10 things you need to know today: November 21, 2014

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1. Obama details his immigration reform orders
2. Woman arrested for carrying a pistol by the White House fence
3. Five detainees released in an effort to reduce numbers at Guantanamo
4. Fraternity vandalized after article on alleged gang rape
5. Mexicans protest students' disappearance
6. More women make sexual allegations against Cosby
7. Utah panel backs proposal that would bring back firing squads
8. Five members of family killed in crash en route to Disney World
9. NFL moves Buffalo Bills game due to massive snowfall
10. Spain's Duchess of Alba dies

last updated 13 January 2015

1. Obama details his immigration reform orders

President Obama announced Thursday that he was using his executive powers to unilaterally impose immigration reform despite gridlock over the issue in Congress. In a primetime address, Obama said he would enact measures deferring the deportation of four million undocumented immigrants, allowing undocumented parents of U.S. citizens who have been in the country five years to apply for legal residency, but with no path to citizenship. Republicans vowed to fight the moves, saying Obama had overstepped his authority by acting alone.

Secret Service officers on Thursday arrested a Michigan woman who allegedly was spotted walking by the White House fence carrying a pistol. Plainclothes officers noticed that the woman — identified as April Lenhart, 23 — was wearing a holster, and notified uniformed officers. Lenhart was charged with carrying an unregistered 9 mm handgun, and a man who was with her was questioned and released. A day earlier an Ohio man was arrested after police found a rifle in his car a block from the White House.

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Five Guantanamo Bay detainees were transferred to Slovakia and Georgia under a plan to reduce the number of suspected terrorists at the facility, Defense Department officials said Thursday. The number of detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, where many Taliban and al Qaeda fighters captured early in the Afghan war were taken, reached 750 after the U.S. began holding post-9/11 terrorism suspects there. As of Thursday, there were still 143 detainees at the facility.

Vandals broke windows and spray painted walls at a University of Virginia fraternity house that was described by Rolling Stone as the scene of a gang rape two years ago, authorities said Thursday. The article, published Wednesday, quoted a student identified as Jackie who said she was raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house after going on a date with a member of the house. UVa. President Teresa Sullivan said there were details in the article that school officials had not been aware of, and she had asked police to formally investigate.

Masked protesters threw Molotov cocktails at police in Mexico City on Thursday in an expression of mounting anger over the government's handling of the abduction and apparent killing of 43 trainee school teachers in the southwestern city of Iguala. Earlier in the day, tens of thousands of demonstrators, led by parents of missing students, marched through the capital, many of them calling for President Enrique Pena Nieto's resignation. The victims were believed to have been kidnapped by corrupt police working with a drug gang.

Two new accusers came forward on Thursday saying that comedian Bill Cosby raped or made unwanted sexual advances toward them years ago. Florida nurse Therese Serignese, 57, said she had been drugged and raped. Carla Ferrigno, wife of actor and former body builder Lou Ferrigno, said Cosby forced a kiss on her in 1967. More than a dozen women have now made allegations against Cosby, who has declined to address the claims, but his lawyer has called some of the latest ones "utter nonsense."

Utah lawmakers have backed a proposal to resume the use of firing squads in state executions. Utah banned the use of firing squads 10 years ago, but state Rep. Paul Ray (R) has introduced a bill that would give the state the option of using a firing squad if officials were unable to obtain lethal injection drugs within 30 days of a scheduled execution. An interim panel approve the measure 9-2 this week. It still has to be debated by the full legislature next year.

Five members of a Texas family were killed as they set off for a "dream trip" to Disney World when a 16-year-old boy apparently fell asleep at the wheel, causing the family's SUV to roll over, police said Thursday. Police charged the boy, who had a driver's license, with reckless driving. The dead included the driver's parents, primary-school teachers Michael and Trudi Hardman, and three of their children — Dakota Watson, 15, Adam Hardman, 7, and Kaci Hardman, 4.

The Duchess of Alba, Spain's richest woman, died in Seville on Thursday. She was 88. Guinness World Records said the duchess, Maria del Rosario Cayetana Fitz-James Stuary, was the world's most titled person. She was five times a duchess, 18 times a marchioness, and 18 times a countess, among other titles. She was a member of one of Spain's oldest noble families, and had a fortune worth an estimated $753 million. She also was a gossip-column fixture known as the "rebel noble," and was once asked by Picasso to be his muse.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.