Statistics show that there are more Americans below the poverty line now than when President Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty. We must use every arrow in our collective quiver to reverse this devastating trend. The Urban League is dedicated to fighting poverty by empowering youth in unders...

Are House Republicans serious about dealing with the deficit? You could listen to their rhetoric - or you could read the rules they are poised to adopt at the start of the new Congress. The former promises a new fiscal sobriety. The latter suggests that the new GOP majority is determined to continue...

  Increasingly rancorous confirmation brawls are taking a toll on the federal judiciary, and so on American justice. Controversial but qualified people are often left twisting slowly, their nominations never voted on. Recently, even nominees with bipartisan support have had to wait many months ...

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When Lyndon Johnson was majority leader in the Senate, he needed to file for cloture to end a filibuster only once. During President Obama's first two years, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed for cloture 84 times. To put that in perspective, the filibuster was used more in 2009 than in the 195...

Despite the lame-duck defeat of a modest immigration reform known as the Dream Act, both President Obama and Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nev., said they are not giving up on improving the nation's immigration laws. We applaud their persistence and hope progress is possible - if not for somethin...

NEW YORK - The train from Shibi in Guanghzou to Hong Kong will reach speeds of 217 mph before arriving at a 15- story atrium topped by impossibly thin ribbons of solid roof alternating with glass. This is the $8.6 billion West Kowloon Terminus, fed by 88 miles of high-speed rail. The package was com...

There’s really no clear up side to the Great Recession, from which the United States is still only slowly emerging. Households have trimmed debt, motorists have curtailed gas consumption and the U.S. dollar has become more competitive with other currencies. But none of these positive developments ...

There is reason for hope when no new death sentences are imposed in death penalty states, as happened in Virginia and Georgia in 2010. Also heartening are drops in the number of executions in places such as Texas, which has long been the nation’s leader in capital punishment but put to death seven...

One thing that’s become clear about the science of climate change is that it is a mistake to make a big deal of short-term alterations in the Earth’s temperature. The only way to judge whether the planet is warming — or cooling — is to assess decades of data. The same, on a shorter time fram...