Texas mulls whether 18 is an adult
AUSTIN, Texas – Jason Wang and Johnny Truong were part of a gang that dressed as utility workers and held a suburban Dallas homeowner at gunpoint, making off with $68,000 in cash, electronics and jewelry before they were eventually caught.
Although both were minors, the law treated them very differently because Wang was 15 and Truong was 17, setting their adult lives on very different courses. Wang went to a juvenile lockup, where he took classes that eventually helped him earn a college scholarship. Truong went to prison, where little effort was spent on trying to turn his life around.
Since 1918, Texas has charged 17-year-olds as adults, even though they can’t vote, join the military or serve on juries. With the state at odds with a federal law governing the housing of juvenile prison inmates and docked about $800,000 in funding last year, some are pushing to raise the age of defendants classed as adults to 18.
Many states got more aggressive about treating juvenile offenders as adults amid a jump in youth crime in the 1980s. A subsequent drop in such crime, research into brain development and a series of Supreme Court rulings, though, led many states to have a change of heart.
Boehner: I like my job ‘most days’
WASHINGTON – We all have bad days at work.
John Boehner, too.
For the House speaker, “Friday wasn’t all that fun,” he says, though “most days” he likes his job.
The Ohio Republican and his leadership team in the GOP-controlled House had a stunning defeat when a three-week spending bill for the Homeland Security Department went down, thanks to a group of angry conservatives.
The rejection came just hours before a threatened agency shutdown. A compromise – with support from Democrats – is keeping the department open for one more week.
Boehner tells CBS’ “Face the Nation” that Friday “was just messy and I’m not into messy.”
He calls the House “a rambunctious place” and says he enjoys “all the personalities – and I have got a lot of them.”
Brrr! Record cold, snow in Northeast
ALBANY, N.Y. – Hardy souls who shivered and shoveled their way through February in the Northeast now have evidence of just how brutal the weather was, with record cold in at least eight cities and record snowfall in Boston.
“We’re the standout globally,” said Art DeGaetano, director of the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University. “It’s colder in Siberia, but we’re the farthest below normal.”
So what do we have to thank, or blame, for this frigid February?
“We can’t point to anything specific,” DeGaetano said. “It’s just the way the jet stream bulged and set up. It’s random, like a deal of cards. Sometimes you’re dealt a royal flush, sometimes you get nothing.”
Associated Press
