News Headlines
Santorum: Obama is ill-intentioned power grabber who undermines churches, promotes false fears
PHOENIX (AP) — A surging Rick Santorum is making increasingly harsh remarks about President Barack Obama, questioning not just the president’s competence but his motives and even his Christian values.
Mitt Romney also is sharpening his anti-Obama rhetoric. He said Tuesday the president governs with “a secular agenda” that hurts religious freedom. In general, however, the former Massachusetts governor has not seriously challenged Obama’s motives, often saying the president is decent but inept.
But Santorum and Newt Gingrich have heightened their claims that Obama’s intentions are not always benign, ahead of Wednesday’s televised GOP presidential debate and next week’s primaries in Michigan and Arizona.
Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who suddenly is threatening Romney in his native state of Michigan, says Obama cares only about power, not the “interests of people.” He says “Obamacare,” the health care overhaul Obama enacted, includes a “hidden message” about the president’s disregard for impaired fetuses, which might be aborted.
Santorum even seemed to compare Obama to Adolf Hitler, although he denies trying to do so.
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One more big case: High court adds affirmative action in college entry to election-year slate
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is setting an election-season review of racial preference in college admissions, agreeing Tuesday to consider new limits on the contentious issue of affirmative action programs.
A challenge from a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas flagship campus will be the high court’s first look at affirmative action in higher education since its 2003 decision endorsing the use of race as a factor.
This time around, a more conservative court could jettison that earlier ruling or at least limit when colleges may take account of race in admissions.
In a term already filled with health care, immigration and political redistricting, the justices won’t hear the affirmative action case until the fall.
But the political calendar will still add drama. Arguments probably will take place in the final days of the presidential election campaign.
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Administration officials: Treasury to release principles of corporate tax overhaul Wednesday
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration will propose lowering the current 35 percent corporate tax rate, while at the same time eliminating loopholes and subsidies and imposing a minimum tax on the overseas profits of American companies.
Administration officials said the Treasury Department on Wednesday will detail aspects of President Barack Obama’s proposed overhaul of the corporate tax system, a plan he broadly outlined in his State of the Union speech last month.
The 35 percent nominal corporate tax rate is the highest in the world after Japan. But deductions, credits and exemptions allow many corporations to pay taxes at a much lower rate.
The administration plan is not likely to go as far as a House Republican proposal to lower the rate to 25 percent. But Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told a House committee last week that the administration wants to create more incentives for corporations to invest in the United States.
“We want to bring down the rate, and we think we can, to a level that’s closer to the average of that of our major competitors,” Geithner told the House Ways and Means Committee.
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NYPD monitoring of websites of Muslim student groups sparks outrage at Yale, Rutgers
NEW YORK (AP) — The mayor faced off with the president of Yale University on Tuesday over an effort by the city’s police department to monitor Muslim student groups for any signs that their members harbored terrorist sympathies.
The Associated Press revealed over the weekend that in recent years the New York Police Department has kept close watch on Muslim student associations across the Northeast. The effort included daily tracking of student websites and blogs, monitoring who was speaking to the groups and sending an undercover officer on a whitewater rafting trip with students from the City College of New York.
Yale President Richard Levin was among a number of academics who condemned the effort in a statement Monday, while Rutgers University and leaders of student Muslim groups elsewhere called for investigations into the monitoring.
“I am writing to state, in the strongest possible terms, that police surveillance based on religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political opinions is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community, and the United States,” Levin wrote.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, dismissed those criticisms as baseless.
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Dozens killed in Syria as Red Cross calls for daily cease-fire to aid wounded and sick
BEIRUT (AP) — Food and water are running dangerously low in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, with frantic cries for help from residents amid government shelling that pounded rebel strongholds and killed at least 30 people Tuesday, activists said.
Shells reportedly rained down on rebellious districts at a rate of 10 per minute at one point and the Red Cross called for a daily two-hour cease-fire so that it can deliver emergency aid to the wounded and sick.
“If they don’t die in the shelling, they will die of hunger,” activist and resident Omar Shaker told The Associated Press after hours of intense shelling concentrated on the rebel-held neighborhood of Baba Amr that the opposition has extolled as a symbol of their 11-month uprising against President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Another 33 people were killed in northern Syria’s mountainous Jabal al-Zawiya region when government forces raided a town in pursuit of regime opponents, raising Tuesday’s overall death toll to 63, activists said. The Local Coordination Committees, an opposition group, said more than 100 were killed Tuesday, but the report could not immediately be confirmed by others.
Russia, one of Assad’s remaining allies, urged the United Nations to send a special envoy to Syria to help coordinate security issues and delivery of humanitarian assistance.
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Former LA teacher pleads not guilty to committing lewd acts with 23 children
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A former teacher whose arrest sparked a scandal at an elementary school that led to the replacement of all of its teachers pleaded not guilty Tuesday to committing lewd acts with 23 children in his classroom.
Mark Berndt, 61, remained jailed on $23 million bail. He was the first of two teachers arrested within a week on molestation charges involving students at Miramonte Elementary School
Martin Springer, 49, previously pleaded not guilty after he was charged with committing three lewd acts on one girl in 2009. He is free on $300,000 bail.
The entire Miramonte staff was replaced — at least temporarily — as the investigation proceeds.
Former students have sued, alleging other molestation incidents.
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11 children removed from Texas home after authorities find some restrained with harnesses
DAYTON, Texas (AP) — Texas authorities said Tuesday they removed 11 children from a crowded home where a registered sex offender lives after they found eight confined in a small, dark bedroom with restraints tying some to their beds.
Along with the children, 10 adults were living in the one-story, 1,700-square-foot home in Dayton, about 30 miles northeast of Houston, Child Protective Services spokeswoman Gwen Carter said. One month after a raid on the house, authorities are still trying to determine how the children are related and why they were there, she said.
The children ranged in age from 5 months to 11 years. Three who were age 5 or older had not been enrolled in school, Carter said.
The children were removed after authorities found two 2-year-old children tied to a bed during a January visit to the home, according to a court document.
A legally blind, 5-year-old girl “was in a restraint on a filthy mattress, and appeared to be in a daze,” the document said. One child had a black eye and knocked-out tooth.
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New family of primitive, legless amphibians discovered in remote jungles of northeast India
NEW DELHI (AP) — Since before the age of dinosaurs it has burrowed unbothered beneath the monsoon-soaked soils of remote northeast India — unknown to science and mistaken by villagers as a deadly, miniature snake.
But this legless amphibian’s time in obscurity has ended, thanks to an intrepid team of biologists led by University of Delhi professor Sathyabhama Das Biju. Over five years of digging through forest beds in the rain, the team has identified an entirely new family of amphibians — called chikilidae — endemic to the region but with ancient links to Africa.
Their discovery, published Wednesday in a journal of the Royal Society of London, gives yet more evidence that India is a hotbed of amphibian life with habitats worth protecting against the country’s industry-heavy development agenda.
It also gives exciting new evidence in the study of prehistoric species migration, as well as evolutionary paths influenced by continental shift.
“This is a major hotspot of biological diversity, but one of the least explored,” Biju said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We hope this new family will show the importance of funding research in the area. We need to know what we have, so we can know what to save.”
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Mick Jagger, B.B. King, Keb Mo and more belt out the blues for Obama in East Room concert
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sometimes there are downsides to being president: You can’t just go for a walk, says Barack Obama.
Then there are the times that more than make up for all those frustrations — like Tuesday night, when Mick Jagger, B.B. King, Jeff Beck and other musical giants came by the house to belt out the blues.
“I guess things even out a little bit,” Obama joked at the start of a rollicking East Room concert electrified by Jagger and featuring a musical A-list.
Legends and up-and-comers turned the East Room into an intimate blues club for a concert celebrating the rich history of the music and its lasting impact on American music.
“This music speaks to something universal,” Obama declared. “The blues reminds us that we’ve been through tougher times before.”
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Family inherits man’s remarkable comic book collection that is expected to net $2M at auction
DALLAS (AP) — Michael Rorrer said his great aunt once mentioned having comic books she would one day give him and his brother, but it was a passing remark made when they were boys and still into superheroes.
Ruby Wright gave no indication at the time — and she died last February, leaving it unclear — that her late husband’s comic collection contained some of the most prized issues ever published. The 345 comics were slated to sell at auction in New York on Wednesday, and were expected to fetch more than $2 million.
Rorrer, 31, of Oxnard, Calif., discovered his great uncle Billy Wright’s comics neatly stacked in a basement closet while helping clear out his great aunt’s Martinsville, Va., home a few months after her death. He said he thought they were cool but didn’t realize until months later how valuable they were.
Rorrer, who works as an operator at a plant where oil is separated from water, said he was telling a co-worker about Captain America No. 2, a 1941 issue in which the hero bursts in on Adolf Hitler, when the co-worker mused that it would be something if he had Action Comics No. 1, in which Superman makes his first appearance.
“I went home and was looking through some of them and there it was,” said Rorrer, who then began researching the collection’s value in earnest.
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