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Marcus Mariota, widely considered the favorite over co-finalists Melvin Gordon and Amari Cooper, won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night in New York. College football's top honor punctuates the Oregon junior quarterback's list of 2014 accolades, which include the Walter Camp, Davey O'Brien, Maxwell and Johnny Unitas Golden Arm awards. Mariota's banner season included 3,783 passing yards and 38 touchdown passes against two interceptions. The dual-threat quarterback also racked up 669 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns on the ground.

Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi said Sunday an investigation had found a list of “ghost soldiers” in the Iraqi military. Uncovered the presence of 50,000 fictitious named in four military units. “There are two kinds of ‘fadhaiyin,’” one experienced officer in the security forces said, using a word which, literally translated, means “space men,” and refers to the fictitious soldiers crowding the payroll.

House and Senate conferees negotiating a package to fund the Department of Defense through September 2015 have protected commissary operations by restoring 90 percent of a planned $100 million cut. Once again lawmakers thwarted a cost-saving initiative targeting military compensation and endorsed by the Joint Chiefs as a way to dampen personnel costs so more dollars can be spent on training, weapon buys and other readiness accounts being victimized by arbitrary “sequestration” cuts. Only last week House and Senate conferees on a different bill, the 2015 defense authorization act, unveiled a deal to lower the Defense Commissary Agency annual $1.3...

The ascetic and moralizing movements that spawned the world's major religious traditions -- Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity -- all arose around the same time in three different regions... The emergence of world religions, they say, was triggered by the rising standards of living in the great civilizations of Eurasia... It seems almost self-evident today that religion is on the side of spiritual and moral concerns, but that was not always so, Baumard explains. In hunter-gatherer societies and early chiefdoms, for instance, religious tradition focused on rituals, sacrificial offerings, and taboos designed to ward off misfortune and evil. That...

The new technique of analyzing DNA found in ancient parchments can shine a focused light on the development of agriculture across the centuries. Millions of documents stored in archives could provide scientists with the key to tracing agricultural development across the centuries... Amazingly, thanks to increasingly progressive genetic sequencing techniques, the all-important historical tales these documents tell are no longer confined to their texts; now, vital information also comes from the DNA of the parchment on which they are written. Researchers used these state-of-the-art scientific techniques to extract ancient DNA and protein from tiny samples of parchment from documents from...

Other members of the Senate fumed Saturday over objections by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) that held up a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill meant to keep the government open. The objection was fueled by the two conservatives' desire to fight President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration. The objections by Cruz and Lee mean that the Senate must slog through procedural votes Saturday on nominees and also vote to end a filibuster on the omnibus bill at 1 a.m. on Sunday. It was too much for Democrats and even Republicans to bite their tongues over....

The Importance of Mothers and Fathersby Archbishop William E. LoriNo one loves us quite so tenderly and persistently as our mothers. Where would we be without them? They are the glue that holds families together. Even though Mother’s Day is past, it is never too late to pay tribute to our mothers, living and dead, and to commend them to the Lord. Let me wager, however, that good mothers desire, more than anything else, good husbands and fathers. They deserve husbands who are loving and faithful. Mothers understand how important a father’s love and example is for their children....

A site on Apache Mountain, where Apache warriors plunged to their deaths to avoid the U.S. cavalry, may soon overlook a copper mine. Archaeologists and Native American tribes are protesting language in a Senate bill that would approve a controversial land exchange between the federal government and a copper mining company -- a swap that may put Native American archaeological sites at risk. The bill is needed to fund the U.S. military and is considered likely to pass the Senate as early as today. The company Resolution Copper Mining hopes to exploit rich copper deposits beneath 980 hectares of Arizona's...

It is miles away from the Bible story. I hate that I just gave Hollyweird a reward of my hard earned money for producing this garbage. Please, please, learn from my mistake.

A funny thing happened in school today. Not funny ha-ha but funny as in bizarre and unexpected. Funny as in funny money. And not just today. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Every day. Every time a school teaches reading in a way that doesn't work. That's funny, right? You teach reading but somehow nobody learns to read? How funny can you get? And not just in any one school. No, this epic lack of progress is happening everywhere. Point to a school and you're probably looking at a dead zone literacy-wise. That's funny, right? A school's first job is to teach kids to...

At first glance, these rooms could easily be mistaken for museum snapshots, taken from various locations around the world. In fact, each one of these spectacular interior displays - from a 13th Century English Gothic church and a 16th Century French boudoir, to a range of 19th century American estates - could fit into a dollhouse. Painstakingly crafted by American artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne between the 1930s and her death in 1966, these are exceptionally detailed scale models - one-inch to one-foot - of real period rooms she had visited during her life. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2872170/Around-world-70-rooms-Incredible-miniature-models-offer-glimpse-extravagant-period-homes-13th-Century-Europe-20th-Century-America.html#ixzz3LpZ67bsr Follow us: @MailOnline on...

Amongst the findings were shoes and photos hidden by Jewish prisoners of the Holocaust. PRAGUE - House owners rebuilding their attic in the Czech town of Terezinhave found photos, shoes and other possessions of Jews forced into a ghetto there under Nazi rule, a heritage project said on Thursday. Terezin (Theresienstadt), a fortress and garrison town built at the end of the 18th century, was used by the Nazis as a transit camp for Jews rounded up in Czechoslovakia and deported from elsewhere in Europe. They were held in the ghetto until they could be transported to camps farther east....

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, says whites do not understand the protests about the deaths of young black men. CNN's Anderson Cooper cited polls that reveal white people do not view the issue the same way as black people. "It's not happening to them, so they don't quite get it," Fulton told Cooper in an interview that aired Friday on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360." "They don't quite understand. They think that it's a small group of African-Americans that's complaining: 'Oh, what are they complaining about now?'" Cooper asked: "You hear that from people?" "Oh yeah," Fulton said. "The...

      WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET The poet wrote, "Two men looked out through prison bars: one saw mud; the other saw stars." Commenting on this, Father John Powell once wrote: "In the pursuit of the fullness of human life, everything depends on this frame of reference, this habitual outlook, this basic vision which I have of myself, others, life, the world, and God. What we see is what we get." Don't you find that to be true? There's a lot about our world that isn't the way we would want it to be: cruelty,...

Main Card (FOX) 5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 1am UK Heavyweights (five rounds) Junior dos Santos (16-3) vs Stipe Miocic (12-1) Lightweight Rafael dos Anjos (22-7) vs Nate Diaz (17-9) Heavyweight Alistair Overeem (37-14, 1 NC) vs Stefan Struve (25-6) Heavyweight Matt Mitrione (8-3) vs Gabriel Gonzaga (16-8)

Intercessory Prayer " …men always ought to pray and not lose heart. —Luke 18:1 " You cannot truly intercede through prayer if you do not believe in the reality of redemption. Instead, you will simply be turning intercession into useless sympathy for others, which will serve only to increase the contentment they have for remaining out of touch with God. True intercession involves bringing the person, or the circumstance that seems to be crashing in on you, before God, until you are changed by His attitude toward that person or circumstance. Intercession means to “fill up…[with] what is lacking...

Actor Accused Of Killing, Skinning And Then Eating Ex-Girlfriend's Pet Rabbit By Jethro Mullen December 11, 2014 (CNN) -- TV actor Dimitri Diatchenko is accused of killing his ex-girlfriend's pet rabbit -- and then eating half of it. He then allegedly threatened to do the same to her, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said in a statement Wednesday. Diatchenko, who appeared in episodes of "Sons of Anarchy," reportedly made quite a show of the butchery, sending his ex-girlfriend blow-by-blow photos of what he was doing, according to authorities. The actor told a reporter from CNN affiliate KCAL in...

Local Facebook Video Shows Teens Slapping, Taunting Older Man On CTA Train December 11, 2014 5:08 PM Share on email 554 View Comments Related Tags: attack, Blue Line, CTA, Facebook, Steve Miller, Suzanne Le Mignot, VIDEO Featured & Trending: (CBS) – A video posted on Facebook is generating hundreds of responses, and it shows at least two young men on a CTA Blue Line train, slapping an older man and taunting him. WBBM’s Steve Miller has spoken with one of those young men about why he did it. The video goes on for more than two minutes. It shows at...

Doubling down on comments he made Wednesday night, Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera appeared on Fox & Friends Friday morning to discuss Cleveland Cavs star LeBron James and the statement he made recently wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt prior to a game with the Brooklyn Nets. While LeBron is far from the only NBA player who has worn the shirt to show his dissatisfaction with the grand jury’s decision not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, he is definitely the most high-profile athlete who has done so. Therefore, pundits and commentators have focused on...

They came to the nation’s capital on buses and planes and minivans and trains, from Florida, Detroit and Staten Island, led as much by the families, friends and supporters of African-American men and boys killed at the hands of the police as by civil rights leaders. Thousands of people marched along the National Mall on Saturday to protest the deaths, mirroring protests planned around the nation Saturday, ranging from hikes in canyons in the West to marches down the streets of the nation’s urban centers. The demonstrators here — many of them wearing T-shirts that read “Black Lives Matter” and...