PALMVIEW, Texas (CBS/AP) President Barack Obama’s approval rating may be hovering in the 50 percent range, but that doesn’t mean America’s Commander-in-Chief isn’t catching on with new constituents.

There is now a line of Ecstasy pills made in the image of the 44th president of the United States, according to Texas police who have snatched a batch off the streets. Read the full story

Rwanda has been declared free of landmines – the first country to achieve this status.

The announcement was made at the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-Free World in Colombia.

Hundreds of people have been killed and horrifically injured by landmines in Rwanda.

Landmines were laid between 1990 and 1994 in Rwanda and over the past three years more than over 9,000 have been destroyed by Rwandan soldiers. Read the full story

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street. Read the full story

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, two generations of self-styled assassination investigators, probably never will be satisfactorily resolved. Each new release of documents from the various bureaucracies involved in the nearly half century old investigation may only deepen the apparent contradictions.

Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper’s nest at the Texas Book Depository. So was his palm print. He had also bought the ammunition. His cartridge cases were found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight. Read the full story

For the first time in history, the Federal Reserve Bank may be facing an audit. On Thursday, the House Finance Committee passed a bill (HR 1207) that authorizes the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the Fed’s secretive deals with foreign central banks and major U.S. financial institutions.

HR 1207, sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), currently has 313 co-sponsors in the House from both sides of the aisle, which is a veto-proof majority. A companion bill in the Senate (S 604) has 30 co-sponsors.

Glenn Greenwald, an investigative reporter writing for Salon.com, points out what may be the most significant aspect of the passage of HR 1207: Read the full story

What thoughts, comments or suggestions do our local readers have on this topic?

Texans Trying To Legalize Pot Read the full story

The harshly worded legal ruling this week that held the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for much of the flooding during Hurricane Katrina could have far-reaching effects on national flood control policies and on the federal government’s long-held refusal to take responsibility for its errors.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval issued the stinging rebuke to the Corps late Wednesday for its failure to properly manage the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and its levees. He ruled that those failures were directly responsible for much of the flooding that devastated New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish. Read the full story

They have infested every city in america, their numbers are rapidly increasing, they have a seemingly endless amount of money that will most definitely go towards weapons to be used on innocent people, their code of silence keeps their members quiet so they are free to beat you steal from you or even kill you, unlike most gangs whose race is required for membership they are a mixed gang with all races and religions working together to terrorize the innocent, they do not have to answer to the law because they are the ones we trusted to enforce the law.

However increasingly throughout the years we have seen how corrupt they are. They are no longer there to protect and serve but to honestly enslave and exterminate. Police corruption is out of hand I will not argue that police may be a necessary part of society but something has to be done to bring them under control. Read the full story

Sugar Land City Mayor James Thompson was robbed in his driveway Tuesday night by a gunman.

Sugar Land Mayor James Thompson

Thompson was returning home from a City Council meeting at about 8 p.m. when he was approached by a gunman. Read more here.

To see a map of where the robbery took place, click here.

Police say the robbery may be related to a similar one that took place last week in the Meadow Lakes subdivision.

See a sketch of the suspect in that case by clicking here.

To read the original story about the Meadow Lakes robbery, click here.

On Monday, the Burger King in the 3500 block of Texas 6 in Sugar Land was robbed at gunpoint by two men in the middle of the afternoon. Read about that case here.

Residents of Sugar Land who want to find out more about what types of crimes are taking place in the city can search the police department’s daily crime report by clicking here.

http://www.ultimatefortbend.com/

Suicides among soldiers this year have topped last year’s record-breaking numbers, but Army officials maintain a recent trend downward could mean the service is making headway on its programs designed to reduce the problem, Army officials said Tuesday.

Since January, 140 active-duty soldiers have killed themselves while another 71 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers killed themselves in the same time period, totaling 211 as of Tuesday, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, U.S. Army vice chief of staff, told reporters at a briefing Tuesday. But he said the monthly numbers are starting to slow down as the year nears its end. Read the full story

The fire broke out shortly before 7:30pm at a two-story building on Brooks near Commons. The structure housed a grocery store and washateria on the first floor and neighbors tell us there were apartments on the second floor. Officials with HFD say burglar bars made any type of rescue difficult.

At this point, we don’t know what started the fire or how the three people, whose identifications are unknown, died. We have a crew on the scene and will have the very latest on Eyewitness News tonight at 10pm and here on abc13.com.

http://abclocal.go.com/

Read the full story

Located in Central Texas, Fort Hood is the Largest Active Duty Armored Post in the United States.

(CBS) Located just outside of Killen, Texas – about halfway between Austin and Waco – Fort Hood is the largest activity duty armored post in the United States. It is home to about 52,000 troops and according to Military.com, a military and veteran service organization, the total number of people working in the area for the armed services is about 300,000.

Fort Hood plays a major role in Army training and testing as well as developing new equipment and tactics. After 2001, terrorism became a major focus there as the base transitioned from being open to closed (although visitors are allowed to visit museums and other non-restricted parts of the base). Many Fort Hood units have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan – the 4th Infantry Division was able to capture Saddam Hussein in 2003. Read the full story

Statewide Constitutional Amendments (via Chron.com):

Read the full story

Eleven amendments top Tuesday’s ballot

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3, and Texas residents will have an opportunity to vote for or against 11 proposed constitutional amendments. Read the full story

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn declared a war with Fox News this week and this morning on This Week, Axelrod reinforced their stance saying “[FOX] is really not news.”

I asked him if he’s worried his strategy is fortifying his enemy?

“I’m not concerned, Mr. Murdoch has a talent for making money,” Axelrod said.

“The only argument that Anita was making is that they are not really a news organization, if you watch even its not even their commentators, but a lot of their news program. It’s really not news, it’s pushing a point of view and the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours, ought not to treat them that way. And we’re not going to treat them that way, we’re going to appear on their shows and participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.”

http://blogs.abcnews.com/

White House Urges Other Networks to Disregard Fox News

Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view and not being a real news network.

The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece.

Top political strategists question the decision by the Obama administration to escalate its offensive against Fox News. And as of Monday, the four other major television networks had not given any indication that they intend to sever their ties with Fox News.

But several top White House officials have taken aim at Fox News since communications director Anita Dunn branded Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news” in an interview last Sunday.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want “the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox.”

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is “not a news organization.”

“Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way,” Axelrod counseled ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We’re not going to treat them that way.”

Asked Monday about another Axelrod claim that Fox News is just trying to make money, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that while all media companies fall under that description, “I would say sometimes programming can be tilted toward accentuating those profits.”

But by urging other news outlets to side with the administration, Obama officials dramatically upped the ante in the war of words that began earlier this month with Dunn’s comments.

So far, none of the four other major networks has given any indication that they wish to disinvite Fox News from the White House pool — the rotation through which the networks share the costs and duties of White House coverage and the most significant interaction among the news channels.

The White House stopped providing guests to “Fox News Sunday” after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in August.

Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was “something I’ve never seen a Sunday show do.”

“She criticized ‘Fox News Sunday’ last week for fact-checking — fact-checking — an administration official,” Wallace said Sunday. “They didn’t say that our fact-checking was wrong. They just said that we had dared to fact-check.”

“Let’s fact-check Anita Dunn, because last Sunday she said that Fox ignores Republican scandals, and she specifically mentioned the scandal involving Nevada senator John Ensign,” Wallace added. “A number of Fox News shows have run stories about Senator Ensign. Anita Dunn’s facts were just plain wrong.”

Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente said: “Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, health care and two wars. The door remains open and we welcome a discussion about the facts behind the issues.”

Observers on both sides of the political aisle questioned the White House’s decision to continue waging war on a news organization, saying the move carried significant political risks.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said on CNN: “I don’t always agree with the White House. And on this one here I would disagree.”

David Gergen, who has worked for Democratic and Republican presidents, said: “I totally agree with Donna Brazile.” Gergen added that White House officials have “gotten themselves into a fight they don’t necessarily want to be in. I don’t think it’s in their best interest.”

“The faster they can get this behind them, the more they can treat Fox like one other organization, the easier they can get back to governing, and then put some people out on Fox,” Gergen said on CNN. “I mean, for goodness sakes, you know, you engage in the debate.

“What Americans want is a robust competition of ideas, and they ought to be willing to go out there and mix it up with some strong conservatives on Fox, just as there are strong conservatives on CNN like Bill Bennett.”

Bennett expressed outrage that Dunn told an audience of high school students this year that Mao Zedong, the founder of communist China, was one of “my favorite political philosophers.”

“Having the spokesman do this, attack Fox, who says that Mao Zedong is one of the most influential figures in her life, was not…a small thing; it’s a big thing,” Bennett said on CNN. “When she stands up, in a speech to high school kids, says she’s deeply influenced by Mao Zedong, that — I mean, that is crazy.”

Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who was the top political strategist to former President George W. Bush, said: “This is an administration that’s getting very arrogant and slippery in its dealings with people. And if you dare to oppose them, they’re going to come hard at you and they’re going to cut your legs off.”

“This is a White House engaging in its own version of the media enemies list. And it’s unhelpful for the country and undignified for the president of the United States to so do,” Rove added. “That is over- the-top language. We heard that before from Richard Nixon.”

Media columnist David Carr of The New York Times warned that the White House war on Fox “may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling.”

“While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence,” Carr wrote over the weekend. “So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year.”

He added: “The administration, by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight.”