Speaking from London, jazz musician and author Gilad Atzmon speaks out in support of French comedian Dieudonne, accused by the French regime of 'anti-semitism'...

A Venezuelan beauty queen and her British ex-husband were shot and killed after their car broke down on a roadside near Puerto Cabello on Monday night.

Mónica Spear, who won the Miss Venezuela crown in 2004, and Thomas Berry, a travel company boss from London, according to his Facebook page, are believed to be the victims of an attempted robbery or kidnapping in one of the world's most dangerous countries.

Their bodies - along with their injured five-year-old daughter Maya, who is now receiving hospital treatment - were found in a Toyota Corolla that had apparently broken down on the way from Puerto Cabello to Valencia.

Reflecting the high profile of Spear, President Nicolás Maduro made a statement on the killing, saying it reflected wider problems. "It is very sad to hear of the loss of this young woman ... It is a problem of social violence," he said.

Truckers rallied in Washington to restore America to its constitutional republic foundations. So did veterans. And bikers. They all assembled and then departed, leaving the Beltway insiders to continue running the nation into the ground, according to one man who says an event he hopes to hold this spring will be different.

U.S. Army Col. Harry G. Riley, retired, who runs the Patriots for America website, told WND his event planned for May 16 doesn't really have an organized sponsor - it will be just be individual Americans assembling to demand a restoration of their nation.

One of the primary catalysts for the event he said, was the establishment of a prayer group.

Also, he vows that they won't leave Washington until they see change.

"One million or more of the assembled 10 million must be prepared to stay in D.C. as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office," Riley explains in a promotional email about his plan.

"The senior Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives will become Speaker of the House and the U.S. House of Representatives will elect a temporary president and vice president of the United States. The U.S. Senate will take action to elect a new majority and minority leader," he declared.

America is believed by the rest of the world to be the land of opportunity and unimpeded upward mobility. It is where people from all walks of life, backgrounds, races and color can make the best of their opportunities and talents. America attracted people from all over the world to achieve, discover, innovate and improve their lives, and this helped create the greatest society ever built by man. It used to be that in America you could make a future for yourself no matter who your parents were, what your religion or race is. Can you imagine a black president with a Moslem father becoming the elected leader in France, England or Germany?

Unfortunately this is becoming less and less so. Life in America is slowly falling into a type of a new caste system, where your origins, and particularly your family's fortunes can in large part determine your future. If you were born rich you are likely to remain that way. But, if you were born poor, you and your progeny are likely to remain that way as well. The opportunity to change your caste is becoming less available nowadays.

We are slowly turning into a system similar to the landed gentry feudal system in England or to the more structured caste system in India. In a caste system, you are born in a pre-defined caste with no way out. In America the newly developing caste system appears to encompass more than just income inequality, it encompasses inequality in opportunity, in health, in life expectancy, in happiness and in all other aspects of life itself. Robert Reich related the Caste system to the decreasing social mobility in the United States.

Wealth inequality is dividing our one United States into two Americas: one that is rich and in control and one that is poor and helpless. The two Americas exist in increasingly separate spheres and barely know each other. The rich don't use the same schools, don't frequent the same restaurants, don't attend the same social functions, don't support similar causes, and don't use the same modes of transportation or shop at the same stores. They live on a higher plane and have an easier and more enjoyable life, different in many ways from the more demanding and stressful lives of most Americans. The rich populate the Congress and other government hierarchies. They write the laws and establish the rules for the rest of us to follow while largely unfamiliar with our lives and the challenges we face. Now, the wealth gap in the United States is the forth highest in the world; only Russia, the Ukraine and Lebanon are worse.

When the Good Humor ice cream plant closed here two summers ago, more than 400 jobs and a stable, punch-the-clock way of life melted away, another in a string of plant closings that have battered this once-proud manufacturing town.

The hulking plant sat vacant until a co-op of Virginia dairy farmers purchased it in summer 2013 to process milk and ice cream, though on a far smaller scale than the 60,000 cases of ice cream that global food giant Unilever churned out every day.

Randy Inman, the board president for Shenandoah Family Farms, said he expected the plant's revival to trigger plenty of interest in its three dozen or so initial jobs. What he did not expect: 1,600 applicants and counting - a deluge.

Many applicants are desperate former employees still without work in a county with 7.3 percent unemployment and in an economy where manufacturing job openings now require more specialized abilities than the lower-skilled positions that have gone overseas or, in the case of Unilever, to Tennessee and Missouri, where labor and operating costs are cheaper.

Wall Street is booming, the Federal Reserve is paring back its stimulus, there are bidding wars for houses again, but for blue-collar workers in places like Hagerstown the economic recovery has yet to materialize, and many around town worry that it won't. Laid-off workers are living week-to-week on unemployment. They're working temp jobs and trying to reeducate themselves. They are trying to save their houses from foreclosure.

The New York-based Satanic Temple religious group has officially unveiled the design of the statue of Satan it wants to place near the Ten Commandments monument at the Oklahoma state capitol building.

As the sketch of the proposed seven-foot monument shows, the temple hopes to depict Satan as the goat-headed, Baphoment figure, complete with a long beard, horns, wings, and Pentagram design placed overhead. On both sides of Satan are smiling children.

"The monument has been designed to reflect the views of Satanists in Oklahoma City and beyond. The statue will serve as a beacon calling for compassion and empathy among all living creatures. The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation," temple spokesman Lucien Greaves said in a statement.

Ever since the Ten Commandments monument was authorized in 2012, numerous groups have stated their desire to place statues of their own, including a Hindu leader from Nevada, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The case of an Indian consular official accused of visa fraud appeared headed toward a new crisis Tuesday as her attorney and the Manhattan prosecutor handling the case filed dueling federal court petitions, each charging the other side with negotiating in bad faith to resolve the issue.

The arrest last month of Devyani Khobragade, 39, India's deputy consul general in New York, on charges of submitting fraudulent U.S. visa documents for her Indian maid, has become a major crisis in U.S.-India relations and a source of contention within the Obama administration. India has demanded that the charges be dropped, while the State Department and federal prosecutors are at odds over the wisdom of the arrest and how it was conducted.

Hours before a deep freeze moved in, flights in and out of the New York City area had already been disrupted.

JetBlue halted operations at all three major New York-area airports and in Boston in an effort to catch up with dozens of weather-related delays and cancellations.

The airline announced Monday that operations stopped entirely at Newark, John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports and at Boston's Logan International Airport at 5 p.m.

The plan allows 17 hours for the company to rest crew and time to service aircraft.

As CBS 2′s Tracee Carrasco reported, stranded travelers had nowhere to go and nothing to do Monday but wait and sleep in airport terminals.

JetBlue customer Julia Moron has been desperately trying to get home to Houston for days.

"I've been stuck here between JFK and now LaGuardia since Thursday," she said.

I was on vacation for the last two weeks of December, and off the grid for most of that time. Upon my return, I found I'd missed a bunch of dumb stories, along with some real news that will ultimately prove fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The final Obamacare delays of 2013, along with the December enrollment figures, are at home in the latter category. The revelation that my friend Matt Yglesias invented a fake baby to get Amazon's Mom discount was more typical of the former.

There's actually wide agreement among my peers who cover national politics that the last half of December was a news dead zone, which journalists endured by building totems out of trivia, and compiling top 10 lists.

I mostly agree with this assessment, but part ways with those who dismiss the importance of the "Duck Dynasty" dust-up.

How grateful I am this holiday season that I was mostly on vacation during the Duck Dynasty debate. Indeed, I am richly blessed.

- McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) December 28, 2013

On the contrary, if there's one story I wish I'd been on hand to watch unfold in real time, it's the "Duck Dynasty" debate. If you write about politics for a living, and you were bored by the "Duck Dynasty" story, or wrote it off like you might write off a gaffe or some other creation of the outrage industry, you're in the wrong line of work. Phil Robertson's comments about gay and black people and social welfare - and the way they pierced public consciousness - explain more about our country's political culture than almost anything else that happened all year.

An 11-year-old girl was arrested early Saturday morning after allegedly stabbing her mother 9 times at an apartment complex. Although the police have not specified the relationship between the girl and the victim, family friends told News 8 that the victim, Toshia Edmonson, was in fact, the girl's mother. The girl's identity was not released because she is a minor.

According to the police report, the girl was dropped off at an apartment Friday, just before midnight. She was reportedly upset that she had to be home. Police say the girl told them her mother said she was going to give her way and then shoved her into a couch. The report states the girl waited for her mother to fall asleep, retrieved a knife from the kitchen, and entered her bedroom where she stabbed her 9 times in the head, neck and shoulder. The girl's younger brother, according to the report, heard his mother wake up screaming for his sister to stop and calling out her name. Edmonson eventually was able to grab the knife and fell on top of the girl, stopping the attack.