Most of Satellite Likely Incinerated as it Entered Atmosphere

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Photo Credit: My FOX NY Officials say they have confirmed a 2,000-pound European satellite that has been steadily sinking toward Earth after it ran out of fuel last month has re-entered the atmosphere Sunday, and say most of it likely incinerated.

In a status report posted on the European Space Agency’s website, scientists said tracking stations last made contact with the GOCE, or Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, at 5:42 p.m. GMT when it was 75 miles above Antarctica.

Spokesman Robert Meisner tells FoxNews.com the agency has confirmed the GOCE has fallen to Earth, but has not confirmed any other details.

The agency estimates on its website that about 25 percent of the spacecraft survived re-entry and has fallen into the ocean.

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Impeaching Himself, Period

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Photo Credit: APThe side-by-side comparisons of President Obama’s statements then and now are devastating. Especially the “period.” Period here is no punctuation mark. It’s a way of underscoring the word of the President of the United States.

“If you like your health care plan you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” – June 15, 2009

“And I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me.” – November 7, 2013

For him to have made such unqualified assurances to the American people — not once but dozens of times — and for us to learn that he always knew that promise could not be kept — will haunt his presidency. He has impeached himself.

The president’s word has been called “the coin of the realm.” Well, we don’t have a realm, and we have far fewer coins these days. But the point is made: His word has value. Or had value.

Of course, many opponents of this president will raise the specter of impeachment. The legislative process for enactment of ObamaCare was surely debauched by these knowingly false assurances. Of that there can be no doubt.

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Last of WWII’s Doolittle Raiders Keep Promise to Their Commander, Make Final Toast

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Known as the Doolittle Raiders, the 80 men who risked their lives on a World War II bombing mission on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor were toasted one last time by their surviving comrades and honored with a Veterans Day weekend of fanfare shared by thousands.

Three of the four surviving Raiders attended the toast Saturday at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Their late commander, Lt. Gen. James “Jimmy” Doolittle, started the tradition but they decided this autumn’s ceremony would be their last.

“May they rest in peace,” Lt. Col. Richard Cole, 98, said before he and fellow Raiders — Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, 93, and Staff Sgt. David Thatcher, 92 — sipped cognac from specially engraved silver goblets. The 1896 cognac was saved for the occasion after being passed down from Doolittle.

Hundreds invited to the ceremony, including family members of deceased Raiders, watched as the three each called out “here” as a historian read the names of all 80 of the original airmen.

The fourth surviving Raider, Lt. Col. Robert Hite, 93, couldn’t travel to Ohio because of health problems. But son Wallace Hite said his father, wearing a Raiders blazer and other traditional garb for their reunions, made his own salute to the fallen with a silver goblet of wine at home in Nashville, Tenn., earlier in the week.

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Veteran Affairs Sued for Harassing Christian Chaplains

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Photo Credit: WND Two military chaplains are suing Eric Shinseki, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, or VA, for allegedly being harassed and drummed out of a training and placement program because of their Christian faith.

Chaplains Major Steven Firtko, U.S. Army (Retired) and Lieutenant Commander Dan Klender, U.S. Navy, claim they were mocked, scolded and threatened for their faith while enrolled in the San Diego VA-DOD Clinical Pastoral Education Center program, which trains and distributes chaplains to military and VA medical centers in the San Diego area.

According to their lawsuit, Firtko and Klender allege the Center’s supervisor, Ms. Nancy Dietsch, a VA employee, derided them in classrooms and even had one of them dismissed for failing to renounce his Christian beliefs.

For example, on Sept. 24, 2012, the lawsuit claims, during a classroom discussion, Dietsch asked Firtko what he “believed faith was.”

Firtko responded by quoting Hebrews 11:1 – “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

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Obamacare Is Running Out of Bullets

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Photo Credit: Andrew Harrer/BloombergBy Megan McArdle.

There are two key signs that the administration of President Barack Obama is having trouble coping with the events of the last month.

The first is what it hasn’t done: attacked insurance companies. For the past four years, insurers have been a punching bag of the administration and the Democratic Party. Whenever insurers did something the administration didn’t like as a result of the new health-care law, Democrats punched back, hard, with complaints about greedy insurers who were blaming the White House for their own failures.

Not this time. Left-leaning columnists and policy wonks have been suggesting that the cancellation letters were part of an insurance company scam to enroll their customers in expensive policies, but the administration itself has been remarkably oblique. It needs the insurers, especially with the exchanges in so much trouble. Their cooperation is essential to avoiding another round of nasty premium shocks next year.

It reminds me of a late-Soviet joke: A man stands in line all day for bread, only to have the baker come out and say there is none. He loses it, and begins ranting about the government. Eventually, a man in a trench coat puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Be careful, comrade. You know, in the old days, it would have been …” and he mimes a gun pointed at the head.

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Beyond HealthCare.gov, Obamacare’s other challenges

By Jon Kingsdale.

Jon Kingsdale, who oversaw the Massachusetts health insurance exchange from 2006 to 2010, is a managing director of the Wakely Consulting Group. Wakely has provided actuarial and other technical assistance for the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.

“The Affordable Care Act is not just a Web site. It’s much more,” President Obama said last month. This focus beyond short-term technical problems is meant to bolster the faith of those, like me, who support the Affordable Care Act. However, it will succeed only if the administration does much more than fix the Web site.

As HealthCare.gov — the main door to insurance shopping for 13 million of the 17 million uninsured who are eligible for subsidies — gets patched up in the coming weeks, the government must also prepare the world’s largest insurance store to meet two equally daunting challenges.

The first is to get enrollment, billing and premium collections working smoothly. In 2006, when we launched the Massachusetts Health Connector, which became the prototype for insurance exchanges under the ACA, my team encountered start-up problems. Tracking billing and collections was a much bigger challenge than getting our Web site to work.

Here’s why: Enrollees are not covered until their first month’s premium is received. In the individual insurance market, premium billing and collection is difficult to track. Folks frequently pay late or in weekly installments, or send too little or even too much. And when they stop paying, they often do not notify the insurer; the company must determine whether it is an intentional termination, an oversight, or a lost or late payment. Unlike most of today’s 15 million direct enrollees, who pay premiums on their own, an estimated 27 percent of those who will be eligible for tax credits under the ACA do not have checking accounts. So they must use cash, money orders or prepaid debit cards to pay their share of monthly premiums.

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Tom Cruise: My Work as an Actor is as Hard as Fighting in Afghanistan

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Photo Credit: GettyTom Cruise not only thinks he trains harder than Olympic athletes, he believes his job as a professional actor is as grueling as fighting the war in Afghanistan — this according to legal docs obtained by TMZ.

As we reported, Cruise recently sat for a deposition in his $50 million libel suit against a magazine publisher that claimed he abandoned daughter Suri — and his quotes are GOLD.

First, the Middle East — Tom says his location shoots are just like serving a tour in Afghanistan, “That’s what it feels like. And certainly on this last movie, it was brutal. It was brutal.”

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Everything You Know about Matthew Shepard is Wrong

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard Stephen Jimenez sounds remarkably chipper on the phone when he calls in from Portland, his thirteenth city on a seemingly endless book tour. He’s plugging The Book of Matt, and the reason he’s chipper is that he hasn’t been burned in effigy, yet, or heckled mercilessly, yet, or denounced, at least by anybody that really matters, as a traitor to the cause. Yet.

The “cause” in this case would be gay rights, in all of its astounding exfoliations. Jimenez’s book threatens to uproot a foundational myth of the movement: that the murder of a University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard, in 1998, was a “hate crime.”

The approved account, received for 15 years now as both a horror and an inspiration, tells us that Shepard was approached in a bar one night by two strangers, who drove him to the outskirts of Laramie and then beat him nearly to death with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol, for the simple reason that he was homosexual. One of the blows fell so hard it pushed Shepard’s brain into his brain stem, cracking it. He was found the next morning tied to a rail fence crucifixion-style, after 18 hours in near-freezing temperatures, comatose.

Even before his death five days later, Shepard had been made a symbol, thanks to quick work by mainchancers from national gay rights organizations and by compliant reporters from back East, who found in the story a ready-made example of the intolerance, cruelty, violence, and raging homophobia of America’s flyover country, Western States Division.

Well, no, says Stephen Jimenez. Beginning as a self-described amateur journalist (the best kind), he studied Shepard’s murder off and on for 13 years, conducted hundreds of interviews with sources on and off the record, and pored over a public record many thousands of pages long. His comprehensive account corrects the approved version in small matters and large. Shepard was not tied to the rail fence as if crucified, for example, and it’s still not clear, even after Jimenez’s exhaustive reporting, how this piece of misinformation became common knowledge—beyond the obvious explanation that reporters thought the detail was, as the saying goes, too good to check.

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Berkeley Bans Term ‘Illegal Immigrant’

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Photo Credit: thecollegefix.comThe UC Berkeley student government has banned the term “illegal immigrant” from its discourse, deeming the phrase racist, offensive, unfair and derogatory.

In an unanimous vote, student senators passed a resolution that stated the word “illegal” is “racially charged,” “dehumanizes” people, and contributes to “punitive and discriminatory actions aimed primarily at immigrants and communities of color.”

The “resolution in support of drop the I-word campaign” was approved 18 to 0 with one abstention on Oct. 30, according to a copy of the meeting’s minutes obtained by The College Fix.

Its approval marks at least the second time this semester that a public university’s student government has voted to eradicate the phrase. UCLA passed a nearly identical measure in late August.

There are an estimated 900 students in the country illegally who are currently enrolled in the 10-campus, University of California system, according to UC officials. These students live in “fear” because former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano is now president of the UC system, according to the resolution, which aims to “create a safe campus environment for all students.”

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Executions Stall as States Seek Different Drugs

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Photo Credit: wootomFlorida ran out of its primary lethal-injection drug last month and relied on a new drug that no state had ever used for an execution. At Ohio’s next scheduled execution, the state is planning to use a two-drug combination for the first time. Last month in Texas, Michael Yowell became that state’s first inmate executed using a drug made by a lightly regulated pharmacy that usually produces customized medications for individual patients.

The decision by manufacturers to cut off supplies of drugs, some of which had been widely used in executions for decades, has left many of the nation’s 32 death penalty states scrambling to come up with new drugs and protocols. Some states have already changed their laws to keep the names of lethal-drug suppliers private as a way to encourage them to provide drugs.

The uncertainty is leading to delays in executions because of legal challenges, raising concerns that condemned inmates are being inadequately anesthetized before being executed and leading the often-macabre process of state-sanctioned executions into a continually shifting legal, bureaucratic and procedural terrain.

In the Florida execution, which used the new drug midazolam as part of a three-drug mix, The Associated Press reported that the inmate, William Happ, appeared to remain conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than those executed with the old formula.

“We have seen more changes in lethal injection protocols in the last five years than we have seen in the last three decades,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and a death penalty expert. “These states are just scrambling for drugs, and they’re changing their protocols rapidly and carelessly.”

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DMV Employee Pleads Guilty to Giving At Least 300 Illegals State ID’s or Licenses

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Photo Credit: APThree people in Virginia, including a DMV employee, pleaded guilty this week to conspiring to get state IDs or driver’s licenses for at least 300 illegal immigrants.

Noemi Barboza pleaded guilty on Thursday to “a bribery conspiracy charge, admitting that she often drove illegal immigrants to the Fairfax DMV location where an employee would approve their applications for driver’s licenses, learner’s permits, and identification cards knowing they could not prove legal presence in the United States.” Four people engaged in the scheme from 2007 to 2011. The fourth person has not yet been charged.

The illegal immigrants paid Barboza’s husband or another person, who then reportedly “split the money with” Maria Cavallaro, a 45-year-old DMV employee…

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