The distraught father of a missing 9-year-old Florida girl told his daughter Monday that he was doing the best he could to find her.

“I just want to say to Jessie that I love you and I’m trying,” a tearful Mark Lunsford told his little girl, Jessica Marie Lunsford, who disappeared last week from her bedroom seemingly without a trace.

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For five straight days, police were joined by hundreds of volunteers who braved fog, torrential rain and a tornado watch to scour thick forests and marshlands in a five-mile circle around the girl’s house.

But late Monday afternoon, Citrus County Sheriff Jeff Dawsy told reporters he had suspended the full-scale search, expressing frustration it uncovered little evidence.

The sheriff said the girl’s disappearance is not a confirmed abduction, and he hasn’t ruled anything out. Deputies were even taking in tips from psychics.

“We’re all trying to find that little piece to the puzzle,” said Dawsy, who said 20 experts were arriving from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help crack the case.

You can read more at FoxNews. If you would like to leave a message for Jessica’s family, please visit their forum, here, here, or here.

Notice anything about the TSA’s new ruling which bans all lighters on flights? (HINT: I added the bold style to make it easy on you)

Airline passengers will have to ditch their lighters or lose them to airport security screeners when a new ban on lighters takes effect in April.

The ban reflects Congress’ fear that lighters could be used to ignite bombs on planes or otherwise damage or destroy them. The Transportation Security Administration until now had banned all but butane lighters and said each passenger could carry no more than two.

TSA’s new ruling extends the ban to all butane lighters, effective April 14.

Proponents of the ban, including Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., cited the case of convicted “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, who tried but failed to light explosives in his shoes with matches. Had Reid been using a lighter, he might have brought down the plane, Dorgan said. Reid was sentenced to life in prison in 2003.

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Passengers can continue to carry up to four books of matches, but that, too, is under reconsideration, said TSA spokeswoman Amy Von Walter.

Four books of matches? Is that all? Why, you can hardly light a cigarette, let alone light a shoe bomb with four books of matches.

Great job, morons.

The record-setting SpaceShipOne is due to arrive in its final resting place, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington DC.

The suborbital rocket plane, designed by Burt Rutan and his Scaled Composites team, made two piloted trips into space to snag the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

SpaceShipOne is to be displayed in the museum’s Milestones of Flight Gallery, according to a NASM spokesman.

Oh sure, yet another reason to return to the Smithsonian.

Wanna waste some time too?

Up until now I have not posted about Ward Churchill because I honestly don’t think the guy deserves any more attention than he has already taken. So I will not post about him.

I will however, point you to a post by Stephen Green, aka Vodkapundit, who makes a great analogy involving the now infamous professor.

As he would say, it’s required reading.

An Indian teenager from one of the country’s most backward states appears to have fooled governments, the media and even the president into believing he had topped the world in a NASA science exam.

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The certificate, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, declared “You are the member of NASA” (sic) and is signed by Singh and “Chief of NASA, Cin K. Kif” — NASA’s former administrator was Sean O’Keefe. It also lists the name of Singh’s father, common practice in Indian documents.

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Singh says he flew to London on Indian Airlines — which does not fly to the city — and took a taxi to Oxford University and back every day for the exam from January 4-8, a round trip of about 230 km (140 miles).

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Singh told Reuters he stayed in a hotel, but told a Hindi language newspaper he stayed at Buckingham Palace.

The Indian school where he says he sat the preliminary exam along with 200,000 others does not exist. The Bansal institute, where he says he studied mathematics, has never heard of him.

You would think if you were going to concoct a story and try to convince people you did something you didn’t do, you would at least attempt to make sure the places and people you use in your story might actually exist. The thing I find funny about this article is the fact that the Uttar Pradesh state government “rewarded” him with a 500,000 rupee ($11,500) prize and that more than 100 members of the upper house donated a day’s salary to him. This proves that government is full of dumbasses no matter which country it’s in, or what type it is.

Gerald Greene pointed a gun at Douglas County deputies a year ago as they arrested his stepson on charges of sexually abusing young boys.

“It was only the unusual restraint shown by officers the first time he raised a weapon at them that kept him from being killed,” Douglas District Attorney David McDade said Friday. “And I wish to God he was shot and killed then.”

Greene, 69, pulled a gun on deputies again Thursday night, and this time they shot him dead, but not before he killed Deputy Blake Gammill, a 31-year-old officer about to be married.

Gammill, shot in the face, was airlifted to Atlanta Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead about 1 a.m. Friday.

Greene was shot multiple times as he confronted officers again arresting his stepson, former Douglas Deputy Larry Bilbo, said Sheriff Phil Miller.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at [Bilbo] without malice after what happened,” Miller said after a court hearing for Bilbo on Friday.

Gammill was an eight-year veteran of the force and is survived by an ex-wife and two daughters, Haven, 3, and Jewel Grace, 18 months. He had planned to remarry in April, said Sheriff’s Chaplain Wayne Rogers.

Gammill is the first deputy killed since Douglas County established a sheriff’s office in 1870, Miller said.

A memorial fund has been set up to benefit the slain deputy’s daughters. Contributions can be made to the Blake Gammill Memorial Fund, First Commerce Community Bank, 9464 Highway 5, Douglasville, 30135.

Rest In Peace Deputy Gammill.

Scores of law enforcement officers searched this Citrus County community Thursday for a 9-year-old girl whose father reported had vanished from her bedroom.

Jessica Marie Lunsford was last seen wearing a pink silk nightgown and white silk shorts when she went to sleep at 10 p.m. Wednesday at her home, the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office said.

…

Jessica is described as a white, 4 feet 10 inches tall, weighing 70 pounds, with light brown shoulder-length hair and brown eyes.

She lives with her father and grandparents and is a third-grader at Homosassa Elementary School.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office at (352) 726-1121 or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Missing Children Information Hotline at (888) FL-MISSING.

Salt is not found only in the salt shaker. For example, a teaspoon of baking soda contains 1,000 mg of sodium.

Well, duh. Baking soda is “sodium bicarbonate”. Got it? S-O-D-I-U-M…

Viacom Inc. reported today that it lost $18.4 billion in the fourth quarter last year, mainly because it took an $18 billion writeoff to reflect the declining value of its radio station operations, along with its outdoor advertising business.

While investors had known that the radio business was suffering as competition from satellite radio and the Internet continued to make inroads, the size of the writeoff, even though it was a not a cash charge, nonetheless surprised investors. Viacom’s already depressed stock fell 73 cents, or 2 percent, to $35.44 this afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Viacom’s $18.4 billion loss was among the largest taken by American corporations, several analysts noted. That writeoff, coupled with earlier problems at Blockbuster, may have led the company to offer conservative guidance in the hope that it could regain investor confidence by outperforming expectations for 2005.

Viacom said that its fourth-quarter operating loss was $16.7 billion, but that without onetime charges and a tax benefit, its operating income increased by 10 percent, to $1.3 billion, and net earnings from continuing operations rose 22 percent, to $714 million.

Isn’t that kind of like saying, “but without living expenses, other debts, and a tax cut, my operating income increased 10 percent this year, and my net earnings from continuing to work at my current job rose 22 percent”?

Who the hell tries to say “well, we made a lot more money, and you would have noticed that, had our expenses not exploded all over our budget”? They lost money. Can we say losers?