Blog Posts by Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., with other senators in the gang of eight. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Conservative radio talk show hosts have signed a letter opposing the sweeping immigration reform bill in the Senate, bucking tea party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio's attempts to win their support for the bill, which would combine enhanced border security with a legalization program for the nation's unauthorized immigrants. Rubio, a member of the "gang of eight" senators who drafted the bill, has become the most prominent conservative spokesman for its passage.

Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who had Rubio on her show twice in the past few months to let him make his pitch for the bill, signed onto the open letter that says the "unsalvageable" measure "would do more harm than good." The statement, signed by more than 100 conservative groups and leaders, argues that the bill is laden with earmarks and "rewards" lawbreakers by allowing most of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants to legalize if they pass a background check and pay fines.

Some influential conservatives have argued that the party needs to embrace reform in order to combat its declining support among Hispanic voters and to fix a broken system, even though the bill is also high on President Barack Obama's agenda.

In the past, most in the right-wing talk show world have argued that any legalization of unauthorized immigrants was unacceptable "amnesty," forming a unified front that helped kill previous attempts at reform under George W. Bush. But Rubio had appeared to make inroads with Ingraham and syndicated hosts Lars Larson and Mark Levin, who also signed the letter, this spring when he appeared on their shows.

Rubio made the case to all three hosts that the current immigration system provides "de facto amnesty" to unauthorized immigrants, while his bill would hold them accountable for overstaying visas or entering the country illegally. Levin, for one, seemed receptive to the argument, saying after his interview with the senator in April that "It's a problem, we've got to address this problem, and he's right."

Immigration Services officer Norma Christian speaks with an immigrant at the USCIS office on May 17, 2013, in New York City. (John Moore/Getty Images)

The president of a union that represents 12,000 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees announced his opposition to the immigration reform bill in the Senate on Monday morning.

"The legislation will provide legal status to millions of visa overstays while failing to provide for necessary in-person interviews," union President Kenneth Palinkas said in a statement. "Legal status is also explicitly granted to millions who have committed serious immigration and criminal offenses."

The Senate version of the bill, which has not been introduced to the floor, will offer legalization to most of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants, provided they pass a background check and pay fines.

The USCIS union's workers examine and approve citizenship and visa applications.

Palinkas said USCIS employees are pressured to "rubber-stamp" citizenship and visa applications and lack the resources to adequately investigate applicants.

Palinkas is joining the National ICE Council, the

Students at the University of California, Los Angeles campus, which has faced steep state cuts. (David McNew/Getty Images)

When high school senior Jenny Bonilla got her college acceptance letter in March, she felt shock and heartbreak rather than joy. That’s because the letter from Goucher College, a private liberal arts school in Baltimore, also brought news that she would owe an unaffordable $20,000 a year in tuition and board, even with a scholarship the college was offering.

Bonilla had been in the running for a full ride to Goucher but eventually lost out because her parents’ combined income of $57,000 a year was deemed too high.

“That was heartbreaking,” she said.

Bonilla’s experience is all too familiar to many students and their parents contemplating college, as higher education price increases have far outpaced the growth in middle-class wages over the past three decades.

The average tuition and fees at a public, four-year university rose to $8,655 in 2012-13, not counting the costs of room and board, according to the College Board. That’s 250 percent more than it would have cost in 1982, when a year of college would have set the average student back just $2,423 in today’s dollars.

The tuition at private colleges has increased at a slightly lower rate over the same period: The average four-year private institution costs $29,056, not counting room and board. It would have cost $10,901 in 2012 dollars in 1982.

The pricey degree comes with big returns, on average: College-educated workers earned 79 percent more than high-school-educated workers in 2012 and were much less likely to be unemployed.

The pain of the price hikes has been partly offset by an increase in federal grants and tax breaks for college, as well as by private schools offering deeply discounted tuition rates to lower-income students. But even with that help, some students like Bonilla are finding themselves locked out of the system.

Why is college so much more expensive now than it was 30 years ago? Economists fall into two main schools of thought in explaining the trend.

One theory, referred to as the “Bowen Rule,” says the decisions made by many colleges and universities—such as how many administrators to hire and how to spend its cash—primarily drive the cost.

A competing theory, called “Baumol’s cost disease,” posits that higher education is expensive because of outside macroeconomic factors that affect other businesses, specifically that it costs more to hire highly educated workers even in fields that have not grown more productive.

In other words, it’s either the colleges’ fault, or it isn’t.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that the Justice Department investigation into IRS employees singling out conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny will be a broad, nationwide one based in Washington.

"This is something that we will base in Washington, and that way we can have a better impact nationwide," Holder said in response to tough questioning from lawmakers at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday afternoon.

Holder said he launched an investigation last Friday into why the IRS subjected conservative groups to more review when they applied for tax-exempt status. The IRS inspector general's report said that a group of low-level staffers in an Ohio office were responsible, and a top IRS official has apologized on their behalf.

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., asked Holder at the hearing whether an "apology" from the IRS protected them from criminal prosecution. Holder answered, "No."

The DOJ investigation will go beyond Ohio and look into any allegations of targeting elsewhere, Holder said. He noted it's possible civil rights laws have been violated. "We will take a dispassionate view of this," Holder said. "This will not be about parties ... anyone who has broken the law will be held accountable."

At the hearing, Holder faced pointed questions from both sides of the aisle over the twin scandals that have dogged the Obama administration this week: the IRS revelations and the seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors. In his prepared statement at the hearing, Holder mentioned neither topic, instead focusing on the Justice Department's commitment to civil rights, immigration reform and the reversal of sequester cuts.

During the hearing, Holder also said he realized there's been "criticism" of the department's decision to subpoena records for the private and work phones of more than 20 AP reporters and editors without notifying them first. But he added that he was unable to say why the investigation's scope was so large or why it was kept secret from the AP because he had recused himself from the matter along with the rest of the national security division. Deputy Attorney General James Cole signed the subpoena, he said.

"I am not involved in the case," Holder said.

Holder said he didn't believe there is any documentation of his recusal, and acknowledged that it would be better practice to document all of his recusals in writing.

A traveler uses a biometric scanner at the George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport in 2008. (Dave Einsel/Getty Image)

A bipartisan group of senators voted against adding a biometric system to the sweeping immigration reform bill that would ensure people on tourist, student and other temporary visas leave the country when they are supposed to. The failed amendment was one of the most controversial additions to the bill considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee at Tuesday's hearing.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, backed the amendment that would have required the government to use fingerprints and other biometric data to track visitors when they leave the country at airports and other ports of exit. Democrats, including Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, argued the system would be too expensive to implement. It was voted down 6-12, with two Republicans joining the 10 Democrats in opposing it. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who helped draft the original bill, said he opposed the amendment because the government hasn't shown "the will or the desire" to implement the system, and he doubted including it in the bill would change that.

Despite some conservative opposition to the immigration bill, attempts to significantly alter the bill have failed in the committee mark-up process so far.

The current immigration reform bill seeks to legalize most of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country and prevent future illegal immigration though an employment verification system and more border security measures. About 40 percent of the unauthorized immigrants currently in the country entered legally and then overstayed their visas, which Sessions argued raises national security concerns.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress passed a bill mandating that the government institute a biometric tracking system for people on temporary, nonimmigrant visas such as for tourism. Twelve years later, the system still hasn't been implemented due to cost and other complications.

The Department of Homeland Security estimated it would cost up to $6.4 billion to implement a biometric tracking system in the nation's airports, according to a report in USA Today. It's unclear how much it would cost to install similar technology in the country's land ports, where nearly 80 percent of people enter the United States.

Minnesota senators approved a gay marriage bill on Monday, meaning the Midwestern state will soon be the 12th in the union to allow same-sex couples to wed.

Gov. Mark Dayton is expected to sign the bill into law on Tuesday.

Just last week, Delaware lawmakers voted to allow gay marriage in the state. In April, Rhode Island also passed a same-sex marriage law. Gay rights advocates point to California, Illinois, Oregon and New Jersey as the next states that might join the wave of gay marriage legalization.

More than 35 states ban same-sex marriage either through laws or voter-passed amendments to their constitutions. Public opinion has rapidly shifted on the issue, with a slight majority of Americans now saying they support it in polls.

Correction: An earlier version of this article referenced a fabricated story about Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Kermit Gosnell, shown in an undated photo released by the Philadelphia district attorney's office.A jury has found abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell guilty of three counts of first-degree murder after deliberating for 10 days on the case.

Prosecutors are expected to now seek the death penalty for Gosnell.

The 72-year-old was charged with killing four premature babies by severing their spinal cords after they were born alive in his Philadelphia clinic. He was acquitted of one of those charges and convicted in three. Gosnell was also found guilty in the accidental death of a patient who died after receiving an abortion and a lethal mix of sedatives and painkillers at his clinic.

Gosnell's lawyers argued during the trial that no babies were born alive in the clinic.

A 2010 federal investigation described the West Philadelphia clinic as a filthy "house of horrors" that primarily served low-income women seeking late-term abortions. The nearly 300-page grand jury report said remains of fetuses were stored in freezers and that instruments used in abortions were contaminated with sexually

A stained glass window of Saint Perpetua, an early Christian martyr, in the church of Notre Dame. (Gaetan Poix)Candida Moss, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and a practicing Catholic, wants to shatter what she calls the “myth” of martyrdom in the Christian faith.

Sunday school tales of early Christians being rounded up at their secret catacomb meetings and thrown to the lions by evil Romans are mere fairy tales, Moss writes in a new book. In fact, in the first 250 years of Christianity, Romans mostly regarded the religion's practitioners as meddlesome members of a superstitious cult.

The government actively persecuted Christians for only about 10 years, Moss suggests, and even then intermittently. And, she says, many of the best known early stories of brave Christian martyrs were entirely fabricated.

The controversial thesis, laid out in "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom," has earned her a lot of hate mail and a few sidelong looks from fellow faculty members. But Moss maintains that the Roman Catholic Church and historians have known for centuries that most early Christian martyr stories were exaggerated or invented.

A small group of priest scholars in the 17^th century began sifting through the myths, discrediting not only embellished stories about saints (including that St. George slew a dragon) but also tossing out popular stories about early Christian martyrs.

Historians, including Moss, say only a handful of martyrdom stories from the first 300 years of Christianity—which includes the reign of the cruel, Christian-loathing Nero—are verifiable. (Saint Perpetua of Carthage, pictured in the stained glass window above, is one of the six famous early Christian martyrs Moss believes was actually killed for her faith.)

Moss contends that when Christians were executed, it was often not because of their religious beliefs but because they wouldn't follow Roman rules. Many laws that led to early Christians’ execution were not specifically targeted at them—such as a law requiring all Roman citizens to engage in a public sacrifice to the gods—but their refusal to observe those laws and other mores of Roman society led to their deaths.

Moss calls early Christians “rude, subversive and disrespectful,” noting that they refused to swear oaths, join the military or participate in any other part of Roman society.

Moss can at times seem clinical when attempting to distinguish between true and systematic persecution of Christians for their faith and intermittent violence against them for refusing to conform.

"If persecution is to be defined as hostility toward a group because of its religious beliefs, then surely it is important that the Romans intended to target Christians,” she writes. “Otherwise this is prosecution, not persecution."

With true government persecution, victims have no room to negotiate when trying to convince the government to stop targeting them, Moss said. But when the government’s laws inadvertently lead to the persecution of Christians, there remains room for dialogue and debate over changing those laws.