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The Rev Jesse Jackson has appealed to Barack Obama to "please come home" to Chicago and address the crisis in American urban life following the fatal shooting of a teenager less than a mile from Obama's house in the city. "The president's voice is so urgently needed here," said Jackson, arguing that Obama's presence would help draw attention to the complexity of the economic and social problems affecting areas like Chicago that compound problems related to gun violence. "[That alone] would illuminate the condition." At a press conference at his Rainbow/Push headquarters, Jackson insisted that the importation of guns and...

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Approximately 5.2 percent of funds obligated to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) during fiscal years 2009-2011 actually went to the construction of new highways. An additional two and a half percent of that funding went to new construction of bridges, according to a Jan. 16 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) entitled “Highway Trust Fund Obligations, Fiscal Years 2009 to 2011.” Between FY 2009-2011, the Department of Transportation [DOT] authorized $144 billion from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) to four separate administrations within the Department. Of that $144 billion, $116.7 billion went to the FHWA. FHWA then devoted 81...

Goodbye candy bars and sugary cookies. Hello baked chips and diet sodas. The government for the first time is proposing broad new standards to make sure all foods sold in schools are more healthful, a change that would ban the sale of almost all candy, high-calorie sports drinks and greasy foods on campus. Under new rules the Department of Agriculture proposed Friday, school vending machines would start selling water, lower-calorie sports drinks, diet sodas and baked chips instead. Lunchrooms that now sell fatty “à la carte” items like mozzarella sticks and nachos would have to switch to healthier pizzas, low-fat...

Jen Maksel knows she's one of the lucky ones. Her 7-year-old son, Bryce, escaped last Friday's carnage by fleeing hero teacher Vicki Soto's classroom when the gunman looked away. Last Friday morning Maksel, 42, was just drifting off to sleep after working an overnight shift then putting her kids on the bus when her phones began ringing off the hook. Before she could answer them, a neighbor began pounding on her front door yelling, "There's a school shooting at Sandy Hook!" She jumped in her car and headed to the school. "I parked on the side of the road and...

Washington continues to talk, but only talk, about the danger of Bashar al-Assad's increasingly desperate regime in Syria distributing its arsenal of high-tech or even nuclear weapons to terrorists throughout the Mideast. Meanwhile, the Israelis continue to act. Five years ago, they took out a nuclear reactor the Syrians were building without seeing any need to noise it about, realizing that action speaks louder than words -- and that much of the world, especially the Bush administration back then, would discreetly approve. This time the Israelis aren't saying anything official about what seems to have happened to a convoy of...

About 200 Arabs set up an illegal outpost Saturday near the village of Burin, not far from Shechem, in Samaria. They had put up a tent when the IDF arrived on the scene and dispersed them. The Arabs attacked the IDF force with rocks, and the soldiers responded with riot dispersal gear. No one was reported hurt. Voice of Israel public radio reported that Jew and Arabs confronted each other at the Yitzhar junction, in another incident on the Sabbath. The two groups hurled rocks at each other and an IDF force came in to separate them. Three Jews were...

<p>ATLANTA (AP) — A student opened fire at his middle school Thursday afternoon, wounding a 14-year-old in the neck before an armed officer working at the school was able to get the gun away, police said.</p> <p>Multiple shots were fired in the courtyard of Price Middle School just south of downtown about 1:50 p.m. and the one boy was hit, Atlanta Police Chief George Turner said. In the aftermath, a teacher received minor cuts, he said.</p>

If only American soldiers in Afghanistan were unemployed Democratic voters in Chicago, then they might be getting three square meals a day from the government.

Yet another student has been suspended for having something that represents a gun, but isn’t actually anything like a real gun. This time, Daniel McClaine, Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School in Tan Valley, Arizona, made the mistake of setting a picture of a gun as the desktop background on his school-issued computer. The picture shows an AK-47 lying on a flag, reports KNXV-TV. The gun isn’t his, McClaine assured the ABC affiliate in Phoenix. He found it on the Internet and liked it, partly because he is interested in serving in the military after graduation. A teacher...

New London — Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said the military's ban on women in combat had become embarrassing, and the decision to lift it may one day affect the draft. "What we've really done is spun the paradigm on its head," Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in his first visit to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy Thursday. The question isn't "should a woman serve" in a job specialty, Dempsey said, it's "why shouldn't a woman serve?" "Will this expand into the selective service? It might," he said. "But that's a decision of Congress. I can...

There is a fun little website up that is being run in conjunction with The Walking Dead television show -- which is, by the way, my favorite of all time.There is something SO FAMILIAR about the concept of an apocalypse that is caused by mindless, shuffling, constantly-hungry masses of people that care nothing about their own safety or well-being (or that of the people around them), but ONLY about gratifying their unholy and insatiable needs.There is something SO IN TUNE with the modern American landscape, and perhaps that is what draws me to the show.All of that nonwithstanding, I give...

Michigan: Detroit Closing 50 ParksDetroit will close nearly half of its parks and will reduce maintenance and services at dozens of others after the City Council passed on a deal that would have had the state operate the city’s Belle Isle park, Mayor Dave Bing said on Friday. Closing 50 of 107 parks will allow the city to keep running Belle Isle, a 985-acre park in the Detroit River, after the Council declined to vote on Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposal. Mr. Snyder’s offer called for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to run Belle Isle as a state park, but...

An armed guard successfully disarmed a 14-year-old shooter who had opened fire at an Atlanta middle school on Thursday. Thanks to the courageous off-duty school resource officer, only one student was shot and no one was killed. Yet CNN host Piers Morgan on Friday argued that the armed guard, an unidentified off-duty Atlanta police officer, “was NOT able to stop” the Atlanta school shooting, apparently because the teen shooter was able to shoot just one student before he was stopped. “REVEALED: Armed guard was NOT able to stop Atlanta school shooting,” Morgan posted via his official Twitter account. He then...

People have been warning us for years that drilling for oil in the Alaskan arctic would lead to big environmental trouble. It’s not that the technology hasn’t advanced to the point where it can be done safely, but those nasty people in charge of the projects just don’t care about the environment. These Mother Earth Hating Monsters would clearly let the whole thing go to H. E. double toothpicks and ruin the pristine beauty of the wilderness. Well, I guess they turned out to be right. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to plug at least one additional...

As of this writing, major news networks such as ABC, Fox News, CBS, and NBC have yet to report on the high court’s decision to review Barack Hussein Obama’s eligibility to hold political office in the United States or any of its territories. The case is identified as Edward Noonan, et al., v. Deborah Bowen, California Secretary of State. On Feb. 15, all nine justices will gather in conference to review whether Obama used forged government documents and fake identification in order to get elected as commander-in-chief. Edward Noonan, et al., contend that if Obama had been ineligible to run...

Actually, the answer is no, and it wasn’t intended to do so either, as I write in a new column for The Fiscal Times. The Obama administration was under a court order to modify the mandate regulation after a legal representation to a federal court that HHS never intended to enforce the mandate in its then-current form. The court ruled that a binding commitment and ordered HHS to submit a new regulation for their review by March 31st. Yesterday’s release of the new regulation is intended to win the court’s approval in dismissing a lawsuit brought by Belmont Abbey College...

Barack Obama recently told the New Republic that he understands the concerns of gun owners, because “in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.” As critics chortled over both the notion that skeet shooting is what concerns gun owners and the idea that Obama shoots clay pigeons “all the time,” the White House has finally released a photo to back up its claim … and only one photo, dated August 12, 2012: That led to a barrage of questions from journalists about whether the White House could offer proof that the president had gone shooting....

This is somewhat surprising given all the signals Brown had been sending over the last few weeks. But his reasoning appears sound. From Boston Herald: ________________________ Scott Brown will not run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by John Kerry, the former senator told the Herald first today. "U r the first to know I am not running," Brown texted the Herald. Brown's decision follows yesterday's announcement by fellow Republican Charlie Baker that he won't run for the seat either. Baker did urge former Gov. William Weld, who just moved back to Massachusetts, to run if Brown doesn't. [...] Brown...

Archbishop Jose H. Gomez. Credit: Patrick Novecosky/Legatus. Los Angeles, Calif., Feb 1, 2013 / 05:22 pm (CNA).- Archbishop José Gomez's decision to relieve Cardinal Roger Mahony and Bishop Thomas Curry of their duties in the L.A. archdiocese is being welcomed as “the best possible thing he could have done.” “The archbishop has in one stroke, opened up the doors and let in the sunlight,” historian and author Charles Coulombe told CNA Feb. 1. “It is an enormously difficult task he has taken on...it would have been the case no matter what he did.” “However, he handled it brilliantly, wisely,...