Arkansas Republican state representative is facing serious scrutiny after he apparently "rehomed" his adopted daughters to a household where one of the girls, age 6, was raped by the father. Furthermore, Rep. Justin Harris is accused of continuing to take state funds intended for the girls' care even after his family had given them away.

Wonkette reported on an Arkansas Times exposé about Harris and the Christian pre-school he runs with his wife, a school that employed the sexual predator who raped the 6-year-old girl.

When the Times asked Harris why he handed over his adopted daughter to a sexual predator without ever consulting state authorities or the foster care system, the legislator quoted the Christian Bible's Book of Isaiah, saying, "No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you."

He then said, "You don't know what we've been through this past year. You have no idea what my family has been through. I don't care what the people of Arkansas think about me. I don't care if I lose my position. I care what my wife thinks about me, and I care what my three sons think about me."


The situation has reopened scrutiny of the Harris family's Christian daycare center, Growing God's Kingdom Preschool. The pre-kindergarten has run afoul of authorities in the past for taking state and federal subsidies intended for non-religious institutions. Now, as some in Arkansas are pointing out, Harris is making headlines for trying to eliminate government benefits to immigrants, benefits that his preschool heavily relies on.

It appears, the Times said, that Harris and his wife Marsha took in two little girls in September of 2012. The girls were sisters and in foster care because a male relative had sexually abused the older girl and left her traumatized.

The Harrises formally adopted the girls six months later in March, 2013. By October of 2013, something had gone seriously wrong in the home. The Harrises — who had three older biological sons — handed off the two girls to Eric and Stacey Francis, essentially abandoning them.

An Israeli tourism brochure depicting the Old City of Jerusalem has been banned by Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for presenting a "misleading" image, which suggests the Palestinian enclave is Israeli.

The ASA banned the leaflet on Wednesday after consumers lodged complaints.

Its headline, "Israel: Land of Creation," showed a photograph of the walled Old City and Muslim Dome of the Rock against more modern buildings of West Jerusalem.

The caption read "Israel has it all," adding "everyone falls for the Old City, with its narrow (and car-free) alleys, teeming pilgrims and bazaar-like buzz," AFP reported.

The ASA issued a statement saying consumers had complained the advertising presented a "misleading" image of the Old City as a widely accepted part of Israel.

Sharpstown is a Texas community, located just southwest of Houston, and the way they maintain security in this community has gotten our attention.

In 2012, they fired their cops.

The Sharpstown Civic Association then hired S.E.A.L. Security Solutions, a private firm, to patrol their streets.

The statist fearmongers will have you believe that "privatizing" anything would result in mass chaos and a Mad Max scenarios of warlords and rampant crime. But they are wrong.

"Since we've been in there, an independent crime study that they've had done [indicates] we've reduced the crime by 61%" in just 20 months, says James Alexander, Director of Operations for SEAL.


Government police, despite not acting like it, are still part of the government. This means that any progressive change for the better takes ten times longer than it would in the private sector; if it happens at all. Government police are not driven by efficiency and threats from liability, as neither one of these things are needed when you have a tax farm to rob when things get tight.

Contrary to the government apparatus, private police, must be efficient as well as safe, for one small mistake or claim could end their entire operation. If an inefficiency is spotted within the system, changes must be implemented swiftly to avoid the loss of revenue.

The reason for the success rate of SEAL Security is that they can see a problem and quickly adapt versus trying to spin the rusty cogs of the bureaucratic process. And that is exactly what SEAL did in Sharpstown.

According to guns.com, Alexander cites the continuous patrol of SEAL's officers in their assigned neighborhoods as opposed to the strategy of intermittent presence that the constable embraced. "On a constable patrol contract, it's either a 70/30 or an 80/20. Meaning they say they patrol your community 70 percent of the time, [while] 30 percent of the time they use for running calls out of your area or writing reports."

At least 45 people were killed on Tuesday by suspected Boko Haram militants in a remote village in the north-eastern Borno state of Nigeria, according to sources from the military and authorised vigilante groups.

The insurgents started shooting into houses in Njaba at about 5.30am, local time, a military source in Maiduguri told Reuters on Thursday. The village is close to the town of Damboa and about 60 miles south of the state capital, Maiduguri.

"The attack was not immediately known because the village is very remote and our men couldn't access the area," the source said.

Media regulator to launch investigation into views expressed during Crosstalk programme on Kremlin-backed broadcaster

Russia Today is to be investigated by media regulator Ofcom over anti-western comments in a late-night discussion on Ukraine - its sixth ongoing inquiry into the Kremlin-backed news channel following complaints by viewers.

The regulator, which threatened Russia Today, or RT, with statutory sanctions after repeated breaches of broadcasting regulations on impartiality last year, faces a new investigation over its Crosstalk programme broadcast on 23 December last year.

The programme is understood to have featured a number of anti-western views in the discussion between the presenter and three studio guests, prompting one viewer to complain.

This story is developing. Please check back for further updates.

Delta flight 1086 from Atlanta to LaGuardia Airport slid off the runway when landing, according to a Federal Aviation Administration official.

According to that official, the McDonnell Douglas MD-88 aircraft skidded during a Thursday morning snowstorm. New York's LaGuardia Airport was closed immediately after the incident occurred. The FAA said the airport is expected to reopen at 6:59 p.m. EST.

"Travelers with flights scheduled to arrive and depart from the airport should check with their carrier to determine the status of their flight," the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in a release. "The Port Authority will provide more information as it becomes available."

The red tape involved in firing federal employees is so bad that the government hasn't even been able to fire employees who were caught watching up to six hours a day of porn at work.

A recent report from CBS News finds that government employee unions and civil service rules make it almost impossible to fire employees, and it's costing the taxpayer big bucks.

In one instance, CBS found an employee who had 7,000 pornographic files on his office computer and was tracked sometimes spending up to six hours a day watching porn at work. But this employee is still being paid as his years-long appeals process continues.

In other cases, abusive or troubled employees remain employed even after caught sending threatening emails to other employees and bosses.

A recent article in the Guardian described an "off-the-books interrogation compound" where Chicago police secretly hold criminal suspects for questioning for hours on end, beyond the reach of lawyers, family members, and basic constitutional protections.

"I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every [police official] I talked to said they had never heard of him," one Chicago attorney says of a client, who, like other detainees at the nondescript warehouse on the city's west side, was kept out of official booking databases.

People are rightly shocked to learn that police in the US have allegedly been "disappearing" criminal suspects and subjecting them to ill-treatment. But it bears pointing out that in the parallel legal universe that is the U.S. immigration system, hundreds of thousands of people are routinely held in detention facilities under similar circumstances — for days, weeks, even months at a time — while they await court hearings or deportation for civil immigration violations.

Family members and lawyers of immigrant detainees often have a tough time finding them. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has custody over immigrants caught in the interior of the US, often doesn't enter names into its online detainee locator system until at least 72 hours after they have been taken into custody, and sometimes longer. And that's assuming ICE spells their names correctly in its database,which is not always the case. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has authority over immigrants caught within 100 miles of US borders, doesn't provide a locator service at all for the individuals detained in at least 130 small substationsdotting the border.

An Oregon family is demanding answers after a Sheriff's deputy shot and killed their pony. The family says they had no idea the officer was going to shoot the family pet, and it all happened without their knowing and for no good reason whatsoever.

Crista Fitzgerald of Clackamas County explained that the 30-year-old American Miniature Horse, named Gir, had no problems aside from being old. But when he escaped from his stall in a Molalla barn overnight on February 18th, an officer shot and killed him.

"I locked his stall door, and I always do a double check. The next morning I came back out before I had class in the morning, which is around 10, and he was gone," Crista explained.

She said that Gir didn't get very far from the barn before being shot.

"We started knocking door-to-door. And the first house we came to he was laying in their yard," she recounted.

A Colorado Springs first-grader was suspended from school after pointing his fingers at a classmate in the shape of a gun.

Six-year-old Elijah goes to Stratton Meadows Elementary School. On Monday, he pointed at a classmate in the shape of a gun and said, "You're dead."

According to his behavior report, an administrator spoke with him about what being dead means and about not confusing "make-believe" or things in games with reality. And he received a one-day suspension for threats against peers.

"I know they have zero tolerance, but more of a maybe no recess," his dad, Austin Thurston said. "Going as far as a one-day suspension is a little extreme for a six-year-old in a first-grade class."

A spokesperson for Harrison School District 2, which Stratton Meadows is a part of, couldn't give specifics about the case, because it's part of the student's personal record. But she said school administrators feel they issued the appropriate disciplinary action.

She also said school staff speaks with students and parents before a suspension, and they consider current as well as previous behaviors.

Elijah has been at the school since January. His dad said while he had minor behavioral incidents in his previous school, this was the first time he got in trouble at Stratton Meadows.

"Of course I think he was playing," Thurston said. "What six-year-old doesn't play cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians?"

Thurston said he and his wife have spoken with the boy about guns.

"We just told him there's a time and a place for everything, and we told him school is never a place for that. We let him know that the guns in the wrong hands will be very dangerous," he said. "He knows the difference between really doing that, and just putting your finger up and saying, 'boom you're dead.' We made sure he understands the severity of what he said."

Although the school didn't require it, Elijah is writing an apology letter to the school stating he understands his actions.