Mars lander sends photos from Red Planet’s arctic

NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet’s surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and sniff the northern polar site’s soil and ice," the space agency said. The first pictures, which the lander began taking shortly after touching down near Mars’ north pole — the end of a 422 million-mile trek — showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could see

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Obama’s Other War: Fighting Mexico’s Drug Lords

The convenient and long-standing tradition south of the border is for Mexico to blame its problems on the U.S. It can often be justified when the matter is the drug-trafficking violence now terrorizing much of Mexico, which is powered in large part by the insatiable gringo demand for drugs, the relentless flow of high-powered weapons from the U.S.

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NBA great Barkley begins 3-day sentence in Tent City

Basketball great Charles Barkley began serving a three-day sentence in Arizona’s infamous Tent City on Saturday, jailed by the same sheriff whose autobiography he endorsed 12 years ago. “You come here when you screw up,” Barkley said at a news conference hours after he reported at the Maricopa County jail

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Lessons Obama learned from stimulus deal

President Obama will pitch his plans this week for dealing with record home foreclosures and trying to thaw frozen credit markets — and taking some key lessons learned into consideration. Aides said the White House has learned several lessons from the fight over the economic stimulus plan, including that the president is better at selling his ideas when he gets out of Washington.

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Obama planning ambitious road ahead

Fresh off victory on President Obama’s signature $787 billion economic recovery plan, several top White House aides say they’re planning an ambitious agenda for the rest of February. The Senate had waited for the return of Democrat Sherrod Brown, who was returning from his mother’s wake in his home state of Ohio, to close the voting late Friday. For the rest of the month, the White House agenda will focus on addressing the housing crisis, cleaning up the banking mess and laying the groundwork for reform of the health care system and entitlement programs like Medicare.

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