It's been a busy two and a half years for President Barack Obama. There was this country's near financial collapse, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now the conflict in Libya. And who can forget the ugly battle over health care reform. There has also been political turmoil as the nation's first non-white president navigated the terrain of a country in transition.

But for all the drama, President Obama wants four more years. That's why he filed paperwork today to seek another term with the Federal Election Commission. The certification allows Obama to begin raising money in what some think could be the first billion dollar presidential campaign.

Obama also sent a video to his supporters and launched a new website that's already has 19 million Facebook followers and 7.3 million Twitter supporters.

"I just saw the energy and hope that he had for this country," says man named Mike from New York who is shown in the video. "Even though I couldn't exactly vote at the time, I knew that someday I'd be able to help re-elect him. And that's what I plan on doing."

With the country's economic position improving, Obama can say his policies are working. He can point to health care reform, efforts to reform this country's financial regulation, his international efforts, and the fact that foreign leaders have more confidence in this country's leadership as proof that he deserves a second term.

Obama's election wasn't easy last time and it won't be easy this time. He's no longer the upstart Senator. He is the President of the United States with a long record of decisions that his opponents can shift and pick through

"President Obama is one person. Plus he got a job. We are paying him to do a job so we can't say hey can you take some time off and come and get us all energized. So we better figure it out," said a woman in the video named Alice who lives in Michigan.

At first glance, it sounds like a terrible thing that should certainly be outlawed: being able to choose an abortion based on the race of the parent or the fetus.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (pictured) just signed a bill that makes it a felony to "knowingly perform or provide financing for an abortion sought because of the race or sex of the fetus or a parent's race."

There's only one problem.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that anyone is getting abortions based on the race or sex of the fetus or the race of the parent.

So what's really going on here?

They watched their friends and families die in last year's devastating earthquake and they have survived the rigors of being an immigrant in a new land to excel in school.

Now a group of Haitian teens from Brooklyn, N.Y. who have won an invitation to a prestigious robotics competition in St. Louis need just $15,000 to make it there.

The mostly Haitian students from the It Takes a Village Academy in East Flatbush beat out kids from 63 other area high schools, including some of New York City's most prestigious, to earn the invitation. It was something many of the kids on the team did not think was possible.

"It's like a dream come true," said Margely Saint-Pierre, 17, who saw 10 friends die and his high school destroyed in the devastating Haitian earthquake, told the New York Daily News.

The school is just one of two from the city to be invited to the FIRST Tech Challenge next month where they would participate in a competition to build the fastest and most precise robot.

"What their victory shows is how a little bit of money in the right place can accomplish a lot," Marilyn Gelber, president of the Brooklyn Community Foundation, told Aol Black Voices in an interview.

The foundation, in conjunction with Polytechnic Institute of New York University, sponsors the Central Brooklyn Robotic Initiative. Graduate students from the university travel to 18 schools in Central Brooklyn to work with the kids on robotics programs. The program is working so well that it will double to 36 schools next year.

"To travel from Brooklyn to St. Louis to compete on a national level would be an extraordinary experience and show these kids that you can be written off as one who is not going to succeed but come out on the other side as champions. We want them to be champions and represent all kids in that situation," Gelber added.

For many of these kids, participating in the robotics program has brought a world of benefits.

Closing the Gap with Robotics from NYU-Poly on Vimeo.

It is one of the most horrific symbols of hate in American culture, and it was openly used to strike fear into the hearts of Southern blacks by the Ku Klux Klan for decades.

For a black family in the wealthy, mostly white central Californian town of Arroyo Grande, though, that reality came to life last week, when an 11-foot cross stolen from a nearby church was set ablaze near their home.

A 19-year-old woman in the house looked out of her window and saw the flames, and a town that has not had a reported hate crime in almost a decade was in shock.

"I was horrified," the Rev. Stephanie Raphael, president of the San Luis Obispo Ministerial Association, told the Associated Press. "We live in a paradise, and I think the first thought was, this can't really be real."

Unfortunately, hate does still exist in this world. Even though the town in rural San Luis Obispo County is "a region of vast farms, picturesque towns and a state university campus," ugly sentiments can easily lie beneath the surface. Those sentiments can be brought to the surface when a black family does something as simple as move into a neighborhood of their choosing.

As the settlement patterns of African Americans change and we head into suburbs that were once all white, I won't be surprised if we see more incidents like this.

Some people just can't accept change.

These old symbols of hate seem to endure, passed down from one generation to another. Take the Massachusetts man who pled guilty to burning down a black church, after President Barack Obama was elected.

Law enforcement needs to make it abundantly clear to the perpetrators of these crimes that there will be swift and harsh consequences for these sorts of actions. The man who burned down the church in Springfield, Mass., was sentenced to nine years in prison. In 2007, a man who burned a cross outside a northern California church to intimidate a clergy member visiting from Rwanda was sentenced to two years in prison.

More than 70 years ago, Recy Taylor (pictured above) was attacked and savagely gang raped by a group of white men in rural Abbeville, Ala., while walking home from church... and then the racist law enforcement system of the deep Jim Crow South raped her again.

Taylor's attackers were never brought to justice.

Two all-white and all-male grand juries declined to indict the rapists, and to make matters worse, police, who should have been seeking justice for Taylor, began to harass her.

"What happened to my sister way back then... couldn't happen today," said Taylor's 74-year-old brother, Robert Corbitt, who still lives in the same town where his sister was attacked. "Boy, what a mess they made out of it. They tried to make her look like a whore, and she was a Christian lady."

Now 91, living in Florida and in failing health, Taylor believes her attackers are dead. She did ask for an apology, though, from the system that managed to make the horrible crime that was committed against her even worse, the Associated Press reported.

On Monday, Taylor finally got one.

"It is apparent that the system failed you in 1944," Henry County probate judge and commission chairwoman JoAnn Smith said, according to the AP.

"I would like to extend a deep, heartfelt apology for the error we made here in Alabama," Rep. Dexter Grimsley, who represents the 85th district of Alabama, said while looking at Corbitt who attended the news conference as his sister's representative. "It was so unkind. We can't stand around and say that it didn't happen."

It did happen. And not just to Taylor.

All through the pre–civil rights South, black women were victimized by white men and then victimized by the law. Rosa Parks took up Taylor's case, but it was eventually overshadowed by the larger Civil Rights Movement, showing how abuse against women was left out of the struggle for justice even by some of our great leaders.

Danielle McGuire, a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, tells the story of Taylor's ordeal and the similar situations endured by other black women in the book "At the Dark End of the Street.

"The fact that they are acknowledging that this happened is important," said McGuire.

It's important but not nearly enough.

Author Danielle McGuire Joins FOX 2 to Discuss New Book in Honor of Black History Month: MyFoxDETROIT.com

In an irony befitting the horrendous nature of Jon Burge's decades-long crime spree against black men, honest police officers and the American justice system, the same day the disgraced cop reported to federal prison for lying about torturing confessions out of hundreds of blacks, one of the victimized men was released from prison after 25 years.

Unfortunately, irony can be as cruel as it is poetic. So while Burge will only serve 4 1/2 years for lying about the torture because the statute of limitations for prosecuting him for the crimes has expired, Eric Caine, (pictured below right) has lost more than half of his life for a crime he was tortured into confessing to.

In fact, the 45-year-old Caine has spent five more years of his life in prison than he's spent out of it.

"On the day that Jon Burge is headed for prison, Eric Caine got word he is coming home," said Caine's attorney, Russell Ainsworth.

President Barack Obama is not walking the walk when it comes to handling the way gun violence is destroying our country and particularly devastating the African-American community.

Despite criticizing former President George W. Bush for failing to renew the federal ban on assault rifles, Obama has steered clear of the issue himself, according to the Associated Press.

Obama said Bush's failure to renew the law was a "scandal," but Obama has yet to touch the issue himself. To give the president credit, he has called for a conversation about gun control and ways to "keep America safe for all our people."

He has also called for the strengthening of existing laws and requiring gun dealers to perform background checks; however, he has yet to call for the federal ban on assault weapons to be renewed, even after the high-profile shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

The AP writes:

Nor did the president take the opportunity to endorse legislation backed by many Democrats on Capitol Hill after Giffords' shooting that would ban high-capacity ammunition magazines but not assault weapons themselves. That bill could be more politically palatable in Congress.

Obama's silence on the issue is a change from earlier in his career. During a debate while running for Senate in 2004, he said: "I think it's a scandal that this president did not force a renewal of this assault weapons ban." Since becoming president, Obama hasn't sought to force a return of the ban either. In fact he appears to have mentioned it publicly only once, in response to a reporter's question during a 2009 trip to Mexico. At the time the president said he continued to support the ban but "none of us are under any illusion that reinstating that ban would be easy. And so, what we've focused on is how we can improve our enforcement of existing laws."

President Barack Obama will call for an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind education law on Monday because of features the administration says actually lower educational standards.

The speech is part of a push by Obama to encourage a bipartisan revision of the law that was a hallmark of the administration of President George W. Bush. Obama has said he wants to return the United States to the position it previously held as the world's top producer of college graduates.

The law, the Obama administration says, has "one-size-fits-all mandates" that four out of five schools in the country will not meet. These mandates have also caused states to lower their standards to satisfy the law. Particularly problematic is the law's pass/fail approach. Under Obama's proposed changes, progress would be measured.

For example, even though a school has not reached certain hallmarks, such as the number of students reading at grade level, but has shown considerable progress toward that goal, the school would not be given a failing grade but receive credit for the progress it has made.

"In the State of the Union address and 2012 budget, President Obama called for key investments in education because he believes in order to win the future for this generation and the next, we must dramatically accelerate learning for all children. In order to do that, we must fix [No Child Left Behind] this year. It has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed or to recognize success," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said during a conference call Sunday.

"We need to fix this law now, so we can close achievement gaps in the future. We want to create a new law that is fair, flexible and focused on the schools and students most at risk. A fair accountability system shares responsibility for improvements and rewards excellence and is based on high standards as informed by sophisticated assessments that measures individual student growth," Duncan added.

United States Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Democrat from Florida, has been accused of sexual harassment.

Winsome Packer claims the harassment took place between 2008 and 2010 when Hastings co-chaired the Helsinki Commission, an independent U.S. government agency in Europe.

Packer filed the suit against Hastings and the commission. According to the suit, Packer was subjected to "unwelcome sexual advances," "unwelcome touching" and retaliation.

When she complained, Packer says she was forced to endure more harassment and then threatened with termination.

"Mr. Hastings' intention was crystal clear: he was sexually attracted to Ms. Packer, wanted a sexual relationship with her, and would help progress her career if she acquiesced to his sexual advances," the complaint reads.

Hastings allegedly made Packer extremely uncomfortable with a litany of sexual advances. According to the suit, Hastings asked to stay in her apartment, hugged her in a sexually intimidating way, invited her multiple times to his hotel room and made sexual comments to Packer, at one point allegedly asking in public: "What kind of underwear are you wearing?"

Hastings, a senior member of the House Rules Committee, Ranking Democratic Member of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, and Democratic Chairman of the Florida Delegation emphatically denied the charges in a statement.

"I have never sexually harassed anyone. In fact, I am insulted that these ludicrous allegations are being made against me. When all the facts are known in this case, the prevailing sentiment will be, 'How bizarre!'" Hasting wrote. "I will win this lawsuit. That is a certainty. In a race with a lie, the truth always wins. And when the truth comes to light and the personal agendas of my accusers are exposed, I will be vindicated."

As the Space Shuttle Discovery makes its final descent from the International Space Station Wednesday morning and then heads to the Smithsonian Institute to be preserved for history, Benjamin Alvin "Al" Drew Jr. will be able to say that he was part of a historic moment.

The retired Air Force colonel is the only African American aboard what will be the final mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery. The crew delivered the first humanoid robot in to space. Drew, 48, also performed a pair of spacewalks during this final historic trip.

The two spacewalks helped to upgrade important parts of the international space station. During one of the spacewalks, Drew was tasked with removing toxic ammonia from a cooling unit. According to Space.com, Drew was also "removing thermal coverings, attaching camera lens covers and adjusting loose radiator grapple beams that had been improperly installed during a previous shuttle mission."

Discovery is NASA's oldest and most traveled shuttle. Only two more shuttle launches remain before the program is shuttered for good. The shuttle is expected to disconnect from the International Space Station this morning and spend another two days in orbit before returning to Earth on Wednesday.

"What a great program, and I got to be a part of it," Drew said in an interview before this trip.