Daily news sites

Yahoo Newsreports Jan Brewer faced intensifying pressure Monday from CEOs, politicians in Washington and state lawmakers in her own party to veto a bill that would allow business owners with strongly held religious beliefs to deny service to gays and lesbians.

Senate Bill 1062 has set off a political firestorm since the Arizona Legislature passed it last week, with critics denouncing the measure as blatantly discriminatory and embarrassing to the state.

The chorus of opposition has grown each day, and on Monday, three state senators who voted in favor of the bill changed course and said they oppose it. U.S. Sen. John McCain asked Brewer to veto the measure, as did Apple Inc. and the CEO of American Airlines Group Inc.

More here

NY DailyNews reports the South Jersey kindergarten teacher who stumbled across two of her pupils naked and "having sex" in a bathroom was suspended for supposedly failing to supervise the students, a teachers’ union official said Monday.

But Kelly Mascio "acted in a professional manner and responsibly reported the incident,” Mullica Township Education Association President Barbara Rheault told the Daily News.

Now school officials are looking to fire the popular teacher who has been with the district for 16 years.

“Originally they said it was failure to supervise her students,” said Rheault.

So far the district has not said why they suspended Mascio with pay, but the police who investigated the incident have not charged her with a crime.

Macio got into hot water on Sept. 30 when she found two 5-year-old students — a boy and girl — naked in the bathroom at her classroom said.

She reported the incident immediately to her supervisor but was suspended later that day. The district conducted an investigation that concluded in December but so far Rheault said they have not released the reasoning for the suspension.

More here

NY Times reports Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since before the World War II buildup and eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets in a new spending proposal that officials describe as the first Pentagon budget to aggressively push the military off the war footing adopted after the terror attacks of 2001. 

The proposal, described by several Pentagon officials on the condition of anonymity in advance of its release on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged to end two costly and exhausting land wars. A result, the officials argue, will be a military capable of defeating any adversary, but too small for protracted foreign occupations. 

The officials acknowledge that budget cuts will impose greater risk on the armed forces if they are again ordered to carry out two large-scale military actions at the same time: Success would take longer, they say, and there would be a larger number of casualties. Officials also say that a smaller military could invite adventurism by adversaries.

More here

LA Timesreports they come from Central America with slips of paper sewn into their pockets bearing names they are sometimes too young to spell. Parents send them with Bibles, rosaries and small wooden crosses in their backpacks.

The flood of undocumented immigrants has slowed compared to five years ago — likely due to tighter border enforcement and the economic downturn in the U.S. — but in its place is a new immigration surge even more confounding: children and teenagers traveling through the rugged border lands into south Texas, lured by the promise of safety. Up to 120 unaccompanied youths are arriving each day, officials say, a number that has tripled over the last five years and that by some estimates could soon reach 60,000 a year.

The southeastern edge of Texas has become the busiest border crossing in the country for these wandering youths, most of whom are adolescents, though some are as young as 5 or 6. Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protectionagents apprehended more than 21,000 minors traveling without families on a roughly 315-mile stretch of the Rio Grande that runs west from Harlingen to the south of Laredo. That was more than half the total of 38,833 detained nationwide.

More here

Yahoo News reports the United States plans to launch a pair of satellites to keep tabs on spacecraft from other countries orbiting 22,300 miles above the planet, as well as to track space debris, the head of Air Force Space Command said.

The previously classified Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) will supplement ground-based radars and optical telescopes in tracking thousands of pieces of debris so orbital collisions can be avoided, General William Shelton said at the Air Force Association meeting in Orlando on Friday.

He called it a "neighborhood watch program" that will provide a more detailed perspective on space activities. He said the satellites, scheduled to be launched this year, also will be used to ferret out potential threats from other spacecraft.

The program "will bolster our ability to discern when adversaries attempt to avoid detection and to discover capabilities they may have which might be harmful to our critical assets at these higher altitudes," Shelton said in the speech, which also was posted on the Air Force Association's website.

The two-satellite network, built by Orbital Sciences Corp will drift around the orbital corridor housing much of the world's communications satellites and other spacecraft.

The Air Force currently tracks about 23,000 pieces of orbiting debris bigger than about 4 inches. These range from old rocket bodies to the remains of an exploded Chinese satellite.

More here