints: 113,000 New Jobs, Unemployment Rate to 6.6 Percent

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner The Labor Department’s jobs report disappointed for a second consecutive month Friday, bringing the news that the U.S. created just 113,000 jobs in January, as the unemployment rate fell to 6.6 percent.

December’s even weaker job report was little revised, from 74,000 to 75,000.

Friday’s jobs number fell short of expectations, which were for 180,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate to hold steady at 6.7 percent

The report contained few indications, however, that the drop in the unemployment rate in January was due to out-of-work Americans continuing to quit the job hunt and leave the ranks of those counted as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey. The labor force participation rate ticked up from a multi-decade low of 62.8 percent to 63 percent. A broader rate of unemployment, which reflects those forced into part-time work or only marginally attached to the labor force, fell from 13.1 to 12.8 percent.

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Planned Parenthood Must Pay $2 Million Settlement After Killing Woman in Abortion

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Photo Credit: LifeNewsThe Planned Parenthood abortion business has been forced to pay a $2 million settlement to the family of a black teenager it killed in a botched legal abortion in 2012.

Walter Hoye, a black pro-life leader who has closely followed the case, obtained a copy of the court order awarding the settlement. The settlement document indicates Planned Parenthood of Illinois, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation must pay her son Alvin Jones III, who was one at the time of Reaves’ death from the botched legal abortion.

He told LifeNews today that the settlement is an acknowledgement on Planned Parenthood’s part that it took Reaves’ life, but he said he’s disappointed the abortion giant won’t be held accountable further.

“In my opinion, Planned Parenthood is guilty of criminal negligence, depraved indifference, and gross medical incompetence,” Hoye said. “Now that the case is settled, we will never know how a jury would have reacted.”

“Finally, what happens to Planned Parenthood’s late term abortionist Mandy Gittler and their professionally trained staff operating out of their modern downtown Chicago facilities?” Hoye asked.The payouts of the settlement do not begin until Tonya’s son turns eighteen (18) in 2029.

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At Pakistan’s ‘Taliban U,’ Jihadists Major in Anti-Americanism

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Photo Credit: Fox News A 90-minute drive northwest of Islamabad is an Islamic seminary that is considered the ivory tower of terrorism, a jihadist factory that has produced prominent Taliban fighters and its leadership for decades.

Unofficially dubbed “University of Jihad,” Dar ul Uloom Haqqania [House of Knowledge and Truthfulness] counts Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the dreaded Haqqani Network, among its alumni. Names of most of more than 8,000 former students who have passed through the seminary are encased in glass-covered wooden frames that hang on the walls inside the main building.

“The Haqqanis got their surname from Haqqania, this madrassa” “Ammanullah,” a proud member of the Class of 2007, told FoxNews.com during a recent tour, a rare look inside the seminary along the Grand Trunk Road in Akora Khattak.

The campus is the size of four football fields, encompassing several buildings guarded by one police gunman. About 3,500 students currently live and study at the compound, which has churned out generations of freedom fighters stretching back to the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Closely aligned with the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is at violent odds with the current governments of both nations.

Founded by Maulana Abdul Haq just after Pakistan gained independence in 1947, the seminary propagates Deobandi, a revivalist and anti-imperialist movement of Sunni Islam formed in reaction to the Britain’s colonization of India.

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CBO Report Fallout: Specter of Welfare State Jolts Democrats

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Photo Credit: Charles DharapakThe White House and congressional Democrats are trying to limit the fallout from the politically damaging conclusion in a Congressional Budget Office report that the Obamacare entitlement creates a major incentive for some people not to work.

While some critics focused on a finding by the CBO that Obamacare will result in 2.5 million fewer workers over a decade, conservatives said the bigger fundamental issue highlighted in the report is one familiar to the welfare state — that taxpayer-funded government subsidies provide disincentives for full-time work.

“People used to be stuck in jobs because they needed the health insurance,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a practicing physician and a specialist on health care policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “Now they’re going to be prevented from taking jobs because they need the subsidies.”

The CBO forecast continued to reverberate across Capitol Hill on multiple issues. The nonpartisan budget agency’s prediction that the U.S. jobless rate likely will stay above 6 percent through 2016 was revealed as Senate Democrats were preparing a push for another extension of benefits to the long-term unemployed, raising the prospect that the government will face much higher benefit costs over the coming years.

The Senate is expected to stage a test vote Thursday on extending the long-term jobless benefits.

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Report: Ex-Girlfriend Physically Attacked George Soros and his Lawyers During Deposition

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Photo Credit: Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty ImagesGeorge Soros’ ex-girlfriend flew into a rage and hit the billionaire before slapping Hollywood lawyer-to-the-stars Marty Singer in the face, knocking off his glasses, during a heated hearing in her $50 million lawsuit against the mogul.

Court papers filed by Singer say Brazilian actress Adriana Ferreyr, who dated Soros for five years until 2011 and is suing him for allegedly reneging on a promise to buy her a $1.9 million apartment, screamed “f - - king a - - hole” at the mogul then lunged at the lawyers during Soros’ deposition at her attorney’s office.

The papers filed Friday include an account by Singer — who also reps Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger — that Ferreyr “suddenly and without warning . . . lunged at Mr. Soros, who is 83-years-old, and struck his head with her hands, knocking off the headphones he was wearing to amplify the audio . . . Ms. Ferreyr pulled back her arm to strike Mr. Soros in the face. I was able to grab both of Ms. Ferreyr’s arms to move her away from Mr. Soros.”

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Routine Traffic Stop Interrupted by Pack of Scary Yet Adorable Wolves (+video)

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During a routine traffic stop, a police officer panicked and climbed into the back seat of the car he had just pulled over… because a pack of wolves was racing toward him.

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Should Conservatives Freak Out About Pot?

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Photo Credit: The Federalist “Wolf!” cried the young, foolish shepherd boy in the famous story. The first couple of times, there were no wolves. He just made it up. So people stopped paying attention and rallying to save the flock. When the wolves finally came, people no longer believed his cries. They just ignored him like the noise from an annoying, oversensitive car alarm. Consequently, the wolves descended. The boy’s sheep were slaughtered. In some versions of the story, he wound up on the dinner menu as well.

“Do not lie,” is the lesson moralists have wanted us to take from Aesop’s story, but there are other lessons. Do not let your imagination get the better of you, is one. Sometimes the wolves are real, is another. The boy and his sheep and the wolves are apropos because this is the first year of the legal sale of marijuana in these United States since 1937, in Colorado and my own Washington state.

And I fear that conservatives are reflexively crying “pot!” without thinking through what that might mean. Former George W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote that the “freedom to destroy oneself with hard drugs” doesn’t just “degrade human nature but also damage[s] and undermine[s] families and communities and ultimately deprive[s] the nation of competent, self-governing citizens.”

That’s a debatable though entirely plausible point that ought to be taken seriously, but then he veered sharply into self-parody. Gerson went on to apply the warning to pot as well. “By what governing theory,” he asked, “did the citizens of Colorado — surveying the challenges of global economic competition, educational mediocrity and unhealthy lifestyles — decide that the answer is the proliferation of stoners?”

One might respond to his paean to technocratic managerialism by quoting from an obscure old stoner tract, drafted on hemp it turns out: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, man, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, so get off of my cloud.”

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Obama Says ‘Freedom of Religion is Under Threat’ as Catholics Sue Administration

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Photo Credit: Reuters In a speech during Thursday morning’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama acknowledged, “It’s also clear that around the world, freedom of religion is under threat.”

“No society can truly succeed unless it guarantees the rights of all its people, including religious minorities,” he added later.

The Obama administration has been harshly criticized by the Catholic church and civil liberties organizations concerned that Obamacare mandates that organizations provide their employees free access to contraceptives through their health care plans, even if their religious faith calls contraception a sin.

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