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The article reports on the alterations to the immigration enforcement system that is anticipated to be announced by U.S. President Barack Obama could provide legal documents to illegal immigrants in the country in 2014, almost double the number from deportation under the 1986 amnesty legislation.

The Haitian-American hip-hop singer Wyclef Jean, left, filed papers on Thursday to run for president of Haiti. Several hundred supporters cheered as he arrived by motorcade at an electoral office in the capital, Port-au-Prince, still largely in ruins from the Jan. 12 earthquake. ''The United States has Barack Obama, and Haiti has Wyclef Jean,'' he shouted. His candidacy must still be approved by a review board to verify that he meets constitutional requirements, including having lived in Haiti for the five years before the election and never having held foreign citizenship. Mr. Jean, who was born in Haiti but raised in Brooklyn, has said his appointment as a roving ambassador by President Rene Preval exempts him from the residency requirement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The New Republic called Elena Kagan a ''wonderwonk'' for her work on tobacco legislation in the Clinton administration. She was, the magazine said, ''a nerd who can talk tough.'' Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she served as a law clerk, called her, Ms. Kagan once wrote, ''to my face and I imagine also behind my back, 'Shorty.' '' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the first time in its 161-year history, The Chicago Tribune is endorsing a Democrat for president. The newspaper, which has links to the Republican Party that date back to the party's founding, said Friday that Senator Barack Obama was the strongest choice ''to lead us through a perilous time and restore in us a common sense of national purpose.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A freelance photographer who took the picture of Barack Obama that became the basis for Shepard Fairey's well-known ''Hope'' poster, left, has filed court papers arguing that The Associated Press, for whom he was working temporarily at the time, does not own the copyright to the picture. The photographer, Mannie Garcia, said he had worked for The A.P. for five weeks in spring 2006, when he took the picture of Mr. Obama listening intently at an event about Darfur at the National Press Club in Washington, far left. Mr. Garcia contends in his papers, filed July 8 in federal court in Manhattan, that he received no benefits or vacation from The Associated Press during his time working for it and ''never agreed to assign his copyright rights'' to any photographs he took, so that he owns them and should benefit from any profits made from them. Mr. Fairey and The Associated Press have been locked in a court battle for several months over the Obama image. The Associated Press contends that it owns the copyright to the picture and that Mr. Fairey misappropriated it. Mr. Fairey says his borrowing is protected under fair-use exceptions to copyright law. George F. Carpinello, Mr. Garcia's lawyer, said his client was saying ''neither one of you should win this case -- I should win this case.'' A spokesman for The Associated Press said it was ''evaluating Mannie Garcia's position, but remains confident in A.P.'s ownership of the copyright because Mr. Garcia was an employee of A.P. when he took the photo in 2006.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A former legislative aide to President Obama's designated commerce secretary, Senator Judd Gregg, accepted thousands of dollars in free meals, drinks and sports tickets from a lobbyist for whom he placed items in spending bills, according to court papers. The aide, Kevin H. Koonce, was identified in court papers only as Staffer F. They detail his interactions with Todd A. Boulanger, the lobbyist who pleaded guilty last week to charges that he had provided gifts to public officials in return for help for his clients. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to register and grant working papers to millions of undocumented people who have been working in the country for several years, highlighting several security concerns that may arise from the immigration plan.

The article reports on the controversy of President Barack Obama's white paper that justifies targeted killings of Americans suspected of involvement in terrorism in the U.S.

PAPER CUT The mountains of paperwork are one of the few certainties of home buying. Now, regulators are aiming to cut back on some mortgage documents, as the new federal consumer watchdog announced plans on Wednesday to revamp crucial forms. ''The current forms can be complicated and difficult for consumers to use,'' Elizabeth Warren, above, the Obama administration official setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement, adding that the forms are also ''redundant and can be costly for lenders to fill out.'' BEN PROTESS [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration on Saturday released five videos recovered from Osama bin Laden's hide-out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that an intelligence official said showed the Qaeda founder threatening the United States, condemning capitalism and at some points flubbing his lines and missing a cue. In the most candid scenes, Bin Laden can be seen watching news coverage of himself on television. The videos, which were made public without sound to avoid disseminating terrorist messages, were the first materials to be released from what an American intelligence official described as the ''single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.'' The trove, which includes hundreds of computer file storage devices, hard drives, videos, documents and personal papers, was seized by the United States assault team that killed Bin Laden early last Monday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In December, Congress voted to end the 17-year old ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy that prohibited military service by anyone who was openly gay or bisexual. President Obama applauded the vote, which he had long urged, and signed the bill on Dec. 22. This week, Mr. Obama's Justice Department is expected to file papers with a federal court in California that, essentially, defend the original policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On paper, President Obama's new $3.7 trillion budget is encouraging. It makes a number of tough choices to cut the deficit by a projected $1.1 trillion over 10 years, which is enough to prevent an uncontrolled explosion of debt in the next decade and, as a result, reduce the risk of a fiscal crisis. The questions are whether its tough choices are also wise choices and whether it stands a chance in a Congress in which Republicans, who now dominate the House, are obsessed with making indiscriminate short-term cuts in programs they never liked anyway. The Republican cuts would eviscerate vital government functions while not having any lasting impact on the deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AS we all move forward with our New Year's resolutions, it's a good time to remember the promises our politicians have been making about the American mortgage market. The Obama administration, at a conference last August on the future of housing finance, pledged to have, come January, a plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that are now wards of the government. Congressional Republicans, in their recent position paper, made an even bolder resolution: to build a mortgage market that ''does not rely on government guarantees'' and ''does not make private investors and creditors wealthy while saddling taxpayers with losses.'' This latter promise is pleasing populist rhetoric. The problem is, it may be neither politically nor practically feasible. Even if we forget about the gigantic near-term problem -- namely, that the federal government is in the housing market mainly because most banks simply won't issue mortgages that can't be guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie or the Federal Housing Administration -- there's the fact that federal involvement in housing has been a constant since the 1930s. A market without government support would almost certainly involve the demise (for most of middle-class America) of that populist favorite, the low-cost 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost two years ago, President Obama pledged $19 billion in stimulus incentives to help convert the nation's doctors and hospitals to using a paperless system of electronic health records intended to improve the quality of care and reduce costs. But the conversion is still a slow work in progress. Only about one in four doctors, mostly in large group practices, is using the electronic record system. A vast majority of physicians in small offices, the doctors who serve most Americans, still track patients' illnesses and other problems with pen and paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, President Obama's policy on Iran and its illicit nuclear program is not all that different from President George W. Bush's. They both committed themselves, on paper, to sanctions and engagement. Mr. Bush, however, was never really that serious about the carrots, and he spent so much time alienating America's friends that he was never able to win broad support for the sticks: credible international sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PHOENIX -- In the public outcry that followed passage of Arizona's new immigration law, President Obama and other critics worried that it would lead to racial profiling. But while that concern has dominated the public debate and inspired a round of boycotts of the state, it played little role in the actual legal challenge the administration filed Tuesday against the law. The word profiling appears only once, in passing, in the Justice Department's lawsuit against the law, which allows the police to demand legal papers from those its officers think might be illegal immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The senators who emerged from a White House meeting with President Obama on energy policy on Tuesday made no effort to paper over the large differences that remain between them. Democrats continued to insist on putting some sort of price on greenhouse gas emissions; Republicans continued to insist that to do so would be to impose a tax that would smother the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A bit of the fog is beginning to lift on the work and thinking of Elena Kagan, President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court. An initial perusal of thousands of pages of documents from her years in the Clinton White House show her to be an adept centrist -- much like her old boss -- who tried to remain thoughtful while shielding President Bill Clinton from ideological extremes. It is hard to find anything in the 90,000-odd pages of papers released so far that shows whether Ms. Kagan will be an effective restraint on the Roberts Court's aggressive march to the right. She was, after all, a mid- to senior-level bureaucrat in the 1990s, working for a White House that could twist itself into knots trying to find the midpoint on every issue. Her job often required her to become a contortionist, searching for principled positions that would not inflame a newly Republican Congress or a generally conservative Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Obama administration's ambitious civilian push in Pakistan and Afghanistan will keep thousands of Americans in those countries for years -- rebuilding Afghan agriculture, rooting out corruption and using the local media to counter anti-American sentiment. The steps, laid out in a 30-page policy paper to be released Thursday by the State Department, are the most detailed blueprint yet for the civilian part of the administration's strategy in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the ways that the Bush administration tried to avoid accountability for its serious misconduct in the name of fighting terrorism was the misuse of an evidentiary rule called the state secrets privilege. The Obama administration has essentially embraced the Bush approach in existing cases, trying to toss out important lawsuits alleging kidnapping, torture and unlawful wiretapping without any evidence being presented. The other day, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. issued new guidelines for invoking the state secrets privilege in the future. They were a positive step forward, on paper, but did not go nearly far enough. Mr. Holder's much-anticipated reform plan does not include any shift in the Obama administration's demand for blanket secrecy in pending cases. Nor does it include support for legislation that would mandate thorough court review of state secrets claims made by the executive branch. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Obama administration said it would decide by mid-November whether to bring charges in federal court in the United States against the five detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accused of involvement in the September 2001 terrorist attacks, according to government legal papers filed Wednesday. In two legal motions, one filed with a military court in Guantanamo and another with a federal appeals court, the government said it would seek a third postponement of proceedings in the 10 military tribunal cases at Guantanamo. It is trying to decide whether to shift the cases to civilian criminal courts, including those of the five men currently charged before a military tribunal with offenses related to the Sept. 11 attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On one proposal for health care reform at least, there is a rare bipartisan consensus: the push to computerize patient records. The goal of moving paper medical records into the digital age has been championed for years by health care policy makers across the political spectrum, from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Newt Gingrich. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama, too, was an advocate, and the economic crisis opened the door for an ambitious step -- $19 billion put into the recovery package to encourage doctors and hospitals to install and use electronic health records. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ten moderate Senate Democrats from states dependent on coal and manufacturing sent a letter to President Obama on Thursday saying they would not support any climate change bill that did not protect American industries from competition from countries that did not impose similar restraints on climate-altering gases. The letter warned that strong actions to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases would add to the cost of goods like steel, cement, paper and aluminum. Unless other countries adopt similar emission limits, the senators warned, jobs will migrate overseas and foreign manufacturers will have a decided cost advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IN Washington, the same week Barack Obama took office, a young staff member for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice enlisted Paperless Post, a new online stationery service, to help put together a going-away party for her boss. The interactive correspondence ''was all anybody wanted to talk about,'' said Sarah Lenti, who went on to work for Mitt Romney -- the way the hyperreal envelope with the invitee's name appears on the computer, how it reverses to the sender's on the back, and then the piece de resistance invitation pops out, so detailed you can see the paper's grain. How intuitive it was to click on the RSVP and fill out the reply card. Zac Posen had used it for a benefit, as had some Diane Von Furstenberg folks, and the Young Friends of the Elie Wiesel Foundation were about to try it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

-- It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama's argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime ''would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?'' The Times's lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him: [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama is right to want banks' compensation structures to reward long-term performance over short-term bets. But micromanagement and publicity like the punitive bonus tax Congress tried to impose on the American International Group make bad policy. Better to keep politics out of pay regulation and focus on broader, commonsense rules. Incentives in finance need to change. Paying bonuses for short-term paper gains on money held up for years, with no downside risk for the bankers, makes no sense for shareholders or governments, the ultimate rescuers of troubled banks. It's this system that fostered the debacle at A.I.G. Financial Products. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Obama administration signaled Friday that it would seek stricter controls on mercury pollution from the nation's power plants, abandoning a Bush administration approach that the industry supported. The Justice Department submitted papers on Friday to the Supreme Court to dismiss the Bush administration's appeal of the current rule, which a lower court struck down last year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On Thursday morning, the president's wooden desk gleamed, bare except for a dark portfolio opened to two sheets of paper. Barack Obama glanced down and signed his name. ''There we go,'' Mr. Obama said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Timothy F. Geithner, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for Treasury secretary, failed to pay more than $34,000 in federal taxes over several years early this decade, and also faces questions about the employment papers of a former household employee, suddenly complicating what had seemed to be an easy confirmation process in the Senate. Mr. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, huddled privately with members of the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday afternoon to explain that he had now paid the back taxes and interest. Senate Democratic leaders quickly released statements of support lest the controversy threaten the nomination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It's time to remind President Bush as he leaves office that his White House records are not his personal property. They belong to the nation. The Presidential Records Act made that the law of the land after the Watergate scandal. Showing disturbing forethought, Mr. Bush signed an executive order in his first year, effectively decreeing that a sitting or former president can withhold his papers indefinitely. Congress is moving to strike down the Bush order. The House has overwhelmingly approved a corrective measure that has a good chance in the Senate. If there's any delay, we urge President-elect Barack Obama to issue his own executive order restoring the Presidential Records Act as soon as he enters the White House. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chosen for: White House staff secretary Brings to the job: A lawyer's eye for detail to an office that experts describe as the nerve center of the White House. She will be the gatekeeper for nearly every piece of paper that reaches the president's desk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Just when Democrats thought it was time to triumphantly claim hard-won administration appointments, Team Obama has created a vetting process worthy of aspirants for political sainthood. Applicants are being required to spill the most detailed personal beans about their lives, families and finances in a seven-page, 63-question grilling that covers everything from paper trails to confessional revelations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conservative group running advertisements that highlight Senator Barack Obama's association with the 1960s radical William Ayers is being financed by a Texas billionaire who has raised money for Senator John McCain and who also helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry in 2004. The billionaire, Harold Simmons, donated nearly $2.9 million on Aug. 12 to the American Issues Project, the group running the advertisements, papers it has filed with the Federal Election Commission show. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a multiracial and somewhat foreign person I have on occasion found myself on the receiving end of the same kind of unease that many Americans seem to have about Barack Obama's ambiguous identity. He is either not black enough or too black. His name sounds odd. He had a weird childhood with kids who didn't speak English. Mr. Obama is not just politically atypical. He is unusual demographically. A recent paper by economists from Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago said that in 2000 only one in 70 births in the United States came from mixed, black-white parents. In the 1980s it was one in 200. In the 1960s, when Mr. Obama was born, there were virtually none. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A federal judge in Ohio granted a request late Tuesday from Senator Barack Obama's campaign to extend the voting hours in 21 precincts in Cleveland by an extra 90 minutes because of a lack of paper ballots. But because the order arrived after the polls had already closed, election officials were only able to reopen 10 polling stations, according to the Ohio secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner. That resulted in five additional votes being cast, Ms. Brunner said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]