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(Reuters) - Firefighters struggled on Wednesday to beat back a fiercely aggressive wildfire raging at the edge of Colorado Springs that has forced at least 35,000 people from their homes and was nipping at the edges of the U.S. Air Force Academy. The so-called Waldo Canyon Fire, fanned by gusting winds, has gutted an unknown number of homes on the wooded fringes of Colorado's second-most populous city and prompted more evacuations as flames roared out of control for a fifth day. President Barack Obama plans to pay a visit to the area on Friday to view the damage, the White...

1. Have someone to watch your back. 2. Be prepared to walk away. 3. Focus on what matters first. 4. Have a Plan B. 5. Capabilities trump gear.

Authorities called a ring of child prostitutes drawn from foster care the victims of ‘professional predators’ who seek out vulnerable children to become sex workers. The teenage foster kids called their rendezvous with men who paid for their affections “dates.” Sometimes they had several scheduled each day. Their alleged handler, whom they called “E-Nasty,” or just “E,” would text the girls on the cell phones he provided them. “You’re gonna have some dates today,” he would say, a source told The Miami Herald. On days where the girls had a hectic schedule, they’d be driven to school in the morning,...

US regulators sued hedge fund billionaire Philip Falcone for fraud Wednesday, accusing him of taking $113 million from a fund to pay his taxes. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Falcone, who raked in billions betting against packaged mortgage securities ahead of the US real-estate crash, took clients' money from funds run by his Harbinger Capital Partners to pay his personal taxes.It also said Falcone illegally manipulated bond prices, traded preferential treatment to investors who backed a controversial board initiative, and broke restricted period trading rules in three initial public offerings to make money on short sales.

PETERBOROUGH — Jackie R. Whiton of Antrim had been a six-year employee at the Big Apple convenience store in Peterborough until a single transaction sent her job up in smoke. The store clerk was fired after she refused to take a customer’s Electronic Balance Transfer card to pay for cigarettes.

The White House has kept its preparations for the Supreme Court’s decision on President Barack Obama’s health care law close to the vest. Mr. Obama, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday, the West Wing is merely “waiting for an opinion, a decision, and we’ll assess.” But Mr. Obama has been doing more than sitting back and waiting. The president has three separate speeches prepared in anticipation of the ruling on his signature legislative achievement, a person familiar with them said. One of the speeches addresses a complete overturn of the law, while another is crafted as if the...

North Korean soldiers have been dispatched to water crops that are withering in the worst drought to affect the country in more than a century, with the United Nations warning that yields for staples such as wheat, barley and potatoes will inevitably be affected. The state-run KCNA news agency said temperatures have been as much as eight degrees higher than usual for May and June and, combined with historically low levels of precipitation, have left rice paddies dried and cracked. The maize crop stands a mere 15 inches tall in many places in North and South Hwanghae provinces, instead of...

This is longish, but I think it has to be seen by as many people as possible: Office of Media Relations 3211 Fourth Street NE ? Washington DC 20017 ? 202-541-3200 ? Fax 202-541-3173 USCCB/MRDATE: June 27, 2012 FROM: Sr. Mary Ann Walsh O: 202-541-3200 M: 301-325-7935 mwalsh@usccb.orgAdvisoryMemo to journalistsWe became aware on June 7, that news media received a memo from John Gehring, casting aspersions on the Catholic bishops and their educational project on religious liberty, the Fortnight for Freedom. [I wrote about this in my post Group funded by George Soros poised to attack US Bishops for the “Fortnight for...

But despite a myriad of pollsters hypothesizing that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could lose her coveted gavel, Pelosi has adopted a stiff jawed mien of denial that some have compared to Mohammed Saïd al-Sahaf, Saddam Hussein’s information minister during the 2003 invasion of Iraq... “Well let me say why I believe that [it] would be very difficult for the Republicans to take over the House of Representatives. Let me tell you right here and now that I would rather be in our position right now than theirs,” Pelosi told Charlie Rose on Wednesday.

The NRA is putting pressure on the White House and members of Congress when it comes to Thursday’s House vote on contempt against Attorney General Eric Holder. In a letter to the House, Chris Cox, NRA-ILA Executive Director, said the NRA is paying attention. “The American people – including millions of NRA members and tens of millions of NRA supporters – deserve the truth about these issues, and we will support any effort that leads us to the truth,” wrote Mr. Cox. “This is an issue of the utmost seriousness and the NRA will consider this vote in our future...

Politics: The president accuses his likely opponent of outsourcing jobs as his re-election campaign hires telemarketers in Canada and the Philippines. And what about GM in China and those electric cars built in Finland? After his attacks on Mitt Romney's involvement in the job-creating private equity firm Bain Capital failed to resonate with an underemployed America, President Obama has retooled his message somewhat. Now, after the Washington Post published a story about Bain's alleged role in outsourcing factory jobs overseas, he's blasting Republican nominee Mitt Romney as an "outsourcer in chief" and "outsourcing pioneer." He did so even as, the...

DHS denies Virginia's request for 287(g) agreement On Tuesday, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) announced that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied his request for the Virginia State Police to join the 287(g) program which trains local and state law enforcement to identify illegal aliens in custody for possible deportation. Gov. McDonnell told reporters: "I'm incredibly disappointed with the Obama administration." In August 2010, McDonnell asked DHS to allow 28 state troopers to receive the specified training in order to identify illegal aliens charged with serious crimes such as "major drug offenses or violent offenses such as murder, manslaughter,...

Circumcising young boys on religious grounds amounts to grievous bodily harm, a German court ruled Tuesday in a landmark decision that the Jewish community said trampled on parents' religious rights. The regional court in Cologne, western Germany, ruled that the "fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents", a judgement that is expected to set a legal precedent. "The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised, if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised," the court...

I’ve abstained up until now from making any predictions on how the Obamacare cases will be decided. But I’m now ready to offer my own reading of the tea leaves. Specifically, the fact that Justice Scalia read his dissent from the bench in the Arizona immigration case leads me to believe that the Court will invalidate the individual mandate by a 5-4 vote. Let me explain the logical links (and expose their potential weaknesses): 1. As I understood it when I was a law clerk for Justice Scalia twenty years ago, there was an etiquette at the Court that any...

Watching green ideology crash and burn Twenty years ago the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro marked the ascension of environmentalism as a political force in international affairs. That conference in 1992 produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. At the time, Chris Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute crowed, “You cannot go to any corner of the globe and not find some degree of environmental awareness and some amount of environmental politics.” Flavin added that with socialism in disrepute, environmentalism is now the “most powerful political ideal today.” At the conclusion...

Remember during the first two years of "Obama-Wonderment" when most cable news outlets described Obama as Jesus,God,Lincoln,Erkle,Elmo & Richard Simmoms? And how many times have we heard colleages on MSNBC declare Obama Unbeatable? "There's No One Out There That Can Beat Obama", Even Joy Bearhard wanted to cancell the election after Obama killed Osama. And here we are in the summer of 2012 and King Obama wants all of us to give him our cash presents we planned to give to our friends at weddings,barmitvahs and graduations.

The House oversight committee voted Wednesday to demand a broad audit of the Federal Reserve system by congressional investigators - a major move lawmakers said is designed to bring accountability to the murky workings of the independent board. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who turned the push for an audit into a powerful campaign slogan and whose criticism of the Fed’s monetary policy drew hundreds of thousands of voters into the political process.

Did the French just elect a self-described socialist who wants to raise taxes on the rich? Yes, they did. Is President Obama asking for four more years with an economic philosophy similar to that of the new French president? Yes, he is. In France, those earning over a million euros would face a tax rate of 75%. And one of Francois Hollande's first acts as new president of France was to reverse his predecessor's course and lower the retirement age from 62 to 60 — this in a country whose projected unfunded pension liabilities for its living citizens are about...

Rest in peace , Don .

The real Supreme Court news on Tuesday wasn't the Arizona immigration decision or even the summary reversal of the Supreme Court of Montana in the "Citizens United 2" case. It was that the chief justice of the United States didn't write any of these opinions.This is critically important, because we can now deduce with a reasonably high degree of certainty that John Roberts is writing the lead health care opinion. If we are right about this, then the law is in even deeper trouble that most observers imagined. Let’s start from the beginning. The Supreme Court tries to spread its...