President Obama and key congressional leaders held their first meeting to discuss the budget crisis Wednesday afternoon, but drew no closer to resolving the impasse.
Democrats continue to seek a stopgap funding bill and a debt ceiling increase with no conditions attached, while Republicans continue to mount an effort to seek concessions on the health care law. President Obama said he's exasperated, and called the whole process entirely unnecessary.
You know who else is exasperated — the 800,000 people who've been furloughed as a result of the shutdown. Unemployment claims across the country went up yesterday. Many of them can't afford to wait to hear back from their employers about when they'll return to work.
Federal lawmakers sure won't be missing any checks. The constitution requires Congress receive their pay no matter what. Some representatives have offered to decline their salaries or give them to charity.
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Little Rock police are investigating the homicide of a Little Rock man.
Officers were called to a home on the 5000 block of Fisher Street just after 2:30 Wednesday morning. That's where they found 36-year-old Shannon Austin lying in the street unresponsive. He had a bullet wound to his lower abdomen. Austin was pronounced dead at the scene.
This is the 24th homicide for the city of Little Rock in 2013.
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It was only a matter of time before somebody made the first functional gun using a 3D printer. Sean Kubin and Cody Wilson successfully fired a 3D printed gun back in May. It is called the Liberator and is the first of its kind in the world.
Kubin says his group got the idea of creating the first printable gun as a way of empowering people who felt as if the government was attacking their right to bear arms. He admits the idea was to take advantage of sort of a loop hole in the law where you can manufacture weapons for yourself.
The gun can be created with some galvanized pipe and the design template. But there are some concerns with the availability of the files in a public domain, and that's why Kubin and his group are under an investigation by the State Department.
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