What: Salvation Army “Toy „N Joy” Store 

When: Thursday, Dec. 20 [9:00am – 6:00pm] and Friday, Dec. 21 [9:00am – 12:00pm] 

Where: 30-400 Landau Blvd. Cathedral City, CA 92234 

Other: The Salvation Army Christmas Distribution 

Cathedral City, CA – The Salvation Army Davis Corps Community Center will be distributing toys over the next two days to families in need throughout the Coachella Valley. Gifts were collected through toy drives as well as two Salvation Army programs. Those families who were not selected through the “Adopt a Family” or “Angel Tree” programs will have an opportunity to select gifts through our Toy „N Joy Store. As families wait for their gifts to be wrapped by volunteers, they can enjoy complimentary cider and cookies. You are invited to come out and be a part of this Christmas Season of Giving!

While Adam Lanza’s intent for slaughtering more than two dozen people last week in Newtown, Connecticut remains unknown, new information has led some experts to suggest possible motives for the massacre.

According to some sources close with the Lanza family, the shooter’s actions may have been triggered by his mother’s insistence on having him committed to a psychiatric facility. The 20-year-old gunman killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, inside their Newtown, CT home before opening fire inside of a nearby elementary school. Twenty-six people, mostly children, were killed by Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary before he took his own life.

Speaking with Fox News, a local man who reportedly grew up close to the school says the shooter’s mother was public with her plans to have her son institutionalized.

“From what I’ve been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed,” Joshua Flashman, 25, tells FoxNews.com. “Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.”

Additionally, Fox quotes a senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation as saying the shooter was enraged over his mother’s plans for “his future mental health treatment.”

An article published over the weekend by the New York Daily News reportedly cited Adam Lanza’s uncle as saying the shooter was prescribed an antipsychotic called Fanapt, a drug with documented links to causing impulse-control disorder and major depression in some users, as well as other side-effects. By Tuesday, though, the Daily News’ quote had been scrubbed from the site and no verifiable source has been able to confirm that preliminary report.

Whatever caused the bloody massacre, though, one former FBI investigator, Lanza’s actions were very-well planned. According to Mary Ellen O’Toole, an ex-FBI profiler, Adam Lanza’s behavior before and during the Sandy Hook massacre suggests his actions weren’t spontaneous ones.

“He didn’t just snap. This takes a lot of planning,” O’Toole tells The Lookout. O’Toole worked for 15 years as a behavioral analyst for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and says the FBI’s Computer Analysis and Response Team has been working 24 hours a day since last week’s shooting in hopes of making sense of it.

“The FBI is pretty good, we can pull stuff off anything,” she says.

According to O’Toole, Lanza’s actions are typical with mass murderers who’ve skillfully plotted attacks.

“He wanted to accomplish maximum lethality,” O’Toole says. “He was not out of touch with reality. I think he put some security measures in place so he wouldn’t be stopped.”

Astronomers have discovered that the closest Sun-like star, Tau Ceti, is orbited by five planets, one of which is in the “habitable range”. If its existence is confirmed, the planet could be the closest potentially life-harboring world to our own.

Tau Ceti, twelve light years away, belongs to the same G-type yellow main-sequence class as our sun, which is relatively rare – only one in 25 stars has the same properties.

Its planets were detected not by direct observation, but by calculating the slight gravitational tug these as-yet-unseen planets exert on the orbit of their star. Previously, these star ‘wobbles’ could not be clearly separated due to a multitude of other factors, but scientists at several universities in the UK and the US, say they have cleared the ‘noise’ with sophisticated new techniques and have found five planets.

“This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets. They are everywhere, even right next door,” said a statement from Steve Vogt, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is the co-author of the discovery, due to be published by the reputable journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

One of the planets, tentatively designated HD 10700e, appears to be in the so-called “Goldilocks zone”, the relatively small corridor where temperatures are just right for water to remain liquid, and for life to possibly flourish. It is two to six times the size of the Earth, weighs five times as much, and orbits its sun every 168 days.

Tau Ceti is three times as far away as the closest star system to our sun, Alpha Centauri. Earlier this year, astronomers confirmed that Alpha Centauri contains a planet, but with a temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius it is unlikely to host life.

Yet it is too early to believe that HD 10700e is an Earth-like paradise, waiting for us to arrive. It is not clear what it is made of, and what gases its atmosphere contains.

Some scientists remain to be convinced it exists at all.

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