United States

Ushering in a new era in medicine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it had cleared the way for the world's first clinical trial of a therapy derived from human embryonic stem cells. By early summer, a handful of patients with severe spinal cord injuries will be eligible for injections of specialized nerve cells designed to enable electrical signals to travel between the brain and the rest of the body.

The housing plan unveiled by President Obama on Wednesday goes further than any previous effort to break the vicious cycle of declining home values, rising mortgage defaults and frozen credit that triggered the country's worst recession since the 1930s. And it embraces strategies that attack the complex problems on several fronts but without requiring a long struggle in Congress.

The Army's internal study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last year produced the most memorable image of the invasion. As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein.

In the heart of the Ethiopian community here, a group of friends gathered after work in an office to chew on dried khat leaves before going home to their wives and children. Sweet tea and sodas stood on a circular wooden table between green mounds of the plant, a mild narcotic grown in the Horn of Africa. As the sky grew darker the conversation became increasingly heated, flipping from religion to jobs to local politics. Suddenly, one of the men paused and turned in his chair.

As President Obama names more policy czars to his White House team -- high-level staff members who will help oversee the administration's top initiatives -- some lawmakers and Washington interest groups are raising concerns that he may be subverting the authority of Congress and concentrating too much power in the presidency. The idea of these "super aides," who will work across agency lines to push the president's agenda, is not a new one.

President Obama's proposal for direct government funding of student loans -- cutting out private industry -- sent shares of Sallie Mae, Student Loan Corp., Nelnet Inc. and other college loan companies plunging Thursday. For-profit vocational schools, such as Corinthian Colleges Inc., DeVry Inc. and ITT Educational Services Inc., also saw their stock prices drop. Their students often rely on government-backed loans from private lenders.

In February, when Congress approved President Obama's mammoth plan to stimulate the economy, transportation projects were supposed to be among the fastest-acting pieces of the $787-billion package. All 50 states moved quickly to qualify for their share of the money. But since then the pace has slowed considerably, particularly in California and Florida, where the effect of the economic crisis has been especially severe.

The Bush administration will announce increases in immigration application fees today that will double the cost of citizenship and almost triple the cost of becoming a permanent resident. The new fees, reflecting an average 66% increase, led immigrant advocates and some members of Congress to criticize them as a "wall" that could bar poorer immigrants from citizenship. U.S.

Federal regulators, taking aim at a common tactic used in mortgage frauds, will look at a nationwide ban on companies' charging upfront fees for helping homeowners modify loans to avoid foreclosures. The move comes as federal and state officials plan to expand a crackdown on mortgage-related scams to other schemes that prey on debt-ridden consumers desperate to stay financially afloat during the recession. "Working together, we can send a clear and straightforward message: If you perpetrate mortgage fraud . . . we will find you and we will charge you and we will put you in jail," U.S. Atty.

Throughout the heroic struggle in Congress to provide a "public option" in health insurance, one question never seems to get answered: Why are we so intent on protecting the private option? The "public option," as followers of the debate know, is a government-sponsored health plan that would be available as an alternative to, and in competition with, the for-profit health insurance industry, otherwise known as the private option.