Politics

PORT-AU-PRINCE — On Monday, Haitians awoke with their hopes for a smooth transition to a new government dashed by a series of missteps and miscalculations that left the outcome on hold. After widespread complaints by voters who said they either couldn’t find their names on the voting lists or were coerced into voting for a…

America’s prisons, like many of our public schools, reflect our country’s most shameful and profound failings. This week the U.S. Supreme Court takes on one aspect of our nation’s love affair with incarceration. In Schwarzenegger v. Plata, the state of California has challenged an order issued by a three-judge federal court under the Prison Reform…

President Barack Obama has announced that he is freezing pay for federal workers for two years. Citing growing concerns about the deficit and Republican pressure about federal pay and benefits, the president announced that he will stop pay increases for most of the 2 million people who work for the federal government. The freeze applies…

The White House received a big package Saturday: a Douglas fir tree from Lehighton, Pa. Christmas has come to Pennsylvania Avenue. Christopher Botek, who won the right to donate the tree through the National Christmas Tree Association’s annual contest, delivered the tree. It will be set up and decorated in the White House Blue Room…

For the last several weeks, thousands of people have lined up in front of makeshift voter-registration offices in Haiti as they attempt to replace lost registration cards. The voter rolls, which numbered more than 3 million people, have been depleted as hundreds of thousands of voters either lost their lives or their voter cards in…

Just a few months after North Carolina Republican Chairman Tom Fetzer asked for the resignation of Michael Steele from the top post at the Republican National Committee, Fetzer is now tending his own resignation, effective in January. The reasons for his departure are less interesting than the issue of succession: Are local Republican organizations buying…

President Obama is known for having game. Apparently, being chief executive means nothing when you play a friendly basketball game with your friends. The president took an elbow to the lip from another player during a Friday-morning pickup game that required 12 stitches, according to news reports. The president got his stitches under local anesthesia…

A California man was indicted on Wednesday for writing a letter in which he threatened to kill President Barack Obama. Apparently Roger Hudnall has a thing for writing threatening letters to the government. A Humboldt County man who served time in prison for mailing a phony anthrax letter to the FBI was indicted Wednesday by…

As if a new reality show, Fox News commentaries and daughter Bristol’s Dancing With the Stars spin weren’t enough, Sarah Palin is back with another book: America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family and Flag, which was released on Tuesday. In it, the half-term governor and full-time Republican enigma shares her increasingly extremist worldview on…

The Associated Press is reporting that President Barack Obama has pledged that the United States would defend South Korea after what the White House branded a “provocative, outrageous attack by North Korea” on its neighbor. Its options limited, the U.S. sought a diplomatic rather than a military response to one of the most ominous clashes…