Barack Obama, Hate Crime | featured news

David Plouffe, senior advisor to President Obama’s reelection campaign, fired back in unusually harsh terms Sunday in response to former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s assertion that Obama’s comments on the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin were “disgraceful.”

At a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden Wednesday afternoon, President Obama plans to sign a bill into law that was more than a decade in the making. It is an update to the federal hate crimes statute that Congress initially passed in 1968.

Physical attacks on people based on their sexual orientation will join the list of federal hate crimes in a major expansion of the civil rights-era law Congress approved today and sent to President Barack Obama.