Washington, DC - President Obama says he makes mistakes, but has learned from them and is a better president heading into his re-election campaign.

"I second-guess constantly," Obama told ABC News. "I make a mistake, you know, every hour, every day ... (but) there are always things that you're learning in the job."

"And I have no doubt that I'm a better president now than the day I took office just because you get more experience," he said. "But when you look at the broad outlines of what we did, had it not been for the steps we took our economy would be profoundly weaker than we are right now."

Obama cited the Recovery Act -- also known as the stimulus bill -- as well as the auto bailout.

As ABC notes, "the president was responding to a question by a Yahoo user asking him if there's something he learned about himself and wished he had done in the first three years."

The president wraps up a post-State of the Union tour with an education speech today at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Read more >>> http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/01/obama-i-make-mistakes-but-am-learning-/1

Chicago, IL - Three teenagers were charged with a hate crime after they allegedly attacked another youth at a home on the South Side in December — putting a noose around his neck, threatening him with a knife and calling him a racial epithet, police said Wednesday.

The victim, who is 17, and one of the alleged attackers are both students at Brother Rice High School on the South Side, police said. The accused are all white — ranging in age from 16 to 18 — and the victim is black, police said.

The incident happened Dec. 23, when the victim went to the home of one of the accused in the 1600 block of W. 100th Place, police said. It was unclear why the victim went to the home, but police said the attack stemmed from his relationship with “one of the offenders’ family members,” police said.

The victim told police that during the attack, the teens twice put a noose around his neck, threatened him with a knife, used the N-word and refused to let him leave the house. The victim was eventually able to escape.

In an interview with Fox Chicago News, the victim said one attacker threatened him with a knife and told him “stop talking to my cousin, you are annoying her; if you don’t stop, I’m going to kill you.”

The teens were charged Jan. 10, police said. Two have been charged in juvenile court. The third, Matthew Herrmann, 18, is charged as an adult.

Mesa, AZ - Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer came to greet President Barack Obama upon his arrival outside Phoenix Wednesday. What she got was a critique. Of her book.

The two leaders could be seen engaged in an intense conversation at the base of Air Force One’s steps. Both could be seen smiling, but speaking at the same time.

Asked moments later what the conversation was about, Brewer, a Republican, said: “He was a little disturbed about my book.”

Brewer recently published a book, “Scorpions for Breakfast,” something of a memoir of her years growing up and defends her signing of Arizona’s controversial law cracking down on illegal immigrants, which Obama opposes.

Obama was objecting to Brewer’s description of a meeting he and Brewer had at the White House, where she described Obama as lecturing her. In an interview in November Brewer described two tense meetings. The first took place before his commencement address at Arizona State University. “He did blow me off at ASU,” she said in the television interview in November.

She also described meeting the president at the White House in 2010 to talk about immigration. “I felt a little bit like I was being lectured to, and I was a little kid in a classroom, if you will, and he was this wise professor and I was this little kid, and this little kid knows what the problem is and I felt minimized to say the least.”

On the tarmac Wednesday, Brewer handed Obama an envelope with a handwritten invitation to return to Arizona to meet her for lunch and to join her for a visit to the border.

“I said to him, you know, I have always respected the office of the president and that the book is what the book is,” she told reporters Wednesday. She said Obama complained that she described him as not treating her cordially.

“I said that I was sorry that he felt that way. Anyway, we’re glad he’s here, and we’ll regroup.”

A White House official said Brewer handed Obama a letter and said she was inviting him to meet with her. The official said Obama told her he would be glad to meet with her again. The official said Obama did note that after their last meeting, which the official described as a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation between the president and the governor.

Bridgeport, CT - Four police officers, including the president of the local police union, were arrested Tuesday by the FBI on charges that they assaulted illegal immigrants and created false reports to cover up abuses in a New Haven suburb where a federal investigation found life was made miserable for Hispanics.EastThe East Haven officers assaulted individuals while they were handcuffed, unlawfully searched Latino businesses, and harassed and intimidated individuals, including advocates, witnesses and other officers who tried to investigate or report misconduct or abuse the officers committed, according to the federal indictment.

Federal authorities began investigating police in 2009 in East Haven, where the federal probe last month documented a pattern of abuse. Latino business owners said rough treatment by police drove many newcomers from Mexico and Ecuador to leave the blue-collar city.

The arrests were welcomed by Hispanic business owners in East Haven, including Luis Rodriguez, an immigrant from Ecuador who had complained of harassment by police at his Los Amigos Grocery store.

"They should have to pay, not with many years, but enough to make an example of them. They should not abuse their power," Rodriguez said. "All I ever wanted was to be left in peace."

Officers Dennis Spaulding, David Cari and Jason Zullo and Sgt. John Miller, president of the police union, are charged with conspiracy, deprivation of rights and obstruction of justice.

Federal officials said the officers denied Latino residents and their advocates the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to not be arrested and detained without probable cause and the right to not be arrested on false and misleading evidence.

Zullo allegedly described taking joy in singling out Latinos, telling Spaulding in a 2008 exchange quoted by the indictment that he liked harassing drivers and referred to "persons who have drifted to this country on rafts made of chicken wings and are now residing" in East Haven.

Miller repeatedly slapped a man handcuffed in his car, while Spaulding threw a man to the ground and repeatedly kicked him while he was handcuffed, according to the indictment. Mayor Joseph Maturo said the four men were arrested around 6 a.m. Tuesday at their homes and at the police department.

Donald Cretella, Miller's lawyer, said his client has been honored with awards and risked his life in shootouts.

"John Miller is a hero in East Haven," he said. "He's decorated. He's a wonderful family man. Hopefully, we'll clear his name."

Frank Riccio Jr., Spaulding's attorney, said his client is an exemplary police officer.

"At this early stage, it's our position Mr. Spaulding is not guilty of the charges. He's been nothing but an exemplary police officer. That's why this is shocking."

It wasn't immediately clear who was representing Cari and Zullo.

The indictment said Miller reported to a police department leader described as a co-conspirator who blocked efforts by the police commission to investigate Miller's misconduct. That is a reference to Chief Leonard Gallo, according to a person with direct knowledge who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. A message was left for Gallo.

The indictment also accused unnamed union leaders of intimidation and interference to protect the officers, including a depiction of a rat posted on a bulletin board and a cartoon saying, "You know what we do with snitches?" in a police locker room.

The U.S. attorney for Connecticut, David Fein, said the investigation is still looking into other incidents and individuals. Officials said no more arrests were expected Tuesday.

Maturo, a Republican who took office Nov. 19, recently reinstated Gallo as police chief. Gallo had been on paid administrative leave since federal authorities began investigating in 2010. Maturo said he backs the police.

"I stand behind the police department," he said. "We have a great police department."

The U.S. Department of Justice, which has pledged to reach out to the police department to work on reforms, said last month that the department engaged in a pattern of discrimination against Latino residents. Investigators said their probe was complicated by efforts to interfere with witnesses and by police silence.

Nearly half or a third of the drivers pulled over by certain officers were Latino, and the number of Latinos pulled over by certain squads was "extraordinarily high," said Roy Austin Jr., deputy assistant attorney general for the civil rights division. Latinos who were stopped for minor violations were subjected to harsher punishments, such as arrest or vehicle towing, than were non-Latinos.

The East Haven Police Department of some 50 officers has come under scrutiny previously for civil rights issues. A federal jury ruled in 2003 that a white officer used excessive force and violated the rights of a black man he fatally shot after a chase.

Some officers involved in that case kept their jobs and were promoted, and there was no evidence that anyone received training to prevent similar confrontations in the future, Austin said.

Philadelphia, PA - Looks like Red Tails, George Lucas' World War II biopic about the Tuskegee Airmen, made $19 million over the weekend. Decent, considering its limited opening in the dreaded dead zone between Christmas and the Oscars.

I wasn't going to let ho-hum reviews stop me from seeing it. If anything, I went to honor men like Maj. John L. Harrison, one of the 320 surviving airmen (out of about 900) to receive a Congressional Gold Medal in 2007.

Harrison saw it, too, and liked it.

"I thought it was a superior depiction of aerial combat. It was truthful," says the retired Air Force command pilot, one in a class of 41 airmen who received flight training in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1943.

Harrison has flown more than 12 types of aircraft and logged more than 10,000 hours all over the world, but he never got to fly World War II missions. See, the military believed black pilots could never be trained enough, so Harrison spent the entire war stateside.

"We trained for four years at bases all over the country," he says. "We were the best-trained outfit in the United States."

For the most part, Harrison tried to ignore the racial prejudice that defined his stint in the military, starting in an Omaha recruiting office in 1941, when a white sergeant threw his enlistment papers back at him and said, "We don't train you people.

Read more >>> http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/137936313.html