Video: Occupiers Arrested With Weapons, Bomb Making Materials

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NY Post: The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday. People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said. Morgan Gliedman, daughter of Realtor Susyn Schops Gliedman and prominent doctor Paul Gliedman, was busted at this building with her OWS boyfriend. Cops found the stash in the couple’s West Ninth Street home Saturday when they went there to look for Gliedman, 27, who was wanted for alleged credit-card theft.

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Report: Wind Generation Costs Twice As Much As Government Estimates

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As lawmakers rush to hash out a deal to extend tax credits for wind energy generation, a new report shows that, once hidden costs are accounted for, the true cost of wind power generation is twice that of what previous government estimates have shown.

“Once these hidden costs are included and subsidies are excluded, wind generation is not close to being competitive with conventional generation sources such as natural gas, coal or nuclear,” said George Taylor, lead author of the report and senior fellow in energy policy at American Tradition Institute, in a statement.The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

For example, wind generation costs three times as much as natural gas-fired electricity and up to 50 percent more than government estimates for new nuclear and coal power generation.

The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

Most electricity cost estimates fail to take into account, the cost of keeping fossil fuel power plants online to balance out the variations in wind power generation, and the increased fuel consumption — per unit of output — which wind requires of power plants. Estimates also typically don’t include the additional long-distance transmission costs required by wind, as well as the electricity losses associated with it.

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New Year’s Eve On the Cliff: Lawmakers Have No Bill and No Deal (+Update)

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UPDATE: Deal in the Works?

Senate leaders and Vice President Biden are putting the finishing touches on an agreement to extend income tax rates for the vast majority of the country, just hours before the “fiscal cliff” deadline.

The agreement will extend Bush-era income tax rates on individual income up to $400,000 and on family income up to $450,000, according to a senior GOP aide. It will adjust the estate tax rate to 40 percent, up from 35 percent, but maintain the exemption for all inheritances below $5 million, the aide said.

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is engaged in one-on-one talks with Biden, said the tax portion of the deal was finished, and that a broader agreement was at hand.
“I can report that we’ve reached an agreement on all of the tax issues,” McConnell said. “We are very, very close.”

Republican leaders in the House, meanwhile, said they would not hold a late-night vote even if tax and spending legislation cleared the Senate, guaranteeing that the nation will go over the fiscal cliff at midnight, if only for a few hours. Read more from this story HERE.

New Year’s Eve On the Cliff: Lawmakers Have No Bill and No Deal

Senate leaders are racing against the clock to reach a “fiscal cliff” deal the House and Senate can approve on New Year’s Eve.

Leaders in the upper chamber narrowed their differences Sunday as Republicans agreed to drop a demand to curb cost-of-living increases to entitlement benefits, while Democrats showed flexibility on taxes.

Yet after months of talks on ways to avoid the fiscal cliff of tax hikes and spending cuts at the end of 2012, House and Senate lawmakers find themselves approaching the new year without a bill to present to their members.

Significant differences remain over two key parts of a deal — the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester and the estate tax.

Instead of working through the night, the Senate recessed at 7:27 p.m. Sunday with plans to reconvene Monday at 11:00 a.m., and the House recessed around the same time. Read more from this story HERE.

Biblical Baby Names Fall Out of Favor in US, Uptick in Names from Pop Culture such as Erotic Shades of Grey

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Biblical names are out and pop culture is in for America’s newborns – if this year’s list of most popular baby names are anything to go by. The once hearty trend of parents naming their babies after Biblical scripture has shown a steady decline in recent years according to an annual baby name report by BabyCenter.com.

What can be gathered in supplement shows a perhaps surprising uptick in inspiration from pop culture such as erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, TV show Downton Abbey and even Apple electronics.

TOP 10 BOYS NAMES:

Aiden
Jackson
Ethan
Liam
Mason
Noah
Lucas
Jacob
Jayden
Jack

TOP 10 GIRLS NAMES:

Sophia
Emma
Olivia
Isabella
Ava
Lily
Zoe
Chloe
Mia
Madison

That’s a stark contrast from 12 years ago when Biblical names dominated the top 10 list, in 2000 it being: Michael, Jacob, Matthew, Joseph, Joshua, and Andrew.
For girls in 2000 it was Hannah, Sarah and Elizabeth.

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Death of Tea Party Exaggerated? Members in House Appear to Hold Key Fiscal Vote (+video)

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The Tea Party has had an up-and-down political ride since the movement helped Republicans take control of the House in 2010, but those elected in the midterm elections still appear to wield considerable power in the fiscal negotiations.

The roughly 50 members elected to the House two years ago have been a challenge for the more moderate House Speaker John Boehner since they took office. Perhaps most memorably, many of them refused last year to support a debt-ceiling bill because they said it didn’t reduce federal spending enough.

Just last week they squashed Boehner’s fiscal plan by refusing to compromise and vote on a tax increase for any American, despite the House speaker — in his so-called “Plan B” — having suggested extending tax cuts only for those making more than $1 million annually.

And their most powerful vote might be yet to come, should Tea Party-backed House members reject a possible Senate proposal over the next two days to extend tax cuts and perhaps avert massive federal spending cuts that start January 1.

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Californians’ Support for Death Penalty Goes Against Trend

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Even as Californians voted to maintain the death penalty, the nation’s support for capital punishment continued to wane in 2012, with relatively few states performing executions.

Only nine states executed inmates in 2012, and three-fourths of the executions occurred in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a monitoring group critical of capital punishment. Connecticut became the fifth state in five years to abolish capital punishment.

California, whose voters rejected a November ballot measure to repeal the death penalty, is not expected to resume executions for three years, according to Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. Litigation has blocked executions in California for nearly seven years.

Despite its unused execution chamber, California’s death row, already the largest in the nation, continued to swell in 2012. Fourteen inmates were added, mostly from Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

Nationally, there were fewer than 80 new death sentences, the second-lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the center said.

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Palestinian Arab Girl Who Attacked IDF Soldiers Eats Breakfast With Turkish PM Erdogan (+video)

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Awad Tamimi, a thirteen year old Palestinian Arab girl, found internet fame when a video of her cursing at and kicking IDF soldiers was posted on YouTube. Today, the Turkish news agency “Anatolia” reported that “the brave Palestinian girl” and her mother met Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey at a hotel in Istanbul, where they had a short conversation. Erdogan gave some gifts to her family, and the two posed for photographs , before eating a meal together. “I give thanks to Prime Minister Erdogan for his hospitality—and his support for Palestine” she said.

Tamimi came to Turkey last week to receive an award from the Istanbul City Council for “courage”. She said she waved her fist in the face of Israeli soldiers as a way to “liberate Palestine”.

See video below:

See original video:

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Obama Vows to Make Gun Control Priority, Put ‘Full Weight’ Behind Efforts

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President Obama on Sunday said he would make gun control a priority in his new term, pledging to put his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms in 2013.

“I’m going to be putting forward a package and I’m going to be putting my full weight behind it,” Obama said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m going to be making an argument to the American people about why this is important and why we have to do everything we can to make sure that something like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary does not happen again.”

In the wake of the Dec. 14 mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., school, the president has launched a White House task force led by Vice President Biden to present proposals in January to help stem gun violence. Obama has said that he would seek a broad approach to the problem addressing the role of violence in entertainment and measures to improve mental healthcare.

But he has also called on Congress to move quickly to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban and a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines.

Obama on Sunday repeated those calls and said he would meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisles to see action.

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Hillary Clinton, Not Seen for Weeks, Now Reportedly Hospitalized with Blood Clot

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is under observation at a New York hospital after being treated for a blood clot stemming from the concussion she sustained earlier this month.

Clinton’s doctors discovered the clot Sunday while performing a follow-up exam, her spokesman, Philippe Reines, said. He would not elaborate on the location of the clot but said Clinton was being treated with anti-coagulants and would remain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital for at least the next 48 hours so doctors can monitor the medication.

“Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her concussion,” Reines said in a statement. “They will determine if any further action is required.”

Clinton, 65, fell and suffered a concussion while at home alone in mid-December as she recovered from a stomach virus that left her severely dehydrated. The concussion was diagnosed Dec. 13 and Clinton was forced to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East that had been planned for the next week.

The seriousness of a blood clot “depends on where it is,” said Dr. Gholam Motamedi, a neurologist at Georgetown University Medical Center who was not involved in Clinton’s care.

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