Daughter Of WWII Soldier To Receive Dad’s Long-Lost Purple Heart

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Photo Credit: AP/Hyla MerinHyla Merin grew up without a father and for a long time never knew why. Her mother never spoke about the Army officer who died before Hyla was born. The scraps of information she gathered from other relatives were hazy: 2nd Lt. Hyman Markel was a rabbi’s son, brilliant at mathematics, the brave winner of a Purple Heart who died sometime in 1945.

Aside from wedding photos of Markel in uniform, Merin never glimpsed him. But on Sunday, decades after he won it, Merin will receive her father’s Purple Heart, along with a Silver Star she never knew he’d won and a half-dozen other medals.

“It just confirms what a great man he was,” Merin said tearfully. “He gave up his life for our country and our freedom. I’ll put it up in my house as a memorial to him and to those who served.”

Merin’s mother, Celia, married Markel in 1941 when he already was in the military. They met at a Jewish temple in Buffalo, N.Y.

About four months ago, the manager of a West Hollywood apartment building where Merin’s mother lived in the 1960s found a box containing papers and the Purple Heart while cleaning out some lockers in the laundry room, Merin said.

The manager contacted Purple Hearts Reunited, a nonprofit organization that returns lost or stolen medals to vets or their families.

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No Exams On Wiccan, Pagan Holidays At University Of Missouri?

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Photo Credit: ensign_beedrillStudents at University of Missouri don’t need to cram for exams that fall on Wiccan and Pagan holidays, now that the school has put them on par with Christmas, Thanksgiving and Hanukah.

The university’s latest “Guide to Religions: Major Holidays and Suggested Accommodations” — designed to help faculty know when and when not to schedule exams and other student activities — lists eight Wiccan and Pagan holidays and events right alongside more mainstream occasions. It’s all part of the school’s effort to include everyone’s beliefs, although some critics say listing every holiday associated with fringe belief systems is a bit much.

“The holidays and accommodations section of this guide is provided to faculty, staff and student leaders as an educational resource for the myriad of religious holy days celebrated at Mizzou,” the guide reads. “Not only does this section offer crucial information about dates and practices, we also hope that the information about recommended academic and food accommodations will be valuable to those planning classroom activities and other academic and co-curricular events.”

The first holiday on the list is the Hindu two-day festival celebrating the birth of Krishna, a god considered to be a “warrior, hero, teacher and philosopher.” During the observance, which occurs on Aug. 28 this year, Hindus are likely to forgo sleep in order to, among other things, sing traditional songs.

“Avoid scheduling major academic deadlines on this day, since it is likely that students will be operating on very little sleep,” the guide continues.

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Pennsylvania Pioneer Program Achieves Drop In Abortion

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Photo Credit; APA Pennsylvania program that empowers women to choose life over abortion has achieved a seven percent drop in the number of resident abortions in the state over the last 17 years.

Real Alternatives, a charitable nonprofit organization that is funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, is the nation’s first alternative program of its kind. The organization states that its mission is to “provide life-affirming alternatives to abortion services throughout the nation.”

The program offers support services to women throughout pregnancy, including maternity residences, adoption education, and parenting skills training. Real Alternatives has served more than 200,000 women throughout Pennsylvania since the program began in 1996. The organization offers free and confidential support, counseling, and guidance to pregnant women, in an effort to provide an alternative to abortion.

“It has been so gratifying over these years that so many women who were alone and facing a crisis pregnancy had another person to assist them and empower them to overcome obstacles and pressures so they could choose life for their preborn baby,” said Kevin Bagatta, president and CEO of Real Alternatives, in a Wednesday statement.

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Facebook Paid No Taxes Despite Record Profits

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Photo Credit: sherifer22Despite earning more than $1 billion in profits last year, social media juggernaut Facebook paid zilch when it came to federal and state taxes in 2012. In fact, the website will actually be getting a refund totaling $429 million thanks to a tax reduction for executive stock options.

In the coming years, Facebook will continue to get monster tax breaks, totaling about $3 billion.

“The employees cash in stock options, and at that point there is tax deduction for the company,” Robert McIntyre, of watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice, said in an interview with Fox News Channel. “Because even though it doesn’t cost Facebook a nickel, the government treats it as wages and they get a deduction for it. And usually it doesn’t wipe out companies whole tax bill, although many companies get big breaks from it.”

The news comes after President Obama’s State of the Union speech in which he called for such tax breaks to end.

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Toledo Football Player To Forgo Last Year Of Eligibility To Be With Sick Fiancee

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Photo Credit: The BladeA football player at the University of Toledo who has been playing the sport since he was a kid told his coach that he will forgo his last eligible season so he could be at his fiancee’s side while she undergoes treatment for leukemia, The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.

Ben Pike, 22, a 6 foot, 3-inch 260-pound defensive lineman who is coming off his best season and was likely to start next year, learned in January that leukemia returned to his fiancée Ashlee Barrett, the report said.

“I know in some people’s terms, he’s giving up things,” Becky Pike, Ben’s mother, told the paper. “But he’s really not giving up. He’s not giving up anything. He’s really fighting for life. And he’s just turned his forces to he’s going so win a battle for life instead of winning on the football field.”

The attraction between the two appeared to be immediate. They met during a bible study class. Barrett, herself a basketball player at Toledo, was taken by Pike’s confidence when he would discuss various topics in class, the report said. Pike couldn’t help but notice the pretty blonde’s energy.

They began dating and fell in love. Pike took Barrett to Washington, D.C., in December 2011 and proposed, the paper reported. He somehow managed to talk White House security guards into giving them clearance so he could pop the question on the main driveway leading to the White House. They set the date for the summer of 2013.

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Officials: Christopher Dorner May Be Dead Following Deadly Standoff

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Andy Smith says that despite earlier reports, Christopher Dorner’s body has not been recovered from a burned out cabin where he was reportedly holed up during a deadly shootout with authorities earlier today.

Cindy Bachman of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department says authorities have not yet been able to enter the cabin, but when they do, they believe they will find a body inside.

Dorner, who allegedly shot and killed his fourth victim — a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputy — was barricaded inside a Seven Oaks residence for several hours Tuesday afternoon. He is also accused of shooting a second deputy, who was undergoing surgery after being airlifted to Loma Linda University Medical Center.

The home, ironically, is located near the Sheriff’s outpost that was set up earlier this week as part of the search for him.

CBS2′s Carter Evans reported that tear gas was fired into the house before the fire broke out. A single shot was also heard at that time, according to CBS2′s Juan Fernandez. During a news conference earlier in the day, LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith urged Dorner to surrender.

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In Cold Blood: Cold Case Files Taint Truman Capote Classic

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Photo Credit: Steve Schapiro/CorbisTruman Capote’s masterwork of murder, “In Cold Blood,” cemented two reputations when first published almost five decades ago: his own, as a literary innovator, and detective Alvin Dewey Jr.’s as the most famous Kansas lawman since Wyatt Earp. But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an “immaculately factual” recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.

It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero. A long-forgotten cache of Kansas Bureau of Investigation documents from the investigation into the deaths suggests that the events described in two crucial chapters of the 1966 book differ significantly from what actually happened.

Separately, a contract reviewed and authenticated by The Wall Street Journal shows that Mr. Capote in 1965 required Columbia Pictures to offer Mr. Dewey’s wife a job as a consultant to the film version of his book for a fee far greater than the U.S. median family income that year.

The details are to be found in papers from the Clutter case that a now-deceased KBI agent, Harold Nye, carried home with him years ago. Those documents, reviewed in August by the Journal, are the subject of litigation between the adult son of Mr. Nye, who hopes to publish or sell them, and the KBI, which claims to own the material.

Today, the KBI declines to explain the five-day delay in visiting the suspect’s farmhouse or to answer other questions delivered via email as well as by hand to a receptionist at its Topeka headquarters. Over the decades, literary sleuths have turned up numerous journalistic sins in “In Cold Blood,” ranging from minor inaccuracies to outright fabrication. The latest revelations, though, are particularly damaging because they undermine one of the longest-standing defenses of the book: that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation hailed the book as true. Mr. Dewey many times called the book accurate.

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Inside Highclere Castle, The Set And Real-Life Muse For Downton Abbey

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Photo Credit: ForbesPinnacles jutting into the sky, Highclere Castle is a place millions of Americans are familiar with — even if they haven’t heard the name before. The sprawling British estate is where Downton Abbey is shot, the wildly popular PBS series that depicts daily life in a British mansion during the early 20th century. But Highclere isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a real-life muse for the series, one of the last operational ‘great houses’ still occupied by lord and lady and accompanying staff.

“It’s possibly the most important Victorian House still lived in in England today,” says Lady Fiona, the charming 8th Countess of Carnarvon (and real-life equivalent of Downton’s Lady Cora Crawley). With her husband, the 8th Earl of Carnarvon George Herbert, the couple call Highclere home, employing a roster of domestic staff, hosting royal guests (as well as commoners) and gleaning income from the surrounding farmland.

Located in England’s southern county of Hampshire, Highclere Castle is the seat of the Earl of Carnarvon, owned by the Herbert family since 1679. The property’s history goes back 1,300 years, when it was owned by the Bishops of Winchester (hence the term ‘abbey’). Since the 17th century, the great house has gone through several architectural incarnations: it was renovated in Elizabethan style, converted to a classical Georgian home, and then underwent an extensive expansion in the 19th century under the direction of Charles Barry, a Renaissance revival architect who added the soaring tower and bath stone exteriors that grace the castle today. The accompanying gardens were sculpted by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, an 18th century landscape architect who designed more than 170 gardens including those of the royal palace.

Surrounded by 1,000 private acres of parkland, the castle itself is huge, boasting as many as 300 rooms – the inhabitants say they don’t know how many exactly. (As Lady Carnarvon wryly told the Telegraph in 2010, “I suppose if you know how many rooms you’ve got, you haven’t got a very big house.”) Between 50 and 80 of these spaces are bedrooms, an estimate based on the constantly changing designations of rooms due to remodeling. The Countess says the family regularly uses different rooms “because it’s good to move around.” There are three main staircases including the hand-carved Oak Staircase, the “Red Staircase” that leads to the second-floor bedrooms and nurseries, and a stone servant staircase running from the main floors down to the bottom levels that was once used by house staff in much the same way depicted on Downton Abbey.

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Oregon Bakery Refuses to Make Same-Sex Wedding Cake

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GRESHAM, Ore. — The Oregon Department of Justice is looking into a complaint that a Gresham bakery refused to make a wedding cake for a same sex marriage.

It started on Jan. 17 when a mother and daughter showed up at Sweet Cakes by Melissa looking for the perfect wedding cake.

“My first question is what’s the wedding date,” said owner Aaron Klein. “My next question is bride and groom’s name … the girl giggled a little bit and said it’s two brides.”

Klein apologized to the women and told them he and his wife do not make cakes for same-sex marriages. Klein said the women were disgusted and walked out.

“I believe that marriage is a religious institution ordained by God,” said Klein. “A man should leave his mother and father and cling to his wife … that to me is the beginning of marriage.”

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Roe’s Multiplier Effect: Generations Dead From Abortion

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Photo Credit: JlhopgoodThis year’s marking of the 40th anniversary Roe v. Wade included, naturally, much regret over the growing death toll caused by the scourge of abortion. The number is now over 55 million. That’s 55 million abortions of children who never became Americans.

That number, however, doesn’t begin to do justice to the total loss. 40 years of Roe v. Wade now equates to the loss of multiple generations of Americans, thus producing an even worse multiplier effect, one that must be considered in counting up the casualties. Think about it:

A huge number of those 55 million would have gone on to have their own children. Those aborted in 1973, would be 40 years old this year. Some of them would even have grandchildren.

In fact, just imagine—a conservative estimate—if those 55 million abortions had all been born, and, in turn, had each produced, on average, just one or two or three or four descendants. If that had happened, there would be another 100 to 200 million Americans right now.

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