Nigeria: Boko Haram kidnaps 30 more children; Study: Non-citizens are voting in federal elections...more

Nigeria: Boko Haram kidnaps 30 more children
Around 30 children were abducted by suspected Boko Haram militants during a siege on a village in northeast Nigeria, a local chief said on Sunday.

Alhaji Shettima Maina, who leads the village of Mafa in Borno state, said insurgents "grabbed young people, boys and girls" during an attack on Thursday.

"They took all boys aged 13 and above ...and all girls aged 11 and above," he added...
Muslim Extremists Kill 31 Christians in Taraba State, Nigeria

China Announces New Two-Child Policy
...The modifications come as China worries about its shrinking labor force. As the birth rate drops and the population grays, the number of workers between 15 and 59 years old fell in 2012 by 3.45 million to 937 million. Cai said the country’s potential growth rate will decrease 6.2 percent every year from 2016 to 2020. He doubts the policy change allowing a second child will stop the population from shrinking, as China’s fertility rate hovers at 1.6 per women, lower than the 2.1 needed to sustain population levels.

 

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, said in a statement “the problem with the one-child policy is not the number of children ‘allowed.’ Rather, it is the fact that the CCP is telling women how many children they can have and then enforcing that limit through forced abortion, forced sterilization, and infanticide.” The government has deemed forced abortions illegal, but the practice still continues in the countryside. At the same time, cultural preference for boys has led to a gender imbalance as parents abort their baby girls...

Churches urged to join forces against abortion-coverage mandate  ...The American Civil Liberties Union convinced the state agency that a 40-year-old state law requiring that plans cover "basic health services" has been misinterpreted for decades and should include elective abortion. But as many pro-life and pro-family groups argue, abortion is not healthcare...

Study: Non-citizens are voting in federal elections — and probably tipped at least one Senate race to Democrats ...Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin...

Derek Jeter’s Enduring Legacy
...Since the time he was a rookie, Jeter also exuded a quality rare among young athletes: maturity. He was a throwback to an earlier era—when the grass was real, and the game more traditional—demonstrated by his legendary work ethic, courtesy toward reporters, and passion to succeed. Others may have had more talent, but no one had more class on the diamond, practiced harder, or burned more to win.

Off the field, Jeter has not led an uneventful life—as the celebrity columnists are quick to remind us. But in an age of social media, Jeter has managed to keep his personal life largely private. More important, he told the New York Times that he is Catholic, recently revealed he always prays, and now talks about marrying and starting a family. In retirement, the process of maturity continues.

With his quiet demeanor and athletic grace, Derek Jeter has been called the Joe DiMaggio of our generation. He was, as Joseph Bottum maintains in his elegant Kindle essay on Jeter, genuinely important for baseball as well as our sports-oriented culture. Whether anyone sings a popular song about his mystique—as Simon and Garfunkel did for DiMaggio—is yet to be seen. But Derek Jeter’s standing—both as a baseball player, and human being—is secure among his legion of followers. His is a legacy that will endure...

7 things the middle class can't afford anymore ...The middle class has certainly changed. We've ranked a list of things the middle class can no longer really afford. We're not talking about lavish luxuries, like private jets and yachts. The items on this list are a bit more basic, and some of them are even necessities. The ranking of this list is based on affordability and necessity. Therefore, items that are necessity ranked higher, as did items that a larger percentage of people have trouble paying for...