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To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran's Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories. In January 1968, LBJ's last year, 82 sailors of the Pueblo were captured by North Korea and held hostage with Captain Lloyd "Pete" Bucher, and abused and tortured for a year before release. In the final 444 days of the Carter presidency, 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, and released only when Ronald Reagan raised his hand to take the oath. In 2001, under...

An American Jewish philanthropist reportedly bought one of the winning tickets in the Powerball lottery for one of his employees at a California nursing home. According to reports on Thursday, a nurse from Pomona who won a split of the record-breaking $1.59 billion Powerball jackpot was given the ticket by her boss, nursing home owner Shlomo Reichnitz. The 62-year-old woman is a senior registered nurse at Park Avenue Health Care and Wellness Center in Pomona, a spokesperson for Reichnitz told ABC7 in Los Angeles. The other two winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, where no winners have been...

With oil product stocks at moderate levels, Shandong's teapot refineries have kept refinery run rates relatively high, which is supporting demand for feedstock crudes, sources said this week. Regular importer Beifang Asphalt Fuel in northeastern Liaoning province plans to import around 500,000 mt/month of imported crudes over January and February, a refinery source said Thursday. This month, the refinery will take delivery of a 100,000-mt cargo of Russian's Sakhalin blend, 120,000-mt of Nemba crude from Angola, and 34,000-mt of Sarir crude from Libya. Other grades destined for this month arrival, include those Black Lion from Vietnam, Marlim and Roncador from...

U.S. stock index futures indicated a lower open on Friday after the Chinese stock market and crude prices plunged. The Shanghai composite fell 3.51 percent and entered bear market territory, while Brent and WTI futures both held below $30 a barrel, down 4.3 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively. The pan-European STOXX 600 index fell nearly 2 percent. Dow futures fell more than 300 points, as the blue chips index was also dragged down by falls in Intel, Apple and Goldman Sachs. Intel reported better-than-expected earnings Thursday, but the stock is down about 6 percent in the premarket on Friday. Traders...

A quarter of Republicans think White House hopeful Ted Cruz is disqualified to serve as U.S. president because he was born in Canada to an American mother, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found. Republican voters nearly mirror independents and the broader electorate in their belief that Cruz cannot hold the White House, with 27 percent of all voters and 28 percent of independents responding he should be disqualified. Cruz, a U.S. Senator from Texas who was born to a U.S. citizen mother and Cuban father in Calgary, Alberta, has brushed aside the attacks about his eligibility as pure politics. But...

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley didn't get a Donald Trump smackdown at tonight's debate, instead the Republican front runner said Haley hit the nail on the head when she talked about politicians being angry during her response to the State of the Union address. 'I'm very angry because our country is being run horribly,' Trump said. 'And I will gladly accept the mantle of anger.' *snip* n the Today Show the next morning, Haley confirmed that Trump was among those she was pointing fingers at. 'He was one of them, yes. He was one,' Haley told Matt Lauer. Tonight, Trump...

The high cost of government pension plans are often dismissed by blaming them on either employees abusing the system for plush benefits or poor investment returns due to a temporary market blip. Neither is correct. The real problem is the assumptions used to prefund future retirement benefits. To keep pension costs from draining resources meant to fund current services, Michigan politicians at all levels should address the pension underfunding crisis in 2016. The government retirement system for school employees is the largest pension program in Michigan, and it has accumulated $26.5 billion of unfunded benefit promises. The plan for state...

There have been attacks on Jewish people in Germany by both asylum-seekers and anti-immigrant groups in recent days, it has emerged, as tensions remain high after the Cologne sex assaults. Two asylum-seekers have been arrested on suspicion of assault after a 49-year-old Jewish man from France was beaten and robbed in a ferry terminal on the island of Fehmarn, off the northern German coast, on Saturday. The suspects, a 30-year-old Syrian and a 19-year-old Afghan, are alleged to have targeted the victim because he was wearing a Jewish yarmulke skullcap. They allegedly shouted "Jew!" at him in Arabic, threw him...

Oil futures this week dipped below $30 for both West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, and Brent crude, its more global, North Sea counterpart. That's brutally low and analysts have been lining up to predict further declines, but for some producers, oil in the upper $20s would be welcome relief. The cheapest oil on the planet right now, with the possible exception of some very low-quality crudes, can be found in the Canadian oil sands, said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at Oil Price Information Service. The grade, known as Western Canada Select, was changing hands Wednesday afternoon...

Ted Cruz's debating skills are overrated. There. I said it. Over. Rated. ... There are three main reasons Trump came out on top against Cruz. Poll positions First: ad hominem (I'm a winner and you're a loser) combined with ad populum (I'm ahead in the race, so I must be the best). Trump initially mentioned how Cruz was losing by "going down in the polls" and that Trump was indeed winning as he boasted "In Iowa now...Ted, in the last three polls, I'm beating you. So you shouldn't misrepresent how well you're doing with the polls." Cruz had no response,...

Sierra Leone officials have confirmed a death from Ebola, hours after the World Health Organization declared the latest West Africa outbreak over.

Just as President Obama is about to revoke the economic sanctions on Iran's years-long illegal nuclear projects, the fundamentalist mullahs once again showed their true colors. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) detained 10 of our sailors at gun point and Tehran's state-television broadcast images of them with their hands above their heads being involuntarily taken to the Iranian island of Farsi. While Iran's aggressive posturing doesn't surprise me in the least, I find it a national embarrassment that Obama's policy of appeasing the murderous mullahs led Secretary of State John Kerry to even thank Iran's regime for eventually releasing...

Let me put the pieces for you together...slowly now. Perhaps what seems like common sense to me, isn't so obvious. Or, more likely, it is obvious but you are hesitating. Years ago, I sat in a lunchroom at Columbia University to hear an Israeli speak about moving to Israel. His name was Yaakov Kirschen and he is the amazingly talented artist behind the Dry Bones cartoons. Kirschen told a story about lobsters - something that observant Jews to not eat...but his point was what mattered. He explained that he had wanted to purchase lobster salad, but the store was closed,...

The epic-crash in oil prices has wiped out tens-of-thousands of jobs, caused dozens of bankruptcies and spooked global financial markets. The fallout is already being felt in oil-rich states like Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota, where home foreclosure rates are spiking and economic growth is slowing. Now there are calls in at least some corners for the federal government to come to the rescue. "It is time to send out an S.O.S., before it's too late," John Kilduff, founding partner of energy hedge fund Again Capital, wrote in a recent CNBC column. In the Kilduff dictionary, by the way, S.O.S....

Trump Says What "You Can't Say" But can the American voter handle the truth? January 15, 2016 Bruce Thornton Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Received wisdom is what "everybody knows" is true without anyone having to think about it. Received wisdom has a lot of defense mechanisms: for example, trading in unexamined assumptions, avoiding contrary evidence, dismissing the need of evidence at all, or demonizing those who question it. Question-begging slogans are another. Mantras like "nothing to do with Islam" or "war on women" substitute for evidence and analysis. Another is...

In their State of the Union speeches, all previous presidents presented their policies in the most favorable light, but did they go so far as to distort reality? Did they use them to trash their opponents? I don't think so. But in his last one, Obama did, and adding insult to injury, as always, he pointedly decried partisan sniping right before launching into another episode of partisan sniping. It's as though he doesn't even realize he's being hypocritical on steroids. Obama is also the first president to have framed his SOTU speeches, in part, as high-school debate rebuttals. He must...

What if a bad guy with a gun starts shooting? Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA attempted to put to the test the adage, declared by National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre after the Sandy Hook massacre, that "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." "Many Texans choose to arm themselves," the WFAA report began, "but how prepared are the 'good guys' to protect their own families... and even the public? How would they would perform if a 'bad guy' with a gun starts shooting?" The station retained two experts to...

Clearly the only explanation for Jeb Bush's almost effortless stroll to the Republican nomination is the pernicious stranglehold of big money in politics. Oh, wait. Bush is in the low single digits in most national polls, despite his campaign and his super PAC raising more than $100 million. Perhaps that's only because Donald Trump, the billionaire populist, is buying the nomination with his dragon's hoard of gold? Well, no. Trump has spent less than any other major candidate. But surely Hillary Clinton, with her close ties to Wall Street, her husband's storied hobnobbing with the global .001 percent, not to...

The mainstream media would have you believe that the millennial generation is full of liberal drones marching in lockstep with the progressive agenda. But the reality is quite different. Many millennials are left jaded by the Obama administration and recognize the failure of his economic policies.