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ANGOLA, La. – Jerome Derricks says he heard God’s call early. He only wishes he’d answered sooner. By the time he did, he was serving a life sentence for murder in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. “I ran from my calling all my life,” said Derricks, 44. …

PLACERVILLE, Calif. – A rainstorm helped firefighters gain control of wildfires burning across the Sierra Nevada, including a nearly 17,000-acre blaze and a smaller fire ignited by a suspected arsonist in Yosemite National Park (search). The 16,800-acre fire in the Eldorado National Forest (search) was about 50 percent contained Sunday …

Kandahar, Afghanistan – This is the fourth in a series of reports from Afghanistan. Much has been said and written this week about recent inflammatory comments made by President Hamid Karzai, head of the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan — an entity widely abbreviated out here as GIRoA. …

A new report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation is advocating that children as young as 10 be given extensive sex education, including an awareness of sex’s pleasures. The report, “Stand and Deliver,” charges that religious groups, specifically Catholics and Muslims, deny their young access to comprehensive sexual programs and …

The president’s poll numbers are better Monday. He got a nice bounce from the State of the Union address last week. According to Rasmussen, 35 percent of Americans now strongly approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance, while 39 percent strongly disapprove. A big improvement for the president. Mr. Obama did …

Senators Dodd and Dorgan head for the exits, carried in part by political winds that have shifted more in the past year than in any such period in recent memory. Those winds could hardly have been stronger at the president’s back as he took office a year ago and they …

Some individuals have the goal of developing strength, yet they don’t want to use weights to do so. Whether it’s because in these financially tense times they can’t afford a gym membership, they want to give their CNS a break from the heavy lifting, or they are just looking for …

When you cut through all the baloney, the controversy in America today is over freedom. Those lined up against the Obama administration believe the federal government is becoming too intrusive. That is, it is telling us what to do when it has no constitutional authority to do that. On the …

Musician and reality star Bret Michaels’ has had more than his fair share of hospital visits — his lifetime battle with diabetes, his appendectomy in April, and his brain hemorrhage on April 21, which left him fighting for his life in the intensive care unit for days. According to an …

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine: Separate Ways After four decades of marriage, Al and Tipper Gore have separated. The couple said in an e-mail: “We are announcing today that after a great deal of thought and discussion, we have decided to separate… this is very much a …