Harrisburg — In a Senate floor ceremony today, state Sens. Mike Stack and Christine Tartaglione presented Mayfair resident Sgt. Patrick Hamill with a Senate citation and thanked him for his service to our country and for his courageous efforts to advance stability in Iraq.

Philadelphia — A Philadelphia nurse has filed federal charges challenging an attempt by her employer and outside union organizers to ignore the results of a workplace election rejecting unionization.

Swarthmore — A new study titled Rational Ignorance in Education: A Field Experiment in Student Plagiarism, issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), demonstrates that participation in a brief Web-based anti-plagiarism tutorial before completing a writing assignment greatly reduces the likelihood that college students will plagiarize. The most significant results were among students with lower SAT scores, who, among the control group, were the most likely to plagiarize in their academic work. 

Former State House Speaker Marco Rubio has squeaked past Gov. Charlie Crist in the race for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, leading 47 – 44 percent and topping Gov. Crist on trust, values and conservative credentials, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Princeton legal scholar and philosopher Robert George told pro-life leaders at the March for Life Rose Dinner last Friday that the infamous Supreme Court decisions in 1973 that legalized abortion on demand unleashed “a struggle for the soul of the nation” and that as long as those decisions stand, the United States is a “nation under judgment.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — According to American Life League (ALL), new numbers from the Guttmacher Institute show Planned Parenthood-style sex education is having a dramatic impact on the rise in teen pregnancy rates.

NEW YORK, NY — Alexandra Nunez, a 37-year old single mother of four, died after a botched abortion Monday at the A-1 Women’s Center in New York City.

Purcellville, Va. — On Tuesday, in a first of its kind case, a federal immigration judge in Memphis, Tennessee granted political asylum to the Romeike family, who fled Germany in 2008 to escape persecution from the German government for the “crime” of homeschooling.

Carol Aichele has been a Chester County Commissioner since 2003, having been re-elected in 2007, and she received more votes than any other candidate on the ballot in both elections. She was Chester County Chair for the recently victorious Judge Joan Orie Melvin’s campaign for State Supreme Court. She volunteered for Governor Dick Thornburgh’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1978. She’s been a Republican State Committee member since 1990 and a Chester County Committeewoman since 1988. Ms. Aichele also served for six years as a member of the Tredyffrin-Easttown school board, two of those years as president. She is an established vote earner, especially in one of Pennsylvania’s largest swing counties. And she happens to be a major candidate for Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania.

Jerusalem — On Thursday, in a one-on-one meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, set at very short notice, Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak reassured Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Israel “has no intention of attacking Lebanon or Syria.”

Jerusalem — Featured in two major news items this Wednesday: The 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp and the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the announcement from the Iranian government that Iran had indeed achieved enough nuclear capacity to “nuke Tel Aviv.”

Jerusalem — The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) medical and rescue team sent to Haiti concluded its operations Wednesday.

Saturday will be the observation of Tu Bshvat on the Hebrew calendar, the 15th of Shvat, the Jewish arbor day, a day when the Jewish people bid a “happy birthday to the land of Israel.”

Jerusalem — Exactly 19 years ago, when Iraq launched 39 missile attacks against Israel, causing damage to more than 10,000 homes in the center of the country, a German activist organization known as the “Society for Threatened Peoples,” sent a delegation to Israel to warn the Jewish state that 88 German companies were supplying Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya with the technology for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), with the full knowledge of the German government.