Advocacy Group

Earlier this spring, Sen. Rand Paul and his wife, Kelley, invited a crew from the Christian Broadcasting Network into their Kentucky home for what turned into two full days of reality TV. In a half-hour special, "At Home With Rand Paul," the couple are seen bird-watching in the woods, going to McDonald's and, especially, talking about religion — their belief in traditional marriage and the senator's call for a "spiritual cleansing" in America....

Frederick P. Smith Jr., an FBI special agent from 1955 to 1979 and former chief of the agency's explosives unit, died May 22 at Inova Alexandria Hospital. He was 83. He had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, said his son-in-law Bill Moller. Mr. Smith, an Alexandria resident, joined the FBI as a special agent in 1955 and became chief of the bureau's explosives unit in 1970. During his tenure, he received more than 40 commendations for his investigative work, said his family. He received special recognition for his assistance in the murder...

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the...

As Congress continues the search for a new way to fund the nation's roads and bridges, it turns out that many American taxpayers don't know how much they're paying for them now. Forty percent of those who participated in an advocacy group's survey said they didn't know, and a quarter of all those surveyed estimated that they paid twice as much as the $46 that the Federal Highway Administration said was the average monthly gas tax paid by...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — In the United States, "health class" has introduced generations of snickering sixth-graders to the fundamentals of sex. But the terms "sex" and "education" are a mismatch in Pakistan: The subject simply is not taught in schools. Traditional cultural values have prevented any formal integration of the basics of the birds and the bees into the Islam-based education system. Here, young people mainly learn about sex from whispered conversations with their schoolyard friends, or by experience.

Alvin Golub, 83, who spent nearly 20 years as executive director of the Washington Psychiatric Society, an advocacy group representing area psychiatrists, died June 26 at his home in Silver Spring. He had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Mr. Golub was a U.S. Labor Department economist in the 1950s and early 1960s, then spent many years as deputy director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He retired from the Washington Psychiatric Society in the early 2000s. Mr. Golub was a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., and...

Regarding ombudsman Patrick Pexton's July 9 blog post, " Was climate-change poll biased? " Mr. Pexton reported that Jon Krosnick resigned from our board when presented with the claim of a reader that we are an advocacy organization. We regret that Mr. Krosnick felt the need to resign, but we are not an advocacy organization. What we are is a science and journalism organization that is nonpartisan and thoroughly independent, and we have deep roots in the climate-science community.

Nearly three-quarters of crib mattresses in this country contained "suspect or dangerous" chemicals, underscoring the need to reform the federal laws that govern chemical use, according to a report scheduled to be released Thursday. The report by Clean and Healthy New York, an environmental health advocacy group , surveyed 28 companies that make most of the standard-size crib mattresses and found that 72 percent of mattress models use one or more chemicals of concern, including certain...

The news about narcotic painkillers is increasingly dire: Overdoses now kill nearly 15,000 people a year — more than heroin and cocaine combined. In some states, the painkiller death toll exceeds that of car crashes. The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared the overdoses from opioid drugs like OxyContin an "epidemic. " And a growing group of experts doubts that they work for long-term pain. But the pills continue to have an influential champion...

Poverty levels in the District have climbed steadily since the beginning of the economic downturn, with one in three children now living below the federal poverty line, according to data released last week by the D.C. Fair Budget Coalition, a network of advocacy groups. In an event co-sponsored with five D.C. Council members, the group called for the District to allocate an additional $100 million in fiscal year 2014 to reduce poverty. Next year's budget is...

President Obama's supporters are discovering that winning a national election is easier than winning over Congress. Organizing for Action , an advocacy group born from the remnants of Obama's victorious 2012 reelection campaign, has struggled in its attempts to help the president push through legislation on the economy, guns and other issues central to his second-term agenda. The fledgling nonprofit group has spent its first four months staging rallies and generating local news coverage in an...

President Obama's once-broad ambitions to clamp down on the influence of special interests have been largely abandoned since his reelection, dismaying longtime allies in the campaign-finance reform movement. The predicament will be on full display Tuesday, when all five members of the Federal Election Commission will be serving past the formal expiration of their terms. The panel's sixth seat remains vacant. The president has not made a nomination to the FEC, which enforces the nation's...

Ahead of the expected release Tuesday of a sweeping bipartisan proposal to revamp the nation's immigration laws , faith-based and civil liberties groups began calling for changes, singling out the proposed path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as too stringent, while a key Republican senator said lawmakers need to be "realistic" about creating such a path. President Obama described the bill in a late-afternoon statement Tuesday as "clearly a compromise" and cautioned that "no...

Anne G. Murphy, who led one of the country's biggest arts advocacy organizations in the 1980s and early 1990s, an era marked by rancorous political debate about federal arts funding, free speech and the very definition of art, died April 4 at her home in Washington. She was 74. The cause was Parkinson's disease, her niece Meghan Keller said. At her death, Ms. Murphy was an adviser to the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital...

Director, National Priorities, Consumer Action Consumer Action's director of national priorities and one of the organization's chief spokespersons, Linda Sherry joined the San Francisco-based national consumer education and advocacy group in 1994 from a background as a weekly newspaper reporter. Sherry, a nationally recognized consumer advocate, is an expert on credit and financial services pricing and practices and consumer rights. She responds regularly to requests for interviews and background information about consumer protection...

Poverty levels in the District have climbed steadily since the beginning of the economic downturn, with one in three children now living below the federal poverty line, according to data released last week by the D.C. Fair Budget Coalition, a network of advocacy groups. In an event co-sponsored with five D.C. Council members, the group called for the District to allocate an additional $100 million in fiscal year 2014 to reduce poverty. Next year's budget is expected to be released in the coming...

President Obama's supporters are discovering that winning a national election is easier than winning over Congress. Organizing for Action , an advocacy group born from the remnants of Obama's victorious 2012 reelection campaign, has struggled in its attempts to help the president push through legislation on the economy, guns and other issues central to his second-term agenda. The fledgling nonprofit group has spent its first four months staging rallies and generating local news coverage in an...

Reversing course after weeks of public pressure, the head of the  new nonprofit organization formed to take over President Obama's campaign operation announced Thursday that the group will not take donations from corporations as originally planned and will provide more transparency about its funding. In an article posted Thursday on CNN.com, Jim Messina, chairman of Organizing for Action, detailed the changes, which will include disclosing the precise amount contributed by donors who give more than $250.

Two guys in a black Pontiac Vibe cruise the streets of Washington's residential neighborhoods. The only sign of what they are up to is a gray plastic tube hanging out of the trunk. And the fact that they get out of the car frequently to place a black box on manhole covers and study its readings. Measuring how much methane gas is leaking from pipes under the District could help answer a key policy question. As natural gas production expands in the United States, do its...