Public Policy

PHOENIX — Something is bugging Kyrsten Sinema. It tugged at her while she spoke to kids at the elementary school where she once served as a social worker. It rubbed her wrong while she told the pack of teachers and staff members trailing her into the parking lot afterward about the time she got pulled over by a police officer on her way home from a similar speech. He asked for her license. She had left it in the school office. "You're a shambles," she recalls the policeman telling her. "Officer, yes, I am!"

Cory L. Richards, 64, an authority on sexual and reproductive health and the executive vice president and the vice president for public policy of the Guttmacher Institute, died of pancreatic cancer April 4 at the Washington Home and Community Hospice. He lived in Washington. His husband, Douglas Mitchell, confirmed his death. Mr. Richards spent 38 years with the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that specializes in research and study of sexual and reproductive health and rights.

I was surprised to read George F. Will's defense of the 1905 Lochner v. New York decision, in which the Supreme Court held unconstitutional a New York law regulating the work hours of bakers as a violation of "liberty of contract" — a liberty mentioned nowhere in the Constitution [ "Why liberals fear ‘Lochner,' " op-ed, Sept. 8]. While Mr. Will depicted Lochner as reviled mainly by liberals, no less a conservative than Robert Bork has described the case as "liv[ing]

Michael Schwartz, a conservative activist who served as chief of staff to Tom Coburn (R.-Okla.) in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, died Feb. 3 at his home in Germantown. He was 63. The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. A son, Joseph Schwartz, confirmed the death. Mr. Schwartz spent his early career in public affairs with the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in Milwaukee. He settled in the Washington area in...

Walker White's Sept. 28 letter on the analogies between people challenging Einstein's theory of relativity and those challenging climate change is correct in terms of the scientific process but not correct in terms of applying science to public policy. One can legitimately challenge Newtonian physics, but that doesn't mean that public policy should encourage people to jump out of skyscrapers because a small group doesn't believe in gravity. When every major international scientific society says that global warming is...

Vice President, Global Public Policy, Facebook Marne Levine is Vice President, Global Public Policy and oversees the company's efforts to educate governments and non-governmental organizations on its plans, products and policies to foster understanding and support for innovative technologies like Facebook. Marne has substantial government experience working on international issues and particular sensitivity to navigating policy challenges in an Internet company. She joined Facebook from the Obama Administration, where she served as Chief of Staff at the...

As the Ottoman Empire vanished after World War I, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a new Turkey in the mold of Europe. Controlling all levers of power, including the military, Ataturk implemented his vision by mandating a separation between religion, public policy and government, and by telling his compatriots to consider themselves intuitively Western. It took a century and a democratic revolution invoked by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a coalition of conservatives, reformed Islamists and Islamists that came to power...

Matthew Quirk's first novel carves its title from a cultural cliche: that there is "a list of the five hundred people inside the Beltway with real power, the select who [run] Washington and, by extension, the country. " That conceit has more in common with Facebook lists of the Greatest Rock Guitarists or Hollywood's Hottest Superstars than with the chaos in which things get done in this country. But millions of Americans accept the cliche as true, and Quirk, a former writer for the Atlantic, has...

Two brothers, Stone Weeks, 24, and Holt Weeks, 20, died July 23 in a multi-vehicle collision on Interstate 81 near Interstate 66 in Warren County, Va., as they were on their way back to their parents' home in Rockville from Rice University in Houston. The chain-reaction crash started when a tractor-trailer struck their car as they waited in a traffic jam. Stone Weeks was an assistant and researcher for historian Douglas Brinkley and had worked with him on Brinkley's just-published "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore...

Cory L. Richards, 64, an authority on sexual and reproductive health and the executive vice president and the vice president for public policy of the Guttmacher Institute, died of pancreatic cancer April 4 at the Washington Home and Community Hospice. He lived in Washington. His husband, Douglas Mitchell, confirmed his death. Mr. Richards spent 38 years with the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that specializes in research and study of sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Kenneth W. Thompson, 91, a scholar of foreign relations and U.S. government who directed the University of Virginia's Miller Center for two decades, died Feb. 2 at an assisted living facility in Charlottesville. He had double pneumonia, said his daughter-in-law Pamela Thompson. Dr. Thompson led the Miller Center, a nonpartisan institute for the study of the presidency, public policy and governance, from 1978 until his retirement in 1998. In a statement announcing his death, U-Va.

Is the lobbying business shrinking or just changing? It's hard to say. Disclosure reports filed with Congress show that the amount of money spent on lobbying fell for the second year in a row in 2012, according to a tally from the Center for Responsive Politics. Companies and lobbying firms spent $3.3 billion on the influence game last year, down about 1 percent from 2011 — which was itself down 6 percent from the $3.5 billion record set in 2010. That small shrinkage is notable because it marks the end of what had been...

I'm disappointed in the lack of coverage The Post gave leading up to the March on Washington for Gun Control on Jan 26. There was nothing in the paper alerting the public it was planned for Saturday or what the route would be. It's hard to believe the coverage of a major public policy topic, and one being addressed by the administration, was finally reported on Sunday and not on the front page [" Nearly 1,000 rally on Mall to call for more gun control...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke called on lawmakers Monday to "take care of their job" and raise the nation's debt ceiling, warning that default could derail the still-fragile economic recovery. In a free-wheeling conversation at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Bernanke said the debt limit has only "symbolic value" and advocated eliminating it. But he dismissed suggestions that the Fed's policy of keeping interest rates low is taking pressure off Congress to act. "We're not...

PHOENIX — Something is bugging Kyrsten Sinema. It tugged at her while she spoke to kids at the elementary school where she once served as a social worker. It rubbed her wrong while she told the pack of teachers and staff members trailing her into the parking lot afterward about the time she got pulled over by a police officer on her way home from a similar speech. He asked for her license. She had left it in the school office. "You're a shambles," she recalls the policeman telling her. "Officer,...

The intercom had been switched on. "At first we heard a bunch of kids scream," said a therapist at Sandy Hook Elementary School, "and then it was just quiet and all you could hear was the shooting. " It is the silence that seemed particularly haunting. The methodical silence of the killer. The unnatural silence of children. Even the apparent silence of a bystander God. But among those not directly affected, the silence did not last for long. We attempt to regain control of lurching events by explaining...

The Whisper Brigade assembles itself on stackable plastic chairs, arranged in rows behind the senators. Sixty-three ear-side seats. The 23 senators, in their cushy leather swivel-thrones, postulate into microphones, gnashing over the details of this epic health-care bill consuming Washington, now deep into Week 2 and dragging into the longest Senate Finance Committee set-to in 15 years. The whisperers have their say, but almost exclusively into the senators' ears. Prompting, hinting, tipping -- a parallel dialogue, public speaker to private...

Position : Senior vice president of public policy at AOL, a global Web services company based in Dulles. Career Highlights : Vice president and chief counsel, public policy and regulatory, AOL; senior corporate counsel, Startec Global Communications; associate, Steptoe and Johnson. Age: 38 Education: BA, political science and economics, Trinity College; JD, Columbia University School of Law. Personal: Resides in the Washington area with her husband.

Director, Office of Planning, District of Columbia Harriet Tregoning is the Director of the Washington DC Office of Planning, where she works to make DC a walkable, bikeable, eminently livable, globally competitive and sustainable city. Prior to this she was the director of the Governors' Institute on Community Design and co-founder, with former Maryland Governor Glendening, and executive director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute.  ...

Linklaters, the U.K.-based global law firm, has opened a Washington office — the second time the firm has tried to establish a D.C. presence. The firm, which has 2,200 attorneys worldwide including 230 in the United States, had a Washington office from 1992 to 2002 but closed it as the firm reconfigured its U.S. strategy to focus on building out the New York office, said Linklaters's U.S. co-managing partner Jeff Norton. Linklaters's U.S. presence is primarily in New York, and the new D.C. office will be an extension of...