Hasta La Gadget!

President Barack Obama’s planned executive action that would reportedly offer deportation relief to millions of undocumented immigrants is based on uncontroversial and widely accepted legal foundations, experts said.

It won’t be possible to fully assess Obama’s executive action until Thursday, when he unveils it. But if, as administration officials have suggested, the executive action expands prosecutorial discretion and provides work permits for beneficiaries, a consensus is forming among legal experts that few legal barriers would stand in the way.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is considering suing the White House over its use of executive authority on immigration, according to The Washington Post. U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said this week that Obama’s deportation relief would provoke a “constitutional crisis.”

But Stephen Yale-Loeher, a professor of law at Cornell University, disagreed.

“Constitutional crisis is in the eye of the beholder,” Yale-Loehr told The Huffington Post. “The president, I’m sure, has consulted with his legal advisers to make sure that it will withstand legal challenges. Ultimately it will be up to the courts to decide who’s right on this.”

If a lawsuit makes it to the courts, Yale-Loehr said he expects the White House to prevail. He cautioned that he can’t speculate until Obama announces details, but noted that courts have generally given both Congress and the White House wide latitude to regulate immigration.

“Certainly anyone can sue on anything at any time,” Yale-Loeher said. “I think that such a lawsuit would fail however, for the following reasons: One is that the courts have generally recognized broad discretion on the part of the executive on prosecutorial discretion. Second, there’s wide recognition that Obama can’t deport everyone. He doesn’t physically have the resources. … Given that fact, he has to prioritize.”

Prosecutorial discretion, the idea that the government may choose which cases it prosecutes in order to focus its limited resources, has been widely applied in immigration law.

In 2012, the Obama administration announced it would defer deportation for children brought here illegally as children. The policy, known as “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” or DACA, currently shields more than a half-million undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Prior to DACA, Obama had used the principle of prosecutorial discretion to direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus on deporting people with criminal records or who had been deported before.

The application of prosecutorial discretion to deportation cases didn’t begin with Obama.

The last comprehensive immigration reform, signed by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986, created a pathway to citizenship for roughly 3 million undocumented immigrants. But the legislation left out parents and spouses of those who applied, according to a report by the Immigration Policy Center. The Reagan administration responded by using its authority to protect those groups from deportation, a policy expanded by President George H. W. Bush when Congress failed to pass legislation addressing the issue.

Since 1956, every U.S. president has used executive authority to offer deportation relief to one group or another, the report says.

Legal scholars at the annual meeting of the Federalist Society last week conceded it’s difficult to defend the argument that using executive action to offer deportation relief is somehow illegal.

“I think the roots of prosecutorial discretion are extremely deep,” Duke Law School professor Christopher Schroeder said at the meeting. “The practice is long and robust. The case law is robust.”

Stephen Legomsky, former chief counsel with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said Congress itself has recognized “deferred action” in laws passed after the principle had become widely applied in the 1980s.

“The old INS used deferred action regularly, long before it was in the statute,” Legomsky said, referring to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was replaced by the Department of Homeland Security. “Congress has added to the statute provisions that have recognized deferred action by name.”

Offering work permits to those who benefit from deferred deportation is, likewise, uncontroversial as far as the law is concerned, Legomsky said.

The Code of Federal Regulations, a collection of rules with the force of law established by federal agencies, specifically authorizes the employment of undocumented immigrants who have been granted “deferred action,” provided the applicant demonstrates “an economic necessity for employment.”

The rule was first adopted in 1987, according to Legomsky.

Both Legomsky and Yale-Loeher questioned the argument that the executive action was unconstitutional. Even if Obama enacted the broadest reform that unnamed officials have hinted so far, which would protect some 5 million undocumented immigrants, millions of immigrants would remain and deportations would proceed apace, making it difficult to mount the argument that Obama isn’t enforcing immigration law.

“I feel very confident about his legal authority,” Legomsky said. “Nothing he’s about to do will prevent him from deporting as many people as his resources permit. Either way, he’s using all the enforcement resources that Congress is giving him.”

Logitech has launched a new case for the iPad mini and iPad Air 2 that in some ways resemble Lenovo’s ThinkPad 8 cover, only with one notable exception: a hidden hinge. With this hinge, users can fold the case into different angles for use in a variety of situations, whether propping it up to watch a movie or to use … Continue reading

Guardians of the Galaxy was one of the best movies of the year and probably one of the funnest movies I’ve seen in a long while but it also had its fair share of logic gaps that were glossed over. HISHE hilarious fixed the movie by changing some scenes in the movie so it all makes sense. Spoiler alert: the bad guys win.

Read more…

For the last few months, Ebola has grabbed the media’s attention around the world. Understandably, a significant number of news stories have portrayed the epidemic in West Africa as one of the most serious emergencies of modern times.

But we must not forget that another outbreak continues across the Atlantic. Cholera remains a crisis in Haiti and the recent attention to the Ebola outbreak should be a reminder that we cannot drop our guard. Unlike Ebola, cholera is not a deliberate killer and easily treated with access to services, but it moves quickly, transmitted by contaminated food or water, and in environments without minimal health, hygiene, water and sanitation systems, it causes fatal epidemics, like the one that Haiti faces today.

Where Ebola and cholera are linked, however, is that both feed on weak public health systems, and require a sustained response to combat. And, as Ebola has reminded us, in today’s globalized world, neither epidemic respects borders.

Haiti maintains the highest caseload of cholera cases in the Western Hemisphere. By the end of September, over 707,000 suspected cholera cases and 8,600 cholera-related deaths had been recorded since the outbreak in October 2010. When rains began heavy and late in October, cases tripled from previous months. And the situation can turn worse. Long before the earthquake and cholera, Haiti has been highly vulnerable to natural disasters. Every emergency is an opportunity for epidemics.

We are working on longer-term solutions. The UN is supporting the Government’s efforts to increase access to water, sanitation and health services, and the Secretary-General and Prime Minister launched a national sanitation campaign in July and with the World Bank announced a three-year plan in October. But it also recognizes that strengthening systems and capacity will take time. Rapid response, prevention and treatment activities need to continue while water and sanitation infrastructure is built and service delivery can be improved.

A key preventive measure, complementing the response and systems building, can be oral cholera vaccines. Safe, affordable and effective, this intervention protects vaccinated individuals and reduces transmission and consequently the burden of disease in a community. The Government of Haiti has committed to vaccinating 600,000 people against cholera by 2015. Fresh off a vaccination campaign in September, it needs to reach 313,000 more people in 2015. The cost is only $3 million. As of now, there is zero funding available.

Four years into the outbreak, we are seeing the cost of fleeting support. Due to lack of funding, some partners have left and many cholera treatment centers have closed. This has reduced access to treatment, is limiting timely reporting and is delaying response time. Lack of medical staff in treatment centers is also hampering response. We must be able to respond to each alert and provide treatment to cut the transmission and prevent more infection and further deaths.

Without this, we will see more cases and more cholera-related deaths.

Haiti’s Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe has said that cholera remained an emergency requiring all possible strategies to eliminate. In the longer term, we must for once invest in its public health systems, in particular water and sanitation, and the UN is working to support the Government of Haiti. But this will take years, and the humanitarian response is needed to respond to and control outbreaks today.

Both cholera and Ebola have had limited reach when confronting strong public health infrastructure. Lacking these, Haiti and the Ebola-affected countries must respond to outbreaks while keeping site of the future.

Ebola is a reminder that the job in Haiti is not done.

Pedro Medrano Rojas is the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Senior Coordinator for Cholera Response in Haiti.

There is a new icebreaker in the international diplomatic circuit. The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call at the UN General Assembly for declaring an International Yoga Day has gained support from several quarters — many representatives from Congress and President Obama as well have shown keen interest in yoga.

From being an ancient spiritual pursuit for those seeking enlightenment, yoga has been absorbed into mainstream lifestyle by people from all cultures and backgrounds across the globe. And now it has also arrived in the global political arena. Good governance and administration require multi-faceted skills and yoga brings skill in action. In fact, it was called Raja Yoga because it was practiced by kings and princes in the ancient days.

Yoga became popular in the West as a solution to lose weight or as a physical exercise and people also found relief from many ills such as stress, anxiety, professional burnout, addictions and insomnia. In additions to its remedial properties, yoga is also a path to realize and harness your deepest potential.

It has a profound impact on multiple levels of our existence. While stretches and postures make the body supple, pranayama and meditation take the mind deep within. An unknown dimension opens up within our being that enriches the experience of life in many ways. There are several benefits of yoga — it enhances health, improves memory and concentration, sharpens the intellect, de-stresses the system and increases energy levels. It also unveils an intuitive ability within us, which is much needed for creative pursuits and in overcoming obstacles like the writers’ block.

According to Maharishi Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the oldest known text on the subject, yoga is freedom from all the distortions of the mind. If we observe the mind, we will realize that it is always engaged in one of five things:

1. Seeking proof or answers
2. Forming conclusions
3. Imagining or fantasising
4. Remembering past events or memories
5. Dreaming

Yoga or union with the Higher Self happens when the mind is not engaged in any of the above. You usually identify with the activity in the mind. In the waking state, you are caught up in all that you see, smell, hear, touch, taste. If not, you return to sleep or to the state of dreaming where you are completely cut off from the world. None of these really give that deep rest that the system needs to totally recover from the stress that it gathers.

In the physical realm, it takes effort to get results. In the realm of the mind, what is needed is effortlessness. For instance, you cannot relax or go to sleep by putting effort; in fact, putting effort is counterproductive. It takes a certain kind of skill to become effortless. The ability to deeply relax renews your ability to be dynamic in action. Passion is like the in-breath but you cannot just breath in; you need to breath out as well and that is dispassion. Life becomes a harmony when we have all three — passion, dispassion and compassion.

Often one has to sacrifice personal freedom to some degree to observe discipline. But yoga is a discipline that opens the door to inner freedom, contradictory as it seems. With practice, you acquire the knack of switching between different modes of the mind, from engaging with the outside world to withdrawing from it and going within; between passion and dispassion. This skill of moving outward or inward at will makes you the master of your own mind, and when you win over the mind, you win over the world.

Follow Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on Twitter @SriSri
For more on happiness and silence programs, visit http://www.artofliving.org/us-en and International Meditation Center, Boone, North Carolina