Even as the US debates immigration reform, a new report says four per cent of the total illegal immigrants living in the US are Indians.

The figures of illegal immigrants in the United States has remained unchanged since 2009 at 11.2 million, says a new report by Pew Research.

India is 4^th in the top five source countries of unauthorized immigrants to the US since 2005.

Reuters, on Wednesday, quoted a White House source as saying US President Barack Obama is poised to give relief from deportation to millions of undocumented immigrants who are parents of US citizens or of permanent legal residents.

More than 450,000 "unauthorized" Indian immigrants were living in the US, constituting four per cent of the total illegal immigrants in the country in the year 2012.

Obama has said earlier this year that he would like to improve the US legal immigration system in a way that "makes this underground migration system less necessary." He has had a showdown with Republicans in Congress who have refused to pass legislation that would aid in fixing immigration problems.

Indian are the largest unauthorised immigrants in New Hampshire, says the Pew report.

While the Indian illegal immigrants comprise second largest population in Indiana with four per cent, the percentages in other states were Michigan (14 per cent), Minnesota (nine per cent), New Jersey (11 per cent), Ohio (11 per cent), Pennsylvania (11 per cent) and Washington (five per cent), the report said.

Indians were the third largest unauthorised immigrants in Alaska (four per cent), Arizona (two per cent), Delaware (seven per cent), Illinois (five per cent), Kansas (five per cent), Massachusetts (ten per cent), Missouri (nine per cent)and Oregon (two per cent).

Although the US population of unauthorised immigrants was stable from 2009 to 2012, the number of Mexicans in this population fell by about half a million people during those years.

Unauthorised immigrant populations from South America and from a grouping of Europe and Canada held steady between 2009 and 2012, whereas it grew slightly from Asia, the Caribbean, Central America and the rest of the world for the same period.

The top five source countries of unauthorized immigrants to the US are Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, India and Honduras.

Political language can be used, George Orwell said in 1946, "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." In order to justify its global assassination program, the Obama administration has had to stretch words beyond their natural breaking points. For instance, any male 14 years or older found dead in a drone strike zone is a "combatant" unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving him innocent. We are also informed that the constitutional guarantee of "due process" does not imply that the government must precede an execution with a trial. I think the one word most degraded and twisted these days, to the goriest ends, is the word "imminent."

Just what constitutes an "imminent" threat? Our government has long taken bold advantage of the American public's willingness to support lavish spending on armaments and to accept civilian casualties in military adventures abroad and depletion of domestic programs at home, when told these are necessary responses to deflect precisely such threats. The government has vastly expanded the meaning of the word "imminent." This new definition is crucial to the U.S. drone program, designed for projecting lethal force throughout the world. It provides a legal and moral pretext for the annihilation of people far away who pose no real threat to us at all.

Model and TV host Janice Dickinson is adding her name to the women who have accused comic Bill Cosby of sexual assault.

In an Entertainment Tonight interview that aired Tuesday, Dickinson said that the 1982 incident occurred in Lake Tahoe, Calif., where he was performing.

Dickinson said that she wrote about the assault in her 2002 autobiography, but that Cosby and his lawyers pressured her and the publisher to remove the details. She said her new account is a "true story."

The 77-year-old Cosby, who was never criminally charged in any case, settled a civil suit in 2006 with another woman who claimed she was assaulted.

Cosby, who has remained silent, did not respond to a request for comment. His lawyer has called the renewed accusations "discredited."

Source: The Associated Press

The City Union Mission in Kansas City announced that even if same-sex marriage becomes legal in both Missouri and Kansas, it would not allow same-sex couples to cohabit in its family shelter, the Kansas City Star reports.

"We are a Christian, faith-based organization that really does adhere to biblical standards," executive director Dan Doty told the Star. "Our view is that it [same-sex marriage] is inappropriate. Our intent is not to shelter same-sex couples together."

Doty acknowledged that he "knew this day would come, especially when the media would begin asking that question," and that he hopes the public understands "the can of worms this could open."

"Probably for the last three or four years this is something we have been concerned about, praying about, our board has been involved in," Doty said. "We had an October board retreat where this was a very serious topic to talk about."

However, he added, the shelter wants "to stay true to our biblical convictions, yet we do love all people. We do shelter men who are gay, and lesbian women, and transgender people, although if their birth gender is male, we require them to dress that way if they are in our men's shelter."

ThinkProgress noted that the City Union Mission does not receive any funding from the government, and is therefore not subject to city, state, or federal anti-discrimination ordinances.

Other groups, like the Salvation Army and the Catholic Charities of Kansas City-St. Joseph, said that they do not discriminate against anyone seeking their services, because their mission is to help the homeless.

"Our values are Catholic, but the people who come to us aren't necessarily Catholic, and we don't ask them to affirm our beliefs," Catholic Charities' communications manager Vicki Timiney said.

• Qiang Qiang interrupted his aunt Xue Paan as she was texting her beau
• She stormed into the kitchen, picked up a knife, and hacked off his penis
• Doctors were able to re-attach the appendage in emergency procedure
• But knife was blunt and cut was not clean so he needs more treatment

A cruel aunt faces jail after she cut off her three-year-old nephew's penis because he burst in on her in the loo and asked to use her phone.

Xue Paan, 37, attacked her nephew Qiang Qiang as she was supposed to be looking after him while his mother went to visit a neighbour in Luohe, a city in Henan Province, central China. Xue was sitting on the toilet sending text messages to her boyfriend when the toddler walked in and asked if he could play a game on her mobile phone.

Instead of giving him the phone, the aunt went into the kitchen, picked up a knife, then came back and sliced off the boy's penis. She fled the house before his mother could return.

Qiang Qiang's mother Cai Tuan, 27, said: 'I had popped out to see a neighbour and was only gone 30 minutes when I heard Qiang Qiang scream. Qiang Qiang had fainted and was lying in a pool of blood. Next to him was a knife and his penis.

It was horrific. 'I ran back to the house and couldn't believe what I saw. 'Qiang Qiang had fainted and was lying in a pool of blood. 'Next to him was a knife and his penis. 'It was simply horrific. 'My sister, his aunt, had gone.'

Qiang Qiang was rushed to hospital where surgeons managed to reattach his appendage and was then sent to a specialist clinic in the capital Beijing. A hospital spokesman said: 'Unfortunately, the knife was quite blunt and the cut wasn't clean so although we reattached the boy's penis, it wasn't ideal and he had to have further treatment. 'However, he has now had three surgeries all of which have been successful and we are confident that his penis will be perfectly OK again in three months.'

There's certainly a lot of talk about female leaders going on. But perhaps the most unexpected news about women CEOs today isn't about how much these women make, but rather where they work.

In Grant Thornton's newly released International Business Report, the accounting firm surveyed about 6,600 private companies in 45 countries to determine where the most women are in senior management positions. The results were unexpected.

The places topping the list with the most females in charge are countries like Russia, Indonesia, Latvia and the Philippines, where women comprised over 40 percent of those in senior-level positions.

Russia takes home the gold for the highest proportion of women in these high-level job titles, with 43 percent. Japan lags in last with an embarrassing nine percent.

The United States ranked towards the bottom of the list with just 22 percent of women in senior management, which also falls below the dismal global average of 24 percent.

Nearly 36 million people across the world are involved in some form of slavery, from forced labor to forced marriage, a survey by a global human rights organization has revealed, describing modern slavery as a "hidden crime" and "big business."

Modern slavery contributes to the production of at least 122 goods from 58 countries worldwide, according to the report by the Australian anti-slavery campaign group Walk Free. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates the illicit profits of forced labor to be $150 billion a year.

"From the Thai fisherman trawling fishmeal, to the Congolese boy mining diamonds, from the Uzbek child picking cotton, to the Indian girl stitching footballs, from the women who sew dresses, to the cocoa pod pickers, their forced labor is what we consume. Modern slavery is big business," Walk Free states in its report, claiming it has found evidence of slavery in all 167 countries it surveyed.

The 10 countries with the highest estimated prevalence of modern slavery as a proportion of population are Mauritania, Uzbekistan, Haiti, Qatar, India, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Syria and the Central African Republic.

For the second year running, India has turned out to be home to the greatest number of slaves, with over 14 million people in its population of 1.25 billion labeled as victims of slavery, spanning from prostitution to forced labor and making up nearly 40 percent of people in slavery worldwide.

A middle school math teacher in New Mexico waved a big, sharp knife at two students who were talking too much during a pop quiz, police say.

The incident happened on Friday at Bernalillo Middle School in Bernalillo, a small suburb maybe 20 miles north of Albuquerque, area affiliate KOB-TV reports.

The teacher, Benjamin Nagurski, had the knife out in the middle school classroom because he was digging staples out of a bulletin board on the wall.

He approached the two unidentified students who were chatting during the pop quiz. "Stop talking," Nagurski, 63, said, while holding the knife perhaps four feet from the students. "Maybe next time I'll pull a machete on you," the math teacher later told one of the boys later, according to police.

"At one point, the teacher told the student the next time he could bring a machete," Bernalillo police chief Tom Romero explained, according to Albuquerque CBS affiliate KRQE.

A new report on child homelessness in America finds that 2.5 million children experience homelessness annually.

The annual levels of homelessness among children have never been higher in the United States, according to a new comprehensive report released on Monday.

Prepared by the National Center on Family Homelessness, the report - America's Youngest Outcasts (pdf) - shows that with poverty and inequality soaring in recent years, approximately 2.5 million children in 2013 found themselves without a roof over their head or place to call home. That number equals one in 30 American children nationally, and constitutes an 8 percent increase over the previous year.

"Child homelessness has reached epidemic proportions in America," said Dr. Carmela DeCandia, director of the NCFH, in a statement. "Children are homeless to night in every city, county and state - in every part of our nation."

Masai people living in northern Tanzania are facing eviction from their historical homeland, as the government has reportedly reneged on a promise and is proceeding with plans to remake the land into a hunting reserve for Dubai's royal family.

There are about 40,000 Masai people living on the 1,500 square kilometer "wildlife corridor" bordering Serengeti National Park. They are known for their semi-nomadic ways and have their own distinctive culture.

The original proposal by a company based in the United Arab Emirates to turn the land into a commercial hunting park was turned down last year.

But the deal seems back on track now and the Masai people were notified to leave their ancestral lands by the end of the year, the Guardian reported.

Tanzania's prime minister, Mizengo Pinda, is scheduled to meet with the Masai's representatives, who will speak out against the decision.

In their view, the sale of the territory will in some way or another impact the lives of at least 80,000 people and will leave those residing on the land without their heritage or livelihood, as Masai are reliant on the livestock living on the land.