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Forget the French fries. How about a side of yuca with that Big Mac? Venezuela's more than 100 McDonald's franchises have run out of potatoes and are now serving alternatives like deep-fried arepa flatbreads or yuca, a starchy staple of traditional Venezuelan cooking. McDonald's franchisers are blaming a contract dispute with West Coast dock workers for halting the export of frozen fries to the country. The dispute also caused several days of French fry rationing in Japan last month. But Sonia Ruseler, who runs McDonald's restaurants in Latin America, declined to say Tuesday why other countries in the region are...

Forty years after first taking the oath as governor of California, Democrat Jerry Brown was sworn in to an historic fourth term Monday, proposing sweeping changes to address global climate change while offering a measured approach to targeting the state’s long-term financial liabilities. Brown said he would push to reduce petroleum use in cars by up to 50 percent; increase from a third to a half the required proportion of electricity produced from renewable energy sources and make heating fuels cleaner – all within 15 years.

Fifteen months ago, academic climate scientists expressed worries that a new climate model sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was going to harm existing modeling efforts, siphoning off talent and funding when federally funded science is short on both. The biggest concern: that the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project, meant to forecast local impacts of climate change and to be used on DOE’s future exascale supercomputers, would dilute resources from the Community Earth System Model (CESM). That model, managed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, is built on science and code...

To hear the White House tell it, the November elections never happened and 2014 was a super-duper year for President Obama. In a “Year in Review” slideshow, the White House suggests 2014 represented a “breakthrough” for America. The Obama administration takes credit for: • An economy growing at a record pace; • The longest streak of private-sector job growth on record; • The number of Americans without health insurance falling to a near record low; • Concerted action to prevent sexual assaults on college campuses; • The highest high school graduation rate in the nation’s history; • Historic steps to...

Like the Nazis, who, where actually a small percentage of Germans, the “soldiers” of the Black War on our police represent the sentiments and beliefs of a considerably larger segment of African American. Barack Obama Eric Holder Al Sharpton and Comrade Bill de Blasio have done so much to poison race relations in America that this is undeniable. In their aims attitude and ultimate goals the soldiers of the Black War on our police and the Nazis are very similar. Both regularly use(d) lies and propaganda to promote their message. Both attack(ed) weak and defenseless targets like elderly people and...

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for efforts to enhance the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in universities and improve Party building there. "Enhancing CPC leadership and Party building in the higher learning institutions is a fundamental guarantee for running socialist universities with Chinese features well," he said. Xi said the higher-learning institutions shoulder the important tasks of studying, researching and publicizing Marxism, as well as training builders and successors of the socialist cause with Chinese characteristics. The core socialist values should be incorporated into the whole teaching process while ideological guidance should be enhanced to ensure...

Kwanzaa's roots stretch from York to Africa Kwanzaa's roots from York to Africa By Rebecca Hanlon For the Daily Record/Sunday News Updated: 12/28/2014 04:02:22 PM EST Maulana Ron Karenga, a 1958 William Penn Senior High School graduate, created Kwanzaa in 1966 as a way for those of African descent to explore their culture and bring good into the world. As an Afrocentric scholar, Karenga has said he hoped Kwanzaa would give people a deeper African-American consciousness and a sense of community within ancient African culture. The holiday kicked off Friday and will run through Jan. 1, with different celebrations and...

Larry Schweikart recently spoke at the Heritage Foundation about the newly released 10th anniversary edition of the book he co-authored with Michael Allen, “A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement.” “A Patriot’s History” had a rather unusual journey from publication to fame; becoming a No.1 New York Times bestseller six years after its publication.Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton, wrote the book in response to what he calls a lack of textbooks that “dealt accurately and fairly with American history.” Many of the existing classroom materials, he said,...

Less than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. This is a marked change from 1960, when 73% of children fit this description, and 1980, when 61% did, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of recently-released American Community Survey (ACS) and Decennial Census data. Rapid changes in American family structure have altered the image of who’s gathering for the holidays. While the old “ideal” involved couples marrying young, then starting a family, and staying married till “death do they part”, the...

THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 26, 2014 Statement from the President and the First Lady on Kwanzaa Michelle and I extend our warmest wishes to those celebrating Kwanzaa this holiday season. Today begins a celebration highlighting the rich African American heritage and culture through the seven principles of Kwanzaa—unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. During this season, families come together to reflect on blessings of the past year and look forward to the promises in the year ahead. As we remain committed to building a country that...

Protesters in New York announced a march on 5th Avenue to defy Mayor DeBlasio’s moratorium on demonstrations after two NYPD cops were slaughtered. The Twitter account @MillionsMarch posted a sign that said to meet at 59th and 5th. Another Twitter account posted a sign that said “No Christmas shopping as usual.”

Many parents undoubtedly think they are doing the best for their children by having them bring lunch from home instead of eating the lunches served in school. But recent studies clearly prove them wrong. Home-packed lunches, the research showed, are likely to be considerably less nourishing than the meals offered in schools that abide by current nutrition guidelines for the National School Lunch Program. That program is, distressingly, increasingly under attack. But the program must not continue to be undermined, and more schools should be encouraged to participate. Nearly 32 million of the more than 50 million children in public...

... There were many AGU talks about the climate impacts we’re already seeing. For example, human-caused global warming is amplifying many types of extreme weather like drought, heat waves, and storms. Climate and social scientists have struggled to communicate this urgency to the public. While most people accept that humans are changing the climate, few understand the urgency of mitigating these risks. This is particularly a problem for ideological conservatives. Among social scientists, a consensus is forming that more climate-specific knowledge translates into greater acceptance of the science and support for mitigation. However, facts are more effective when ideological barriers...

Some of the consequences of climate change are obvious -- shrinking polar ice caps, rising sea levels, more damaging floods -- and some are subtle. Among the latter, we can now add bad-tasting seafood. So concludes a team of researchers led by Sam Dupe of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, recently published in the Journal of Shellfish Research. They tested shrimp raised for three weeks in seawater of average pH versus shrimp raised in acidic waters, similar to conditions that may prevail as the continued emission of excess carbon dioxide turns the oceans more acidic. Seafood is an important source...

Full Title: Why do you MANSPREAD? Woman with her tape measure confronts splay-legged men on the subway about the space they consume It is a gripe that frustrates subway riders daily: men with their legs splayed. So one woman decided to confront male commuters about the amount of space they consume. The investigation comes a month before New York City's MTA launches a campaign targeting 'manspreaders'.

Before circumstances and Providence brought me to a small, Christian liberal arts college in a sleepy northern Virginia town, I spent three years studying at the University of Illinois followed by a two year stint in the Army. Needless to say, I spent much of my early twenties participating in American party culture, and I'm lucky I made it through those years relatively unscathed. Looking back, I made a lot of foolish decisions. I put myself in a lot of compromising situations that could have easily taken a dark turn. What I have to say in the following paragraphs, then,...

"With new leaders in charge in both Washington and Havana, there have been numerous speculations about changes/improvements in U.S.-Cuba relations. For example, in December Raúl Castro floated the possibility of releasing from his gulag certain political prisoners in exchange for five Cuban spies convicted of spying, murder and other charges in the United States. The idea is a non-starter because there is no comparison between the so-called "Cuban Five," convicted in open American courts, and political prisoners, convicted without any semblance of due process, locked away in Castro's dungeons because of their opposition to his communist regime. But it did...

"On Wednesday, Obama administration officials confirmed to The Post that Cuba has freed American citizen Alan Gross. Gross, who was detained in December 2009 while working as a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been accused of espionage and sentenced to 15 years in prison by Cuba. His imprisonment was a major problem in relations between Washington and Havana. Gross was not freed by accident. According to ABC News, his release is the culmination of more than a year of "secret back-channel talks at the highest levels of both governments." And, importantly, his release comes at the...

A protest put on by a group of second-graders in Massachusetts has sparked controversy, but the school says it was just teaching the kids a lesson in civics. The peaceful demonstration happened on Friday, a spokesperson for the Alma del Mar Charter School in New Bedford told ABC News today. Second-graders gathered in front of the school with signs, some that said "Honk For Justice." "A group of scholars played on the playground while other scholars held their demonstration without incident," Will Gardner, the school's executive director, said today in a statement.

<p>Demonstrators protesting killings by police in New York and Missouri were arrested Monday after they chained themselves to doors and a flagpole at the Oakland Police Department headquarters.</p> <p>A live-stream video via Blackout Collective shows demonstrators blocking a doorway outside the headquarters and singing, “Calling out the violence of the racist police” as they were taken into custody by officers.</p>