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Moorhead has set a new Minnesota record for mugginess. The State Climatology Office said the 88-degree dew-point temperature at Moorhead on July 19 is a state record. Minnesota's previous dew-point record was 86 degrees, set at Pipestone and St. James on July 23, 2005. Moorhead's 88-degree dew point was recorded from 7 to 9 p.m. The climatology office said that at the time, wind speeds were decreasing and air temperature rising, which suggests there were local influences helping to drive the dew point to "this extreme level."

The office of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has released a record of a dinner attended by the governor and Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, just hours after Gawker filed a lawsuit aimed at getting the governor to release records of communication between Christie and Ailes. The record is simply a datebook entry that indicates a private dinner attended by Christie and his wife, with a pair of details redacted and no mention of Ailes. But the governor’s office told Gawker writer John Cook the record indicates “a schedule entry for a private dinner attended by the Governor and Mr....

Speaking to hundreds of conservative activists at the Faith and Freedom conference in Washington on Friday morning, Michele Bachmann positioned herself as the 2012 Republican field’s most effective social conservative — the one with the best record of tangible steps to oppose gay marriage, abortion and the federal health care law. The firebrand congresswoman said she was “at the tip of the spear” in efforts to block gay marriage in her home state of Minnesota, where the Republican-controlled state legislature voted last month to put a gay marriage Constitutional amendment on the November 2012 ballot — seven years after she...

Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program. For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with...

Updated: 04/06/11 2012 Presidential Hopefuls' Immigration Stances Chart at link.

(Reuters) - Gold rose to a record high for a fourth straight day and silver surged on Friday, as a weaker dollar, the prospect of a U.S. government shutdown and inflation worries lifted precious metals in a broad commodities rally. Gold was set for its biggest weekly gain in four months, drawing support from renewed euro zone sovereign debt fears amid Portugal's financial crisis and inflation jitters as crude oil and corn hit new highs this week. Bullion broke above key resistance on technical charts and could target above $1,500 an ounce. The metal has risen more than 10 percent...

Federal Reserve reports record profitBy Peter Schroeder - 03/22/11 12:12 PM ET The Federal Reserve turned a record $81.7 billion profit in 2010, up 53 percent from 2009, the central bank reported Tuesday. The vast majority of the Fed's profit — $79.3 billion — will be turned over to the Treasury Department, with the rest being paid out to member banks in dividends. A substantial chunk of that profit came from increased interest income from the $1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities the Fed purchased during the financial crisis to help stabilize the housing market. The Fed made $24.4 billion more...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The government posted a record monthly budget deficit of $222.5 billion in February as spending growth outstripped revenue gains that were crimped by tax cuts enacted late last year, the Treasury Department reported on Thursday. The budget gap for February -- typically a large deficit month -- beat the previous record of $220.91 billion set in February 2010. But it came in under the consensus forecast of a $227.5 billion gap from analysts polled by Reuters.

A new record was set on 29 January 2011 when the science team operating a new prototype telescope discovered not one Near-Earth Asteroid, not two, but nineteen in a single night! “This record number of discoveries shows that PS1 is the world’s most powerful telescope for this kind of study,” said Nick Kaiser, head of the Pan-STARRS project. One of the most difficult jobs astronomers have in outreach is encouraging spending in asteroid discovery programs, to give us sufficient warning of any potential asteroids that will collide with Earth, while avoiding the temptation to whip up false panic. The risk...

EL PASO, Texas (AFP) – The United States deported more illegal immigrants than ever before during the first two years of President Barack Obama's administration, his government said Monday. "In both fiscal years 2009 and 2010, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more illegal immigrants from our country than ever before, with more than 779,000 removals nationwide in the last two years," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said. The Obama administration must prove it is tough on illegal immigrants and can secure the country's porous borders if it is to stand a chance of passing a comprehensive overhaul of America's tattered...

State lawmakers want Obama’s birth recordsBy Howard Fischer Capitol Media Services Sat, 01/29/2011 - 00:34 PHOENIX — More than three dozen Republican legislators want a plan to require Barack Obama to produce an original birth certificate for Arizona officials if he intends to seek re-election. HB 2544 would forbid the secretary of state from putting a presidential candidate’s name on the ballot unless certain documents are first provided. These include a sworn statements outlining where the candidate has lived for the last 14 years, that the candidate does not hold dual citizenship and that the person’s allegiance “is solely to...

The latest posting today of the National Debt shows it has topped $14 trillion for the first time. The U.S. Treasury website today reported that as of last Friday, the last day of 2010, the National Debt stood at $14,025,215,218,708.52. It took just 7 months for the National Debt to increase from $13 trillion on June 1, 2010 to $14 trillion on Dec. 31. It also means the debt is fast approaching the statutory ceiling $14.294 trillion set by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last February. The federal government would have to stop borrowing and might even...

Unemployment sets record in WashingtonBy SCOTT SUNDE SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF Wednesday, December 22, 2010 / Last updated 9:55 p.m. PT So much for holiday cheer. By next week, more than a half-million residents in the state will have collected almost $4.7 billion in unemployment benefits. Both numbers are records. "This has been another demanding year for Employment Security, but even more challenging for those who still can't find a job after months and months of looking," said Joel Sacks, deputy commissioner of the Employment Security Department, in a news release. There is little good news in the year-end statistics. In February,...

N THE age-old war between cats and dogs, canines might just have struck the killer blow. A border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of 1022 items - more than any other animal. She can also categorise them according to function and shape, something children learn to do around the age of 3. Chaser follows in the footsteps of Rico, who trained at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Rico had a "vocabulary" of 200 words and could identify new objects in a group of familiar objects by a process of elimination, according to...

(CNN) -- Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, made its own history Tuesday as its homicide rate reached 3,000 deaths for the year -- 10 times the number of killings annually that the border city counted just a few years ago. With two weeks left in the year, 2010 is now the deadliest year Juarez has ever seen, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general's office told CNN. "At 12:15 p.m. we hit 3,000 murders for the year. The state attorney general's office had the number at 2,998 as of Monday and with the two murders today that brings us to 3,000,"...

Sarah Palin's documentary / travelogue / reality-tainment / promotional-biopic shattered TLC ratings records Sunday night. The debut of Sarah Palin's Alaska delivered a whopping 5 million viewers. The first episode of the eight-part series was the most-watched program launch in TLC's history.

The ratings are in, and it looks like “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is a hit. TLC says nearly 5 million total viewers tuned in to the premiere of the series. In case you haven’t seen our previous coverage, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is a documentary series from producer Mark Burnett and starring former Alaska governor and Fox News Channel contributor Sarah Palin. TLC says 4.96 million total viewers tuned in, including 1.8 million adults 25-54, and 1.6 million adults 18-49, two of the network’s key demos. That is the best premiere in network history with regards to total viewers, beating the 2003...

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak defends signing letter pushed by J Street calling for easing Gaza blockade. LOWER MERION TOWNSHIP – One day, months before the race to represent Pennsylvania in the US Senate entered the homestretch, Democratic candidate Joe Sestak arrived at his campaign office to find it practically empty. “Where is everybody?” Sestak told The Jerusalem Post he had asked at the time, only to be told it was Pessah. That’s how he found out that nearly half his staff was Jewish. But on Monday, the day before Americans finally head to the polls, Sestak’s headquarters in...

The Minnesota State Climatology Office reported that “it appears that the minimum pressure … measured at Bigfork is the new record low pressure for a non-tropical storm in the Continental U.S. (excluding tornadoes).” For comparison, they also noted that the lowest pressure recorded in the “Edmund Fitzgerald storm” was 28.95 inches, and the lowest pressure record in the Armistice Day Storm was 28.55 inches. This storm also set local records for low pressure at Duluth and International Falls, and a new Wisconsin state record set at Superior, which recorded a reading of 961.3 millibars, or 28.39 inches of mercury, at...

Chris and Amy Stevens drove to New York City this week with the world's largest pumpkin in the back of their truck. The couple from New Richmond, Wis., was scheduled to appear on "Live with Regis and Kelly" this morning and receive their Guinness Book of World Records award on the show. "Oh, my God! Driving a three-quarter-ton pickup truck with an 1,800-pound pumpkin in the back through downtown Manhattan was insane," Chris Stevens said in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. "I have never been in New York in my life, and I have never seen traffic like this. Rush...