Jewels Morris-Davis is a no-nonsense kind of girl. When the high school sophomore turned 16 recently, she didn't celebrate with any My Super Sweet 16 foolishness. Nor did she rush to get her driver's license and race around the back roads in this rural northwest corner of South Carolina. But Jewels did quietly revel in one achievement. "I am," she says a few weeks later, a proud smile spreading across her face, "the first person in my family to reach ...

My eyes always cringe at the sight of a homeless veteran. As I know the pains of war firsthand, it breaks my heart to see that people who have sacrificed so much for my freedom are suffering to such a degree. But it's comforting to know that groups like the American Legion Homeless Veterans Housing Project in Jewett City, Conn., have been renovating old buildings and turning them into shelters for veterans for quite some time. They've ...

For the longest time, Sarah Palin was leery of Facebook. Some of the comments left on her page during the 2008 vice-presidential campaign were so withering and unpleasant that it took months of coaxing by her staff and her daughters Bristol and Willow to convince Palin that she should give it another try. So she waded back into the digital fray just after she resigned the Alaska governorship and as her aides were compiling a new press list. Her first Facebook post, in ...

Correction Appended: Aug. 4, 2009 As the House and Senate prepare to embark on their summer recess without having passed any health-care-reform bills, President Obama's dreams of radically restructuring the system have, at least for now, bumped up against the reality of Washington politics. But even if Congress manages to overcome the many obstacles and pass some kind of meaningful reform this fall, the goal of covering some 50 million currently uninsured Americans will encounter a whole new ...

Can 35 million Americans be wrong about pot? Penalties against the possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." So said Jimmy Carter in urging Congress last week to reduce federal penalties for possession of up to 1 oz. of marijuana, enough for about four dozen joints. For a first offense, the maximum penalty now is a year in jail and a $5,000 fine for possession of any amount ...

With an assist from Duarte, Reagan reassures Congress and critics The Reagan Administration wants to give billions of dollars to Central America, it says, to support liberty and political pluralism. Yet democracy in Central America is a patchy business at best. From among the few authentic democrats in the region, the U.S. has staked most of its money and hopes on Jos Napolen Duarte, who will assume El Salvador's presidency on Friday. Last week he came to Washington for four ...

It's as predictable as Rush Limbaugh sparking a controversy: every few years, someone in Congress brings up the Fairness Doctrine. In 1987 the FCC abolished the policy, which dictates that public broadcast license-holders have a duty to present important issues to the public and — here's the "fairness" part — to give multiple perspectives while doing so. Now, more than 20 years later, a group of Democratic legislators are calling for it to be brought back to ...

The logic seems pretty simple: if you eliminate gym class, school kids will get fatter. In 2006, a blue-ribbon commission released a worried report about the precipitous decline of physical education in schools since the early '90s, coinciding with a ballooning rate of obesity in kids. Both Democrats and Republicans have latched onto that argument to criticize school districts for eliminating P.E. in order to spend more to meet the rigorous testing standards of 2001's No Child ...

It has been four decades since Pilar Maroto lost her newborn son, but tears still fill her eyes when she speaks of him. She perfectly remembers the moments after his birth in April 1972, when she heard his first cry and then, later, the sudden, devastating news that her little boy had died. On Tuesday, she stood outside Spain's Congress of Deputies and hoped that, finally, someone in power would take seriously her insistence that her baby ...

President Barack Obama's year of outreach to Iran has succeeded in putting it on the diplomatic defensive: that much was clear from Friday's blunt reproach of Tehran by the International Atomic Energy Agency's board. But it's less clear that Obama can convert that diplomatic advantage into sanctions that will curtail Iran's nuclear program. "The question is," says one senior Democratic aide in Congress, "Can Obama pivot [from engagement to sanctions] and succeed in changing conditions on the ground?" Iran ...