Dictionary.com's word of the year is 'xenophobia'

You might have thought about it, heard it. A lot. You might have even felt it: Dictionary.com's word of the year is "xenophobia."

While it's difficult to get at exactly why people look words up in dictionaries, online or on paper, it's clear that in contentious 2016, fear of "otherness" bruised the collective consciousness around the globe.

The Brexit vote, police violence against people of color, Syria's refugee crisis, transsexual rights and the U.S. presidential race were among prominent developments that drove debate — and spikes in lookups of the word, said Jane Solomon, one of the dictionary site's lexicographers.

The 21-year-old site defined xenophobia as "fear or hatred of foreigners, people from different cultures, or strangers." And it plans to expand its entry to include fear or dislike of "customs, dress and cultures of people with backgrounds different from our own," Solomon said in a recent interview.

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Chicago shootings leave eight dead and 58 injured over Thanksgiving weekend

At least 58 people were shot in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend, leaving eight dead as the city faces the highest number of homicides in more than a decade.

The latest victim is an 18-year-old who was shot dead in his vehicle at 2pm on Sunday, NBC reported.

Two gunmen outside a house party on Saturday night left one dead and five others injured, while another shooting killed a 16-year-old boy on Friday evening.

In October, Chicago surpassed 600 homicides this year, in numbers that have not been seen since 2003. There were 468 murders in 2015, and 416 the year before.

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Accident In Berlin

Berlin Fire EMS dispatched to the area of Racetrack Rd and Adkins Rd. Motor vehicle accident with injuries. Use caution.

Annapolis sees record homicides in 2016

A 24-year-old man was killed in a double shooting in Annapolis over the weekend.

The shooting happened Saturday on Clay Street.

"It certainly appears the people shot were targeted," Annapolis police spokeswoman Cpl. Amy Miguez said.

The shooting fits a recent pattern in Annapolis, which has seen a historic increase in homicides.

Last year, there was one reported homicide. So far in 2016, there have been 10 homicides, "which is the most recorded since we started reporting information to the FBI in the mid '70s," Miguez said.

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Podesta Group Failed To Disclose Lobbying For Foreign Government

A Beltway lobbying firm with close connections to Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that it failed to disclose work it did for the Indian government in 2014 and 2015.

The Podesta Group disclosed the lobbying activities in an amended filing submitted to the Justice Department earlier this month, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday.

The documents lists five separate contacts that Podesta Group chairman Tony Podesta, a prolific Hillary Clinton campaign donor, made with his brother and former business partner, John Podesta, to discuss U.S.-India relations in 2014 and 2015. During that period, John Podesta, who co-founded the Podesta Group with Tony in 1988, served as White House counselor and then as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

The Podesta Group’s failure to disclose the lobbying was an apparent violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Under the law, which was enacted in the 1930s to prevent Nazis from planting propaganda in the U.S., lobbyists are required to disclose all lobbying activities carried out on behalf of foreign governments to the Justice Department.

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Cartels Flood Remote Border Sector with Migrants, Overwhelm U.S. Agents

Border Patrol agents in the remote Texas Big Bend Sector are sounding the alarm as Mexican cartels overwhelm them with illegal immigrants ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration. The sector has very few agents assigned and has remained one of the most open and unsecured regions along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Border Patrol Agent Shawn Moran spoke exclusively with Breitbart Texas on the matter. Agent Moran is vice president of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), the union representing approximately 16,500 Border Patrol agents. He stated, “This situation shows what happens when Border Patrol continues to use an outdated enforcement strategy. Since the initiation of Operation Gatekeeper, the Border Patrol has strengthened some sectors at the expense of others. Agent Moran continued, “Mexican cartels take the path of least resistance.

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Black Lives Matter Salutes Fidel Castro, ‘Grateful’ He Harbored an FBI Most-Wanted Terrorist

The Black Lives Matter movement has come out in support of Fidel Castro, following his death on Friday, saying they must “come to the defense of El Comandante” and thanking him for safeguarding Assata Shakur, who’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.

The movement penned an article on Sunday titled “Lessons from Fidel: Black Lives Matter and the Transition of El Comandante” on the Medium platform where they eulogized the passing of the Cuban dictator. The article, which was not bylined, was Tweeted out by the closest thing there is to an official Black Lives Matter account and also posted on the movement’s semi-official Facebook page.

The article claims Castro’s death has caused “an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety.”

“Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante,” it added.

The article continues by portraying Castro as a model freedom fighter, who Black Lives Matter should strive to follow and emulate.

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Jill Stein Raises Millions for Recount, Source of Money Murky

Prior to the Thanksgiving Day holiday, failed Green Party candidate Jill Stein launched a fundraising effort to raise the millions needed to pay for a recount of election results in three of the key states that gave Donald Trump the White House, but the source of these millions of dollars is murky.

Just before the noon deadline on November 25, Stein filed an official petition for a recount in Wisconsin, one of at least three key states that gave Donald Trump a surprise win on Election Day, NBC reported on Friday.

Stein posted the fundraising message to the Internet after news broke that Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was meeting with supposed election experts who felt there may be evidence that election systems were hacked in the states that gave Trump the victory.

And as Hollywoodites reveled in the idea, Green Party nominee Jill Stein launched her fundraising effort to try to delegitimize Trump’s win and to raise the millions necessary to pay for recounts in at least three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Stein launched her effort to raise this money the day before Thanksgiving by asking supporters to help her raise up to $3 million to force a recount in Wisconsin, the state with the closest deadline to the date when she launched her fundraising effort.

Shockingly in only a day Stein had raised that three million. And on a holiday at that.

After her initial goal was met, Stein raised the stakes several times and even more millions rolled in. And all still over the Thanksgiving holiday. She is now claiming she needs seven million to fund recounts in all three states, an amount almost three times higher than her initial goal.

Critics wonder where all this money is coming from. How do we know if this money didn’t come from foreign sources? Further, what reporting requirements will Stein be forced to satisfy to prove the source of the cash?

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A public park for ashes? As cremations soar, demand for scatter gardens grows.

Jennifer Beman wants to spend her death where she made her life, in her adopted home town of Takoma Park. Like others who have their cremated remains unofficially scattered in the Maryland city’s back yards and public parks, the 54-year-old likes the ashes-to-ashes idea of lingering eternally in her local ecosystem.

But Beman and a group of like-minded neighbors are going a step further than the kind of DIY ash-tossing that has grown common as cremation rates in the United States have doubled over the past 15 years. They are asking their city to set up the country’s first municipal “scatter garden,” a patch of memorial commons where residents could commingle in the soil of their burg — and where families could return to remember.

“Throwing them in the ocean is very romantic, but then there is no place for a person to go back to,” said Beman, a documentary filmmaker. “You can go with your kids and say, ‘I think it was somewhere around here, but maybe it was on the other side of the island.’ I like the idea of a real place.”

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Shock Chart Reveals Number 1 Item Bought With Welfare Money Is Soft Drinks

Food stamp recipients aren’t buying necessities, and there’s government research to prove it.

CNS News reported that the No. 1 commodity bought by United States citizens using food stamps in 2011 was soft drinks. In addition, the amount spent on those soft drinks totaled $357,700,000 at only one “leading U.S. grocery retailer.”

On the other hand, citizens not receiving government assistance bought milk as their No. 1 commodity.

The study, based on food purchases at one unidentified food retailer in 2011 and released by the Food and Nutrition Service, revealed some other harrowing statistics.

“About 40 cents of every dollar of food expenditures by SNAP households was spent on basic items such as meat, fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, and bread,” it said.

However, “another 20 cents out of every dollar was spent on sweetened beverages, desserts, salty snacks, candy and sugar,” items that are not necessary in daily life, or even unhealthy.

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True The Vote Supports Trump’s Claim on Illegal Voters

True the Vote, an organization founded to stop voter fraud, has backed President-elect Donald J. Trump’s statement Sunday that “millions of people” had voted illegally.

True the Vote released a press statement on Sunday, which is reproduced below, in full (original emphasis):

“True the Vote absolutely supports President-elect Trump’s recent comment about the impact of illegal voting, as reflected in the national popular vote. We are still collecting data and will be for several months, but our intent is to publish a comprehensive study on the significant impact of illegal voting in all of its many forms and begin a national discussion on how voters, states, and the Trump Administration can best address this growing problem.”

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NFL considering pulling the plug on Thursday Night Football?

Nobody likes Thursday Night Football. The players and teams don’t like it because if the extremely short week and the toll that it takes on everybody involved. The fans don’t like it because the quality of play takes a noticeable dip from games that are played on Sundays because of the short week. And shoot, the networks probably don’t like it either because they have to pay an extra couple hundred million dollars for games that they could have the rights to air on Sundays.

But in Roger Goodell’s quest for world domination and putting the NFL on your televisions seven nights a week, Thursday Night Football has expanded into a full season’s worth of games. A few years ago, it was initially expanded to a half season as a ploy to put exclusive games on NFL Network and boost the league channel’s distribution and carriage fees. Then the league opened the games to the highest bidder and created not one but two televisionpackages and a Twitter deal. Now it’s impossible to remember week to week who’s broadcasting games between CBS, NBC, NFL Network, and Twitter.

Alas, with ratings taking a tumble this season and the complaints about Thursday Night Football getting louder, the NFL could finally be coming to the realization that less is more.

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It's official: Michigan certifies Donald Trump's win

President-elect Trump's election victory in Michigan was certified Monday by the Michigan Board of Canvassers.

The board voted 4-0 to certify the state's election results Monday afternoon, and the final tally showed Trump with a total of 2,279,543 votes, while Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton got 2,268,839, a difference of just 10,704 votes. Behind the two front-runners were Libertarian Gary Johnson at 172,136 votes and the Green Party's Jill Stein at 51,463 votes.

Last week, the Michigan secretary of state posted vote counts certified at the county level from the contest that showed Trump with a 10,704 vote lead, but the count wasn't official until Monday. Michigan's 16 electoral votes deals Trump a total of 306 electoral votes to Clinton's 232. It was the closest presidential race in the state in more than 75 years, the Associated Press reported.

The state's 4.8 million votes may soon be getting another look, following media reports of alleged hacking or tampering in three swing states, including Michigan, though there is no hard evidence of any tampering of the results. Stein, with the support of Clinton, is leading a fundraising campaign to request recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. After raising millions of dollars, a recount is already underway in Wisconsin and Stein filed for another one in Pennsylvania on Monday.

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Nearly 400 children rescued and 348 adults arrested in Canadian child pornography bust

Nearly 400 children have been rescued and 348 adults arrested following an expansive and “extraordinary” international child pornography investigation, Canadian police announced Thursday.

The three-year project, named Project Spade, began when undercover officers with the Toronto Police Service Child Exploitation service made contact with a Toronto man allegedly sharing “very graphic images” of child sexual abuse in Oct. 2010, Toronto Police Service Chief William Blair said at a press conference on Thursday.

Police said their investigation revealed an entire child movie production and distribution company in Toronto operating via the web site azovfilms.com.

The site was run by 42-year old Brian Way, according to police, and sold and distributed images of child exploitation to people across the world.

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Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission hires diversity consultant

Maryland's Medical Cannabis Commission announced on Monday that it is hiring a diversity consultant.

Critics point to the lack of minority-owned businesses among those named as finalists to grow and process pot.

The diversity consultant will determine if, and how, the commission could do a disparity study. The state is in a classic catch 22 situation. A racial disparity study could help put extra weight to minority applications. But the study can't be done until there is an industry to examine.

The commission gave preliminary license approval to 102 dispensaries. The panel also addressed criticism over the lack of diversity among those already named as finalists to grow and process medical marijuana.

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TALK ABOUT INCREDIBLE!!!

There are many great things that have happened over the years of my running Salisbury News, here's yet another.

This morning we ran an article about someone breaking into someone's garage and stealing the John Deer vehicle above. One of our readers saw the article and immediately called me to let me know they had one at their home that is not being used and offered to donate it to the Family that had theirs stolen. 

Paying It Forward, that's what it's all about. Man, we've got some great people coming to this Site!

Man arrested, accused of murdering woman at hospital on Eastern Shore

NASSAWADOX, Va. (WVEC) -- Sheriff's deputies charged Winston Leroy Burton, 58, of Cheriton with First Degree Murder after a stabbing at Riverside Shore Memorial Hospital Monday.

Northampton County Sheriff David Doughty, Jr. said Burton attacked Shellie L. Crockett, 42, of Keller in the hospital parking lot.

Emergency dispatchers received a call about the stabbing at 7:32 a.m. The caller told them the attacker left the scene.

When deputies got there at 7:40 a.m., they found hospital staff members treating Crockett who had been stabbed several times.

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Just Say "Merry Christmas"

A Viewer Writes: Stolen in Salisbury Child's Ride on Toy

My grandsons' (ages 2 and 5), children's ride-on John Deere Gator was stolen last week in Salisbury in the E. Main Street area. It is green and yellow with black tires. It was taken by breaking and entering a shed in a residence of the E. Main street block. A police report has been filed. It is a sad state of affairs when someone has to steal a child's prized possession. The boys ride all spring, summer and fall on it. It was in the shed under lock and key. My grandson has been crying since this was discovered stolen. Shame to the person(s) responsible. It is theft in excess of $350.00.

Dylann Roof to represent self in Charleston murder trial

The man accused of killing nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina has been granted his request to represent himself.

Dylann Roof’s motion was approved by a federal judge Monday. Roof, 22, was deemed competent to stand trial last week.

The Associated Press reported that Roof’s request came despite his lawyer’s advice. U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel said the decision was made reluctantly to accept Roof’s “unwise” decision.

Roof is charged in connection to the June 2015 attack at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Charleston. Included in the charges are hate crimes and obstruction of religion.

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