Interactive: Mapping High School Graduation, Dropout Rates Across the U.S

The National Center for Education Statistics released this week a report on public-school graduation and dropout rates, and the news overall isn?t bad. About 78 percent of high school students have graduated within four years, the highest average since 1974.

(RELATED: Recession Pushes States to Make Deep Cuts to Higher-Ed Budgets)

Graduation rates by race and ethnicity are up across the board, with Hispanic students seeing a 10-point increase over five years to 71.4 percent, and black students showing a 7-point increase to 66.1 percent.

But it?s hard to ignore comparative gaps. Asian-American students graduate at a rate of 93 percent--nearly 27 points higher than black students--while white students are at 83 percent.

Also, students of color drop out at a higher rate. While the national average stands at 3.4 percent, the rate for Hispanics is 5.5 percent, and that for black students is 5 percent. In comparison, just 1.9 percent of Asian and Pacific Islanders and 2.3 percent of white students are not finishing high school.

The maps below show graduation and dropout rates.?The darker areas represent higher percentages of students either graduating within four years or dropping out of school.

On average, students on the East and West coasts complete school at rates better than students in parts of the South. Dropout rates appear to almost mirror that effect: More students drop out in the South than anywhere else.

Try switching back and forth between students by race and ethnicity.?

?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/interactive-mapping-high-school-graduation-dropout-rates-across-123659929--politics.html

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Lavrov: Iran and West need to set venue for talks

MOSCOW (AP) ? Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that Iran and the West should stop behaving "like little children" and agree on where to hold talks on Tehran's nuclear program that were supposed to take place this month.

"We think the essence of our talks is far more important than the atmosphere of any given town," Lavrov said at a news conference. "We hope that common sense will prevail and we will stop being capricious like little children."

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Monday blamed the West for the holdup over the venue, striking back at the European Union, which last week accused Tehran of willfully delaying new nuclear talks with the six world powers by changing venues and using other stalling tactics.

Monday's statements by Salehi and Lavrov suggest no headway has been made on Iran's proposal of Egypt as the site to renew dialogue, more than six months since the last round ended in stalemate.

Salehi also suggested Turkey, which hosted one of the three rounds of talks Iran held last year with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

The West has not given a definitive list of options, but Salehi said Kazakhstan, Switzerland and Sweden have been raised.

The talks had been planned for January, but with less than a week remaining in the month they will most likely have to be delayed.

The last round of nuclear talks ended in stalemate in Moscow in June, triggering new international sanctions that have been pressing hard on the Iranian economy.

The West demands that Iran halt its highest-level enrichment of uranium, which Washington and others fear could quickly be turned into nuclear warhead-grade material.

Iran insists it does not seek nuclear arms ? repeatedly citing a 2005 edict by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that called atomic weapons a violation of Islamic tenets ? and says it only wants to enrich uranium to make fuel for reactors.

Iran's leaders know the only route to ease the economic pressures ? and possibly undercut threats of military action on its nuclear sites by Israel ? is through potential deal-making with the six world powers.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lavrov-iran-west-set-venue-talks-110411593.html

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Shapiro: 'Liberal' label doesn't cut it for Obama

By Walter Shapiro

Is Barack Obama a liberal?

That question might have aroused spirited debate, especially among Democrats, during the president?s vague-is-in-vogue re-election campaign. But since the polls closed on Nov. 6, President Obama has undeniably positioned himself to the left of Candidate Obama.?

Amid the national grieving over the Sandy Hook shootings, Obama suddenly found the gumption to stare down the NRA and put gun control back on the national agenda. His inaugural address will be remembered for the stirring endorsement of gay rights and the sudden rediscovery of climate change. Then before the inaugural glow wore off, the Pentagon announced that it would drop its ban on women in combat. And immigration reform?another explosive topic?is likely to receive a star turn in the upcoming State of the Union address.

But before we dust off right-wing commentator Dinesh D?Souza?s absurd claim that Obama is really a Kenyan socialist, let?s look more closely at the president?s sudden liberal fervor.

Make no mistake, Obama is indeed a transformational 21st-century leader when it comes to any issue that touches on individual rights and equality. He reflects the end of the white-bread politics that elected both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to two terms. Rather than defying the demographic and attitudinal shifts that produced the America of 2013, Obama embodies them.

Some of his liberal statements and actions are undoubtedly payback to the electoral coalition that gave the president a second term despite the stagnant economy. When the first wave of Obama White House memoirs are published, it will be fascinating to read about the internal debates over the gay-rights portion of the inaugural address. But maybe, in reality, there was little dissent. Maybe Obama and his top advisers simply understood that it was time.

Any discussion of Obama?s newly expressed passion for gun control has to begin with the fact that this Chicago-shaped politician is our first urban president since John Kennedy. Unlike, say, Bill Clinton, Obama never came from a place where guns are equated with hunting rather than violent shootouts. Remember, during the 2008 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Obama in a private fundraiser derided rural voters who ?cling to guns or religion.?

When it comes to regulating guns, political geography matters. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg may be the nation?s most zealous proponent of gun control, but it is hard to describe this billionaire plutocrat, who endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004, as a dangerous left-winger.

Immigration reform is another issue with a bipartisan pedigree. The plan that Obama is likely to highlight in his State of the Union address will bear a close resemblance to the legislation that John McCain and Ted Kennedy introduced in 2005 with the blessing of George W. Bush and Karl Rove. It is hard to describe the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has consistently backed immigration reform, as a hotbed of left-wingers.

Painting an ideological portrait of any incumbent president is tricky since the subject keeps moving rather than holding a fixed position. All presidencies are filled with contradictions: Ronald Reagan raised taxes; Bush dramatically expanded the social safety net by adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare; and Obama, for a while, dramatically increased troop levels in Afghanistan.

Even now, there is a zigzag quality to Obama?s foreign policy. In his inaugural address, the president declared, ?A decade of war is now ending.? But not the vastly expanded drone attacks, which have become Obama?s favored way of battling terrorists. To the consternation of liberals, Obama has refused to make public the legal justification for this airborne war conducted by robots.

The president?s economic orientation can be equally confounding. In an interview after the election, Obama claimed, ?My policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.? Of course, this contention is self-servingly hyperbolic. But Obama?s words do underscore how the political pendulum on economic issues (but decidedly not on social issues) has moved to the right in the past three decades.

How liberal is a president who signed the ?fiscal cliff? legislation that made permanent the Bush tax cuts for roughly 99 percent of Americans? How liberal is a president who at various points in his budget negotiations with the Republicans has toyed with raising the eligibility age for Medicare and cutting back the inflation adjustment for Social Security? How liberal is a president who allowed the Wall Street masterminds behind the economic collapse to go unpunished for their flagrant misdeeds?

Even the big-government complexity of Obamacare was created in large measure because the president refused to endorse the liberal cause of a single-payer system like Medicare. And while not beating the drums for the president?s claim to be a moderate Republican, didn?t a Massachusetts governor named Mitt Romney enact an analogous health-care plan?

The point is that an inaugural address and a few post-election gestures do not, by themselves, define who Obama is as a political leader. So far the liberalism of Obama in the personal sphere has been tempered by the centrism of Obama in the economic and foreign-policy realm.

This ideological blurriness comes with the keys to the Oval Office. To steal a line from Walt Whitman, Obama can rightly say, ?I am large, I contain multitudes.?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/don-t-hem-him-in---liberal--can-t-define-the-obama-presidency--154423941.html

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Randy Quaid Denied Canadian Residency Status

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/01/randy-quaid-denied-canadian-residency-status/

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Senate nears vote on $50.5B bill for Sandy victims

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Three months after Superstorm Sandy devastated coastal areas in much of the Northeast, the Senate moved Monday toward passing a $50.5 billion emergency package of relief and recovery aid after House Republicans stripped it of spending unrelated to disasters.

Despite opposition from conservatives concerned about adding billions of dollars more to the nation's debt, Northeast lawmakers were optimistic about having the 60 votes needed to win Senate approval and send the long-delayed package to President Barack Obama, who has said he would sign it. The House passed the bill two weeks ago.

Lawmakers say the money is urgently needed to start rebuilding homes, businesses, public transportation facilities and other infrastructure damaged by the Oct. 29 storm, one of the worst ever to strike the Northeast. Sandy is blamed for more than 130 deaths in the U.S. and tens of billions of dollars in property damages, particularly in New York and New Jersey.

"There's no excuse for delay," said Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. "We need to get assistance to victims of Sandy as soon as possible.

The biggest chunk of money is $16 billion for Housing and Urban Development Department community development block grants. Of that, about $12 billion will be shared among Sandy victims as well as those from other federally declared disasters in 2011-2013. The remaining $3.9 billion is solely for Sandy-related projects.

More than $11 billion will go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief aid fund for shelter, restoring power and other storm-interrupted utility services and meeting other immediate needs arising from Sandy and other disasters. Another $10 billion is devoted to repairing New York and New Jersey transit systems and making them more resistant to future storms.

"The funding in this bill is urgently needed," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., as Senate debate began. "Hundreds of thousands of families have seen their lives turned upside down."

Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., said Republicans weren't seeking "to undermine" help for Sandy victims, but instead wre trying to make sure that the money was actually being spent on emergency needs.

"We're simply trying to say we need some standards," Coats said.

Earlier in January, Congress approved and Obama signed a $9.7 billion bill to replenish the National Flood Insurance Program, which has received well more than 100,000 flood insurance claims from businesses, homeowners and businesses related to Sandy. Added to the new, $50.5 billion package, the total is is roughly in line with the $60.4 billion that Obama requested in December.

Sandy damaged or destroyed 305,000 housing units in New York and more than 265,000 businesses were disrupted there, according to officials. In New Jersey, more than 346,000 households were destroyed or damaged.

The aid package was greased for passage before the last Congress adjourned and the new one came in on Jan. 3. But Speaker John Boehner refused to bring it to the floor after two-thirds of House Republicans voted against a "fiscal cliff" deficit reduction deal raising taxes on couples making more than $450,000 a year while deferring some $24 billion in spending cuts to have been shared between defense and domestic programs.

The ruckus after the Senate had passed an earlier $60.4 billion Sandy relief package by a nearly 2-to-1 margin on Dec. 28 exposed deep political divisions within Republican ranks. "There's only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims, the House majority and their speaker, John Boehner," Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fumed at the time.

Top House Republicans responded by bringing new Sandy aid legislation to the floor under ground rules designed to win over as many Republicans as possible while retaining support from Democrats eager to approve as much in disaster aid as possible.

GOP leaders cut spending in the Senate bill unrelated to disasters. One was to transfer $1 billion for training Iraqi policemen to instead be used on bolstering security at U.S. diplomatic missions abroad in the wake of a Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed.

Also deleted was $188 million for an Amtrak expansion project that included new, long-planned tunnels from New Jersey to Penn Station in Manhattan, and another $150 million for fisheries disasters that states such as Alaska and Mississippi could have shared.

After all the cost-cutting, 179 House Republicans still voted against the disaster aid package with only 49 favoring it. GOP leaders had to rely on yes votes from 192 Democrats to pass it.

As with past natural disasters, the Sandy aid bill does not offset the aid with spending cuts, meaning the aid comes at the cost of higher deficits. The lone exception is an offset provision requiring that $3.4 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects to protect against future storms be covered by unspecified spending cuts of an equal amount in other programs before next October.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, sought to amend the final package Monday with a provision to cut federal programs across the board by one-half of 1 percent through 2021 as a way to prevent the disaster aid from swelling the U.S. debt. Democrats were optimistic Lee would be unable to muster 60 votes needed to prevail.

As of Monday, FEMA said it spent $3.3 billion in disaster relief money for shelter, restoring power and other immediate needs arising from the storm.

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, New Hampshire, Ohio, Delaware, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia have shared that money.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senate-nears-vote-50-5b-181528898.html

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Mali: Timbuktu mayor says Islamists burned texts

SEVARE, Mali (AP) ? Fleeing Islamist extremists torched a library containing historic manuscripts in Timbuktu, the mayor said Monday, as French and Malian forces closed in on Mali's fabled desert city.

Ousmane Halle said he heard about the burnings early Monday.

"It's truly alarming that this has happened," he told The Associated Press by telephone from Mali's capital, Bamako, on Monday. "They torched all the important ancient manuscripts. The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people."

The mayor said Monday that the radical Islamists had torched his office as well as the Ahmed Baba Institute ? a library rich with historical documents ? in an act of retaliation before they fled late last week.

He said he didn't have further details as communications to the city have been cut off.

Ground forces backed by French paratroopers and helicopters took control of Timbuktu's airport and the roads leading to the town in an overnight operation, a French military official said Monday. It marked the latest success in the two-week-old French mission to oust radical Islamists from the northern half of Mali, which they seized more than nine months ago.

French Col. Thierry Burkhard, the chief military spokesman in Paris, said Monday that the town's airport was taken without firing a shot.

"There was an operation on Timbuktu last night that allowed us to control access to the town," he said Monday. "It's up to Malian forces to retake the town."

The Timbuktu operation comes a day after the French announced they had seized the airport and a key bridge in a city east of Timbuktu, Gao, one of the other northern provincial capitals that had been under the grip of radical Islamists, who had turned it into a virtual replica of Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

The French and Malian forces so far have met little resistance from the Islamists, who seized northern Mali in the wake of a military coup in the distant capital of Bamako, in southern Mali.

Timbuktu, which lies on an ancient caravan route, has entranced travelers for centuries, is some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) northeast of Bamako. During their rule, the militants have systematically destroyed UNESCO World Heritage sites in Timbuktu.

A spokesman for the al-Qaida-linked militants has said that the ancient tombs of Sufi saints were destroyed because they contravened Islam, encouraging Muslims to venerate saints instead of God.

Among the tombs they destroyed is that of Sidi Mahmoudou, a saint who died in 955, according to the UNESCO website.

Timbuktu, long a hub of Islamic learning, is also home to some 20,000 manuscripts, some dating back as far as the 12th century. Owners have succeeded in removing some of the manuscripts from Timbuktu to save them, while others have been carefully hidden away from the Islamists.

The destructions recall tactics used by the Taliban in 2001 when they dynamited a pair of giant Buddhas carved into a mountain in Bamiyan province. Around the same time, the Taliban also rampaged through the national museum, smashing any art depicting the human form, considered idolatrous under their hardline interpretation of Islam. In all, they destroyed about 2,500 statues.

___

Petesch reported from Johannesburg. Associated Press reporters Rukmini Callimachi in Sevare, Mali and Lori Hinnant in Paris contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mali-timbuktu-mayor-says-islamists-burned-texts-114143401.html

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Chris Brown investigated for possible assault

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) ? Grammy-winning singer Chris Brown is under investigation for an alleged assault in a West Hollywood parking lot, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said early Monday.

Deputies responding to a report of six men fighting Sunday night found the scene clear, but were told by witnesses there had been a brief fight over a parking space.

"The altercation allegedly led to Chris Brown punching the victim," the department said in a statement released early Monday morning.

The "victim" wasn't identified, but the celebrity website TMZ, which first reported the fight outside the Westlake Recording Studio, said it also involved Frank Ocean, one of the top nominees at the Grammy Awards next month.

In a Twitter posting later, Ocean said he "got jumped by (Brown) and a couple guys" and suffered a finger cut.

It wasn't Brown's first problem in the run-up to the Grammys. His attack on singer Rihanna on the eve of the 2009 awards event overshadowed the show.

Last June, he was injured in a brawl with members of hip-hop star Drake's entourage at a New York nightclub.

No arrests were made. Brown was gone by the time deputies arrived but the department said the investigation is ongoing and Brown would be contacted later.

Email messages to Ocean's publicist and Brown's lawyer and representative were not immediately returned. A man answering the phone at the recording studio declined to comment.

Brown, 23, remains on probation for the attack on Rihanna and is due back in court on Feb. 6 to update a judge on his progress. Prosecutors have raised concerns about records showing that Brown has completed his community labor obligations.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chris-brown-investigated-possible-assault-090656620.html

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