QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The current system is failing the men and women in uniform.”
Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., before the Senate blocked a bill that would have stripped senior military commanders of their authority to prosecute or prevent charges in cases of rape and other serious offenses Article, 5A
2 more Texas abortion clinics shut down
AUSTIN, Texas - The last abortion clinic in the vast, impoverished Rio Grande Valley closed Thursday, along with the sole remaining clinic in the 100-mile stretch between Houston and the Louisiana border, posing an obstacle to women seeking to end pregnancies across a wide area of the nation’s second-largest state.
The closures in McAllen and Beaumont take to 19 the number of clinics that have shut down since Texas lawmakers adopted new abortion restrictions last summer. Twenty-four clinics remain to serve a population of 26 million people, and more closures could happen after additional restrictions take effect later this year.
Lawmakers required all abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles, all abortions to take place in a surgical facility, and all women seeking abortion-inducing medications to make four clinical visits.
Those rules made it impossible for the clinics in Beaumont and McAllen to stay open, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health.
The Whole Woman’s Health clinics in Beaumont and McAllen had been open since 1973, when abortion was made legal by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.
Obama: Won’t deport over health care
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama assured Hispanics on Thursday that signing up for new health-insurance exchanges won’t lead to deportation for any relatives in the U.S. illegally.
Facing fresh skepticism from one of his traditionally most loyal constituencies, Obama pushed back on the notion of some critics that he’s become America’s “deporter in chief,” insisting that Hispanics know that “I’ve got their back.” In a virtual town-hall meeting with Spanish-language media outlets, Obama disputed that his credibility had been undermined by the chaotic health-care rollout and his failure to secure legal status for millions of Hispanics in the U.S. illegally.
Obama’s push to boost enrollment comes as the end of-March deadline to enroll is rapidly approaching - and with it, renewed concerns that if the Obama administration misses its target, the insurance pool could become unsustainable and undermine the broader law’s success.
Florida says illegal alien can’t be lawyer
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Aliens in the country illegally can’t be given a license to practice law, a question that was raised when a man who moved to the United States from Mexico when he was 9 years old sought a license in Florida, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The court said federal law prohibits people who are unlawfully in the country from obtaining professional licenses. The justices said state law can override the federal ban, but Florida has taken no action to do so.
The case involves Jose Godinez-Samperio, whose parents brought him to the United States on tourist visas and then never returned to Mexico. He graduated from New College in Florida, earned a law degree from Florida State University and passed the state bar in 2011.
Identities of Pearl Harbor victims sought
CONCORD, N.H. - The remains of 21 sailors killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor and buried as unknowns should be identified and returned to their families, a group of U.S.
senators said Thursday.
The sailors were aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma when it was attacked Dec. 7, 1941, ripped open by as many as nine torpedoes. The ship quickly rolled and came to rest just 20 minutes after being hit. Nearly 430 men died.
The remains of 27 sailors were classified as unknown and buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as The Punchbowl, in Honolulu.
In 2003, historian Ray Emory of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association used military records and personnel files to tentatively identify the 27 men. Five were then definitively identified by the Central Identification Laboratory of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and their remains returned to their families.
Emory also tracked down family members of 21 of the remaining 22 sailors. In a letter sent Thursday to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the 15 senators asked that those remains be exhumed and sent to the lab for identification.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 03/07/2014