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I've always been that adult who squeezes in with the kids at their mini coloring table and delves into the arts and crafts right along with them. I may have even snagged a page or two out of their coloring books and created my own masterpiece- and then proudly displayed it to all of the 4-year-olds in the room. But now the doodling dreams of grown-ups worldwide have come true with coloring books for adults. We can unwind with our very own coloring books tailored for an older crowd, containing countless pages of intricate designs. Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure...

BOSTON (MyFoxBoston.com) -- The Mass. Registry of Motor Vehicles is allowing a Pastafarian woman to wear a colander in her driver’s license picture. This comes after The American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center's attorneys were enlisted to assist with the woman's appeal after she was denied the right to wear it in her license photo by the RMV. Lindsay Miller says she is a Pastafarian, also known as a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is a secular religion that believes the existence of a "spaghetti monster" to be just as possible as the existence...

There are times when you see or read something that you just know you want to share. On this Veterans Day I was fortunate enough to have the following excerpts shared from the logs and diary of a then 23 year old B-24 pilot. Mr. Drummond, who is still with us today and is the 94 year old father of our banker, wrote these words back then and I think they say something to each of us. To those of us who are aviators they surely speak to how it must have felt to command a 4 engine bomber with...

A group of University of Massachusetts students is attempting to bring attention to rights and access that transgender and non-gender conforming people have on campus. Gender Liberation UMass has already held a rally, delivered a letter of demands to Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy’s office and dropped a banner, and has more events planned for the rest of the week. Justin Killian, a junior majoring in women, gender and sexuality studies, and social thought and political economy, as well as one of the organizers of the week’s events, said that this week would set a precedent in terms of activism of the...

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is offering “voice feminization therapy” for male students claiming to be transgender women. As part of the university’s “Transitioning at UWM” resource, the university encourages students to utilize “voice feminization therapy for male-to-female transgender clients” offered by the UWM Speech and Language Clinic, which claims to treat “voice disorders in adults and children.” Elsewhere on the UWM website, the university claims voice feminization therapy is a “non-medical option” that allows transgender students to “live their gender identities.” Michelle Johnson, the Media Content Manager at UWM, told Campus Reform that the school provides the voice feminization therapy...

For the press, the debate over ObamaCare is over. There may be a few proverbial Japanese soldiers wandering on isolated islands yammering on about the failure of ObamaCare, but word will eventually filter down to them, too. This assumption is so deeply embedded that it is impervious to new evidence that ObamaCare is an unwieldy contraption that is sputtering badly. Yes, ObamaCare has covered more people and has especially benefited those with pre-existing conditions (to be credible, Republican replacement plans have to do these things, as well), but the program is so poorly designed that, surely, even a new Democratic...

Short bouts of intense exercise could be the key to staying in shape after researchers found that even just a few minutes of strenuous activity can make muscles work harder. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) has become popular with athletes and amateurs and has clear visible benefits. But sports scientists have always struggled to understand how a short amount of activity can produce similar effects as endurance training. Now, researchers at the Karonlinska Institute in Sweden have found that even small levels of intensive exercise boost the production of mitochondria– the cell’s batteries – which enhance muscle endurance.

"The martyr-nurturing nation of Iran is not at all prepared to abandon the slogan of 'Death to America' under the pretext of a nuclear agreement," 192 members of Iran's 290-seat parliament said in a statement carried by state news agency IRNA. They said the slogan, chanted at the weekly Friday prayers in mosques and at protests, had "turned into the symbol of the Islamic republic and all struggling nations". The statement was issued two days before Iran's commemoration of the start of the November 4, 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by radical Islamic students that led to...

“We’re feeling a little bit of the tightness in the market,” said Tim Grace, the global chief talent officer for Toys “R” Us. Mr. Grace said the retailer is on track to meet its goal of hiring 40,000 seasonal workers, but added that “we are not getting as many applicants as we have in the past.” With unemployment at a seven-year low, hourly retail work is becoming less attractive to job seekers who now have more options. The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons—those who want to work full-time but can only get a part-time job—has shrunk by...

A record number of Americans have renounced their citizenship so far this year, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service. According to IRS data published in the Federal Register on Monday, 1,426 Americans expatriated in the third quarter of 2015, bringing this year's total to 3,221 so far. The figure is 25 percent higher than the same period last year, when 2,585 renounced their citizenship.

How scary are your jack-o’-lanterns? Scarier than you think, according to the Energy Department, which claims the holiday squash is responsible for unleashing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Most of the 1.3 billion pounds of pumpkins produced in the U.S. end up in the trash, says the Energy Department’s website, becoming part of the “more than 254 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) produced in the United States every year.”

When I went to post a comment I was redirected to a presumed Firefox warning page that Free Republic was a reported malware/phishing site. The below second warning message indicates that Google's blacklist was invoked. I don't know if this is a malware warning generated on my computer or a real issue that Free Republic should be quickly investigating. I'll post the link here for investigative purposes, DO NOT click on this link. https://www.stopbadware.org/firefox?hl=en-US&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freerepublic.com%2Ffocus%2Fnews%2F3353488%2Fposts ===== Wait! Please don't visit that site right now! Google detected badware on the site you were visiting. Firefox uses Google's blacklist to warn you about...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Upon taking office in 2009, Democratic President Barack Obama identified himself with the towering figure in Republican Party history: Abraham Lincoln. And now his presumed successor, Hillary Clinton, wants to take on the mantle of another great Republican: Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive who fought the excesses of the most powerful corporations of his day. In 2009, Obama saw himself, like Lincoln, as a president who mournfully led a nation divided against itself, a president who hoped to build a bipartisan team of rivals to heal the wounds. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for Obama any better than...

DREAMers are shaping up to play a prominent role in next year’s presidential election— at least in the Democratic camp. Bernie Sanders this week become the second Democratic presidential hopeful to enlist a DREAMer to a high-profile campaign position by hiring Cesar Vargas, an undocumented immigrant who became the first without legal status to be approved to work as a lawyer in New York. Vargas has joined the Sanders campaign’s Latino outreach team. “It shows the evolution of the DREAMer movement,” Vargas told me in a phone interview today. “We’ve graduated from colleges, we’ve been politically active on immigration reform....

Lawless migrants at a camp in Slovenia torched their own living quarters and took SELFIES of the carnage in a shockingly dangerous act of vandalism. Hundreds of women and children fled the Brezice Camp in terror and plumes of smoke billowed into the sky as the ferocious blaze spread like wildfire between the closely-spaced tents. Photographs from the scene showed groups of young men wearing hoodies were the only ones left behind, with one apparently making a 'V for victory' sign for the cameras as a tent burnt down behind him. Police said the gang of young men were chanting...

“Support for, and opposition to, gun control is closely associated with several demographic characteristics, including race, level of education and whether one lives in a city. Nearly all are trending forcefully against the NRA,” author and UCLA professor Adam Winkler writes. “The core of the NRA’s support comes from white, rural and relatively less educated voters. This demographic is currently influential in politics but clearly on the wane. While the decline of white, rural, less educated Americans is generally well known, less often recognized is what this means for gun legislation.”

Journalists Sophia Jones and Hiba Dlewati traveled thousands of miles with refugees for three weeks in August across seven countries: Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Germany. Jones, the Middle East correspondent for the WorldPost, says she encountered compassionate people dedicated to helping those on the risky trek to safe haven in Western Europe, comprising a "modern-day Underground Railroad." At times, these acts of kindness stood in stark contrast to government inaction that has afflicted many countries amidst the worst refugee crisis since World War II. “At times, it was difficult to maintain journalistic distance and make sure our...

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti faced throngs of hostile protesters at a community meeting Monday night as chaos descended on a gathering that had been intended as a forum for him to improve his fraught relationship with the black communities of South L.A. The meeting at Holman United Methodist Church, attended by several hundred, was quickly overtaken by about 50 protesters from organizations including the national activist group Black Lives Matter, which was formed in the wake of high-profile police killings of young black men. As Garcetti spoke to a full house in the church's cavernous sanctuary hall, the demonstrators...

Authorities in the Philippines have cancelled flights and ordered thousands of people in coastal areas to evacuate as Typhoon Koppu hits the country. The slow-moving storm made landfall near the town of Casiguran on the main island of Luzon on Sunday morning. Koppu is predicted to bring three days of torrential rain, triggering floods, storm surges and possibly landslides. Disaster officials said a few thousand people living in vulnerable coastal areas had already sought shelter. Earlier, President Benigno Aquino made a televised warning, the first time he had done so since Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, which killed more than...

Paris (AFP) - Gerard Depardieu played a Frenchman desperate to do anything to live in America in the 1990 movie "Green Card", but in a new interview, he shows little love for the US. "The US? They're a people who have constantly destroyed others," the 66-year-old actor railed in a broadcast Thursday by Paris radio station France Inter, taken from an interview he gave the day before to Russian journalists in Moscow. "They fought each other, destroyed the Indians, after that they perpetrated slavery, then there was the civil war," he said. "After that, they were the first to use...