just tweet me. or post it on my facebook page. that's all for today. thanks so much for joining me. and until next time, i hope you're learning to be more of a healthy you. after all the problems, broken promises, apologies, restarts and moving deadlines, the white house now is showing renewed optimism for the president's health care law. welcome to america's news headquarters. i'm harris faulkner. we now know how many people are seeking obamacare on the final deadline day this week. the white house says 880,000 people visited the website. and looking for plans which begin january 1. now we'll wait and see how many enroll. president obama is vacationing

in hawaii. and doug is traveling with the president and joins us live from honolulu. doug? >> reporter: that's right, harris. the administration promised that it would be sending a team of experts to fix the website after the number of glitches and the disastrous rollout of october 1. that appears now to have paid off. we were watching the surge of december 23rd, later expended to december 24th, that the deadline of people who wanted health care coverage to take effect on january 1. here are the latest numbers. it looks like it worked quite well. on monday, december 23rd, there were 2 million plus site visits, that was the peak day. the system handled 83,000 concurrent users. 129,000 people were sent to the cueing system. the next day, 880,000 total visits. >> the website was sturdy, it staid up and people were able to shop for health care options.

the fact that 1 million people went to the website today is an indication that demand is high for the quality of affordable health care options available to people on the we believe site. >> reporter: the administration now says it's going to be devoting most of its energy to the implementation of obamacare. that's where many critics say we will see larger problems. congressman tom price says he's beginning to see some of those problems manifest themselves in the atlanta area. >> when i talked to doctors i used to practice with in atlanta, four of the major hospital systems in the city itself are not even going to be on the panel or able to have access to the patients that are signed up for obamacare. the patients don't know yet. the hospitals know that, but the patients don't know that yet. these are the kinds of hidden secrets in this program that are supposed to make it work from a financial standpoint.

it may make it work for government but it doesn't work for patients. >> reporter: we heard that the administration needs 7 million people to sign up by the end of open unenrollment, which is the end of march. and december 20th of this year, 1 million people signed up for private insurance. the administration expected that 1.2 million would have signed up, but they're short of that goal. a lot of work still to be done. >> the white house saying it's optimistic today. you're in an open live harbor right now, which is why we can hear the ships moving in behind you. >> reporter: it's conk shells. the next hurdle for obamacare, tax time. if you got a subsidy to help you pay for your mandatory health care, watch out for something that involves telling the irs about changing in your personal life, like a divorce, or a new

job for you or your spouse. for many americans this will be the first time they've had to do this thing and may owe the government money because of it. michael warren is here to break it down. who gets hit by this new rule? >> well, as you mentioned, anybody who gets a subsidy because they're 400% above the poverty line or lower, and who has some sort of event in their life, like a job promotion or getting married and happens to have a less subsidy after the fact. if they let the irs know, then the irs will be aware of that and will be able to get the correct subsidy. if not, they may be getting a bigger bill at the end of the year. >> these are already people who needed a little help. did the obama administration make this clear that the subsidies would come with a so-called catch? >> from the reports we've seen, you wouldn't know about it unless you went to the irs website and were looking for that information.

it's just another example of one of these provisions of the law that we had to implement to find out that it was in it. >> how much money are we talking about potentially for people having to pay the irs? >> it could be a couple hundred dollars, maybe a couple thousand. but it's money that people might have expected to be getting as a return that they may not get as a return. so they need to follow up with the irs about this. >> so they may not have to cut a check, but they thought they had it coming in the form of a rebate or refund, a credit. and it just may not be coming. if you budgeted for that, that is startling. new topic with you. president obama is getting briefed today, we understand, while he's on vacation in hawaii, on how things are going with his signature health care law. this is the kind of thing you might have expected in october. how does this extra involvement at this point make a difference? >> you know, it's hard to say. a lot of the wheels are moving here.

we're hearing a lot more about those enrollment numbers. but let's not get too ahead of ourselves. let's wait to see how many people actually sign up and pay their premiums for those health insurance plans. i think the administration might be getting a little ahead of itself. but i suppose it's encouraging to know that the president is getting involved in this domestic signature achievement of us. but i don't know how much it will do to undo some of the damage. now people may be getting lower tax refunds or bigger tax bills. so i don't know what the president can do from the top. but other than i guess make big legislative changes, it's all about optics. >> michael warren, thank you very much. libya is releasing four members of the military who we know were detained last night at a checkpoint north of tripoli. pentagon officials are saying the four were likely special

operations forces who were investigating potential evacuation routes for diplomats and supporting u.s. security forces protecting the american embassy. nobody was hurt. and we are learning the death toll from a car bombing that killed a former lebanese ambassador to the united states. state media saying a teenager wounded in yesterday's explosion has died, raising the death toll to seven. the bombing targeted the pro western politician, who criticized syria and its lebanese ally hezbollah. he will be buried in beirut tomorrow. the lebanese government has called for a day of mourning. new efforts now to rescue that russian ship stuck in an arctic ice. more than 70 people on board that ship and they have been there since christmas eve. at first, it looked like a party. now it's a little more serious. a chinese breaker that was enroute, it was forced to turn

back today. that word coming from the people trapped there on the ice. and again, they can't see any help coming anymore. and look at the thick fog above that ice. it's summertime down there, so it's about freezing. now an australian ice breaker is rushing to help them. brian? >> reporter: that australian ice breaker is set to arrive by sunday night their time. the latest report coming from a guardian reporter on board the stranded russian ship, says they should know within 12 hours of its arrival, whether or not it will be able to cut through the thick ice and rescue the ship. so far a chinese and french ice breaking ship have been up able to do so. now the hope is with the australian ship. the ship is said to have the best ice breaking capabilities of the three. but if that plan falls through, the russian ship could be evacuated by helicopter.

the stranded ship left new zealand on november 28, carrying 74 tourists, crew and scientists. on tuesday, high winds wrapped sea ice around the ship, freezing it in place. >> this is labeled the home of the blizzard. it is the windiest place in the world with average wind speeds of 70 kilometers per hour. >> reporter: the ship is not in danger of syncing and the crew celebrate christmas with a feast and even had their own secret santa gift exchange. they're passing the time by playing video games and counting birds. they plan on continuing their expedition if the ship is freed from the ice. harris? >> brian, thank you very much. a punch of wintry weather is

plunging tens of thousands into darkness. it's been that way for some people for a week. and some people are starting to get a little angry over this. the latest on the efforts to restore utilities from michigan to maine. a ruling on the nsa that has come calling victory for th federal government. a judge says data collection is legal on millions of us. so what is being done to protect our rights as american citizens? congressman peter king of new york is about to join me live.

time for a quick check of the headlines now. utility companies in michigan say they expect to restore power to most of their customers this weekend. nearly 32,000 homes and businesses still without

electricity one week after that massive ice storm slammed the midwest. that system also being blamed for problems in the northeast. some 4,000 remain without power in maine. now another blast of winter targeting the area this weekend could cause more outages. and 1.3 million americans receivi receiving unemployment benefits will see them expire today if congress does not act. two judges making conflicting rulings on the legality of the nsa's sweeping surveillance practices of snooping on all of us. a federal judge in new york dismissed the case saying the nsa's data collection program is legal. this comes one week after a federal judge in d.c. ruled that same program likely violates the constitution. a final decision could be decided by the supreme court. joining us live, congressman

peter king, chairman of the subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence. good to see you today. >> thank you. >> your reaction to this latest ruling, which says the nsa found that this is legal? >> i fully support the judge's decision. i strongly believe that the program is legal and constitutional and everyone's rights are being protected. and it's very important to our national security. i fully support judge pauley and his opinion. >> how worried are you that the judge might find that the nsa collection program violates our fourth amendment rights in the future? because this contradicts what we heard from a d.c. judge just a week ago. >> i'm as confident as i can be. this is carefully monitored by the federal courts. it's monitored by the justice department. and it's monitored by the congress. i would say it's monitored more than any other program we have. the fbi, the justice departmen

in organized cases, child pornography cases. and there's far more scrutiny of the nsa. considering the nature of the threat against us, when you balance out the equities, it's clearly on the side of the nsa. >> i don't think any americans want to be unprotected when it comes to terrorist threats, but the issue is how do you go about that fairly and have people feel like their liberties are not being fringed upon. the district court judge said this, surely such a program infringes on that degree of privacy that the founders enshrined in the fourth amendment. so how do you do both? >> i think everyone's rights are being protected. no one's phone calls are being listened to by the nsa. there are no names or addresses. we have a list of phone number to phone number. the only time the nsa goes

further than that is if an overseas terrorist has made a phone call into the united states. then you track down who that terrorist has spoken to. then they have to go to the justice department to go to court to get a warrant to tap conversations in the future. so the nsa cannot do anything unless the federal court allows them to. so no name, no the address and no contempt of the conversations. >> are you concerned that americans don't care about what you just said, they just don't want to be snooped on? >> nobody is being snooped on. if i called you tonight, it would be my phone number and your phone number. no one would no my name or your name or the content of the phone call. in all the years of the program being in existence, there's no examples of abuse.

>> we'll move on. fox news alert. "new york times" just posting a major piece on its website. it's an exhaustive report on what happened in benghazi, libya in september of 2012 in the attack that left four americans dead, including our ambassador there. the "times" is suggesting that they couldn't find any evidence that al qaeda or other terrorist groups had any role in that assault and suggests the deadly attack was in part due to anger at an american made video seen as anti-islam. this goes against much of fox new's own reporting. let's bring the congressman back. congressman king, not only against our reporting, but everything else we knew up until this point. why? >> first of all, i don't agree with the premise of "the new york times." they're saying that this shows al qaeda was not involved. the group that was involved was part of the al qaeda network. while it's not officially linked to al qaeda, in all the years

i've been briefed on intelligence matters, it is considered part of the al qaeda network. supporters of al qaeda, and they have a training camp near benghazi. so i've known all along it was them, and i consider that to be an al qaeda affiliate. so i think "the new york times" -- this is an academic debate. this is an al qaeda supporting organization and there are links between the two. when you're going to have these start-up organizations around the world. >> these were excerpts from six chapters of a book that are coming, and sometimes you have to question when somebody is trying to sell a book what goes in it. real quickly, your response in terms of moving forward with benghazi and an investigation? >> i think we still have to have investigations. >> will we have them? >> i'm certainly pushing for them. and the intelligence committee is going forward.

we've had people who were at the compound that night who were under attack. they've come in and testified before us. so it's clear there was not adequate security and this was a systematic attack. this was not mob at all. which e in actual practice. >> what would you say about this "new york times" report? >> from what i've seen, it's misleading because it's making a distinct without a difference. >> good to see you. happy holidays. >> thank you. >> happy new year. >> thanks. new reaction pouring in on the news, "duck dynasty" is going to resume production on a & e with its patriarch. he's returning after briefly being suspended. gay rights and other civil rights groups say they are not happy with the news, some of them. many fans are rejoicing and there are plenty of them. what everybody is saying won't sides of the issue coming up. speaking of "duck dynasty," the

stars of the show are a few of the guests who will be appearing in times square new year's eve. it will be robbing, baby. can we take a look at 6th avenue 'cause that's pretty rocking right now. look at all those people outside our studios. stay close

the patriarch of "duck dynasty" is back a & e welcoming phil robertson back to the network for production after his controversial statements, they said, to gq magazine over homosexuality, race, and his own personal beliefs got him suspended by the network. dominic dinatale is late insist with an about face from a & e. >> absolutely. you know what a & e hasn't even given us a clear reason why. they caved in in the end. but "duck dynasty" is the channel's highest rated program and it actually set a reality show record with nearly

12 million viewers for its fourth season debut this past summer. you can see why it's incredible lie important to the network n. a statement that still showed a & e executives weren't at ease with his comments on race and gay, it had this to say. "duck dynasty" is not a show about one man's views. it's a show about family, a family that americans have come to love, that come together to reflect and pray for unity, tolerance and forgiveness. these are three values that we at a & e networks also feel strongly about. and that seems to have really patched things up between the two. the robertsons cheered the news via twitter. willie posting this, back to work, he said. so proud of the fans and the show and the family. phil may be a little crude, but his heart is good. he's the real deal. not feeling the love, however, was the gay lobby, glaad rushed out this strong worded statement. phil robertson should look african-american and gay people

in the eyes and hear about the hurtful impact of praising jim crow laws. if dialogue with phil is not part of next stepsen then a & e has chosen profits overran and gay groups. a & e will air public service announcements that would promote tolerance, acceptance. tapings will resume in the spring. back to you. >> #"duck dynasty" on twitter. thank you very much. stay with fox news. i'll be back at 7:00 p.m. eastern with the fox report. my friends on "the five" are now. ♪ ♪ [ sniffles, coughs ] shhhh!

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i'm kimberly guilfoyle, with bob beckel and the others. it's 5:00 o'clock in new york city and this is "the five". ta >> is religion making a comeback in america? " it seems like people are hungry for something beyond what is offered in the materialistic sexually charged culture that seems to dominate our lives. for example, pope francis was named time magazine's 2013 person of the year of the bill o'reilly "killing jesus" is a "new york times" bestzi seller this year and "duck dynasty" and the faith of the robertsonn family has captured the hearts of tens of millions of of americans. and the history channel's mini series "the bible" was a