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The Lakehurst section of Joint Base McGuire-Dix- Lakehurst is on lockdown this morning, base officials said. The lockdown went into effect at about 9:15 a.m., Senior Airman David Carbajal said. The lockdown means no one is allowed to leave or enter the military base. Local police have cars and barricades blocking off Route 571 west of of Route 70. The lockdown was briefly applied to the Dix and McGuire sections of the 40,000-acre base, but is now in effect only at Lakehurst, Carbajal said shortly before 11 a.m. The New Jersey State Police has sent resources to assist with...

NEWARK — Two New Jersey men intent on killing American troops were arrested Saturday as they boarded flights to link up with a virulent jihadist group in Somalia, authorities said. The men, both North Jersey residents, were charged with conspiring to commit an act of international terrorism through a group tied to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, according to officials familiar with the details of the arrests. Mohamed Hamoud Alessa, 20, of North Bergen, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, 26, of Elmwood Park were apprehended at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens before they could board separate flights to...

Who's more important: Christopher Columbus or John Smith? Clara Barton or Ruby Bridges? Ruby Bridges or Dolores Huerta? Is the story of Nathan Hale too gruesome for first graders? Will history books refer to the 44th American president as Barack Obama, Barack H. Obama or Barack Hussein Obama? The curriculum covers grades kindergarten through high school, and yet after 12 hours of debate the board had only just begun talking about its biggest challenge – high school standards – at 9 p.m. Thursday. All day long the board dropped, added and swapped the names of historical figures and events into...

LONDON — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a dramatic bid to keep his beleaguered Labour Party in power after it was punished in elections last week, announcing Monday he will resign by September at the latest even if the Liberal Democrats — being wooed by the Conservatives — decide to join his party in government.The political theater, played out in front of the iconic black door of No. 10 Downing Street, comes as David Cameron's Conservatives — which won the most seats in Parliament but fell short of a majority — struggled in their attempts to win over...

Congressman Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, is initiating an investigation into the timing of the Security and Exchange Commission's fraud suit against Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs. "The events of the past five days have fueled legitimate suspicion on the part of the American people that the Commission has attempted to assist the White House, the Democratic Party, and Congressional Democrats by timing this suit to coincide with the Senate's consideration of financial regulatory legislation," Issa says. Issa's staff tells CBS News that they currently have no hard evidence that the SEC violated federal law...

WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- The prospect of losing two U.S. House seats in special elections spurred a Democratic effort to avoid a potential domino effect in November, strategists said. Projections for special elections next month in Hawaii and Pennsylvania have caused alarm among Democratic officials, who said they feared dual defeats would play into the thinking that the Democratic Party is consigned to huge losses in the fall, Politico reported Tuesday. In Hawaii, party leaders said they were worried the two top Democrats will split the vote, allowing a Republican to take a seat with a plurality in...

No link yet, only from live broadcast: In a press release just handed to Fox by the FBI, the six Michigan residents, two from Ohio, one from Indiana are charged with “seditious conspiracy.” Reportedly, Hutaree is accused of attempted use of weapons of mass destruction. Charges range from August 2008 to today.The militia group Hutaree are said to have conspired to oppose by force the authority of the US Government. The members viewed local, state and federal law enforcement as "the brotherhood," also known as their enemy, and have been preparing, the FBI says, to engage them in armed...

Despite steep odds, the White House has discussed prospects for reviving a major overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, a commitment that President Obama has postponed once already. Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections. In the session, Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council outlined ways to resuscitate the effort in a White House meeting with two senators -- Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- who have...

Black farmers – possibly over 70,000 of them – will get cash payments and debt relief from the federal government totaling $1.25 billion, in reparation for alleged racial discrimination suffered under the Department of Agriculture’s loan programs, the Obama Administration has agreed. The president announced the deal on Thursday, applauding Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Eric Holder for “bringing these long-ignored claims of African American farmers to a rightful conclusion.” The Washington Post called the settlement “part of a wider effort by Obama and senior officials to dispense with lawsuits stemming from America’s checkered civil rights legacy.”...

The Israeli Air Force has introduced a fleet of pilotless aircraft that can stay in the air for nearly a day and fly as far as the Gulf.The Eitan drones, which have a wingspan of 86ft (26m), are the size of Boeing 737 passenger jets. They can reach an altitude of more than 40,000ft (12,000m) and fly for more than 20 consecutive hours. AP quoted defence officials as saying the planes could provide surveillance and jam enemy communications. Israel, along with the US and other Western nations, believes Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons and has repeatedly suggested...

The embattled representative from the state of Florida, Alan Grayson found himself on the verge of being caught in a coup in Niger earlier this week. www.southernstudies.org Representative Alan Grayson Democrat from Florida. Alan Grayson, the often outspoken Democratic Representative from Florida was on a trip to Niger earlier this week. While on his trip there was a military coup that Grayson almost found himself caught up in. According to a Grayson's press secretary, Todd Jurkowski, "He heard the gunshots. They were literally in the building next door." Grayson was serving as part of a congressional delegation that was...

Texas Gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina spoke to an enthusiastic Kingwood Tea Party crowd in far-northeast Houston Saturday interested in hearing her plans to reform the Lone Star State.Medina made no reference about her Glenn Beck interview. However, the 20 or so random people with whom this reporter spoke before and after her speech seemed to accept Medina’s follow-up response released by her campaign a couple of hours after the Thursday morning radio interview. As Char with Texans for Nullification Today said, “If you go back and look at the radio transcript, when Glenn asked if she believed the government...

In State of the Union, President Suggests Court Opened Doors to Foreign Intervention in American Elections President Obama is taking aim at the Supreme Court's recent decision to roll back limits on corporate spending on political campaigns in his State of the Union address this evening, saying the high court "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign companies - to spend without limit in our elections." "Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities," the president will say, according to...

Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer announced his resignation Tuesday amid criticism the party has been wasting money and not raising as much as it should.Greer will step down Feb. 20, more than three years after Gov. Charlie Crist hand-picked him to run the state GOP. In recent weeks, major party donors and other leaders have called for his resignation, citing questionable party spending, lackluster fundraising and division among party loyalists.In his resignation letter, Greer said he has the support of most party executives, leaders and donors, but the few who oppose him are causing too much division."This...

The Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating a statewide anthrax scare. Local lawmakers are among the targets. Letters with white powder were sent to the offices of Senators Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions and Congressman Jo Bonner around the state. The 15th floor of the RSA Tower in downtown Mobile, where one of Bonner's offices is located, has been evacuated as a precaution. So has Bonner's office in Foley. It's located in a shopping center on McKenzie Street. More than a dozen businesses, including the News 5 bureau, have also been evacuated. The FBI says everything they've tested so...

WASHINGTON – The CIA said Thursday that seven of its employees were killed and six others wounded in a suicide bombing at a base in Afghanistan. The Associated Press has learned that one of them was the chief of the CIA's post in Afghanistan's southeastern Khost Province. CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a message to agency staff that the casualties sustained in Wednesday's strike at Forward Operating Base Chapman were the result of a terrorist attack. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing. Initial reports indicated that eight American civilians had been killed. There was no explanation for...

HONOLULU (AP) -- President Barack Obama has rejected his first piece of legislation from Congress, a stopgap spending bill that never had to take effect. The White House on Wednesday said Obama exercised his right to send back to the Capitol a temporary appropriations bill that lawmakers passed in case a winter storm about two weeks ago would have prevented them from approving a final measure to fund the Pentagon next year. The Dec. 19 blizzard didn't keep them away from the Capitol and they approved the $626 billion defense spending bill before the previous budget expired. The White House...

France’s Constitutional Council has rejected a tax on carbon emissions strongly backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy that was to take effect Friday. But his ruling conservative party said the measure would be redrafted so it could be passed into law next year.The council ruled late Tuesday that the bill contained too many exemptions for polluters, broke with past practices and threatened to make tax collection unfair. The ruling is a blow to Mr. Sarkozy, who has sought to burnish his green credentials by holding international talks next year to seek agreement on emission cuts following the Copenhagen climate conference....

photo: Ayatollah Khamenei (left) en Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (right) (EPA) Reports from Iran indicate that the Supreme National Security Council has ordered a complete check-up of the jet which is on standby to fly Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei and his family to Russia should the situation in Iran spiral out of control. The order, to the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard Corps, was dated on Sunday, 27 December. A fax containing the order was sent to Dutch-based Shahrzad News.   In Iran, tens of thousands of pro-government supporters took to the streets on Tuesday, calling for leaders of the opposition to be...

Investigators combed through Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's history Sunday in hopes of learning how the British-educated son of a Nigerian bank executive ended up carrying what authorities said was a bomb onto a Michigan-bound jetliner. Abdulmutallab was released from a hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Sunday after being treated for burns, according to Gina Balaya, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit, Michigan. The 23-year-old is charged with attempting to set off an explosive device aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from the Netherlands shortly before its landing in Detroit on Christmas Day, and was being held in...