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A smirking gunman who reportedly shouted Nazi slogans opened fire at a Jewish community center and an old-age home in a suburb of Kansas City, killing three people. The gunman, said to be an older man, singled out Jewish victims for death, Rabbi Herbert Mandl, a chaplain with the Overland Park Police Department, told CNN. “Asking someone if you are Jewish before shooting sounds very much like a hate crime,” Mandl said. Police said two people were killed at the JCC of Greater Kansas City, where children were auditioning for a musical. Despite Mandl’s assertion, the JCC victims were identified...

Local radio is reporting that there has been a shooting at the Overland Park, Kansas Jewish Community Center around 1:00 p.m. Central time. Man walking up to people asking if they are Jewish and boom. News conference at 5:00. Evidently CNN is reporting.

ABC News Vice President Jeffrey Schneider has apologized for a story on his network that connected a CEO who supports traditional marriage to the Westboro Baptist Church and their offensive "God hates fags" signs. Mr. Schneider contacted the Media Research Center on Thursday after our social media department requested members call and complain about the comparison.

WASHINGTON – The Westboro Baptist Church, an extremist organization known for its anti-gay activism, announced that it will picket the funerals of the three people killed in Sunday afternoon’s shooting attacks at two Kansas City Jewish sites. The church, which has famously picketed funerals of US military personnel and has protested against the American Jewish community, sent out a tweet shortly after the shooting saying, “Thank God for shootings at Overland Park KS jewish centers! Westboro to picket funerals. God did not passover.”

The 73-year-old man charged with murder in the shooting at a Jewish community center and retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas, that left three people dead is reportedly the former Grand Dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Fraiser Glenn Cross Jr., of Aurora, Mo., was taken into custody in the parking lot of an elementary school near the scene of the shootings, and was booked on a charge of first degree murder, according to the Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff's Office. Cross is an alias for Frasier Glenn Miller, the former KKK leader, according to the Southern...

A retired Marine with nearly two decades of aviation experience has stepped forward with a compelling theory about a mysterious plane that was spotted flying over Texas last month. On March 10, photographers Steve Douglass and Dean Muskett took pictures of three puzzling aircraft flying over Amarillo, and posted them online in hopes of identifying the planes. Retired-Marine James Vineyard has submitted one of the more interesting explanations, telling the Houston Chronicle he believes they are SR-72 Blackbirds - a spy plane that can cross the U.S. in less than an hour, unmanned.

first time. Aviation Week & Space Technology journalist Bill Sweetman has posted photos taken March 10 by two veteran sky watchers, Steve Douglass and Dean Muskett. In his blog post of March 28, Sweetman writes that he and two Aviation Week editors agree that the photos depict "something real." In other words, these pictures aren't easily explained away by reports of known military flights or the work of someone who got carried away with Photoshop. So what can aviation experts say about the object in the photos? "The photos tell us more about what the mysterious stranger isn't than what...

Explanation: If you see a sky like this -- photograph it. A month ago in Iceland, an adventurous photographer (pictured) chanced across a sky full of aurora and did just that. In the foreground lies the stratovolcano Öræfajökull. In the background, among other sky delights, lies the constellation of Orion, visible to the aurora's left. Auroras are sparked by energetic particles from the Sun impacting the magnetic environment around the Earth. Resultant energetic particles such as electrons and protons rain down near the Earth's poles and impact the air. The impacted air molecules obtain excited electrons, and when electrons in...

GARRETTSVILLE, Ohio - Firefighters are battling a massive 3-alarm blaze in the Village of Garrettsville. Flames swept throughout Garrettsville’s historic downtown buildings and businesses on Route 82 (Main Street), just east of the Route 88 intersection, around 1:15 p.m. Saturday. The blaze is not under control, but spreading. Buildings from the 1800's are a total loss. Sources tell NewsChannel 5 that water is being pulled from the Silver Creek River to help battle the massive fire. A person witnessing the blaze said that it feels like the whole downtown portion of the village is on fire. Auburn, Aurora, Bainbridge, Boardman,...

Explanation: Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case in 2011 March when one of the largest auroral displays in recent years appeared over northern locations like the border between Norway and Russia. Pictured in the above time-lapse movie, auroras flow over snow covered landscapes, trees, clouds, mountains and lakes found near Kirkenes, Norway. Many times the auroras are green, as high energy particles strike the Earth's atmosphere, causing the air to glow as electrons resettle into their oxygen hosts. Other colors are occasionally noticeable as atmospheric nitrogen also becomes affected. In...

Explanation: A remarkably intense auroral band flooded the northern night with shimmering colors on December 7. The stunning sequence captured here was made with a camera fixed to a tripod under cold, clear skies near Ester, just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. Left to right, spanning a period of about 30 minutes, the panels follow changes in the dancing curtains of northern lights extending to altitudes of over 100 kilometers in a band arcing directly overhead. The panels span 150 degrees vertically, covering about 500 kilometers of aurora laying across the sky from edge to edge. The auroral activity was triggered...

Explanation: It was Halloween and the sky looked like a creature. Exactly which creature, the astrophotographer was unsure (but possibly you can suggest one). Exactly what caused the eerie apparition was sure: one of the best auroral displays in recent memory. This spectacular aurora had an unusually high degree of detail. Pictured above, the vivid green and purple auroral colors are caused by high atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen reacting to a burst of incoming electrons. Birch trees in Tromsø, Norway formed an also eerie foreground. Many other photogenic auroras have been triggered by recent energetic flares on the Sun.

Over the past several days the Sun has unleashed more than half a dozen major flares including four X-class events. The resulting aurora in some parts of the world have been beautiful. Here’s a collection of recent images taken by Jason Arhns in Alaska. It seems the aurora is just blanketing not only the sky, but the landscape as well! See more below, as well as a video showing 23 of the 26 M- and X-class flares on the sun between Oct. 23 and Oct. 28, 2013, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It also shows the coronal mass...

Explanation: What spooky planet is this? Planet Earth of course, on the dark and stormy night of September 12 at Hverir, a geothermally active area along the volcanic landscape in northeastern Iceland. Geomagnetic storms produced the auroral display in the starry night sky while ghostly towers of steam and gas venting from fumaroles danced against the eerie greenish light. Tonight, there is still a chance for geomagnetic storms triggered by recent solar activity, so high-latitude skygazers should beware. And ghostly shapes may dance in your neighborhood, too.Have a safe and Happy Halloween!!

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Heroes in AuroraPosted By Bruce Bawer On July 24, 2012 @ 12:20 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 7 Comments Three episodes from recent European history: In 2007, the nationally known Swedish politician Anna Lindh was gunned down in a Stockholm shopping mall by a gunman who then fled the scene.  The place was busy.  Several people observed the crime.  But it didn’t occur to anybody to tackle the killer, and nobody rushed to stop him.The next year, on Queen’s Day in Amsterdam, a male model taking part in an outdoor fashion show just off...

In between bowls of chicken poodle soup and deciding to provide air cover for al-Qaeda in Syria, our Dear Leader, Barack Hussein Obama, found time to meet with mayors from our crumbling major cities. From Justin Sink of The Hill: *** "President Obama told a collection of big-city mayors Tuesday at the White House that he would continue to use executive actions to combat gun violence plaguing major cities. In the meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder and the mayors of 18 cities from across the nation, Obama discussed commonly applicable strategies to reduce youth violence. 'He also vowed to...

As for place, Churchill, Manitoba and Tromso, Norway come to mind, but until the transporter is invented, most of will be staying closer to home. The simple answer is north and the farther north the better. In the northern border states of the US, auroras occur fairly regularly around the time of solar maximum, when the sun peaks in storm activity. The current solar cycle tops out this summer and fall, so your chances at seeing northern lights are far better now than a year and a half ago when solar activity saw a steep decline during a protracted minimum.

Controversy erupted in Colorado on Wednesday after a Republican legislator was accused of making racially insensitive remarks when she invoked images of barbecue and fried chicken while discussing the lower life expectancy among black Americans. The comments came during a meeting of the state’s Economic Opportunity and Poverty Reduction Task Force. State Sen. Vicki Marble (R-Fort Collins), who is white, took the opportunity to address what she sees as an ongoing health problem among black citizens: “When you look at life expectancy, there’s certain problems in the black race. Sickle cell anemia is something that comes up. Diabetes is something...

The sun unleashed a powerful storm early Tuesday morning (Aug. 20), sending an enormous cloud of superheated particles rocketing toward Earth. The solar eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), occurred at 4:24 a.m. EDT (0824 GMT) Tuesday and blasted billions of tons of solar particles toward Earth at a mind-boggling speed of 2 million mph (3.3 million km/h). ... Tuesday's blast doesn't appear to have too much disruptive potential. "In the past, geomagnetic storms caused by CMEs of this strength have usually been mild," NASA officials wrote. CMEs that hit Earth can also ramp up the auroras, also...

Explanation: Why would the sky still glow after sunset? Besides stars and the band of our Milky Way galaxy, the sky might glow because it contains either noctilucent clouds or aurora. Rare individually, both are visible in the above time lapse movie taken over Caithness, Scotland, UK taken during a single night earlier this month. First noted in 1885, many noctilucent clouds are known to correlate with atmospheric meteor trails, although details and the origins of others remain a topic of research. These meandering bright filaments of sunlight-reflecting ice crystals are the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. The above...