America's Aging Armed Forces: Another Upgrade Planned for Vietnam-Era Helicopter

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The U.S. Army will hold a flight demonstration on Tuesday of a newly upgraded version of the Vietnam-era OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter, an Army-led initiative that officials say will save $600 million in coming years.

The Army managed the project, which first began in December 2010 and was aimed at improving the capabilities of the existing helicopters by giving them a new common sensor, upgrading their cockpit displays, and cutting their weight by about 160 pounds (73 kg).

By tapping its own expertise and working closely with the helicopter’s original manufacturer, Bell Helicopter, a unit of Textron Inc, and Honeywell International, which makes the helicopter’s avionics, Army officials said they were able to build two prototype aircraft and start flying them just two years after the program began.

“We’ve taken the best of everything and tried to package it into an aircraft as quickly as possible and get it out there … to the force at considerable savings to the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayer,” Army Colonel Robert Grigsby, project manager for armed scout helicopters, told reporters.

As the “lead system integrator” for the initiative, the Army also retained the technical rights to the new F-model, unlike earlier programs in which the integration work was outsourced to private firms which kept those rights, Grigsby said.

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Obama Admin. Threatening Benghazi Whistle-Blowers at CIA, State

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Photo Credit: Jonathon NarveyAt least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

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Female DNA Found on Bomb Components in Boston Marathon Probe, Source Says

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Photo Credit: APFemale DNA was found on bomb components used in the attack this month on the Boston Marathon, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to Fox News, though the source cautioned that it is too early to draw hard conclusions from that evidence.

“No one should expect that the investigation is over,” the source told Fox News in confirming the development first reported by the Wall Street Journal, adding that it is just one piece of evidence that investigators are looking at.

The revelation about female DNA came on the same day that the FBI went inside the Rhode Island home of bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow’s parents, and the nearby family of a man identified as his mysterious mentor hired a family spokesman to keep the media at bay.

“We are there as part of our ongoing investigation, but we aren’t permitted to discuss specific aspects of our case,” an FBI official said outside the suburban Providence home where Katherine Russell and her 3-year-old daughter are staying.

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Global Warming Hysteria Wrong Again: Methane Emissions Decreasing Significantly

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Photo Credit: APRevised data from the Environmental Protection Agency now shows that methane emissions released by natural gas drilling are substantially lower than previously estimated, which undercuts claims made environmental groups that methane leaked during drilling accelerates global warming.

“We need a dramatic shift off carbon-based fuel: coal, oil and also gas,” Bill McKibbern, founder of the environmental group 350.org, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Natural gas provides at best a kind of fad diet, where a dangerously overweight patient loses a few pounds and then their weight stabilizes; instead, we need at this point a crash diet.”

“New data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may not answer all of those questions in a comprehensive fashion, but they do strongly suggest that activists’ arguments about ‘the methane problem’ for natural gas development are without merit,” according to Energy in Depth.

“They also suggest that methane emissions aren’t increasing it all. They’re decreasing, actually — even as more wells and greater production come online,” the industry-funded group added.

The EPA said that tighter pollution controls by the gas industry has allowed methane emissions to decrease substantially between 1990 and 2010 — by about 41.6 million metric tons per year on average for a total of more than 850 million metric tons overall.

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Wealth Gap Between Whites and Blacks Has Grown Sharply Under Obama

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Photo Credit: Tax CreditsMillions of Americans suffered a loss of wealth during the recession and the sluggish recovery that followed. But the last half-decade has proved far worse for black and Hispanic families than for white families, starkly widening the already large gulf in wealth between non-Hispanic white Americans and most minority groups, according to a new study from the Urban Institute.

“It was already dismal,” Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School in New York, said of the wealth gap between black and white households. “It got even worse.”

Given the dynamics of the housing recovery and the rebound in the stock market, the wealth gap might still be growing, experts said, further dimming the prospects for economic advancement for current and future generations of Americans from minority groups.

The Urban Institute study found that the racial wealth gap yawned during the recession, even as the income gap between white Americans and nonwhite Americans remained stable. As of 2010, white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy.

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Closing Argument: Gosnell Babies Treated Worse Than Sick Dogs

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Closing arguments in the murder trial of an abortion provider alternated between the defense’s insistence that Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s office was no “house of horrors” to the prosecution’s brutal depiction of the deaths of a woman and four viable babies.

Gosnell had declined to testify in his defense or even call witnesses at his capital murder trial. Instead, his attorney, Jack McMahon, offered a passionate, often angry defense of his client, blaming the intense media interest in the case and the prosecution for creating a “tremendous rush to judgement.”

“Never in my life have I seen the presumption of innocence more trampled on, stomped on, than in this case,” McMahon said, arguing that the overdose death of the woman at his West Philadelphia clinic was a “tragic accident” and that there was “no scientific evidence” that Gosnell, 72, killed babies after they were born alive.

But Assistant District Attorney Ed Cameron, in his closing argument, told a story about taking his sick dog to the veterinarian to be put down, with a shot to induce sleep first. “These babies didn’t even get that,” he said.

“My dog was treated better than he treated babies and women,” Cameron said. “And that’s because he didn’t care. He created an assembly line, with no regard for these women whatsoever.”

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Ron Paul: Police Manhunt for Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Scarier Than Attack

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Photo Credit: APFormer Rep. Ron Paul said the law enforcement that swarmed around Boston in the days following the marathon bombings was scarier than the actual terrorist attack.

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” he said on the Lew Rockwell website, Politico reported. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

The terror attacks on April 15 in Boston killed three and injured 264.

Mr. Paul, a former libertarian political candidate who served in Congress as a member of the Republican Party, said the door-to-door searches police conducted in Watertown for the bombing suspects were particularly alarming.

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Global Cooling: US Sets Thousands of Cold, Snowfall Records for April

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Photo Credit: APApril has been a freakishly cold month across much of the northern USA, bringing misery to millions of sun-starved and winter-weary residents from the Rockies to the Midwest.

“The weather map … looks like something out of The Twilight Zone,” Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas of WeatherNation TV wrote on his blog last week.

Record cold and snow has been reported in dozens of cities, with the worst of the chill in the Rockies, upper Midwest and northern Plains. Several baseball games have been snowed out in both Denver and Minneapolis.

Cities such as Rapid City, S.D.; Duluth, Minn.; and Boulder, Colo., have all endured their snowiest month ever recorded. (In all three locations, weather records go back more than 100 years.) In fact, more than 1,100 snowfall records and 3,400 cold records have been set across the nation so far in April, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Unfortunately for warm-weather lovers, after some mild temperatures the past few days, the chill is forecast to return as the calendar turns to May: Accumulating snow is forecast overnight Tuesday night and Wednesday in Denver and in Minneapolis-St.Paul by Wednesday night and Thursday, said AccuWeather meteorologist Mark Paquette.

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Obama Admin. Says its Prior Investigation into Benghazi is Enough, Doesn't Need Congressional Hearings

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Photo Credit: U.S Embassy Kabul AfghanistanThe State Department on Monday defended its decision not to have lower-level employees testify before Congress about last year’s attack in Benghazi, Libya.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is pushing ahead with his investigation of the terrorist assault, and has asked for legal protections for lower-level employees who might be called to testify.

The State Department pushed back on Monday and said the independent probe into the attack “should be enough” for lawmakers.

“We think that we’ve done an independent investigation, that it’s been transparent, thorough, credible, and detailed, and that we’ve shared those findings with the U.S. Congress,” State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said. “And that should be enough.”

Ventrell said the employees who were present during the attack or were otherwise involved have already provided “extensive testimony” to the FBI and the State Department’s independent review board, which issued a scathing report last year. He said they’re back on duty and at their posts around the world.

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Congressman: ‘Explosive’ Benghazi Hearings ‘Coming Quickly’

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Photo Credit: Washington TimesRep. Trey Gowdy, appearing on Fox News on Saturday afternoon, promised that “explosive” congressional hearings over the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, are “coming quickly.”

“There are more Benghazi hearings coming; I think they’re going to be explosive,” Mr. Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who is a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Fox’s Uma Pemmaraju.

Mr. Gowdy wasn’t able to give out too many details, but he hinted that the public for the first time might hear from witnesses to the terror attack that left four Americans dead.

“I am bound by certain measures of confidentiality, but I would tell you that you are getting very warm,” Mr. Gowdy said when asked by Ms. Pemmaraju whether witnesses could be coming forward…

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