U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about strengthening the economy for the middle class and measures to combat gun violence during a visit to Hyde Park Academy in Chicago, Illinois February 15, 2013.

CHICAGO | Fri Feb 15, 2013 9:59pm EST

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama acknowledged on Friday that he wished his father had been a bigger part of his life as he argued that stronger families are just as important as gun control in reducing crime and violence in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Obama returned to his old home neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago with a different take on his gun control message - that it will require an improved home environment for children to reduce the possibility that they will one day resort to violence.

To do that, he said, will require better economic conditions for low- and middle-class Americans, one reason he wants to raise the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $9, a proposal he offered in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, was raised largely by his mother and grandparents in Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., divorced Obama's mother when the president was two years old, and he was the central figure in Obama's memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

Pointing to a group of teenage boys with whom he had met privately before delivering a speech, Obama said he had not been much different than them.

"Don't get me wrong," he said in the address to high school students at Hyde Park Academy. "As the son of a single mom, who gave everything she had to raise me with the help of my grandparents, I turned out okay."

"But at the same time, I wish I'd have had a father who was around and involved," he told the mainly black audience of about 700.

Obama worked as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago but had a more privileged background than many of the children he addressed on Friday.

Chicago has suffered a surge in gang-related violence and is one of the most violent cities in America. Obama's visit comes a week after his wife, Michelle, attended the funeral in the city of 15-year-old honor student Hadiya Pendleton, who was shot dead a week after participating in the presidential inauguration.

At the start of his second term in office, Obama wants Congress to approve a series of tighter gun controls like requiring background checks for all firearms purchasers and banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

But as he made clear in Chicago it will take improvements in the home environment for children to keep them off the streets and that this will require help from parents, teachers and clergy.

"When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child's heart that government can't fill," Obama said.

In too many areas, "it can feel like the future only extends to the next street corner or the outskirts of town...There are entire neighborhoods where they don't see an example of somebody succeeding," he said.

Corey Stevens, 17, a high school senior, was one of the students who got to meet with Obama before his speech.

"I think that he needed to come back here and get the message to the people up close and personal and let them know that this needs to stop," said Stevens, who wants to go into law enforcement.

Hadiya Pendleton's father, Nathaniel Pendleton, who was in the audience, had a message for those who have been following his family's tragedy in the news -- get involved.

"You never expect this tragedy to knock on your door... But there are preventative measures," Pendleton told Reuters. "So let's try to prevent it instead of waiting for it to happen."

Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest known for his activism against gun violence, agreed with Obama that gun laws alone won't solve the problem.

"We have to look in our urban communities and realize that we have a lack of good schools, lack of employment, abundance of poverty, abundance of folks coming back out of penal institutions with records," Pfleger said. "Until we deal with all those issues, you create the perfect storm for violence."

(Writing by Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Renita D. Young; Editing by Alistair Ball, Mary Wisniewski, David Brunnstrom and Carol Bishopric)

(This story was corrected to read, "...or the outskirts of town..." instead of "...of the outskirts of town...")

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1 of 3. People arrive at a district court in New Delhi January 3, 2013. The December 16 attack on the physiotherapy student and a male companion provoked furious protests close to the seat of government in New Delhi and has fuelled a nationwide debate about the prevalence of sexual crimes in India, where a rape is reported on average every 20 minutes.

NEW DELHI | Thu Jan 3, 2013 8:22am EST

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Five Indian men were formally charged in court on Thursday with the gang rape and murder of a physiotherapy student in a case that has generated widespread anger about the government's inability to prevent violence against women.

The December 16 attack on the 23-year-old student and a male companion provoked furious protests close to the seat of government in New Delhi and has fuelled a nationwide debate about the prevalence of sexual crime in India, where a rape is reported on average every 20 minutes.

The woman died of her injuries in hospital in Singapore, where she had been taken for treatment, on Saturday.

The five are accused of assaulting the woman on a bus in New Delhi, leaving her with such severe injuries that she died two weeks later. They were not present in court.

A sixth accused is under 18 and is due to be tried separately in a juvenile court.

A public prosecutor read out charges including murder, gang rape and criminal conspiracy. The court will examine the charges on Saturday, duty magistrate Surya Malik Grover said.

Murder carries the death penalty in India.

The father of the woman said earlier he backed the chorus of calls for those responsible to be executed.

"The whole country is demanding that these monsters be hanged. I am with them," the father told reporters in his home village of Mandwara Kalan in Uttar Pradesh state. The woman was born in the village but the family later moved to New Delhi.

She has not been identified and nor have members of her family, in accordance with Indian law.

In a sign of the depth of feeling surrounding the case, the bar association at the court said none of its members was willing to represent the accused. The court is expected to assign a defense lawyer for the men.

Advocates dressed in black robes protesting outside the court called for fast justice. In the northern state of Kashmir, school girls marched with black ribbons over their mouths and demanded harsh punishment for the accused.

The case is due to be processed by a new, fast-track chamber set up in response to the crime.

While the fast-track procedure has broad support, many lawyers worry new that legislation written in haste could be unconstitutional and oppose introducing the death penalty for rape.

"A swift trial should not be at the cost of a fair trial," Chief Justice Altamas Kabir said on Wednesday.

ANGER

Police have said the accused have admitted to torturing and raping the student "to teach her a lesson". She fought back and bit three of them, a police source told Reuters, and the bite marks are part of the evidence against them.

After throwing her from the private bus, the driver tried to run the victim over but she was pulled away by her companion, a senior police official told Reuters.

Police have prepared a dossier of evidence and charges against the accused, which is believed to run to 1,000 pages, including testimony from the woman's friend who survived the hour-long attack and a man who said he was robbed by the same gang prior to the rape.

Days of protests in New Delhi and other cities followed the attack. Many of the protesters have been students, infuriated by what they see as the failure of the government to protect women.

In the northeastern state of Assam on Wednesday, village women beat a politician and handed him to police for what they said was the attempted rape of a woman, police said. Anti-rape protests have also broken out in neighboring Nepal.

The government has set up two panels headed by retired judges to recommend measures to ensure women's safety. One of the panels, due to make recommendations this month, has received some 17,000 suggestions from the public, media reported.

India's chief justice inaugurated the first fast-track court for sexual offences on Wednesday - a long standing demand of activists to clear a court backlog.

A review of India's penal code, which dates back to 1860, was presented to parliament last month, before the attack, and widens the definition of rape, another demand of activists.

That bill is now likely to be revised further, with chemical castration and the death penalty in rape cases among proposals under consideration.

"We want the laws to be amended in such a stringent way that before a person even thinks of touching a girl, he should feel chills down his spine," said lawyer Suman Lata Katiyal, protesting at the south Delhi courthouse.

Hanging is only allowed in the "rarest of rare" cases according to a 1983 Supreme Court ruling. It was used for the first time in eight years in November when the lone surviving gunman from a 2008 militant attack on Mumbai, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab from Pakistan, was executed.

(Additional reporting by Diksha Madhok, Annie Banerji and Satarupa Bhatgtacharjya in NEW DELHI; and Gopal Sharma in KATHMANDU; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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