Nu Vibez and Roleplay Guide Magazine - January 2014 | Page 28
2013, The Year in Review - p4
During the shutdown, approximately 800,000
federal employees were indefinitely laid off, and
another 1.3 million were required to report to
work without known payment dates. Only those
government services deemed "excepted" under
the An -deficiency Act were con nued; and only
those employees deemed "excepted" con nued
to report to work.
2. The 2013 Acqui al of George
Zimmerman for the Travon Mar n
killing
SANFORD, Fla. — George Zimmerman, the
neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot
Trayvon Mar n, an unarmed black teenager,
igni ng a na onal debate on racial profiling and
civil rights, was found not guilty of second-degree
murder. He was also acqui ed of manslaughter, a
lesser charge. A er three weeks of tes mony, the
six-woman jury rejected the prosecu on's
conten on that Mr. Zimmerman had deliberately
pursued Mr. Mar n because he assumed the
hoodie-clad teenager was a criminal and
ins gated the fight that led to his death.
Mr. Zimmerman said he shot Mr. Mar n on Feb.
26, 2012, in self-defense a er the teenager
knocked him to the ground, punched him and
slammed his head repeatedly against the
sidewalk.
I n fi n d i n g h i m n o t g u i l t y o f m u rd e r o r
manslaughter, the jur y agreed that Mr.
Zimmerman could have been jus fied in shoo ng
Mr. Mar n because he feared great bodily harm or
death. However juror B29, the lone Hispanic juror
in the George Zimmerman murder trial flatly said
that she thought Zimmerman was guilty. Yet she
s ll voted to acquit.
28- Nu Vibez Magazine - January 2014
1. Obamacare
The fumbled debut of the Affordable Care Act,
o en dubbed Obamacare was 2013's top news
story.
The President and his team had high expecta ons
for the health-care reform package, but technical
glitches on the HealthCare.gov website prevented
all that. Out of the millions of uninsured who stood
to benefit from wider access to health insurance
coverage, just six were able to sign up for such
benefits on the day of the website's Oct. 1 launch.
Now according to one report:
Those numbers didn't rise much higher un l far
into November, when technical crews went to work
on the troubled site, o en shu ng it down for
hours for repairs. Republicans opposed to the
Affordable Care Act pounced on the debacle, and a
month a er the launch Health and Human Services
secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Americans, "You
deserve be er, I apologize." Also apologizing was
President Barack Obama, who in November said he
was "sorry" to hear that some Americans were
being dropped from their health plans due to the
advent of reforms -- even though he had
repeatedly promised that this would not happen.
By Dec. 11, it was announced that nearly 365,000
consumers had successfully selected a health plan
through the federal- and state-run online
"exchanges," although that number was s ll far
below ini al projec ons.
And a report issued the same day found that one
new tenet of the reform package -- allowing young
adults under 26 to be covered by their parents'
plans -- has led to a significant jump in coverage for
people in that age group.