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Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal announced in a press conference Wednesday evening that Israel "has failed in all its goals" in Operation Defensive Pillar, following the cease fire announcement. "After eight days, God stayed their hand from the people of Gaza, and they were compelled to submit to the conditions of the resistance," Mashaal said. "Israel has failed in all its goals," he told reporters in a Cairo hotel. Mashaal also thanked ceasefire mediator Egypt, as well as Iran, which he said "had a role in arming" Hamas during the conflict. Arabs in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate the...

So, an “anonymous source” has sent Vice magazine a one-minute video that purports to be home footage of President Barack Obama’s birth in a Kenyan hospital. Titled, “Obama Sr filmimg his sons birth in Kenya” [sic], the camera conspicuously focuses on “Ann Dunham’s” hospital chart and a Kenyan flag sticker before panning to a woman seemingly in labor. A suspiciously large (for a newborn) baby is then pulled from a tangle of sheets and the umbilical cord is cut. The woman cuddles the baby while the nurse and doctor applaud and the Aug. 4, 1961 date flashes.

California state parks Director Ruth Coleman resigned and her second-in-command was fired Friday after officials discovered the department has been sitting on "hidden assets" totalling nearly $54 million. The money accumulated over 12 years in two special funds the department uses to collect revenue and pay for operations: $20.4 million in the Parks and Recreation Fund, and $33.5 million in the Off Highway Vehicle Trust Fund. The money accumulated, state officials said, because the parks department had a pattern of underreporting the actual size of the funds in its regular dealings with the state Department of Finance. ....Advocates for the...

Eleven-year-old Woosuk Kim sees his mother only three or four times a year...Woosuk's father brought him and his little brother to America two years ago to attend Hancock Park Elementary, a public school in Los Angeles. The boys' mother stayed in South Korea to keep working. Goose families prefer to migrate to English-speaking countries. ...And in the U.S., one of the favorite "port of entry" schools is Hancock Park. "I would say that we have a very significant Korean population," says Principal Ashley Parker. "They start first grade, second grade — we have new fifth-graders coming from Korea." A generation...

Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, has promised it will "set our imaginations alight". And so his gallery's latest exhibition will have to, considering the fact that every piece of art inside it will be invisible. From a bare plinth to a canvas painted entirely with invisible ink, the imagination of the paying public will play a decisive role in the success or failure of the show, the first of its kind in Britain. For £8 visitors will be able to marvel at – or search in vain for – 50 works of "invisible art" by leading names including...

Do you ever get the feeling that Rush and Hannity don't really care who wins, just as long as their dollars keep rolling in from us tea party saps. Besides Mark Levin, what prominent talker has gone out on a limb and endorsed true conservative candidates? Everyday we have to here Hannity interview the John McCains of the world. If he truly believed in the conservative movement, wouldn't he be out there trumpeting Richard Mourdock and Don Stenberg like Levin is? As for Rush, he is more interested in commercializing the tea party movement with his "Two if by tea"...

As President Barack Obama tries to jump-start his SuperPAC, a close look at the numbers shows he needs more than a few rich men and women. He needs to create a nationwide base of rich supporters. A Register analysis of donations to the pro-Obama SuperPAC, Priorities USA Action, shows that 56 percent of its money, $2.3 million out of $4.17 million, came from California. An additional 25 percent came from Washington, DC, and 12 percent came from the president’s home base of Illinois. That’s 94 percent of the SuperPAC’s money from just two states and DC.

SAN FRANCISCO - Government regulators are sharing some alarming information about Facebook: They believe the online social network has often misled its more than 800 million users about the sanctity of their personal information. The unflattering portrait of Facebook's privacy practices emerged Tuesday in a Federal Trade Commission complaint alleging that Facebook exposed details about users' lives without getting legally required consent. In some cases, the FTC charged, Facebook allowed potentially sensitive details to be passed along to advertisers and software developers prowling for customers. To avoid further legal wrangling, Facebook agreed to submit to government audits of its privacy...

A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation underlines that many of the promises surrounding President Obama’s health care legislation remain unfulfilled, though the White House argues that change is coming. Workers at the Flora Venture flower shop in Newmarket, NH, remember when presidential candidate named Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., promised that their health care costs would go down if they elected him and his health care plan was enacted. On May 3, 2008, the president told voters that he had “a health care plan that would save the average family $2,500 on their premiums.”Last year workers at the flower...

MODERATOR, I OPENED THIS UNDER CHIT CHAT AND WANT MY TITLE, THIS IS NOT A NEWS STORY POSTING Charles and Jill Segal have not made a mortgage payment in nearly five years -- but they continue to live in their five-bedroom West Palm Beach, Fla. home. Lynn, from St. Petersburg, Fla., has been living without paying for three years. In Thousand Oaks, Calif., an actor has missed 30 payments, and still, he has not lost his home. They're not alone. Some 4.2 million mortgage borrowers are either seriously delinquent or have had their cases referred to lawyers to pursue foreclosure...

The man behind Donald Trump's possible 2012 presidential campaign is a registered Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Not only that, but Michael Cohen, an executive at the Trump Organization who doubles as Trump's chief political adviser, once volunteered for 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and worked for a Democratic member of Congress.

Conservatives make me laugh – and cry, sometimes. From the very beginning of WND's relentless coverage of the eligibility issue, there were many very high-profile conservatives in public office and the media who discouraged any focus on it. They whispered and muttered that it was not a "winning issue." They wrung their hands in worriment over the possibility that Barack Obama would pull the rug out from under the pursuit by pulling his long-form birth certificate out of his hat – making us look ridiculous for ever asking for it. They even went so far as to suggest the whole...

To just about everyone's surprise, the House Ethics Committee last night voted overwhelmingly to recommend that Rep. Charles Rangel be formally censured by the House of Representatives -- the most serious sanction short of outright expulsion. The committee's judgment was not only severe, it was genuinely bipartisan: Only one member of the 10-member panel, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, dissented. Make no mistake. This was not the widely expected wrist-slap. If the House goes along with the recommendation, Rangel will be required to stand silently before all 434 members while his transgressions are spelled out and he is formally...

US Pacific Command’s Adm William Fallon says the group wasn’t conducting anti-sub operations, but the fact remains that the submarine did slip past the group’s security screen undetected and popped up within firing range of the Kitty Hawk.

Two words. Unforced error: President Barack Obama on Friday endorsed plans for a Muslim mosque two blocks from ground zero in New York City, declaring that “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”In remarks prepared for delivery at a White House dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Obama said all Americans have the right to worship as they choose.“That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances, Obama said. “This is America,...

The U.S. government's $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout likely had a greater impact on foreign banks than the stimuli packages of foreign countries had on their American counterparts, according to a report released by the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), “Although the crisis began with subprime mortgage defaults in the U.S., its damage spread rapidly overseas,” the report stated. “[We] found that policymakers were ill-prepared for such a worldwide crisis and that the internationalization of the financial system has outpaced the ability of national regulators to respond." COP indicated that despite the limits of international coordination, most countries ultimately...

Glenn Beck fired Pat and Stu over the weekend because of comments they made about the CT shooter. Their comments were about the shooter listening to Olbermann go on and on about how whites are racist and that the shooter must've been listening to him and MSNBC. Not sure what others think but I firing them was WAY over the top in my opinion.

Springfield, Ill. - More than 40,000 unionized state workers got a pay raise last Thursday, bringing to 7 percent the amount they're gotten since last year. These same state employees are in line for another 7 percent by next July 1, all at a cost of a half-billion tax dollars a year. It's more than the virtually bankrupt state can afford, and some Republican lawmakers say the raises need to be rolled back.

"Some UFOs are intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft, and this is the biggest story of the millennium." These words are not the rantings of a deranged individual looking for attention or a comfortable straitjacket. Stanton Friedman is a maverick of sorts. Employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for companies like General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse and Aerojet General Nucleonics, he worked on highly classified programs involving nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets. In 1958, UFOs caught his attention, and Friedman has since lectured about this subject at more than 700 colleges and professional groups in all 50 states and...

This piece was inspired by an awesome rant from Bob at www.drinkingwithbob.com during March Madness. You can check out the rant here. The Looking Spoon is a conservative humor/satire/art/commentary blog, visit www.thelookingspoon.com to see more posts and art