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At first he was named as one of the possible bombers, then that changed to ‘Person of Interest.’ But Abdulrahman Alharbi is in the U.S. illegally,  but claims to be only a witness to and  victim of the Boston Marathon bombing.

UPDATE: 04/01/2014 — Alharbi is now suing Glenn Beck and his network for defamation, even though nearly every TV network and news organization named him as a suspect in the attack.

“It comes without meaning, it departs in darkness, and in darkness its name is shrouded.” Ecclesiastes 6:4 (NIV)

Anger equals evil.

It took me a year and some time to complete my study of the Book of Jeremiah, in the Old Testament. When I undertake a study from any book in the Bible, I try to place it not only in its faith-based context, but historical and real-world context.

For that reason, I found myself in December at a place so angry within myself that I lashed out at everyone on my Facebook page. It was the wrong thing to have done.

I realized, albeit too late, that everything I was gleaning from Jeremiah wasn’t about me or anyone else in my life – either personally or in cyberspace.

Following my ‘blow up,’ I stopped blogging my political opinions, whether nationally or locally. There was something in me that said it was a good thing to do and so I did and furthermore, I am not planning to return to that subject anytime soon.

Instead, I am going to share some of my notes on the Book of Jeremiah. This will happen over several weeks or maybe months – I don’t know.

What happens to this country isn’t up to me; it’s not even up to the leadership of this nation. Instead, it is up to God and how our relationship as a people is viewed by Him.

Call me crazy, but let’s get started with Jeremiah 1:6.

“I will pronounce my judgments on my people because of their wickedness in forsaking me, in burning incense to other gods and in worshiping what their hands have made.”

Over the course of the last few decades, the U.S. has slowly been erasing God from our national culture. No longer are children allowed to pray in school, in some places the “One nation under God,” is even struck from the Pledge of Allegiance, and finally after lawsuit after lawsuit, the U.S. struck a coin for circulation without the words, “In God We Trust,” on it.

Instead of God, we worship our federal, state, regional and city leaders. We praise the newest technology and the people who brought it to us and we eat our meals without saying grace.

My conclusion: We have forsaken God and he is judging us – the U.S.

BOSTON (AP) — Two bombs exploded in the crowded streets near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing three people and injuring more than 130 in a bloody scene of shattered glass and severed limbs that raised alarms that terrorists might have struck again in the U.S..

Eighty-five runners in the Boston Marathon are from Nevada. Twenty-two are from Reno, eleven from Sparks and another 52 from eastern and southern Nevada.

Spark resident Frank Kight is one of those 130 people to recieve injures in the blast. He and his son-in-law, Scott and ex-wife, Marilyn were near the finish line hoping to watch his daughter Amy Blomquist complete the Boston Marathon.

The  retired track coach and school counselor says he ducked when he first heard the explosion. He believed it to be a celebratory cannon blast, or perhaps a very loud fireworks display.

A few seconds later, he heard the second blast and dove for cover. That’s when he thought of his son-in-law and ex-wife, who were next to him at the time.

When he raised up to see where they were, that’s when he saw the carnage. He describes the chaotic scene as filled with blood and body parts.

As soon as medical personnel arrived, they started treating him and others. Both he and Marilyn recieved injuries to the leg, but since hers were more severe, she went to a different hospital than Frank — one which is under lockdown.

After being stitched up and released, Frank spoke to Marilyn by phone where she told him she was scheduled for surgery.  Neither his daughter Amy or son-in-law Scott were hurt in the incident.

WASHINGTON (AP) – A person briefed on the Boston Marathon investigation says the explosives were in 6-liter pressure cookers and placed in black duffel bags. The explosives were placed on the ground and contained shards of metal, nails and ball bearings.

Adding to a small boat’s more than 5,000-mile  journey is where it came ashore — less than a mile from a  multi-million-dollar project to repair damage done to a harbor from a tsunami resulting from a March 2011 earthquake. Now authorities in Del Norte County have tracked down the owner of that vessel which washed up on South Beach in early April 2013.

It came from the coastal Japanese town of Rikuzentakata, where the tsunami took the lives of 2,000 people and left only three buildings standing.

A photograph of the goose barnacle-covered boat posted to Rikuzentakata city’s Facebook page lead to the boat’s owner: a high school teacher. The social media page also showed the boats handwritten Japanese characters of  “Takata-kou-kou,” which when translated, reads “Takata High School.”

This is the second find for Rikuzentakata. In April 2012, a soccer ball was found on an Alaskan island with a student’s name on it and returned.

Now,  Takata High School would like to have the boat back and Del Norte County officials are working to make it happen.

<"The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel." Proverbs 12:10 (NIV)

It was my turn to work a seven-day stretch at the line shack. It was spring calving time, so I expected to be fairly busy, but I didn't know jus' how busy I would be.

The second evening after checking on the momma cows and their calves, I put up my horse, fixed myself a cup of coffee and stood outside looking at the moon. The night was clear, however the lunar orb had a milky-white ring around it.

I knew immediately that meant bad weather and I decided to prepare for it.

It was about midnight when I pulled myself out of my sleeping bag to have a look outside. A gentle snow had started to fall and I knew then I had to get down to the calving-pens to care for the newborns.

By the time I dressed, had the horse saddled and trotted away from the shack, the snow was swirling and blowing and twisting, making my travel difficult. I'm sure that had I not known my way, I'd have gotten lost within minutes of the storms arrival.

Once there, I had to ride from cow to cow, checking on the calves. Generally my appearance caused the momma cow to spook and move away along with her baby.

However, in one case the momma cow jus' stood there bawling while her calf remained curled in a ball on the snowy ground. I had to get off my horse and approach the little thing carefully so as not to cause the mother cow to panic and run me down.

It took me a few minutes to get a good response from the calf. For a few seconds I thought the thing had frozen to death, but soon it started struggling to get up and get away from me.

Instead I hefted it up into the saddle with me, and with momma following behind, we made our way back to the line shack and the near-by horse stalls, where I laid out a straw bed for the little one to rest. Momma cow, though having never been indoors before, followed me inside and took over the care of her baby.

I was busy until around 10 in the morning.

Soon after I returned to the shack for a cup of coffee, some bacon and a biscuit, the snow stopped falling and the sun broke free of the clouds. By the afternoon, with the help of the warm breath of a Chinook, much of the white stuff disappeared.

And though I was wet, cold, dirty and sore, and one momma cow had prolapsed and needed to be buckled, I didn't lose any of the cows or calves in my care. I recall being tired, but happy for having done a good days work and it was a good feeling.

This may appear to be off the beaten path at first, but you’ll soon understand why I am treading this road…

The Ramona Food and Clothes Closet is in its 30th year of service to the community. The FCC, as it is known locally, was officially launched in March 1983.

My wife’s parents, Don and Helen Conklin along were the primary organizers. They started by supplying a three-day food package to each needy family or individual who lived in Ramona, California and who expressed a need for food.

I was lucky enough to have helped deliver these boxes a couple of times while visiting them.

Meanwhile, Christmastime’s “Share Your Holidays” became an annual event. And as far as I know, this tradition continues with the help of local churches and schools who donate both food and pack the boxes.

In 1994, the FCC was moved to the abandoned Bank of America building on Main Street. It is still in full operation today, housing the thrift shop, emergency and holiday food distribution, an emergency food pantry, board room, and a room to receive, store, and process donated merchandise.

That weekend, my wife and I were visiting her family.  I recall Don and I spent that Saturday cleaning the place, drinking coffee and swapping corn-ball jokes.

Honestly, I miss my wife’s folks.

Bullfrog County was a short-lived county in Nevada created by the Nevada Legislature in 1987.  It consisted of an uninhabited 144-square-mile area around Yucca Mountain completely enclosed by southern Nye County, the county from which it was created.

Bullfrog” was the name Frank “Shorty” Harris and Ernest “Ed” Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, “The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog.”

The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine. If fact, “Bullfrog” became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included “Bullfrog” in their names.

Mining in and around the county 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-air pit mine and mill at the site,  along State Route 374.

LAC Minerals acquired the mine from Bond in 1989 and established an underground mine there in 1991 after a new body of ore called the North Extension was discovered. Barrick Gold acquired LAC Minerals in 1994 and continued to extract and process ore at what became known as the Barrick Bullfrog Mine until the end of 1998.

The name persisted and, decades later, was given to the short-lived Bullfrog County.

Bullfrog County’s 1987 seat was located in Carson City, the state capital, some 270 miles north.  The county’s establishment was a response to plans by the federal government to create a disposal site for radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain when the fed’s agreed to provide payment-equal-to taxes funding to Nye County during the characterization and construction of the Yucca Mountain repository.

This money was intended to go straight to the county government bypassing the state government. In response, Nevada Assemblyman Paul May drafted a law declaring the unpopulated area around the proposed nuclear waste site to be a new county, Bullfrog County.

Because this new county had no population, any federal payments for placing the nuclear waste site there would go directly to the state treasury. Furthermore, rates in the county were set at 20 percent, or $5 on every $100 valued, the highest allowable by the state constitution.

This tax was meant to discourage the waste site’s creation by making the tax rate so high that the federal government would balk at paying to use the land for a radioactive waste dump. However, it also guaranteed that, should the site be built anyway, its existence would at least be profitable (at least $25-million) for the state government.

The bill was passed jus’ before 4 in the morning, June 18th, 1987 — near the end of the year’s legislative session — and signed into law by Governor Richard Bryan. The bill stipulated that if the repository was not built in the county, it would be merged back into Nye County

Bullfrog County was the only county in Nevada whose county commissioners and sheriff were not elected. Instead, the law creating the county stipulated that those officials were to be appointed by the governor.

It was not assigned to any of the state’s nine district courts and as such had no district attorney or judiciary.

To date, Bullfrog County is the only county with a population of zero known to have existed in the United States, and except for Shannon and Todd counties in South Dakota, the only organized county whose was not contained within its boundaries. It contained no paved roads, buildings or infrastructure of any kind. The easiest ground access to the county was by way of a dirt road off U.S. Route 95.

More than three-fourths of the county’s land was to the public. Half of it was taken up by the Nellis Air Force Range. The remaining fourth was owned by the Bureau of Land Management but almost no one visited there.

The existence of Bullfrog County had the potential to create serious legal problems for the state of Nevada. The Nevada Constitution requires all criminal trials to take place in the county where the crime occurred, and before a jury of residents of that county

However, since it was not assigned to a judicial district, it had no judiciary or prosecutors. Additionally, if a felony or serious misdemeanor was committed in Bullfrog County, it would have been theoretically impossible to empanel a jury.

For these and other reasons, Nye County sued, claiming the law was unconstitutional. In late October 1987, Nevada Attorney General Brian McKay announced that the state would not defend the law in court, since in his view it was likely unconstitutional.

On February 11, 1988; retired Nevada Supreme Court justice David Zenoff conducted a special hearing and found Bullfrog County to be unconstitutional. In addition to its zero population size, Zenoff found that the provision of the law giving Bryan the power to appoint the commissioners and sheriff ran counter to the democratic process, so state legislature abolished Bullfrog County in 1989, and the territory was absorbed back into Nye County.

Annette Funicello died April 8th, 2013, following a lengthy battle with multiple sclerosis. She was 70.

In July 1983, when she was 41,  Annette was photographed playing a slot machine at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.  At the time Annette was appearing at the hotel-casino.

Meanwhile, Annette’s passing has touched many in Northern Nevada, including Sharon Baird.  She has a lot of photographs and memorabilia from the times, but her most valued are her memories.

She told KTVN’s Erin Breen she and Annette met when they were 12 on the set of Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club in 1955 and they stayed friends for a lifetime.

“When I moved up here Annette would come and see me here in Reno,” Sharon says. “In fact she made three trips up here after her diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. We knew she wouldn’t always be able to travel and I made a promise to her that I’d continue to visit her. And I did.”

Baird was a child-actor with Annette, who went on to start in string of Disney movies, while Sharon went on to star in other kid shows and adult movies, but the two always kept in touch. Sharon was even there when Annette passed away.

“She always dreamed she’d be able to walk again,” Sharon says, “and she always said she wanted to dance again. The last thing I said to her was, ‘Put on your dancing shoes.’”

Officials are trying to determine if a boat that washed up on a beach is debris from the 2011 tsunami. The  20-foot boat with Japanese writing, believed to be a license or registration number on its side, washed ashore Sunday near Crescent City.

Del Norte County Sheriff Dean Wilson reports, “Yesterday evening at about 8:30, we received our first debris from Japan. It washed up on South Beach and was full of goose neck barnacles.”

A team from Humboldt State University’s Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group, an assemblage of local, state and federal agencies and others that studies tsunami hazards is examining the small vessel. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the group is working with the Japanese government to try to confirm the origins of the craft.

Experts say while unlikely to be radioactive, debris could have invasive species, human remains, or other things that you may not want to casually handle. It’s recommended you call your local authorities to report such finds.

His family had no running water, so they bathed in the Truckee River every Saturday — something that prepared him for conditions during Central Intelligence Agency operations in Vietnam during the war, he wrote in his autobiography, “The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA,” with Malcolm McConnell.

Antonio “Tony” Mendez’s mastery led CIA efforts in 1980 to rescue six Americans hiding from Iranian revolutionaries by using a ploy they were in Tehran to scout locations for a science fiction film. The public learned of his exploits in the film “Argo,” with Ben Affleck playing him.

But not as well-known is Mendez’s life of living in a tent just east of what is now Vista Boulevard in Sparks in 1947 and 1948, while his stepfather worked at a quarry. His time in Sparks helped shape his character.

Mendez was born in Eureka, Nevada in 1940. His father went to work in neighboring White Pine County at the copper pit at Ruth.

In 1943, his father was working as a signal hand on the railroad that carried ore out of the copper pit and when caught between the wall of the mine and a railroad car, he died. He was only 23 years old.

Mendez’s mother remarried and got a job in Eureka editing a newspaper but, when his stepfather lost his job in 1947, they moved to the Sparks area. His stepfather worked in a quarry, and they lived on the property until they moved to Pioche in 1948.

That quarry was jus’ west of Brierly Way and north of where Vista Boulevard meets Interstate 80. The eastern boundary of Sparks at the time was Stanford Way, about two and a half miles away.

Mendez had one older sister, a younger brother and three younger sisters. They walked about a half mile to what is now Larkin Circle, to the one-room Vista School, which had about 10 students, from first grade through high school.

Another important thing leading up to his career in the CIA occurred in Sparks.

One day, his mother gave him a sketch pad and watercolors to encourage his artistic abilities.  Nearly 20-years later, Mendez  the CIA hired him as an espionage artist for the Technical Services Division.

He and his family eventually moved to Colorado, but still have ties to Nevada. It’s a mine near Silverton — east of Tonopah — where the family’s cemetery is found.