Politics

Chris Paine is a filmmaker whose documentaries include "Who Killed the Electric Car?" ,"Charge" and "Revenge of the Electric Car. " The troubles of electric-car-maker Fisker Automotive have fueled another round of debate about whether plug-ins can live up to their promises. The California start-up, which had already halted production and laid off most of its employees, missed a federal loan payment Monday and told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that bankruptcy may be unavoidable . This is likely the end of the road...

CLEVELAND — The families of three women who spent years in captivity inside a Cleveland home celebrated on Tuesday their remarkable rescue, as questions began emerging about why police were called to the house at least twice in recent years yet never went inside. The women — Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight — vanished separately a decade ago while in their teens and early 20s only blocks from the eight-room house where they were found Monday night. Their rescue came when Berry,...

UNITED NATIONS — UN General Assembly approves nonbinding resolution calling for political transition in Syria. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

When someone in the Washington area begins to type the president's last name into the search box of Google's home page, the top three terms it suggests as the most popular selections are Obama, Obamacare and . . . Obama phone. Obama phone? A hotline, maybe, to the Oval Office? Hardly. "Obama phone" is the widely used — and misleading — nickname of a 28-year-old federal program known as Lifeline . It provides discounts, averaging $9.25 a month, on phone service for 13.3 million...

Mayor Vincent C. Gray is set to introduce legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to obtain D.C. driver's licenses, following similar moves by Maryland and several other states. The legislation, according to a Facebook posting Tuesday night by the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Engagement, "would allow all eligible District residents the right to obtain a driver's license or DC identification card, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. " Gray, who is set to...

THE PRICE OF POLITICS By Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster, 428 pp, $30 On the night of Nov. 6, the winner of the 2012 presidential election will deliver his victory speech from the edge of an abyss: the " fiscal cliff ," our national Niagara, over which he and the rest of us will plunge in January if our leaders fail to avert a set of automatic spending cuts and tax increases. Bob Woodward's latest book, " The Price of Politics ," explains how we got this close to the brink.

WASHINGTON — Can we agree on this? Americans still think alike much of the time even if our politicians don't. To get heads nodding, just say something worrisome about the economy or dismissive of Washington. Almost all Americans consider themselves very patriotic, believe in God, value higher education and admire those who get rich through hard work. Not much argument there. But here's the oft-overlooked truth: Even some issues that are highly contentious in the partisan...

John McCain and Barack Obama both indicated that they will suspend campaign advertising on the upcoming anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "Nine-eleven is not a day for politics," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said. SOURCE: Associated Press AUG. 25-28 Democratic National Convention SEPT. 1-4 Republican National Convention

JACKSON, Miss. — It can't meet the mandates of a 2012 state law and the governor wants to shut it down, but Mississippi's only abortion clinic is not about to quietly retreat. The clinic's owners are fighting on a legal front, with a federal lawsuit against the state, and supporters and staff are trying to make inroads on site — urging patients to call elected officials and peppering state-required counseling with their own views and information. Protesters, too, are zeroing in...

Sputtering adjectives — outrageous, appalling, intolerable — can scarcely do justice to the fiasco involving the Internal Revenue Service's reported targeting of conservative groups . But the current scandal obscures — and, ironically, threatens to prevent action on — another, equally corrosive failure on the part of the IRS when it comes to scrutinizing political groups. This less-noticed scandal is the mirror image of the one dominating the front page. It's not that the IRS has been too tough on such...

LONDON — Britain's prosecutors say that a politics and government editor with The Sun tabloid has been charged over a conspiracy to pay thousands of pounds (dollars) worth of bribes to a press officer working in the British government's tax department. Prosecutors say The Sun paid bribes to press officer Jonathan Hall in return for information about unannounced spending plans, deficit reduction work, and policy decisions. Hall, 51, was also charged in relation to the...

The targeting of political groups by the Internal Revenue Service is not only "outrageous," as President Obama said Monday, but it also might be a "deadly sin. " At issue is the boiling scandal about the IRS singling out dozens of tea party and other conservative organizations for special attention of the most unwanted kind. It's worth noting that the IRS is one of Washington's least political agencies, at least in terms of staffing. It has only two political appointees....

Suppose that the Environmental Protection Agency were to admit offhandedly that the fluoridation of water had only modest communist mind-control effects. Or the United Nations were to concede it had been running fleets of black helicopters over U.S. cities, but only in the course of conducting extensive goodwill tours. The Internal Revenue Service has managed a similar confirmation. For years, tea party and patriot groups have breathlessly alleged that federal bureaucrats were conspiring against the Constitution and the Bill of...

RICHMOND, Va. — When Jonnie R. Williams believed he had discovered a way to make tobacco less harmful, the Virginia car salesman-turned-entrepreneur tried to sell his method to anyone who would listen. Persistent phone calls to the nation's top cigarette makers often started with the colorful venture capitalist, once dubbed a "super salesman" by a local newspaper, dropping names and promising the world. "He knew anybody and everybody and they were all endorsing his...