Virgin 'Ignored' Space Safety Warnings

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Photo Credit: AFP / Josh EdelsonVirgin Galactic “ignored” repeated warnings in the years leading up to the deadly crash of its spacecraft in California, a rocket science safety expert said Sunday, as investigators hunted for clues to the accident.

Carolynne Campbell, a rocket propulsion expert with the Netherlands-based International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, said she could not speculate on the cause of Friday’s crash without “all the data.”

However, she said multiple warnings about the spacecraft’s motor and the fuel used to power it had been issued to Virgin since 2007, when three engineers died testing a rocket on the ground.

“Based on the work we’ve done, including me writing a paper on the handling of nitrous oxide, we were concerned about what was going on at Virgin Galactic,” she told AFP.

“I sent copies of the paper to various people at Virgin Galactic in 2009, and they were ignored.”

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Islamic State Group Kills 50 Iraqis

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Photo Credit: APIslamic State group extremists lined up and shot dead at least 50 Iraqi men, women and children from the same tribe on Sunday, officials said, in the latest targeting of the group by militants.

The killings, all committed in public, raise the death toll suffered by the Sunni Al Bu Nimr tribe in recent days to some 150, suggesting IS fighters now view them as a threat. Some Sunnis in the volatile province had previously supported the local expansion of IS and other militants in December.

Meanwhile, separate attacks around Baghdad killed at least 19 people, authorities said.

Sunday’s attack on the Sunni tribe took place in the village of Ras al-Maa, north of Ramadi, the provincial capital. There, the militant group killed at least 40 men, six women and four children, lining them up and shooting them one by one, senior tribesman Sheikh Naim al-Gaoud told The Associated Press. The militants also kidnapped another 17 people, he said.

An official with the Anbar governor’s office corroborated the tribesman’s account. He spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to brief journalists.

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West Urges Christian Voters to the Polls

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Photo Credit: Jim JessBy Jim Jess.

Retired Lt. Col. Allen West, a former member of Congress, urged a crowd of voters at Marietta’s Roswell Street Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon to turn out to vote this week, and encouraged them to get their friends to the polls as well.

The meeting was organized by the Faith & Freedom Coalition of Georgia and Marietta-basedGeorgia Tea Party.
West, a former Florida congressman, told the crowd of 150 that if Christians did not defend their faith, they would lose their freedom to the onslaughts of secular humanists, who have an inaccurate understanding of religious freedom in the First Amendment.

West explained that separation of church and state does not mean that Christians must deny who they are or ignore their faith when considering public policy issues or candidates. He also said that Christians were lights to the world.

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Rand Paul: ‘Dumb’ Focus on Voter ID Could Squander GOP’s ‘Huge Opportunity’ to Win Black Voters

By Josh Siegel.

Sen. Rand Paul today said it would be a “dumb idea” for Republicans to focus on voter ID laws because doing so would turn off black voters, whom the GOP has a “huge opportunity” to attract.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Kentucky Republican and likely presidential candidate stressed that he supports requiring identification to vote in elections. But, he said, Republicans should avoid prioritizing the issue.

“It doesn’t mean that I think it’s unreasonable,” Paul said of conservatives’ efforts to tighten voting laws and rules to prevent voter fraud. “I just think it’s a dumb idea for Republicans to emphasize this and say, ‘This is how we are going to win the elections.’”

Paul’s remarks to host Chuck Todd recalled similar comments on voter ID laws that he made last spring in an interview with a reporter, drawing sharp criticism from some conservatives.

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New York Times: Should Black And Hispanic Men Be Banned From Chatting Up White Feminist Women?

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy now, you’ve probably seen the viral video in which the frumpy woman with the Flashdance hair walks around the streets of New York City getting catcalled.

The hidden-camera video was released last week by Hollaback, a group that bills itself as “an international movement to end street harassment.” The video documents the woman, 24-year-old actress Shoshana Roberts, walking the streets of New York for 10 hours as she claims to be the victim of some 100 instances of harassment.

Now, The New York Times wants to know if a law should shield white feminist women by preventing black and Hispanic men from speaking to them, and possibly offending their tender sensibilities.

“Should current laws dealing with harassment be strengthened to include catcalling, or will that go too far in trying to control speech and behavior?”

In the video, virtually every man who speaks to Roberts (with comments such as “How you doing today?”) is either black or Hispanic.

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Obama 'AWOL'?: GOP Questions President's Role in Freeing Marine

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Photo Credit: Fox News Republicans on Saturday welcomed the news of Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi being released from a Mexico prison and the efforts by GOP congressmen to help broker a deal but questioned whether the Obama administration did enough.

“President Obama still isn’t using all of the tools and levers that we have as the world’s lone super power, whether it is as simple as getting Sgt. Tahmooressi released from custody to defending our interests or protecting our allies in the Middle East,” Arkansas GOP Rep. Tom Cotton told Fox News.

Cotton, who is now running for Senate, wrote Obama asking him to intervene.

A Mexican judge on Friday ordered Tahmooressi’s immediate release, after he spent seven months behind bars for crossing the border with loaded guns.

The judge said Tahmooressi should be freed because of his mental state. But he did not make a determination on the illegal-arms charges against the Afghanistan veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a Mexican official who had knowledge of the ruling but was not authorized to give his name.

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Holder's Wife Linked to 'Fast and Furious' and Abortion Clinic Fraud

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Photo Credit: on.aol.comWhile outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder continues to fend off responsibility for the law enforcement snafu known as Operation Fast and Furious, documents obtained through a judge’s order reveal that not only did Holder know about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), but he discussed it via email with his physician spouse, Sharon Malone, however President Barack Obama is granting those emails to be withheld based on an “executive privilege” claim.

While most media organizations are quick to give President Barack Obama, Holder and others the “benefit of the doubt,” in Holder’s wife’s case they actually turned a blind eye to corruption that included alleged confict-of-interest. For example, Dr. Malone is no stranger to controversy: While Holder had been blasted for his failure to investigate alleged crimes involving abortion clinics, his wife, Sharon, and his sister-in-law co-owned an abortion clinic run by an abortion physician, Tyrone Cecile Malloy, who was indicted by a Georgia grand jury on charges of Medicaid fraud after Holder’s office failed to prosecute the alleged fraud.

The Fast and Furious documents, according to the prolific government watchdog group Judicial Watch, include the emails between the attorney general and his wife regarding a White House statement on the “gun walking” scandal that the White House wanted kept secret.

On July 18, 2014, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ordered the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to produce, a Vaughn Index of withheld documents regarding Fast and Furious which the DOJ grudgingly released on October 22. When the DOJ asked the court to delay the release day until later in November — a ploy to avoid their release before the mid-term elections — Judge Bates denied the obviously politically-motivated request to delay the release until after the Nov. 4, 2014, elections.

In a Vaughn Index, the government must list each withheld document, state the statutory exemption claimed for it and explain how the disclosure of each document would damage the governmental interests asserted by the exemption. Malone is not a government employee or a member of the Obama White House, and so the executive privilege claim rings hollow with many legal scholars.

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Scientists Predict 130 Ebola Cases in US by the End of 2014

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Photo Credit: AP / John MinchilloTop medical experts studying the spread of Ebola say the public should expect more cases to emerge in the United States by year’s end as infected people arrive here from West Africa, including American doctors and nurses returning from the hot zone and people fleeing from the deadly disease.

But how many cases?

No one knows for sure how many infections will emerge in the U.S. or anywhere else, but scientists have made educated guesses based on data models that weigh hundreds of variables, including daily new infections in West Africa, airline traffic worldwide and transmission possibilities.

This week, several top infectious disease experts ran simulations for The Associated Press that predicted as few as one or two additional infections by the end of 2014 to a worst-case scenario of 130.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a huge outbreak here, no,” said Dr. David Relman, a professor of infectious disease, microbiology and immunology at Stanford University’s medical school. “However, as best we can tell right now, it is quite possible that every major city will see at least a handful of cases.”

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'He's Sort Of God': Remember When Obama Was The Messiah?

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerPresident Barack Obama had an approval rating of just 38 percent as of late September and he is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

This week, the man who once filled arenas like a rock star suffered the indignity of Wisconsin Democrats walking out on him as he stumped for another struggling Democrat, Mary Burke. Obama’s visit to Wisconsin coincided with the disappearance of Burke’s modest lead in statewide polls. She now trails her opponent, Scott Walker, by seven points.

The very same thing happened in deep-blue Maryland last week, where the bleachers reportedly began emptying while Obama was giving a speech. The Republican gubernatorial candidate then enjoyed a nine-point polling boost.

Adding still further to Obama’s misery, a new nationwide poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics shows his Svengali-like hold over America’s 18-to-29-year-old voting cohort has finally loosened.

And in Kentucky, Democratic Senate candidate Alison Grimes won’t even admit she voted for Obama.

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Alabama Incest Ring Unravels Following Teen's Disappearance

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Photo Credit: APA teen’s mysterious disappearance helped prompt the deciphering of an alleged sex ring, involving numerous family members in the back woods of Alabama. 19-year-old Brittney Wood is thought to have been with Donnie Holland — her uncle, who was being investigated for disturbing sex crimes — in May 2012, the night Holland died from a gunshot in his car. Wood has not been seen since, and many questions remain surrounding rampant incest in her family, which is being described by investigators as “the largest sex ring ever uncovered in Alabama.”

Eleven individuals — eight of whom are adult relatives of Wood — have been charged with sex crimes related to the alleged ring, according to the Associated Press (AP). The adults allegedly shared their own children for group sex.

According to prosecutors, incest has gone on, unchecked, for at least three generations in the family. Holland was thought to be one of the group’s leaders; he was scheduled to be questioned about his role in the incest ring the same day that his body was discovered.

Mobile County Assistant District Attorney Nicki Patterson told the AP, “Donnie was the manager. He’d say, ‘I’ve got this child and this adult, come on over.'”

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Lt Gov Dewhurst Asks For Cost Estimates To Expand Border Security

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Lt. Governor David Dewhurst asked the Texas National Guard (TNG) and Department of Public Safety (DPS) to provide cost estimates to expand the current border security operations underway along the Texas-Mexico border. In addition to expanding the operation to covering more of the border, the governor is asking for estimates to carry the operation through 2016.

“While defending our borders is, without question, a federal responsibility, Texas has an obligation to defend itself independently of the federal government when Washington fails to fulfill its Constitutional duties,” Dewhurst said in a letter to the DPS and TNG obtained by Breitbart Texas. “As policymakers continue discussion on how to fill the void left by Washington, it is important that the debate be informed by sound strategy and honest budgetary considerations.” Dewhurst’s letter is attached below for reference.

Dewhurst wrote the request to Colonel Steven McCraw, Texas DPS Director and Major General John Nichols, TNG Adjutant General. He requested the department leaders to provide cost estimates for the Offices of the Lt. Governor, Governor and Speaker of the House along with other lawmakers who are involved in the process.

Read more from this story HERE.