Government

The road to recovery for U.S. automakers could be jammed with hundreds of thousands of gas-guzzling used cars, which President Obama hopes will be traded in for more fuel-efficient vehicles -- with the lure of government money. So-called cash-for-clunkers programs in Germany and France have worked well this year to spur new car sales. But similar initiatives aimed at reducing smog in Southern California have not fared so well in recent years.

A government lawsuit accusing No. 1 home lender Wells Fargo & Co. of defrauding a federal mortgage-insurance program is shaping up as a knock-down battle between the San Francisco bank and the U.S. Justice Department. Wells Fargo lost a round Monday, when U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer in Washington refused the bank's request to dismiss the federal action. But the bank, which has vehemently denied wrongdoing, said Tuesday it might appeal Collyer's ruling and would continue to press its counter-claims against the lawsuit in New York.

Sonia Gandhi, the woman who Thursday staged one of India's memorable electoral comebacks, is a reluctant politician with a distaste for the rough and tumble of politics. Gandhi is said to have threatened to divorce her husband, Rajiv, after he decided to enter politics to succeed his assassinated mother and former prime minister, Indira Gandhi. After Rajiv's assassination in 1991, Sonia Gandhi became a virtual recluse. She avoided Indian politics and tried to shield her two children from it.

Every four years Americans are presented with different visions of the future and are asked to choose between them. This year, we've been told, the choice is between two conceptions of government: small versus big. The Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan has promised to "restore" America to its "small government" past. Any vision of the future is built upon a certain understanding of the past. Although past and future are inextricably linked, we spend much less time evaluating candidates as historians than we do assessing their skills as fortunetellers able to predict the future.