Study: One in Five Milky Way Stars Hosts Potentially Life-Friendly Earths

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Photo Credit: Reuters/NASA Ames/JPL-CaltechOne out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.

The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA’s now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds.

The number grows exponentially if the count also includes planets circling cooler red dwarf stars, the most common type of star in the galaxy.

“Planets seem to be the rule rather than exception,” study leader Erik Petigura, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, said during a conference call with reporters on Monday.

Petigura wrote his own software program to analyze the space telescope’s results and found 10 planets one- to two-times the diameter of Earth circling parent stars at the right distances for liquid surface water.

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Gay, Transgender Rights Bill Clears First Senate Hurdle

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Photo Credit: APBy Associated Press.

The Senate pushed a major anti-bias gay rights bill past a first, big hurdle Monday, a clear sign of Americans’ greater acceptance of homosexuality nearly two decades after the law prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

The vote of 61-30 essentially ensured that the Senate has the votes to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would prohibit workplace discrimination against gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

Final passage, possibly by week’s end, would cap a 17-year quest to secure Senate support for a similar discrimination measure that failed by one vote in 1996, the same year Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act.

Reflecting the nation’s shifting views toward gay rights and the fast-changing political dynamic, seven Senate Republicans joined with 54 Democrats to vote to move ahead on the legislation.

“Rights are sometimes intangible but, boy if you’ve ever been discriminated against, seeking employment or seeking an advancement, it’s bitter,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., the only openly gay member of the Senate, said after the vote. “And it’s been a long, long fight, but I think its day has come. And that’s just very exciting to witness.”

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Photo Credit: Weekly StandardENDA Would Grant Transgender Rights to Elementary School Teachers

By John McCormack.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading gay rights group, eighty-eight percent of Fortune 500 companies have formal employment policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And it’s likely that almost all other businesses, like Senator Rick Santorum more than a decade ago, have a de facto policy prohibiting such discrimination. It’s hard to imagine that in the year 2013 that any business in the country could fire someone simply because he is gay without facing a major backlash and boycotts.

So does the country now need a new federal law prohibiting such discrimination by private businesses? When Democrats controlled congressional supermajorities from 2009 to 2011, neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid held a vote on Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). But the Senate is taking up the bill this week, and the vote is being framed in the New York Times as a “test” for Republicans to show that they are not “out of touch with much of the country on social issues.”

A vote for ENDA, however, is not without risk for its supporters. In addition to its gay rights provisions, ENDA creates transgender employment rights. Only 17 states passed laws like that. Furthermore, ENDA contains no exceptions for schools at any age level (though the law does contain a modest religious liberty provision).

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Delta Passengers Emotional Response When They Discover They’re Escorting a Fallen Soldier Home (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube A flight quickly turned into an unforgettable moment when passengers found out they were escorting a fallen soldier home. A passenger on the Delta flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles captured video of the pilot making the announcement shortly before landing.

That passenger, Johnny Jet, shared the emotional story this morning on Fox and Friends. “When the pilot gets on, everyone listens. But when he said there’s a fallen soldier, the plane just went silent.”

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Former Obama Admin Official Van Jones: Obama Will ‘Pay Price’ For Healthcare Promise Reversal

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Photo Credit: Yahoo This morning on “This Week,” Crossfire co-host Van Jones, a former Obama administration official, said the president would “pay a price,” for reversing course on his now famous promise that those Americans who like their plans could keep them if them if they wished under Obamacare.

“”And he overpromised. And he will, listen, he will pay a price. ‘Mission accomplished,’ you pay a price. ‘No new taxes,’ you pay a price. ‘You keep your plan,’ you pay a price,” Jones said.

During his appearance on the “This Week,” roundtable Jones also tweaked the Obama administration for being too ambitious with Healthcare.gov, which has been plagued by problems since its launch last month.

“First of all, they tried to do too much on this website, you could just have the website where you allow people to shop and then they could just call in, I mean, they tried to do too much and I think part of it was because it was a central thing they did, they tried to do too much,” he said.

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Romney: Obama’s Broken Healthcare Promise ‘Rotting Away’ Second Term

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Photo Credit: Getty Images By Mario Trujillo.

Mitt Romney said President Obama’s broken healthcare promise that people who like their insurance can keep it is “rotting away” his second term in office.

If the White House wants to regain trust, Romney said it needs to work with both parties to rebuild the law.

“Whether you like the model of ObamaCare or not the fact that the president sold it on the basis that is not true has undermine the foundation of his second term. I think it is rotting it away,” Romney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Romney asserted that healthcare would never have passed in 2010 if Obama had been straightforward with the public. He said Obama is not able to lead with his credibility fading.

“We’ve got to have a president that can lead and right now he is not able to do so,” he said.

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Photo Credit: AP/Evan VucciRomney: He Planned ‘Requirement’ That All States Ensure All Are Insured

By Terence P. Jeffrey.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee who lost to President Barack Obama in the 2012 election, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that if he had been elected he planned to have the federal government require state governments to make sure that everyone within their states had health insurance.

“But my own plan was to say to each state, ‘You’ve got a requirement to move to a point where all your people are insured, and where you cover preexisting conditions,” Romney said.

Romney also said: “I had a very conservative platform. And that kind of conservative platform I think is the foundation of any successful campaign in 2016.”

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney signed a law that required everyone in that state to have a government-approved health insurance plan that would be subsidized by the taxpayers for people whose income was below a certain level.

Romneycare has often been called the model for Obamacare, but Romney has rejected that characterization saying he would not impose one plan on the entire country. Instead, he has argued, such health-care reform plans should be imposed state by state.

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’60 Minutes’ Contradicts State’s Key Benghazi Claim: No Orders to Wait

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Photo Credit: WNDAlthough unmentioned by the newsmagazine show, last week’s “60 Minutes” segment on Benghazi apparently contradicts a central element of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, WND has found.

“60 Minutes” reported “orders to wait” were given to forces in Tripoli that could have immediately aided the besieged Benghazi compound. However, the Accountability Review Board, or ARB, specifically states the team was “not delayed by orders from superiors.”

The CBS program reported that about “30 minutes into the attack, a quick reaction force from the CIA Annex ignored orders to wait and raced to the compound, at times running and shooting their way through the streets just to get there.”

Continued “60 Minutes” reporter Lara Logan: “Inside the compound, they repelled a force of as many as 60 armed terrorists and managed to save five American lives and recover the body of Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith. They were forced to fight their way out before they could find the ambassador.”

The narrative of ignoring “orders to wait” seems to directly contradict page 23 of the ARB report.

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Germany Finds 1,500 Masterpieces Looted by Nazis

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Photo Credit: AFP/John MacdougallNearly 1,500 priceless paintings including works by Picasso and Matisse that were stolen by the Nazis have been discovered in a flat in Munich, a news report said Sunday.

The German weekly Focus said police came upon the paintings during a 2011 search in an apartment belonging to the octogenarian son of art collector Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had bought them during the 1930s and 1940s.

The search was carried out because the son, Cornelius Gurlitt, was under suspicion for tax evasion, Focus said.

The report said the works were thought to be worth around one billion euros ($1.3 billion dollars) on today’s market.

The artworks lay hidden amid old jam jars and junk in darkened rooms in Gurlitt’s apartment in the southern city for more than half a century, the paper said.

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Why So Shocked? You Were NEVER Meant To Keep Your Health Insurance Under Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Red State By LaborUnionReport.

It takes some time to fundamentally transform America and, while they may be wrong about a lot of things almost everything, in this instance, Democrats are right about one thing: The term transition is absolutely the correct term when discussing the debacle known as ObamaCare.

You see, while they will never openly admit it (excepting, perhaps, in the darkest recesses of some corner inside the White House or the Center of American Progress), ObamaCare was never meant for Americans to “keep their health insurance plans,” it is a transition plan to drive all Americans* to single-payer (aka nationalized or socialized) health care.

On October 15, 2008, several weeks before Barack Obama’s election and well before ObamaCare was enacted, I wrote (pre-LUR and RedState) a post entitled Obama’s Plan to Socialize Health Care.

In the post, I stated, “Within five years (if not sooner), the U.S. will have full-blown socialized medicine under President Barack Obama.”

This prediction was not based on all of the regulations that were eventually put into the Affordable Care Act–those regulations that are causing millions to lose their individual coverage and another 93 million potentially to lose their employer-sponsored health plans–but was based on simple economics.

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Photo Credit: Bloomberg NewsYou Also Can’t Keep Your Doctor

By Edie Littlefield Sundby.

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

Countless hours searching for non-exchange plans have uncovered nothing that compares well with my existing coverage. But the greatest source of frustration is Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchange and, by some reports, one of the best such exchanges in the country. After four weeks of researching plans on the website, talking directly to government exchange counselors, insurance companies and medical providers, my insurance broker and I are as confused as ever. Time is running out and we still don’t have a clue how to best proceed.

Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University’s Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

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Graham Says He’ll Continue to Block Obama Nominees Unless He Gets Benghazi Info

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Photo Credit: APSouth Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham reiterated his pledge to block all of Obama’s nominees for executive branch positions until Congress is allowed to hear testimony from those on the ground during the Benghazi terrorist attacks in 2012.

“I shouldn’t have to do this – to make these threats,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Graham says there are still too many unanswered questions about the Sept. 11 attack in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

While there have been a number of Capitol Hill hearings on the deadly attack in Benghazi, Graham is among a group of lawmakers who say they aren’t satisfied with the information provided and want more.

“I don’t think it’s over the top to find out what happened to four dead Americans,” he said. “I don’t think it’s over the top to talk to survivors. The State Department interviewed these survivors.”

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Riot Warnings Over Food-Stamp Cuts

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Photo Credit: WNDThe 5 percent rollback in food-stamp funding that hit at the start of November has unleashed a wave of familiar scaremongering.

The reduction returns food-stamp benefits to the level they would have been without the infusion of stimulus cash since 2009. That money is now spent, and the average individual monthly benefit is dropping from about $133 to $125.40. Roughly $7.60.

Democrats and the anti-hunger lobby treat the reduction as a cruel and draconian cut.

Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., contends it “will literally take food right out of the mouths of poor children as well as their families, the elderly, the unemployed and the underemployed.”

The rollback “will be close to catastrophic for many people,” a spokesman for Feeding America, a leading hunger relief organization, told CBS News.

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