AOL

Launching a political coalition called Evangelicals for Trump at a Florida megachurch on Friday, President Trump declared his belief that God supports his agenda.

“I really do believe we have God on our side. I believe that. I believe that,” Trump said at King Jesus International Ministry in Kendall, Fla., adding, “or there would have been no way we could have won, right? People say how do you win, you don’t have the media, you have so many things against you, and we win. So, there has to be something.”  Continue reading “Trump tells evangelicals that God is ‘on our side’”

New York Post – by Thornton McEnery

A couple of Americans with names matching private security contractors, including a former US Green Beret who has served time behind bars, accompanied fugitive Carlos Ghosn out of Japan while he was awaiting trial for financial crimes, according to a new report.

Ghosn — who stunned the world with his daring escape from Japanese prosecutors this week — flew out of Japan on a private jet whose only other passengers were two men who identified themselves using US passports, according to the Wall Street Journal.  Continue reading “Carlos Ghosn may have been helped by ex-Green Beret in escape from Japan: report”

Page Six – by Emily Smith

Ghislaine Maxwell — the British socialite who’s long been accused of serving as Jeffrey Epstein’s madam — is hiding in a series of safe houses and is being “protected because of the information she has on the world’s most powerful people.”

Maxwell, 58, allegedly procured young women and groomed them to have sex with Epstein and his wealthy pals, but she has remained out of public view after the convicted sex offender’s re-arrest last year and his death in jail in August. She has always denied any wrongdoing.  Continue reading “Ghislaine Maxwell’s powerful contacts protecting her in safe houses”

AOL

HONG KONG (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people packed Hong Kong streets for an annual New Year’s Day protest march as the monthslong pro-democracy movement extended into 2020 with further violence between police and demonstrators.

Police said they arrested some 400 people for unlawful assembly and carrying offensive weapons as hard-line, black-clad youths broke off from the main group of marchers and attacked banks and ATM machines with spray paint, hammers and Motolov cocktails. They smashed crossing lights, ripped bricks from sidewalks and barricaded roads in the downtown financial district.  Continue reading “Police, protesters clash in New Year’s rally in Hong Kong”

Pocket – by James Temple

In the closing weeks of 2008, the US Department of Energy invited politicians and press to a dedication ceremony for the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. The state-of-the-art lab, backed by $125 million in federal funding, filled the top floor of a glimmering glass office building that reflected the grand hopes for advanced biofuels. Continue reading “The Scientist Still Fighting for the Clean Fuel the World Forgot”

AOL

NEW YORK (AP) — The man charged with stabbing five people during a Hanukkah celebration in New York began boot camp to enter the U.S. Marine Corps but was separated from the service a month later for “fraudulent enlistment,” military officials said Tuesday.

A Marine Corps spokeswoman would not provide details on why Grafton Thomas left the Marines as a recruit in late 2002, about a month after he started training.  Continue reading “Marines: Hanukkah stabbing suspect kicked out of boot camp”

New York Post – by Kenneth Garger

The police department in Mobile, Alabama apologized Monday for the “insensitive gesture” carried out by two of its officers who posed for a holiday photo next to a makeshift “homeless quilt.”

The department was reacting to a since-deleted, but viral Facebook post by the officers, showing them grinning alongside the cardboard display replete with phrases used by panhandlers.  Continue reading “Alabama cops apologize for ‘homeless quilt’ made of cardboard signs”

Get Pocket – by Rian Malan, Rolling Stone

Introduction
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. He hadn’t composed the melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, which was taken to England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa.  Continue reading “In the Jungle: Inside the Long, Hidden Genealogy of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’”

NBC DFW

The man who fatally shot two people at a White Settlement Church on Sunday before being killed by church security has been identified as a 43-year-old Keith Thomas Kinnunen, a River Oaks man with a long criminal history and described by his ex-wife as “battling a demon” and “not nice to anyone.”

Kinnunen was identified as the shooter Monday morning by two law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation. NBC 5 has learned his criminal past included charges of assault, theft, arson and possession of an illegal weapon in Texas, Oklahoma and New Jersey.  Continue reading “River Oaks Man ‘Battling Demon’ Identified as Gunman in White Settlement Church Shooting”

The Weather Channel

High winds from a winter storm sweeping across the nation have caused tens of thousands of customers from Michigan and Ohio and across the Northeast to lose electricity on Monday.

Meanwhile, officials in the town of Otis, Massachusetts, declared a state of emergency as the system, which has been named Winter Storm Gage by The Weather Channel, downed trees and power lines.

Continue reading “Winter Storm Leaves Thousands Without Electricity in Midwest, Northeast; Emergency Declared in Massachusetts Town”

New York Post – by Larry Celona and Selim Algar

A top deputy to city schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was busted in Wisconsin for allegedly trying to arrange sex with an underage boy online, police and sources told The Post.

Department of Education Deputy Chief of Staff David Hay was arrested getting off at General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee Sunday on a charge of using a computer “to facilitate a child sex crime,” according to Neenah, Wisconsin, cops.  Continue reading “Top DOE official arrested for trying to set up sex with underage boy”

KCBD

LUBBOCK COUNTY, Texas (KCBD) – Highway 84 is now back open southeast of Slaton as first responders clear the scene of multiple accidents. The eastbound lanes of the highway were still shut down, as of Friday afternoon.

KCBD had a crew filming as a semi crashed into the pileup on Highway 84, hitting one DPS trooper and pinning another person inside a truck. Both people were taken for medical treatment and are expected to survive their injuries.  Continue reading “DPS trooper struck by semi, driver extracted from pickup in multi-car pileup on Slaton Highway”

The Weather Channel

A powerful winter storm will bring heavy snow, some ice and potentially blizzard conditions to parts of the Plains this weekend, potentially snarling post-Christmas holiday travel.

This significant system has been named Winter Storm Gage by The Weather Channel.

Continue reading “Powerful Post-Christmas Winter Storm May Bring Blizzard Conditions, Ice to Plains, Upper Midwest”

The Union Journal – by Miriam Jackson

Mr. Imus obtained his first radio job in 1968 at KUTY, in Palmdale, Calif., however switched to KJOY in Stockton, the place he was fired for saying “hell” on the air. At KXOA in Sacramento, he known as a restaurant, posed as a sergeant and ordered 1,200 hamburgers to go, for his troops. The Federal Communications Fee slapped his wrist, however the gag was a success with listeners. Billboard journal named him disc jockey of the yr for medium-size markets. By 1970, he was with WGAR in Cleveland.  Continue reading “Don Imus, Radio Host Who Pushed Boundaries, Dies at 79”

Fox News

A young boy and his family got more than they bargained for this past weekend at the Dublin Zoo in Ireland when they received a close-up view of a tiger in full attack mode.

Thankfully, the glass wall of the zoo’s tiger enclosure saved the family from harm. Continue reading “Dublin Zoo tiger ‘attacks’ young boy — only to be stopped by glass partition”

CNN

Los Angeles (CNN) As an Uber driver, Lauren Kush tries to keep her Toyota Prius spotless.

But keeping it tidy serves a dual purpose. The 36-year-old woman is homeless and has been sleeping in her car at night, converting the back seat into a bed.  Continue reading “Living in her car, she was afraid and harassed. Then she found an unexpected refuge”

The Eagle – by Chelsea Katz

The first of her kind, CC the cloned cat is breaking more boundaries as she turns 18 years old.

There are no big plans locally to mark the day, but CC — Carbon Copy or Copy Cat — will be the focus of a Dutch cartoon set for release today to celebrate her birthday, researcher and owner Duane Kraemer said.

Continue reading “CC, world’s first cloned cat, turns 18 years old”

KTRE 9

BEAUFORT COUNTY, N.C. (WCTI/CNN) – You look out for bad drivers and objects in the road while you’re driving, but a North Carolina woman says her car was hit by something truly unexpected – a falling catfish.

Rhesa Walston was driving her SUV home from her mother’s house when she got a surprise from the sky.

Continue reading “Catfish shatters N.C. woman’s car windshield”

The Eagle – by Kimberly Kindy

WASHINGTON – Bits of metal, hard plastic, rubber and even glass are increasingly getting mixed and baked into processed meat products reaching consumers, triggering a record number of safety recalls, a Washington Post analysis of federal records shows.

So far this year, the Agriculture Department has announced 34 recalls involving 17 million pounds of meat products after stray materials were found in them.  Continue reading “Recalls for processed meat rise drastically as consumers bite down on metal, plastic and glass”