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Highway 41 to Yosemite National Park is closed at Fish Camp, the California Highway Patrol and park officials reported Tuesday. Caltrans reported the roadway is closed eight-tenths of a mile south of the park at Summerdale Campground. The agency doesn’t project the roadway reopening until March 10. A washout Feb. 9 eroded the southbound shoulder of the highway, said Caltrans spokesman Cory Burkarth. Since then, Caltrans has had one-way traffic controls in place while agency workers inspected the roadway several times a day. On Tuesday morning, Caltrans workers noticed the northbound lane was starting to sink and banned tour buses...

BIG SUR, Calif. — Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge in Big Sur is starting to fail. According to CalTrans an active slide has been taking place on the mountainside under the bridge since Saturday. The slide is moving one of two column holding the bridge up and cracks are visible at the top of the post. "Basically the mountainside that it is sitting on is moving, which, causes the column to move," said Heath Johnston with CalTrans. The problem has the bridge closed to all vehicle traffic and California Highway Patrol is turning people around at Big Sur Station. -snip-

Look, if any of these male nursery web spiders out there want to get busy and perpetuate their lineage, they better not show up empty-handed. Because they could get eaten. Alive. "Nuptial gift-giving" has long been observed in nursery web spiders (Pisaura mirabilis). Basically, male spiders offer female spiders insects wrapped up in silk (yes, a snack packaged in high-end material). There's been a fair amount of interest in this unique mating ritual, and a new study published this week in Biology Letters sheds further light on it. Researchers found male spiders without gifts were six times more likely to...

ROSEBUD -- An improvised explosive device (IED) was found and disabled Tuesday night under a bridge near Rosebud. According to Falls County Constable Richard Aleman, two juvenile boys were hunting for rabbits late Tuesday evening when they noticed suspicious items under a bridge near Farm to Market 1963. The boys notified one of their parents, who is former military personnel, and he contacted the fire department. The fire department arrived and determined that the packages were possibly IEDs. The McLennan County Bomb Squad was called in and arrived at the scene at approximately 10:00 p.m. An agent from the Bureau...

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — It’s something you’ve likely seen in the movies — it’s something you may not know is also happening in real life. People are getting chips implanted into their hands in an effort to make daily life a little bit easier. From opening doors to making contacts to sending emails — a growing group of people are all-in. People here in the Twin Cities are embracing the extra-personal technology. Set in the far-off year of 2021 is the 1995 film “Johnny Mneumonic.” A movie that inspired a boy named Tim Shank, growing up in Indiana. --snip-- But experiments...

Cities across Venezuela are increasingly agitated, as government offices closed their doors for the rest of the week in the face of a worsening energy crisis that is causing daily blackouts. Venezuela is among the world's most violent countries, and crime generally spikes here when the lights go out. Looting and fiery protests starting spreading Wednesday in Caracas, as hundreds of angry voters lined up to sign a petition beginning the process of recalling the deeply unpopular President Nicolas Maduro. The socialist administration began imposing a four-hour daily blackout around the country this week to save electricity. Then, Maduro announced...

University students are increasingly unable to read a whole book as they simply don’t have the concentration spans required, nor are they able to understand complex, nuanced arguments, academics have said. Lecturers at leading British universities are having to actively encourage students to read beyond the set texts, and have noticed that students are increasingly unwilling to read whole texts. They say they believe internet culture is to blame, as young people nowadays are used to receiving arguments in the form of 800-1000 word articles. Anything beyond that, they say, is now proving too challenging. “Incoming undergraduates have had their...

Society is undergoing a change of mind about the way religion and people of faith intersect with public life. That is, there are intensifying perceptions that faith is at the root of a vast number of societal ills. Though it remains the nation’s most dominant religion, Christianity faces significant headwind in the court of public opinion. The decades-old trend that Christianity is irrelevant is increasingly giving way to the notion that Christianity is bad for society. A new major study conducted by Barna Group, and explored in the new book Good Faith, co-authored by Barna president David Kinnaman, examines society’s...

Around the world, people are beginning to turn their backs on religion. For some time, researchers have observed this trend as it ripples through developed countries, with the United States standing out as the exception. Now, a new study reveals this is no longer the case; with each passing generation, Americans too are steadily becoming less religious. --snip-- Researchers found each generation is subsequently less religious than the one before. In one example, the team found that 41 percent of people aged 70 and older reported they attend church services at least once a month. For people just under that...

A student in Killeen, Texas, was suspended on Tuesday after he picked up a classmate who was having an asthma attack and carried her to the nurse's office against his teacher's instructions. Anthony Ruelas, 15, a student at Gateway Middle School, an alternative school in the Killeen Independent School District (ISD), said his classmate was "wheezing and gagging for three minutes" when his teacher said everyone should stay calm and wait for an email reply from the nurse in response to the situation, Texas TV station KCEN reported. Ruelas said he knew that his friend "needed help," which is why...

Fifth-grader turned part-time gardener Emma Leyson is showing off her greens on Muse School’s campus. “This is the strawberry plant I planted,” Leyson told CBS2’s Stephanie Simmons. Thought to be the first of its kind in the country, the school recently adopted an all-vegan lunch menu. As part of their curriculum, the students learn how to create food from seed to table. --snip-- Paul Hudak, who runs the program at Muse, works closely with the school’s master chef to prepare a variety of vegan choices for the kids. --snip-- Before rolling out the new menu this school year, the staff...

DAVIE COUNTY, N.C. – Pertussis – commonly known as whooping cough – is a serious bacteria. It causes spasms of severe coughing, which can cause those who have it to vomit and lose breath. In the worst cases, it can be deadly. In recent weeks, it made its way to two schools in Davie County. The first case was reported on December 7. Today, the school system reported 13 confirmed cases, 11 in Davie High School, and two in the early college. --snip-- The spread of whooping cough is most easily prevented by receiving the DTaP shot. However – and...

PHILADELPHIA – Police are trying to find two men who they say stole 43 propane tanks from two industrial sites in the last week, and have alerted their Homeland Security division as a safety measure. Lt. Dennis Rosenbaum says the division has been alerted because of the number and size of some of the tanks taken "out of an abundance of caution." --snip-- Lt. Rosenbaum says police just "want to make sure it's nothing sinister." He said they are treating them as industrial thefts, "unless we come up with something else."

The ACLU sued in October to force Trinity Catholic Hospitals to commit abortions. Alliance Defending Freedom is asking to defend the hospital system from this outrageous assault by the left. “ Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing several pro-life, pro-women’s organizations asked a federal court Wednesday to allow the groups to intervene in defense of a Catholic hospital system that the American Civil Liberties Union sued in October. The ACLU lawsuit is asking the court to force Trinity Health and its staff to commit abortions regardless of their religious and pro-life objections. ADF attorneys represent Catholic Medical Association, Christian Medical and...

The Camden County Sheriff’s office in southern Missouri confirmed it received a tip regarding a group of Middle Eastern men asking suspicious questions about Bagnell Dam. --snip-- Lake News Online reported The Camden County Sheriff’s Office has verified that it received a tip regarding a group of Middle Eastern men asking about Bagnell Dam and have forwarded the report to the FBI and a joint task force on terrorism. That does not mean that there is any reason to be scared or panicked that an attack is planned at the Lake of the Ozarks, CCSD Cpl. Scott Hines said, advising...

Now this… A stash of explosives was discovered in Mark Twain National Forest in Mid-Missouri in October....... --snip-- Since the suspicious activity first leaked last week, the investigation has progressively revealed worse details, working retroactively to bring to light every alarming thing that happened before two men were stopped in a Lebanon Walmart. Now, it seems to have reach a head, after an incident in October provides some potential answers as to what is being plotted from the center of our country, and what targets are at imminent risk. A man who was hunting in the Mark Twain National Forest,...

Two “foreign speaking” men set off alarms after they entered the local Walmart store in Lebanon, Missouri and purchased 60 cellphones. The purchase was made around 4 AM last Saturday morning. Police were called but released the men saying they didn’t have a legal reason to detain them.

The devastated girlfriend of Germanwings killer co-pilo Andreas Lubitz is pregnant with his child, it emerged today. Secondary school teacher Kathrin Goldbach, who is in her 20s, left Germany in the aftermath of the crash which killed 150 people thinking her fiance was one of the victims. According to the German newspaper Bild, she arrived in France to find he had been the perpetrator of mass murder. It is believed that she told the pupils at the Gesamtschule in Krefeld, near Dusseldorf, where she works some time ago that she was 'going to be a mum'.

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power...

Marine Corps Air Station New River on Wednesday held a full-scale pandemic outbreak drill where health officials and Marines responded to a smallpox outbreak that “occurred” aboard the installation. --snip-- This is a simulated exercise designed to test our capabilities and respond to a pandemic or biological threat,” he said. “ … We’re trying to identify some areas where we can improve and we’re also trying to foster some confidence in the population that we serve … that we can respond effectively to a mass terror or a weapon of mass destruction incident.”