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U.S. won't tolerate efforts to harm Americans: Obama

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected any denigration of Islam but said there is no excuse for attacks on U.S. embassies, insisting he will never tolerate efforts to harm Americans.

"I have made it clear that the United States has a profound respect for people of all faiths," Obama said in his weekly radio address. "Yet there is never any justification for violence .... There is no excuse for attacks on our embassies and consulates."

Angry anti-American protests have swept the Muslim world in response to a film that insults the Prophet Mohammad. An attack on the U.S. consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others this week.

A day after Obama led a somber ceremony marking the return of the bodies of the Americans killed in Libya, Obama acknowledged that a surge of anti-American violence in the Middle East is disturbing.

The Pentagon is sending Marines to beef up security at the U.S. embassy in Sudan, following similar reinforcements to Libya and Yemen.

The Libyan attack and the U.S.-directed outrage have raised questions about Obama's handling of the so-called Arab Spring, a series of revolutions that have unseated entrenched authoritarian governments.

The turbulence in the Middle East has had ripples in a tight U.S. presidential election, with Obama's Republican challenger Mitt Romney saying Obama has weakened U.S. authority around the world.

However, Obama repeated a vow to bring the attackers of the U.S. consulate in Libya to justice. "We will not waver in their pursuit," he said.

The president also said the turmoil should not deter U.S. efforts to support democracy in the region or elsewhere.

"Let us never forget that for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom, and dignity, and hope that our flag represents," he said.

(Reporting by Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Hands-on preview of iPhone 5: A real lightweight

Chicago Teachers Dig In, Increase Pressure on Obama

Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, speaking at a downtown Chicago rally where thousands of the organizations’ members protested proposed changes to teacher evaluation and tenure policies.

In America’s third-largest school system, union sentiment runs very strong, and not just among the more than 30,000 teachers, administrators and support staff workers who are now in their third day on strike.

A poll of registered Chicago voters found support for the strike running at 47 percent compared to 39 percent opposed. The survey, conducted by McKeon & Associates, the firm run by Mike McKeon, longtime pollster to former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, found broad-based support across racial and economic lines.

Chicago is union territory, and if there’s any big city where teachers could sustain a strike, it’s this one. Remember, it took non-union Wal-Mart years of cajoling to get a store inside the city limits.

Of course, even Woodie Guthrie might lose his union ardor given enough days with his kids stuck at home. What seems like a thrilling exercise of people power today might look very different a week from now.

About 350,000 of the district’s more than 400,000 students have been shut out of class. The district has opened some half-day emergency schools staffed by head-office administrators to take some of the pressure off, and there are hot lunches available for students in poor neighborhoods.

But for most parents, this means missed days at work, alarmingly idle children and lots and lots of logistical headaches. The undecided 14 percent in the poll will feel a strong incentive to side against the strike if the pickets continue.

But for now, Chicago stands with the teachers’ union.

It’s been a long time since the district saw a strike, in part because of the Democratic and union dominance in city government. It’s been more than 20 years since teachers walked out. They prevailed, and then subsequently won a series of negotiating battles in the following years. With an average salary of $75,000, gold-plated benefits and a fast track to tenure, Chicago’s teachers are accustomed to getting their way.

This time, though, the strike isn’t about getting more, it’s about preventing changes to the rules that prevent teachers from getting sacked.

These changes are modest compared to what many districts have enacted and follow along after years of reform efforts by former schools boss and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

After 10 months of negotiations, though, the issue of how easy it is to evaluate teachers and fire failing ones has become a seemingly impossible sticking point. Even with a big raise on offer, the union, a chapter of the AFL-CIO, is nowhere close to budging.

There are always national politics at play in a big-city or statewide teacher strike, but that’s especially true here. President Obama is a Chicagoan and while his children are privately educated, some of his neighbors send their children to public schools.

And the man being cast as the villain in this play by the union, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is Obama’s former White House chief of staff. While true-blue Emanuel is hardly the Scott Walker the union is describing, he is at odds with the most important part of the president’s political base: government worker union members.

So far, Obama has stood silent on the subject. Duncan has issued a statement calling for constructive compromise, but that’s just boilerplate. If the strike continues, Obama will feel mounting pressure to weigh in. Unlike other local-level controversies in which Obama could have been excused for staying above the fray – the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the shooting of Trayvon Martin or the Wisconsin labor protests – Obama is a player in this game.

One assumes that even as the White House tries to deal with the deadly anti-American riots in the Arab world, a sputtery economy and rising fuel prices, somewhere, somebody on Team Obama is trying to get this resolved before the president has to weigh in.

There are considerable upsides to the president joining the fray.

One of the best policy points for the president with voters is the efforts he and Duncan have made to add some elements of meritocracy to public education. Their Race to the Top program doesn’t offer the stick to lousy teachers but does reward schools that increase standards and performance.

If Obama were to call for teachers to return to work and accept the new requirements proposed by Emanuel’s administration,  it would play very well with the suburban mothers who will likely decide the election. Those voters are very concerned about the country’s crumbling public education system and might be gratified to see Obama take a stand against teacher unions.

However popular teacher union are in Chicago, they have fallen into disrepute nationally. The crusade for accountability and flexibility in union rules has become a national concern as in the film “Waiting for Superman.”

If Obama were seen standing up to his political benefactors in the government unions, he would have a chance to change public perceptions about him and his administration. To further abuse a much-overused phrase, it could be a “Sister Souljah moment.”

But Obama is counting heavily on the money and ground troops of government unions to prevail in November. The incremental efforts at reform by his administration were already unpopular with this most-important Democratic bloc. Voicing disapproval for a strike that union members see as a principled struggle would be very costly.

If he speaks out in favor of the strikers, even in tentative terms, Obama would look like a captive of his base. If he speaks out against them, even tentatively, he risks further exacerbating the wide enthusiasm gap with Republicans this year.

The best hope for Obama is that the storm passes quickly and he isn’t forced into the fight. That’s why you can be sure that the efforts behind the scenes in Obamaland to get this strike ended are intense.

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News, and his POWER PLAY column appears Monday-Friday on FoxNews.com. Catch Chris Live online daily at 11:30 am ET  at live.foxnews.com

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Syria says death toll in Aleppo blast rises to 30, as UN envoy appeals for peace

The death toll from a car bomb in Syria’s largest city has risen to 30, state media said Monday, as the new international envoy to the country said the Syrian people are desperate to see peace and stability.

The Sunday night blast ripped through the northern city of Aleppo, which has become one of the main battlegrounds of the country’s civil war. Activists say at least 23,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted in March 2011.

On Monday, the new UN-Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, said he will travel to Syria this week to meet with regime officials as well as civil society.

“I answer to no one except the Syrian people,” Brahimi told reporters in Cairo, where he was meeting with Arab League officials and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. “Syrians aspire to peace, stability and to realizing their goals of freedom and political progress.”

Brahimi, who is tasked with brokering a diplomatic solution to the conflict, replaced former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who stepped down in August in frustration after his six-point peace plan collapsed.

The fight for Aleppo, a city of 3 million that was once a bastion of support for President Bashar Assad, is critical for both the regime and the opposition. Its fall would give the opposition a major strategic victory with a stronghold in the north near the Turkish border. A rebel defeat, at the very least, would buy Assad more time.

Syria’s state run news agency, SANA, said Monday the death toll has risen to 30 civilians — including women and children — with 64 people wounded.

The blast happened near two hospitals. According to Aleppo-based activist Mohammed al-Hassan, one of the hospitals, Al-Hayat, was turned into a site for the treatment of government troops shortly after the fighting in Aleppo began in July.

SANA also reported that the blast was caused by a small truck rigged with more than 1,000 kilograms of explosives, which left a crater 6 meters deep.
SANA blamed terrorists, the term the regime uses for rebels, for the attack. But there was no immediate claim of responsibility from the rebels or any other group.

Some opposition activists disputed the SANA claim that the dead were all civilians. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, citing hospital sources that it did not name, said members of the military were among the dead.

It was impossible to confirm the claims. Syria heavily restricts media access to the country, making official media and activist reports crucial sources of information.