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Obama vs. Romney: Future of the Workforce--Graphic

SPECIFIC POLICY POSITIONS

HIGHER EDUCATION
Obama says that the United States should lead the world in college-graduation rates by 2020. He has pushed to expand the size of, and access to, Pell Grants for students from low-income families, increasing the maximum per-student amount. In the spring, Obama shifted his attention to student loans, advocating for legislation to prevent the 3.4 percent student-loan interest rate from doubling. He succeeded when Congress passed a one-year delay. Obama launched an aggressive campaign promoting community colleges. He has also warned universities that their federal funding could be reduced if they don’t rein in tuition costs. 

K-12
Obama considers the Education Department’s Race to the Top competitive-grant program, which encourages state-level school reforms, to be one of his crowning domestic-policy achievements. His budget for fiscal 2013 includes $850 million for the program, down from its $4.35 billion level in the 2009 economic-stimulus bill. He has also pushed for tougher teacher evaluations based on student test scores, a controversial requirement for some Race to the Top funding. He backs the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an effort to set uniform career- and college-readiness standards in all schools.

JOB TRAINING
In March, the White House unveiled Obama’s job-training strategy—“a streamlined reemployment system.” He wants to unify training programs online under an “American Jobs Center” and invest more in counseling. Displaced workers could be eligible for $4,000 in annual training awards for up to two years, and weekly stipends to cover expenses as they search for work. Older people could receive up to two years of wage insurance to ease the transition to jobs that pay less than their previous ones.

IMMIGRATION
Obama wants to boost high-skilled immigration by attaching green cards to Ph.D.s or diplomas in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics earned in the U.S. He also advocates a new start-up visa, encouraging foreign entrepreneurs who receive U.S. investment to set up shop here, giving them permanent residency if their businesses create domestic jobs and generate revenue. In the wake of the failed Dream Act, Obama established administrative two-year deferrals from deportation for illegal immigrant teens who were brought to the United States by their parents.

UNIONS
Unions cheer Obama for his trio of recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in February and his support of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions. Teachers unions have chafed at his push to tie teacher evaluations to test scores.

RECORD

FUNDING
Obama has been a strong proponent of education funding. In 2009, he
dedicated roughly $100 billion of his $787 billion stimulus package to education, according to the Education Department. He has staved off the most draconian of Congress’s proposed cuts to education programs, and he saved Pell Grant funding.

RACE TO THE TOP
The 2009 stimulus package allocated $4.35 billion for the Race to the Top fund, to be distributed among states for education reform. By January, the initiative had helped one of every three states, while using less than 1 percent of total education spending for the program, according to the White House.

COMMUNITY COLLEGES
Obama announced an $8 billion “Community College to Career Fund” in February. Touted by Jill Biden, the goal is to help community colleges and businesses train 2 million workers for high-demand industries.

KEY ADVISERS

Arne Duncan: The Education secretary is a longtime friend of Obama’s and an ardent champion of school reforms. Duncan started his career at a nonprofit that funded college educations for inner-city students in Chicago, and he spent seven years as chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools.

Cecilia Muñoz: An experienced civil-rights advocate and a veteran of the National Council of La Raza, Muñoz has spent her career fighting for immigrants’ rights. Her portfolio broadened earlier this year when she became director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

Alan Krueger: As a labor economist and the current chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Krueger plays a key role in developing Obama’s jobs policies, making sure they have a strong link to economic growth. He served as the Labor Department’s chief economist in the mid-1990s.

Jill Biden: Obama deputized the vice president’s wife, a longtime community-college instructor, as the face of the administration’s push to raise awareness of and increase access to community colleges.

SPECIFIC POLICY POSITIONS

HIGHER EDUCATION
Romney has promised to reintroduce private banks to the student-loan market, undoing a centerpiece of Obama’s education plan that Romney says “nationalized” the market. To offset “massive increases” in the size of the Pell Grant program, Romney says he will refocus those funds on only the neediest students. He plans to scale back the Education Department’s data-collection requirements and instead partner with the private sector to measure institutional success. Romney promises to unwind “complicated and unnecessary” regulations.

K-12
Expanding school choice, measuring school performance, and implementing teacher evaluations are the three legs to Romney’s K-12 plan. School choice is the boldest of his promises. He wants to require states to give disadvantaged students open enrollment at any school, public or private; the plan would upend the current system in which communities dole out federal dollars to schools with the highest percentage of low-income or disabled students. He would require states to eliminate caps on charter and digital schools and to issue simple report cards on each of their schools. Romney’s plan would eliminate the current law’s “highly qualified” teacher-certification requirement and make block grants available to states that work to improve teacher effectiveness.

JOB TRAINING
Romney would consolidate various federal retraining programs into a block grant for states. He also backs personal reemployment accounts, a George W. Bush-era proposal that lets the unemployed choose how to use cash aid (for example, toward community-college classes or other forms of training). Romney says that the government should reimburse training costs for businesses that train and hire jobless workers.

IMMIGRATION
Romney’s position on high-skilled immigration is similar enough to Obama’s that their plans share imagery—both mention “stapling” green cards to the diplomas of math, science, and engineering students studying here. Romney backs raising the cap on H-1B visas for highly skilled workers and would make mandatory the voluntary “E-Verify” system under which employers electronically check the citizenship status of their hires. As governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants, and he has vowed to veto the Dream Act if Congress ever passes it.  He is “studying” the scaled-back version of the Dream Act proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

UNIONS
Romney opposes “card-check” legislation that would allow workers to organize unions and elect leaders more easily, and he supports a measure that would require the use of secret ballots in all union elections. He plans to use the bully pulpit, if elected, to promote right-to-work laws at the state level.

RECORD

DREAM ACT
As governor of Massachusetts, Romney vetoed a bill in 2004 that would have allowed illegal immigrants who graduated from state high schools to pay in-state tuition at state colleges and universities.

CHARTER SCHOOLS
Romney also vetoed a state freeze on opening charter schools in 2004, arguing that it was not consistent with the Legislature’s budget, which included $37 million to compensate local districts for funds lost to educate charter students, The Boston Globe reported at the time.

UNIONS
Early in his tenure as governor, Romney wrestled with public-employee labor unions over their steering half a dollar of state employees’ weekly paychecks to political action committees, according to The Boston Globe. If elected, Romney would propose legislation banning such practices.

KEY ADVISERS

Rod Paige: Who better to advise you on education policy than someone who once implemented it? Paige was secretary of Education during President George W. Bush’s first term.

John Bailey: A former member of George W. Bush’s Domestic Policy Council, Bailey has emerged as a key adviser on immigration and technology. He also served as deputy policy director at the Commerce Department.

Emily Stover DeRocco: One of Romney’s point people on job training, DeRocco joined thecampaign after a stint at a nonpartisan arm of the National Association of Manufacturers. Before that, she was Bush’s assistant secretary of Labor for employment and training.

Kris Kobach: The Kansas secretary of state has become something of a torchbearer for far-right opposition to the Dream Act. His clout as a Romney adviser has been somewhat in question; the campaign has said that Kobach is merely a “supporter.”

Photos: Marilyn Monroe, the LIFE covers

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Professor wins $5 million grant to study life after death

Pop quiz: Does life exist after death?

A University of California, Riverside philosophy professor, John Martin Fischer, has been awarded a three-year, $5 million grant by the John Templeton Foundation to study just this topic—and yes, students can take his class.

Fischer noted in an email to Yahoo News, "Both I and my post-doc, Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, will teach related classes over the next three years. I have frequently taught classes on death, immortality, and the meaning of life both at Yale University and UC Riverside."

So what's the meaning of life? More on that in a moment.

Fischer noted, "We'll be open both to studying religious and non-religious views about immortality. One thing that we'll study is whether human beings would want to live forever: would it be boring? Would it lose its meaning and beauty and urgency? Does death give meaning to life?"

According to the university's website announcing the grant award, many anecdotal reports of the afterlife abound, but there has been "no comprehensive and rigorous, scientific study of global reports about near-death and other experiences, or of how belief in immortality influences human behavior." The research will look at a range of phenomena, including heaven, hell, purgatory, and karma.  The grant is the largest ever awarded to a humanities professor at UC Riverside, and one of the largest given to an individual at the university.

Fischer said in a statement, "We will be very careful in documenting near-death experiences and other phenomena, trying to figure out if these offer plausible glimpses of an afterlife or are biologically induced illusions," Fischer said. "Our approach will be uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous. We're not going to spend money to study alien-abduction reports."

The grant will also fund two conferences to discuss the findings. Said UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy P. White, Fischer's research "takes a universal concern and subjects it to rigorous examination to sift fact from fiction."

The Immortality Project, as it is called, will solicit research proposals from eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians whose work "will be reviewed by respected leaders in their fields and published in academic and popular journals."

The research will also delve into cultural aspects of the afterlife. For example, there are reports of millions of Americans seeing a tunnel with a bright light at the end. In Japan, reports often find the individual tending a garden.

The professor added that the academic research could include a range of issues, like "heaven and hell: If we are material beings, how can we exist in heaven, where we would not have physical bodies (or not of the sort we have here)?

"There is a lot of interest in near-death experiences. We can carefully catalog them and look into whether there are patterns. There has already been a lot of work on this. Perhaps some cross-cultural studies would be helpful.

"We'll also be open to studying the relationship between beliefs in afterlife and behavior--moral behavior and crime rates."

Sounds like the kind of research topics that many college students have already spent hours pondering. As for the meaning of life? The professor says check back in three years.

Syria pleads with Russia for aid in sign of desperation

BEIRUT - Syria reached out to its powerful ally Russia on Friday, as senior officials pleaded with Moscow for financial loans and supplies of oil products — an indication that international sanctions are squeezing President Bashar Assad's regime.

The signs of desperation came as resilient rebels fought regime forces in the Syrian capital only two weeks after the government crushed a revolt there. The renewed battles in Damascus show that Assad's victories could be fleeting as armed opposition groups regroup and resurge.

"The fighting in Damascus today proves that this revolution cannot be extinguished," said activist Abu Qais al-Shami. "The rebels may be forced to retreat because of the regime's use of heavy weaponry but they will always come back."

Syria is thought to be burning quickly through the $17 billion in foreign reserves that the government was believed to have at the start of Assad's crackdown on a popular uprising that erupted in March 2011. The conflict has turned into a civil war, and rights activists estimate more than 19,000 people.

Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil, who has led a delegation of several Cabinet ministers to Moscow over the past few days, told reporters Friday that they requested a Russian loan to replenish Syria's hard currency reserves, which have been depleted by a U.S. and European Union embargo on Syrian exports.

He said Damascus also wants to get diesel oil and other oil products from Russia in exchange for crude supplies.

"We are experiencing shortages of diesel oil and gas for heating purposes," Syrian Oil Minister Said Maza Hanidi said in Moscow. "This unfair blockade has hurt all layers of the population."

The Syrian regime has blamed sanctions for shortages that have left Syrians across the country standing in long lines to pay inflated prices for cooking gas, fuel, sugar and other staples.

Syrian officials refused to mention specific figures but said that deals with Moscow could be finalized within weeks. There was no immediate comment from the Russian government.

While the Syrian delegation was holding talks in Moscow, a squadron of Russian warships was approaching Syria's port of Tartus, the only naval base Russia has outside the former Soviet Union.

Russian news agencies reported that two of the three amphibious assault ships will call at Tartus while the third will cast anchor just outside the port.

They said that each of the three ships is carrying about 120 marines backed by armoured vehicles. It wasn't immediately clear whether some of the marines will stay to protect Tartus. Some Russian media said the marines were supposed to ensure a safe evacuation of Russian personnel and navy equipment from the base if necessary.

Russia has protected Syria from U.N. sanctions and continued to supply it with weapons throughout the conflict. The Kremlin, backed by fellow veto-wielding U.N. Security Council member China, has blocked any plans that would call on Assad to step down.

On Friday, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly denounced Syria's crackdown in a symbolic effort meant to push the deadlocked Security Council and the world at large into action on stopping the civil war.

Before the vote, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon accused the Syrian regime of possible war crimes and drew comparisons between the failure to act in Syria with the international community's failure to protect people from past genocide in Srebrenica and Rwanda.

"The conflict in Syria is a test of everything this organization stands for," Ban said. "I do not want today's United Nations to fail that test."

Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari called the resolution's main sponsors, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, "despotic oligarchies."

"The draft resolution will have no impact whatsoever. It is a piece of theatre," he told reporters after the vote. And Iran's No. 2 ambassador, Eshagh Alehabib, called the resolution "one-sided."

Assad's regime stands accused of a number of massacres in which hundreds of civilians, including women and children, were killed. The Syrian government blames gunmen driven by a foreign agenda for the killings, but the U.N. and other witnesses have confirmed that at least some were carried out by pro-regime vigilante groups, known as shabiha.

But the recent emergence of videos showing summary executions committed by rebel forces — albeit on a far smaller scale than the regime's alleged atrocities — is making it more difficult for the Syrian opposition to claim the moral high ground.

With the civil war becoming increasingly vicious, chances for a diplomatic solution were fading after the resignation Thursday of Kofi Annan, the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria. Annan cited divisions within the Security Council preventing a united approach to stop the fighting.

The fighting continued Friday in the country's two most important cities, Aleppo and Damascus.

In Damascus, residents reported loud explosions and plumes of smoke over the southern edge of the city Friday, as frightened people stayed at home.

"The bombs are back, I have been hearing explosions all day," a resident of central Damascus told The Associated Press, asking to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Government forces crushed a rebel assault on Damascus two weeks ago, but pockets of resistance remain including the southern neighbourhood of Tadamon, where most of Friday's fighting took place.

Late Friday, Syria's official news agency SANA said government forces had hunted down the remnants of the "terrorist mercenaries" — its term for the rebels — in Tadamon. It said several were killed and many others wounded.

Al-Shami and other activists said troops backed by dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles broke into Tadamon on Friday evening, forcing a fresh wave of residents spilling into nearby areas for shelter.

Many Damascus residents had earlier taken refuge in the country's largest Palestinian refugee camp, Yarmouk, where mortar shells raining down on a crowded marketplace killed 21 people late Thursday.

Nevertheless, there were signs that rebels may be planning another run on Damascus in an effort to drain the army's resources as fighting stretches into its second week in Aleppo, 350 kilometres (215 miles) to the north.

The U.N. peacekeeping chief, Herve Ladsous, warned of a major government assault on Aleppo in the coming days to retake the rebel-held neighbourhoods.

"The focus is now on Aleppo, where there has been a considerable buildup of military means," he told reporters in New York late Thursday after briefing the Security Council on his trip to Syria. "We have reason to believe that the main battle is about to start."

____

Isachenkov reported from Moscow. Associated Press writers Ali Akbar Dareini in Tehran, Iran, and Dalia Nammari in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.

Earth to Mars rover, Curiosity: Have you landed?

Tune in to the Yahoo! live-stream on Sunday, August 5, at 10:31 p.m. PT or 1:31 a.m. ET.

On Sunday night, millions of miles away, a nail-biter of a landing will be executed—or not—on Mars. The Mars rover, Curiosity, which has been traveling to the distant planet for the past eight-and-a-half months, will land on the red planet by remote control.

To stick the landing, the car-size rover must successfully slow down from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, or "Seven Minutes of Terror," as the wildly popular video from NASA explains—which you can watch above.

Due to the long-distance signal from Mars to Earth, researchers won't know for an agonizing 14 minutes if the landing, programmed from Earth, is a success or an epic fail. The event has gotten so much attention that it will be broadcast live in Times Square.

During the short but tense wait, a sequence of events must fall into place for the landing of the 1,982-pound spacecraft to be successful, including using a parachute to slow it down, firing rockets to prepare for the landing, and carefully setting it in a crater to avoid a dust cloud. If all goes well, the craft will send out a signal that its landing was successful.

The Mars rover has already become somewhat of a celebrity, with its own Facebook page, and messages posted on its wall like this one from Issam Motawaj: "Very excited. We hope you will be a safe landing. Good Luck." And from Jeff Baber "I'm be watching!!! Love it!!!"

But the landing is just the beginning of what's hoped to be a two-year mission to explore signs of life on the planet. The rover, essentially a moving science lab, cost NASA $2.5 billion to build and comes equipped with 17 cameras, a 7-foot-long robot arm, and state-of-the-art science experiments and sensors weighing 125 pounds.

Bing Quock, assistant director of Morrison Planetarium at California Academy of Sciences, calls this "exciting times." He wrote in an email to Yahoo! News, "There are so many things that could go wrong, but it's not like NASA's engineers haven't thought it through. They have a way of performing the impossible, so I'll be watching the feed on the Internet that night with fingers crossed, hoping for the best. "

N. Korea gives refrigerators for medals, labor camp for losing

North Korea's Olympic athletes are thrilling their countrymen with surprising success in winning medals and they are attributing their success to their Dear Leader Kim Jong Un.

But others, including former North Korean athletes who have defected, suggest the success of the country's small contingent of athletes at the games may be the result of a policy of training them from a very young age at specialized schools, backed up by rewards like cars and refrigerators for winners and the threat of labor camps for losers.

North Korea ranks 14th in the overall medal count, but fifth in terms of the number of gold medals with four.

The country won two golds in men's weightlifting, one in women's weightlifting and one in women's judo. It also captured a bronze medal in women's weightlifting.

The communist nation has 56 athletes competing in 11 sports. Its hopes for additional medals lie in boxing, wrestling, diving, table tennis, judo, and archery. The best Olympic result in the past was four gold medals and five bronzes in Barcelona 1992.

Joyful residents in North Korea gather to watch the games on huge outdoor screens and public places with television connection.

"After witnessing the gold medal at the Olympics, my heart is unutterably happy and my pride (in our nation) is growing," an unidentified woman said on state television news.

That pride is exactly what the country's new 28 year-old leader Kim Jong Un is looking for. He has taken control of the impoverished nation of 25 million after his father Kim Jong Il passed away last December. Decades of famine have left many North Koreans bitter and analysts say this Olympic Games' fever is a perfect opportunity to generate loyalty and devotion among his subjects.

Gold medalist Kim Un-Guk, who set an Olympic record in 62-kilogram weightlifting, dutifully attributed his triumph to their leader Kim Jong Un.

"I won first place because the shining Supreme Commander Kim Jong Un gave me power and courage," he told reporters in London.

An Kum-Ae, who won her gold in the women's judo 52-kilogram division, said, "I cannot be any happier than right now for I can give my gold medal to our great leader, Kim Jong Un."

Woo-Young Lee, a professor at University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, says, "Athletes in North Korean society are revered as elites and they are managed, trained, and supported on a national level."

Hand-picked by the Communist Party's Sports Committee, the athletes are trained at very young ages and registered at specialized schools which provide "daily meals and spending money at times," said Gu-Kyeong Bang, a defector living in South Korea.

Bang was a student athlete in Taewondo in the North. Training involved four hours of "ideological education" per week aimed at cultivating loyalty to the leader.

"They play with a different mind set," said another North Korean defector to the South, Kim Yo-Han. "An absolute loyalty towards the country and the leader is the core foundation of the North Korean athletes' sportsmanship."

Kim's father was a soccer coach and mother was a rhythmic gymnastics coach in the North.

Upon returning home, gold medal athletes like Kim Un-Guk and An Gum-Ae would be rewarded with handsome prize money, an apartment, a car, and additional perks like refrigerators and television sets.

But most of all, they will be rewarded with a huge jump in social status with the title of "hero" or "people's athlete."

But poor performances, especially losing to their archenemy nations like the United States or South Korea, have consequences. Rumors of athletes being sent directly to labor camps upon arriving home are not confirmed, but it is a common procedure to open "review meetings" after the sports events in which participants "assess" their own and each other's games, said Kim Yo-Han.

If during that process the person is determined "disloyal" to their Dear Leader, the athlete is likely to be expelled from the sports organization and at times sent to labor camps.

Yunjoo Lim and Sungeun Lee contributed to this report

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