The Senate passed their version of immigration reform over a year ago, but House Republicans have failed to address the Senate’s bill or any bill containing the words immigration reform.
“Unfortunately, Republicans in the House of Representatives have repeatedly failed to take action, seemingly preferring the status quo of a broken immigration system over meaningful reform,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House.
“I urge House Republicans to listen to the will of the American people and bring immigration reform to the House floor for a vote,” Obama said.
He repeated that plea in a private conversation with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican said.
The Senate legislation, unveiled on April 16, 2013, and passed by the full Senate in June, has remained stalled in the Republican-led House, despite a strong vote by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The incident happened back in December when an African American student said that he would like to follow in the footsteps of President Obama. The teacher was placed on suspension after telling the student, “we don’t need another black president.”
During a hearing into the incident on Thursday, The Fairfield Board of Education in Ohio voted 4-0 to terminate Freshman science teacher Gil Voigt.
According to the Associated Press, Voigt is accustomed to making such statements and the committee referenced some of these incidents as unacceptable in their recommendation to fire the teacher.
Fairfield Superintendent Paul Otten said in a statement, “The District felt that the evidence was sufficient to support the termination of Mr. Voigt’s employment. The referee recommended such termination, and the board has concurred.”
Rajib Roy, who shares a single room with his mother and brother in the red light district of Kolkata, West Bengal, is set to play football at Old Trafford after being spotted by talent scouts.
The 16-year-old is one of 11 teens arriving in the UK this weekend to spend two weeks training with Manchester United’s coaches.
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Dazzling dribbler: Rajib Roy, 16, from Kolkata, West Bengal, is set to arrive in Manchester this weekend to take part in a training camp at Old Trafford after being spotted by talent scouts
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Rajib is pictured with his few possessions in the family’s single-room home in the Kolkata slum, the largest red light district in Asia, where he grew up with his prostitute mother and younger brother
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Family support: Rajib’s mother Rekha, an impoverished sex worker, helped him along his way to football success by sending him to a local school for children of women in her profession
The talented teenager caught the eye of United talent scouts at a national tournament for India’s best young players.
Most of the other boys travelling to Manchester this weekend are from well-off families and have the advantage of good schooling and fluency in English.
Rajib on the other hand, has grown up playing barefoot in the squalid streets of Kolkata where he lives in the heart of the largest red light area in Asia.
The Sonagachi suburb is home to 12,000 sex workers and he shares a tiny single room with his mother Rekha and younger brother.
Their cramped apartment also has a poster of Chelsea’s Oscar who Rajeeb idolises because, like him, he comes from a background of poverty in Brazil.
Like most boys in his neighbourhood Rajib has no idea who his father is, and he describes the moment he heard Manchester United had picked him as ‘like a father’s recognition.’
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Humble beginnings: Rajib is pictured with his mother Rekha in the small single room they share in Sonagachi, the suburb known as Kolkata’s red light district, which is home to 12,000 sex workers and their families
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Rajib, who has no idea who his father is, stands in the doorway of his home in the Sonagachi suburb of Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, in West Bengal
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Change of scenery: The talented striker learned to play football on these streets in the West Bengal slum he calls home, but is set to swap them for Old Trafford this weekend
Many of his friends have fallen prey to drugs and petty crime but Rajib has some prospects thanks to his natural footballing abilities.
His life changed two years ago when his mother sent him to the local Rahul Vidya Niketan school for the children of prostitutes.
It was set up by the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee whose aim is to improve the lives of sex workers and their families.
Four years ago DMSC founder Dr Samarjit Jana set up a foorball initiative at the school, believing that sport was the best way to integrate them into mainstream society.
Earlier this year striker Rajib was part of the West Bengal team to win the National Slum Soccer Tournament in Nagpur.
Last month he and 30 others from the DMSC were selected to take part in a nationwide school football championship in Goa.
Coaches from Manchester United were watching and they chose 11 boys who will fly to Britain and Old Trafford on Sunday.
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Close to goal: The 16-year-old is one of 11 teens arriving in the UK this weekend to spend two weeks training with Manchester United’s coaches after being spotted at a national tournament for young players in India
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Football for life: Rajib, centre, is pictured with his friends in the Kolkata slum where they grew up
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High hopes: Although he dreams of playing Premiere League football for Manchester United, Rajib hopes that his football talents will help him earn money to put his younger brother in a good school
Among other things they will get a free tour of the world-famous stadium which normally costs £20 – the monthly income of Rajib’s family.
Rajib said: ‘People keep asking me how it feels to be my mother’s son and then achieve something like this.
‘I don’t know how to answer that question.
‘But when my coach told me I had been selected by Manchester United it was like a father’s recognition.’
He added: ‘My mother is a very shy person. She would lock me in my room after lunch so that I could take a nap, but I would quietly sneak out to play with my friends.
‘Last month I was selected along with 30 others to participate in a camp in Goa through a nationwide school championship competition.
‘I arrived late because I took a train from Kolkata. Everybody else took a flight.
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Rajib has been attending the local Rahul Vidya Niketan school for the children of prostitutes, pictured, for two years, which is how he was finally able to play organised football
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The founder of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, whose aim is to improve the lives of sex workers and their families, Dr Samarjit Jana set up the football initiative which helped Rajib win a place at the Manchester United training camp
The teen admits he often spent the little money his mother gives him to buy lunch on watching football tournaments elsewhere in the city.
Dr. Jana said: ‘Rajib’s dream is to build career in football. He wants to play in the English Premier league and his favorite team is Manchester United.
‘One of his other goals is to help his nine year-old brother get into an English medium school so he can develop a better academic career.’
Dr. Jana added: ‘We started a football academy on a very small scale four years ago.
‘It provides training for children of marginalised communities such as sex workers and construction workers.
‘Out of 11 boys selected from this eastern part of India by Manchester United two of them are from our community.
‘There are five million sex workers in India and we are just providing a minority of them, and their families, with a chance.
‘This shows that if you give them the opportunities they have a chance of success and I’m sure other boys will follow them.’
In a joint appearance with her mom Hillary Clinton, daughter Chelsea made the announcement that she and her husband Marc were expecting their first child this year.
“I just hope that I will be as good a mom to my child and hopefully children as my mom was to me,” Chelsea Clinton said, according to the Washington Post.
Former president Bill Clinton took to Twitter and expressed his excitement with this tweet:
“Excited to add a new line to my Twitter bio…grandfather-to-be! @hillaryclinton and I are so happy for Chelsea and Marc!” he wrote.
The 21-year-old Australian woman was livid when she slammed into a bicyclist while texting late last year, putting dents in her car. The victim suffered a spinal fracture and would spend the next three months in a hospital, but Davis wasn’t having any of it, The Standard reports.
“I just don’t care because I’ve already been through a lot of bullshit and my car is, like, pretty expensive and now I have to fix it,” she told a responding officer two days after the Sept. 20 collision. “I’m kind of pissed off that the cyclist has hit the side of my car. I don’t agree that people texting and driving could hit a cyclist. I wasn’t on my phone when I hit the cyclist.”
Davis, of Port Fairy, pleaded guilty on Monday to dangerous driving and was fined $4,500. Police say she used her phone behind the wheel 44 times before running down the cyclist. She called emergency responders but parked more than 300 feet away from the victim and refused to offer him help.
Davis couldn’t contain her sadness after the loss of her license, and she made her woes known on Facebook:
The photo above appears to show that Davis expects to get her license back in May. She won’t — a judge on Monday suspended her license for another nine months.
The wife of the injured cyclist — who got spinal surgery and was told he could have been a paraplegic — said she was deeply disappointed that Davis’ license wasn’t suspended for longer.
And still, the Republicans are stuck on stupid! They’re still talking about repealing a law that is helping the economy, and helping millions and millions and millions of Americans! And as they talk about repeal, they have no idea on what to replace the law with if they somehow manage to repeal it.
President Obama announced Thursday that 8 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, calling the feat a success story that Democrats should “forcefully defend and be proud of” in the face of Republican election-year attacks on the law.
The enrollment figure, revised upward from the 7.5 million signups that the administration had announced earlier this month, renewed hopes at the White House that Democrats will be able to overcome the initial rocky rollout of the health law in the fall as they battle to maintain control of the Senate in the midterms this fall.
“This thing is working,” Obama said at an afternoon news conference. Of the GOP, he added: “They said no one would sign up. They were wrong about that. They are wrong to try to repeal a law that is working.”
The final figure is well above the White House’s initial target of 7 million signups.
Republicans, who have fought the law since it was passed by a sharply divided Congress in 2010, escalated their call for the law to be repealed after the problems with the enrollment Web site, which repeatedly broke down in its first few months. Obama’s job approval ratings dropped, and Democrats worried that the bad headlines would harm the party at the ballot box.
But a buoyant Obama said the better-than-expected enrollment news should convince Democrats to not shy away from embracing his signature domestic achievement.
“I don’t think we should apologize for it, and I don’t think we should be defensive about it,” he said. “I think it is a strong, good, right story to tell. I think what the other side is doing and what the other side is offering would strip away protections for those families.”
Tell us about your apps.
I got started when I got introduced to App Inventor in class. “Draw” is an app that you can draw things and change colors, take a picture from your gallery, make it the background for your drawing. I thought you might want to make a moustache on your friend. Or you might want to save your work so you could show your friend. The two others are for my Vikings report from social studies.
What do you think computer science will achieve by the time you grow up?
We’ll get things by clicking on an app or phone. Be able to change things at your house without even being at your house. I don’t think flying cars will happen – I mean, it would be cool, but do you really need that?
What are your favorite inventions that use software? I like MiniClip.com and Minecraft. For learning to code, I like the farmer levels onCode.org, Scratch, and App Inventor 2.
What do you like about computer science?
Computer science has made everything easier. My favorite thing about coding is I can make something on a device that two months ago, I couldn’t. I can make an app do whatever I want it to do!
And you thought lack of human decency was exclusive to some here in America.
Welcome to Australia, where a 21 year old driver, busy sending over 40 text messages, somehow found a cyclist and unintentionally introduced her car to the man. The driver drove for another 100 yards, found parking for her now damaged car and then, called for help.
The cyclist suffered a spinal fracture which required surgery and placement in a spinal cage at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital. He was originally told he could be left a paraplegic and spent three months recovering.
She was fined $4500 for the hit, but it’s what she told the officers two days after the accident that’s making news.
According to reports, the woman is upset, not because the texting distracted her and caused the accident, but because the cyclist somehow damaged her car.
“I just don’t care,” she told the police. “Because I’ve already been through a lot of bullshit and my car is like pretty expensive and now I have to fix it.
“I’m kind of pissed off that the cyclist has hit the side of my car. I don’t agree that people texting and driving could hit a cyclist. I wasn’t on my phone when I hit the cyclist.”
Two South Dakota girls on their way to an end-of-school-year party at a gravel pit in May 1971 drove off a country road and into a creek where their remains lay hidden until last fall when a drought brought their car into view, authorities said Tuesday.
State and local officials held a news conference Tuesday afternoon confirming that the 1960 Studebaker unearthed in September included the remains of Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson, both 17-year-olds who attended Vermillion High School.
The investigators showed dozens of photographs of well-preserved clothing, Miller’s purse and even her driver’s license complete with a smiling photograph. Those personal items and DNA were used to identify the girls, said Attorney General Marty Jackley. Jackson didn’t have her purse along.
South Dakota Attorney General’s Office/AP Photo
Cheryl Miller’s driver’s license, purse and other belongings were recovered after the car was discovered.
Classmates who saw the teens before they disappeared and other evidence indicated that they had not been drinking, he said. In addition, mechanical tests on the car pointed away from foul play, Jackley said. He noted that the car was in the highest gear and the headlight switch on the dashboard showed the lights were on.
“It’s consistent with a car accident,” Jackley said. “To start with, the forensic pathology and anthropology reports indicate that there’s no type of injury that would be consistent with or caused by foul play or inappropriate conduct.”
He said the bodies were found in the front seats, as opposed to the back seat or trunk, and that their clothing did not appear to be missing — all of which points away from their deaths being caused by a crime.
There is no way to know whether a blown tire might have cause a crash, but one was damaged and the tread was quite thin, he said.
Family members, law enforcement and others had searched the area countless times without luck.
“They were searching and they simply didn’t find it,” Jackley said.
Jackson’s father, Oscar, died Sept. 18, five days before the car was found.
“If you look at that obituary, it indicates one of the saddest parts of Oscar’s life is not knowing about the disappearance of his daughter Pam,” Jackley said.
South Dakota Attorney General’s Office/AP Photo
The odometer mileage reading of the 1960 Studebaker unearthed in September, 2013.
The girls’ disappearance was one of the initial investigations of South Dakota’s cold case unit in 2004.
A September 2004 search of a Union County farm turned up apparently unrelated bones, clothing, a purse, photographs, newspaper articles and other items, but not the car.
In a warrant authorizing the search, authorities said that David Lykken, who lived at the farm in 1971 and was a classmate of the girls, might have been involved in the disappearance of Miller and Jackson as well as three other unnamed people. Lykken is in prison serving an unrelated 227-year sentence for rape and kidnapping.
In July 2007, a Union County grand jury indicted Lykken on two counts of premeditated murder, two counts of felony murder and two counts of murder in the disappearance of Miller and Jackson. But state prosecutors dropped all six murder charges after concluding a jailhouse informant apparently lied about Lykken supposedly admitting to causing the deaths.
This drowsy Orangutan is a dead ringer for the mythical Big Foot as he is treated in hospital after being shot by poachers.
The enormous 14-year-old male dwarfed the petite vet as she worked to remove several metal pellets from his body at Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme centre.
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Docile: This huge Orangutan looked extremely grateful as he lay back for a medical examination after being shot by poachers in Sumatra
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Lookalike: The hulking male great ape is a dead ringer for the mythical Big foot, seen here in the classic 1987 movie Harry and the Hendersons
The team conduct medical examinations on a 14-year-old male orangutan found with air gun metal pellets embedded in his body in Sibolangit district in northern Sumatra island.
The center has cared for over 280 orangutans rescued from palm oil plantations, poachers and pet owners.
Over 200 have been reintroduced in the wild.
The critically-endangered primates population are dwindling rapidly due to poaching and rapid destruction of their forest habitat that is being converted into palm oil plantation.
The great ape was rescued by Indonesia’s ministry of forestry personnel and Orangutan Information Center earlier this week in nearby Langkat district.
He was found in a small patch of forest and agricultural plantation.
SOCP began in 1999.One of its first targets was to establish a quarantine facility for confiscated illegal pets and a reintroduction programme to release these animals back to the wild.
In 2002 the Batu Mbelin orangutan quarantine center was finally completed near Medan in North Sumatra.
SOCP monitors the status of remaining wild orangutan populations in Sumatra using remote sensing and field surveys.
There is a growing problem of human-orangutan conflict, where orangutans at the forest edge are increasingly attacked for raiding the crops of local farmers.
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Safe hands: The center has cared for over 280 orangutans rescued from palm oil plantations, poachers and pet owners and over 200 have been reintroduced in the wild
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