A multitude of sinkholes around the country has struck in the last two days.
A massive Florida sinkhole that opened in February 2013 under the home of Jeff Bush, swallowing the man and his bedroom, reopened on Wednesday. The sinkhole is now part of vacant lots after the government destroyed homes surrounding it and was filled in again for a second time.
“It brings back memories,” the victim’s brother Jeremy Bush told CNN affiliate WFLA with tears in his eyes. “I think about it every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”
Another sinkhole in Leesburg, Virginia knocked out water to residents and left a 30 foot by 40 foot hole in the middle of a street. The city has been monitoring the hole for further movement.
In Athens, Georgia, a sinkhole opened near a local business and swallowed an ice machine and the end wall of a car wash. Lynn Taylor, a neighbor to the business, said she heard noises beginning around midnight and awoke to find the hole the following morning.
“It sounded like somebody was ruffling my doors,” Taylor said.
Finally, Interstate 93 in Concord, New Hampshire reopened Thursday after a sinkhole closed the road down on Wednesday. The 20-foot sinkhole closed the northbound highway between Exits 13 and 14 around Noon Wednesday.
In a fortunate situation, a staffer for the Department of Transportation was driving over the sinkhole as it began to collapse and they were able to stop traffic before anyone drove into it.
A Virginia teenager is planning for life in prison rather than his high school graduation after pleading guilty to helping ISIS.
Ali Shukri Amin, 17, admitted to authorities that he had used his computer to contact ISIS members and helped arrange for an 18-year-old classmate to travel to Syria to join the terrorists.
Amin pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to provide material support to ISIS.
The teen said he ran the twitter handle @Amreekiwitness to “provide advice and encouragement to ISIL and its supporters.” He also taught followers of the terrorist group how to convert currency to Bitcoin so they could fund the terror group.
“Around the nation, we are seeing ISIL use social media to reach out from the other side of the world,” Assistant Attorney General Carlin said. “Their messages are reaching America in an attempt to radicalize, recruit and incite our youth and others to support ISIL’s violent causes.”
The FBI had been keeping the teenager under surveillance for over a month before they took him into custody.
“Today’s guilty plea demonstrates that those who use social media as a tool to provide support and resources to ISIL will be identified and prosecuted with no less vigilance than those who travel to take up arms with ISIL,” said U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente.
A town councilman in Leesburg, Virginia is being attacked for saying that God “touched the hearts of men” to defeat slavery in America.
Leesburg Town Councilman Thomas Dunn had been participating via phone to an hours-long public hearing on the creation of a town Diversity Commission. During the hearing, the president of the local NAACP brought up racism and said that “without government, I’m still in the fields picking cotton.”
Dunn, who was agreeing with a previous speaker the government was not the solution, said that government didn’t end slavery but the hand of God working in the hearts of men.
“That was an evil that this country had. It was the hand of God touching the hearts of man that freed those slaves,” Dunn stated. “And it’s the same hand of God touching the hearts of man that will bring unity within diversity. It’s not government.”
“If you think the people in this room are going to be able to make a change in any shortfalls that we have and how we handle different cultures and races, number one, that’s holding yourself up too high. That has to come from God. That healing comes from God,” he continued. “Jesus said ‘I give you one commandment, and that is to love one another.’ He could have said, ‘Go out and create a diversity commission,’ but He didn’t. He said you go out and love one another, not rely on government to do that. If government was the best answer, He could have said that.”
Thompson attacked Dunn for his references to God, saying the 13th Amendment is pretty clear and that God had nothing to do with it.
A Virginia attorney wants to force public schools to stop renting spaces to churches for worship services.
John Flannery, who served as Chief of Staff for a Democratic representative from California, says that it’s a problem that 34 schools in Loudoun County allow churches to rent space and meet on their premises each Sunday.
“It’s time to declare that religious worship is an impermissible use of our public schools,” the anti-Christian lawyer said. “In Loudoun County, the churches that use public school space are holding ‘church services’ and collecting ‘donations.’ This use advances religious worship, and thus religion. The government is plainly entangled when it’s hosting religious worship not in one or two schools but in 40% of all the county’s public schools.”
School board member Bill Fox notes that Flannery is well known for his desire to eradicate Christians from society.
“Flannery really won’t be satisfied until we’ve completely excised religion from the public sphere,” Fox stated. “Some folks just believe that the First Amendment stands for the proposition that we should free from religion, instead of having freedom of religion. I’ve been an advocate for the First Amendment my entire life, and that’s not the First Amendment [interpretation] that I’ve studied and that I advocate for.”
A Virginia woman is under arrest after she lied to authorities about her connections to ISIS.
Heather Elizabeth Coffman, 29, has been a big supporter of the terrorist group on social media and worked to help those in the United States connect with the group.
The FBI says that Coffman told an undercover agent that she could help them join the terrorist group. She claimed that she had a husband who traveled to Turkey to meet with ISIS agents that could get him to the front lines in Syria. She then claimed the “husband” left her and never made the move.
Coffman had come to the FBI’s attention because of her emphatic postings supporting ISIS on Facebook.
The FBI says Coffman “is suspected of conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) a foreign terrorist organization.”
“As far as I know, she hasn’t traveled anywhere,” Mark Henry Schmidt, Coffman’s attorney, told The Washington Post. “Her connections with the outside world would be on the Internet. I imagine you can get into trouble on the Internet, but I imagine you can also think a lot more’s going on than really is. If nothing else, this is certainly a cautionary tale about the Internet.”
The FBI confirmed they are joining the search for a missing University of Virginia student.
Hannah Elizabeth Graham disappeared after leaving an off-campus apartment complex in Charlottesville before midnight on Sunday. Friends and family say there has been no trace of the 18-year-old Graham since that night.
Authorities have told Fox News the search is officially a “search and rescue” effort.
“Last night we expanded our search about 25 to 30 blocks Right now we are focusing on another five to six block area which is outside of the zone we looked at last night,” Capt. Guy Williams, of the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Office, told WDBJ7.com.
Police are asking anyone with information about the missing girl to call. She is described as 5 feet, 11 inches tall. She was last seen wearing a silvery crop top and black stretch pants.
Forecasters say a tropical storm has formed off the Florida coast and conditions are right for it to strengthen over the next few days.
That means Florida could be facing a Fourth of July hurricane.
A tropical storm watch has been put into effect for parts of Florida’s east coast because of Tropical Storm Arthur. The storm is centered about 95 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral. The cell was mostly stationary through Tuesday morning but was expected to begin moving toward land later in the day.
The storm had maximum sustained winds of 40 miles per hour as of noon Tuesday.
While the official storm track from NOAA predicts the eye of the storm will stay far offshore, some forecasters are seeing parallels between this storm and a similar storm in 2004 that battered the eastern seaboard despite the eye staying offshore.
Meterologist Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL says that the storm is very similar to the tropical storm that ended up as Hurricane Alex in 2004. That hurricane ended up with wind gusts over 115 miles per hour that hammered the east coast from Florida to Virginia.
A group of Muslims in Virginia are outraged that a Christian church is handing out a tract that shows a man throwing his grandmother out of his house because she witnesses Christ to him.
Bible Baptist Church of Roanoke has been distributing a tract called “Unforgiven” which is aimed to reach Muslims with the truth of the Gospel.
The tract tells the story of a man named Lamont who converts to Islam while he is imprisoned. The man changes his name to Mohammed and after his grandmother tries to tell him the truth of Christ, he asks a Muslim leader who tells him the Koran says she is the enemy for being a Christian and should not be let in his house.
The man then kicks his grandmother of the house when she urges him to convert to Christ. The man then agrees he’s declared jihad on Christ. The man dies and is placed in eternal torment for rejecting Jesus as his Lord and Savior.
Muslims say the tract doesn’t fairly represent them.
“It basically indicated that the people are violent, the religion itself is violent, and the facts in here are not true,” Hussain Al-Shiblawi told WDBJ-TV.
However, several area Christians have stood up for the church and their right to present the tract, saying that the paper only presents the hard truth.
“I’m sorry; I’m offended by the Muslim community being offended by the Christian community,” said Teresa Hiner. “The difference is the people don’t care if Christians are offended and make a great big deal when Muslims and atheists are offended.”
Graduates of a Virginia high school thumbed their nose at the demands of the ACLU that a song sung at graduations since 1940 be banned because it references God.
Students at Thomas Walker High School in Ewing, Virginia locked arms after receiving their diplomas and sang “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.” The song has been sung during graduation since the school’s 1940 founding.
The ACLU had sent a threatening e-mail to school officials saying that students should be banned from singing the song, even at their own initiation, because the song makes a reference to God.
ACLU lawyer Rebecca Glenberg, in addition to wanting to remove any references to God from the graduation ceremony, also objected to a plaque of the Ten Commandments being displayed in a school hallway. The administration responded to the anti-Christianist demand by removing the plaque and eliminating the song from the ceremony.
The students, however, chose to revolt and refused to let the ACLU deny them their Constitutional right to express their faith.
The students also rose and recited the Lord’s Prayer at the invocation because it had also been removed from the ceremony.
