News From NPR

Back in November, one of the Homeland Security's intelligence analysis centers in New Jersey was tasked with finding "commonalities" of mass shootings in the United States.

Today, the website Public Intelligence received an unclassified version of that report through a Freedom of Information Act request. The New Jersey "Fusion Center" looked at 29 mass shootings in the United States since 1999.

The findings:

-- Nearly half of the shootings happened at a workplace.

The rise of a new Israeli political party after last week's elections has set the stage for renewed conflict over the country's military draft.

That new party, Yesh Atid, or "There is a Future," campaigned on a promise to draft thousands of ultra-Orthodox students who are currently exempt from military service.

And with the number of ultra-Orthodox students in Israel on the rise given the community's high birth rates, this longstanding debate has become a critical post-election issue.

The Boy Scouts of America as early as next week may drop its ban against openly gay members and leaders, just a dozen years after it successfully took its fight to maintain the policy all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It would mark a seismic shift for the organization, which counts more than 3.3 million youth members who participate in troops largely sponsored by civic and church groups.

"The intense storm system that brought severe weather to the Mississippi Valley on Tuesday will move eastward on Wednesday, bringing a risk of severe weather from the upper Ohio Valley southward to the central Gulf Coast and eastward to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast coast," the National Weather Service warns this hours. "The main threat will be damaging wind along with the possibility of tornadoes, especially across eastern Ala. into western Ga."

In Georgia, a tornado has already touched down. WSB-TV has dramatic video of the funnel cloud raking through Adairsville, Ga.: