American News Broadcasting

North Dakota population hits record

by UPI
BISMARCK, N.D., Dec. 24 (UPI) — A booming economy in North Dakota, fed largely by the oil boom, is drawing in new residents at a record pace, the state’s governor said.

The state’s population has increased 2.2 percent since last year, the fastest pace of any other state in the nation. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show the population in North Dakota is 739,482, an all-time high.

“Our economic growth over the last decade continues to keep North Dakotans home, and we are attracting new residents who come for good jobs, a stable economy and a quality of life that is second to none,” Gov. Jack Dalrymple said in a statement.

North Dakota catapulted to the No. 2 spot in terms of oil production in part because of output from the state’s Bakken and Three Forks reserve areas. Production in early 2014 passed the 1 million barrel per day mark and now stands at around 1.2 million bpd. More than 90 percent of that comes from Bakken and Three Forks.

Dalrymple said he expects oil production to increase by as much as 15 percent through mid-2017, generating around $8 billion in production tax revenue for the state.

The state’s budget for the next two years is based on a domestic crude oil price in the mid $70 range next year and closer to $80 beyond that.

West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude oil price benchmark, has shed almost half of its value since June, trading early Wednesday close to $56 per barrel.

The oil, economic and population boom come with a corresponding increase in crime. The state’s attorney general reported overall crime up 5.5 percent year-on-year in 2013. Violent crime, including murder and rape, accounts for about 10 percent of all crimes reported last year, an increase of 7.4 percent since 2012.

Storm Threatens Christmas Eve Travel Delays From NYC to Chicago, Atlanta

Ferguson Rioters Drag Woman Out Of Her Car And Beat Her To Death [VIDEO] |

Killings of 2 New York officers trigger backlash

By RIK STEVENS and VERENA DOBNIK

NEW YORK (AP) — Civil rights leaders Sunday condemned the ambush killings of two New York police officers and expressed fear that the backlash over the bloodshed could derail the protest movement that has grown out of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

In the raw hours following the killing of the officers, police union officials and politicians accused those who have protested the deaths of Garner and Brown of fanning anti-police fervor. Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolman's Benevolent Association in New York, said there was "blood on the hands" of demonstrators and elected officials who have criticized police tactics.

The Garner and Brown families issued statements repudiating the officers' killings, while civil rights leaders took to the airwaves to try to put some distance between the movement and the crime.

"To link the criminal insanity of a lone gunman to the peaceful protests and aspirations of many people across the country, including the attorney general, the mayor and even the president, is simply not fair," NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Brooks said the shootings were "certainly not a step forward" for the movement.

Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were gunned down at close range in their patrol car in Brooklyn on Saturday by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who then committed suicide. Before the attack, Brinsley, 28, wrote on an Instagram account: "I'm putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours, let's take 2 of theirs."

He used the hashtags Shootthepolice RIPErivGardner (sic) RIPMikeBrown — references to two blacks who died at the hands of police. Garner died in a New York City officer's chokehold, and Brown was shot by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Grand juries decided not to bring charges against either officer.

In the wake of the ambush, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani lashed out at New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Speaking on Fox News, Giuliani said: "We've had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police."

"They have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities, and for that, they should be ashamed of themselves," he said.

In a tweet, former New York Gov. George Pataki called the killings the "predictable outcome of divisive, anti-cop rhetoric of Attorney General Eric Holder and Bill De Blasio."

The accusations stoked fears that any gains made in the protest movement would be lost.

"We've been denouncing violence in our community," no matter who the target is, New York community activist Tony Herbert said. He said he worries that the shooting will be used to discredit the larger cause.

"It sullies the opportunity for us to make inroads to build the relationships we need to build to get the trust back," he said. "This hurts."

Similarly, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has called for peaceful protests, condemned "eye-for-an-eye" violence and called it absurd to blame protesters or politicians for the officers' deaths.

"We are now under intense threat from those who are misguided — from those who are trying to blame everyone from civil rights leaders to the mayor rather than deal with an ugly spirit that all of us need to fight," he said.

Sharpton added: "There are those of us committed to nonviolence and making the system work. And there are those committed to anarchy and recklessness who could care less about the families of police or the families who have raised questions about police accountability."

Irene Sundiata Myers, a black woman who was selling roses and inspirational words Sunday on Harlem's Malcolm X Boulevard, said that because of Saturday's ambush, some officers might think twice about pulling the trigger on black men.

"It will change the attitude of police across the country in terms of how they go about killing black men, if they begin to think that there's a possibility that there will be a retribution," she said.

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Jennifer Peltz and Mike Balsamo in New York City contributed to this report. Stevens reported from Concord, N.H.

Battered NY mayor calls for temporary protest halt

By JONATHAN LEMIRE and
COLLEEN LONG

NEW YORK (AP) — As the New York Police Department mourns two of its own, Mayor Bill de Blasio pleaded for a pause in protests and rancor amid a widening rift with those in a grieving force who accuse him of creating a climate of mistrust that contributed to the executions of two officers.

De Blasio called on Monday for a halt of political statements until after the funerals of the slain officers, an appeal to both sides in a roiling dispute centered on the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers.

"We are in a very difficult moment. Our focus has to be on these families," de Blasio said at police headquarters. "I think it's a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in all due time."

De Blasio's relations with the city's police unions have tumbled to an extraordinary new low following Saturday's shooting, an ambush the gunman claimed was retaliation for the police-involved deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

In a display of defiance, dozens of police officers turned their backs to de Blasio at the hospital where the officers died, and union leaders said the mayor had "blood on his hands" for enabling the protesters who have swept the streets of New York this month since a grand jury declined to indict an officer in Garner's chokehold death.

De Blasio, though he said he did not agree with the union leaders' comments, largely tried to strike a unifying note in his first extensive question-and-answer session since the shooting. He said he was confident the city was "working toward a day where we can achieve greater harmony toward policing and community."

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were ambushed Saturday afternoon by a man who vowed in an Instagram post to put "wings on pigs." The suspect, Ismaaiyl Brinsley was black; the slain officers were Asian and Hispanic.

The killings came as police nationwide are being criticized following Garner's death and the shooting death of the 18-year-old Brown. Protests erupted after grand juries declined to charge officers in either case.

On Monday, a prosecutor said a white Milwaukee police officer who was fired after he fatally shot a mentally ill black man in April won't face criminal charges. The brother of the slain man, though clearly angry, urged protesters to remain peaceful.

De Blasio and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton met with the officers' grieving families Monday.
"There's a lot of pain. It's so hard to make sense of it — how one deeply troubled, violent individual could do this to these good families," a somber de Blasio said. "And I think it's a time for everyone to take stock that there are things that unite us, there are things that we hold dear as New Yorkers, as Americans."

But the Rev. Al Sharpton, a close de Blasio ally, and other protest leaders said Monday that they would not heed the mayor's call to suspend demonstrations.

Investigators continued to depict Brinsley as an emotionally troubled loner. He had an extensive criminal record and involved in a 2011 standoff with police in Georgia that ended with officers using a stun gun on him, according to records.

Police are trying to determine Brinsley's whereabouts in the two hours he was in New York before killing the officers. Surveillance video shows Brinsley holding a foam food container that investigators believe held the gun he used. After the shooting, he then ran into a nearby subway station and killed himself.

Police said Brinsley was a bystander during a protest in Manhattan's Union Square two days before the Garner grand jury decision but had not participated. It remained unclear if Brinsley simply latched onto the cause at the end of a violent rampage that began Saturday morning in Baltimore when he shot his ex-girlfriend in the stomach. The woman said Brinsley had first held the gun to his own head but she talked him down, authorities said.

The police unions — who even before the weekend shooting had circulated a petition to ban the mayor from attending police funerals — blame de Blasio for fostering anti-police sentiment.
Sergeants Benevolent Associations head Edward Mullins refused to back down from that stance, saying that "the mayor has turned his back on us — he got elected on his campaign of attacking the police all along."

Bratton said representatives from the five unions had agreed to stand down until after the funerals, but he also downplayed their tensions with de Blasio.

"Can you point out to me one mayor who has not been battling with police unions in the last 50 years? Name one," he said to reporters at the police headquarters news conference. "The experience of this mayor of some cops not liking him, it's nothing new."

But some pundits say the level of animosity between the unions and de Blasio had reached a critical point, and that the officers were even more inflamed than when thousands of cops stormed City Hall and stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1992 to protest Mayor David Dinkins' efforts to create a civilian oversight board.

"It's poisonous right now," said Jeanne Zaino, political science professor at Iona College.
De Blasio said he would be willing to meet with the union leaders but also angrily suggested that their ire was, in part, fanned by what called media exaggeration of anti-NYPD sentiment among protesters.

Bratton said a viewing for Ramos would be held on Friday at a Queens church, followed by a funeral service the next day. Officials are working to obtain travel documents for some of Liu's family in China; a funeral will be scheduled after they arrive in the United States.
De Blasio said he would attend both funerals.
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Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz and Tom Hays in New York and Kathleen Foody in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Mark Levin to the GOP: I AM ONE INCH AWAY FROM LEAVING YOU!

Dec 15, 2014 at 6:38 PM
Mark Levin ripped Republicans a new one as he opened his show tonight, saying that he is one inch away from leaving the Republican Party.

He starts in hard, asking Republicans if they think this is a joke, if they think they can just lie to Republicans and conservatives with impunity about defunding Obamacare and fighting Obama’s illegal amnesty.

He points out that Republicans go on and on about an imperial president and his illegal amnesty and they can’t even vote on a point of order challenging Obama.

Levin says the Constitution is in tatters and that the Republican Party doesn’t even realize they’ve ceded their power to Obama.
And there’s so much more.

Australia hostage drama at Sydney cafe: Timeline

(AP Photo/Rob Griffith) SYDNEY (AP)

An armed gunman entered a Sydney cafe during Monday morning's rush hour and took an unknown number of hostages. Hours after the crisis began, five people escaped but a number of others remained inside. Then early Tuesday morning, a loud bang was heard and police stormed the cafe.

Emergency personnel wheel an injured hostage to an ambulance during a cafe siege in the central business district of Sydney , Australia, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2014. A swarm of heavily armed police stormed the cafe in the heart of downtown Sydney early Tuesday, ending a siege where a gunman had been holding an unknown number of people hostage for more than 16 hours. A police spokesman confirmed "the operation is over," but would not release any further details about the fate of the gunman or his remaining captives. After a flurry of loud bangs, police swooped into the Lindt Chocolat Cafe shortly after five or six hostages were seen running from the building.

A timeline of events:

MONDAY

9:45 a.m. - Police are called to Lindt Chocolat Cafe in Sydney's Martin Place, a busy plaza in the heart of the city. Initial reports suggesting it could be an armed robbery are soon ruled out.

10:10 a.m. - Australian television stations broadcast images of hostages inside the cafe with their arms in the air and hands pressed against the window. Shortly after, two hostages appear at the window holding a black flag with white Arabic script.

10:30 a.m. - Armed police line up outside the shop. Nearby buildings are evacuated.

12:30 p.m. - Prime Minister Tony Abbott goes on national television and pledges that the police response will be thorough for what he calls "a deeply concerning incident."

About 4 p.m. - Three men escape from the cafe's fire exit and run toward police. One is wearing a Lindt cafe apron and appears to be an employee.

About 5 p.m. - Two women sprint from the same side door and run into the arms of police. Both are wearing Lindt aprons.

6 p.m. - Prime Minister Abbott says the gunman has claimed "political motivation," but makes no reference to concerns of a terror plot.

6:30 p.m. - Police Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn says police are conducting a "sensitive negotiation" that requires discretion. She declines to say if direct contact has been made with the gunman, or specify the number of hostages held or any operational tactics.

8:15 p.m. - Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione says the priority of police is getting everyone out safely. He declines to speculate on the gunman's motives or possible terror link.

9 p.m. - Lights inside the cafe are switched off. Police outside put on night googles.

TUESDAY

1 a.m. - A cleric from Iran, Man Haron Monis, is identified as the gunman. He had been granted asylum in Australia.

2:10 a.m. - A loud bang is heard from the cafe, and several hostages flee.

Moments later - Heavily armed police storm the cafe after throwing what appear to be stun grenades.

2:40 a.m. - Police say the siege has ended.

5:30 a.m. - Police confirm 3 people died: two hostages - a 34-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman - and the gunman. Four other people are wounded.