MESA, Ariz. (AP) — Seeking to tackle "a crisis unlike any we've ever known," President Barack Obama unveiled an ambitious $75 billion plan Wednesday to keep as many as 9 million Americans from losing their homes to foreclosure.

Announcing the plan in Arizona — a state especially hard hit by the housing crunch — Obama said that turning around the battered economy requires stemming the continuing tide of foreclosures. The housing crisis that began last year set many other factors in motion and helped lead to the current, widening recession.

"In the end, all of us are paying a price for this home mortgage crisis," Obama said at a high school outside Phoenix. "And all of us will pay an even steeper price if we allow this crisis to deepen."

Press coverage of the numerous changes that Barack Obama has made since taking office has overlooked one change that makes a welcome and swift departure from the policies of the previous administration: the revocation of the so-called “global gag rule.”

The rule made it impossible for federal funding to go to international groups that provide abortions or even provide abortion information to the women they serve. It was first passed by President Regan in 1984, overruled by President Clinton in 1993, and put back in place by the second President Bush as one of his first acts as president in 2001.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Savoring his first big victory in Congress, President Barack Obama on Saturday WASHINGTON (AP) — Savoring his first big victory in Congress, President Barack Obama on Saturday celebrated the newly passed $787 billion economic stimulus bill as a "major milestone on our road to recovery. "

Officials said he would sign the measure on Tuesday in Denver.

Speaking in his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said, "I will sign this legislation into law shortly, and we'll begin making the immediate investments necessary to put people back to work doing the work America needs done."

The recent State of the Union-type stirring from the Obama camp has led me to ponder the state of something else: feminism. But what are the recent feminist milestones, the ones that will one day be read over in the history books and chuckled about as artifacts from a time when we actually needed something like feminism to fight a thing called “social inequality”? Answering that question proved harder than I expected.

When I finally left the 5 degree Fahrenheit weather in Ithaca behind to study abroad in Greece, I believed that I would spend my time enjoying the sun during the day and drinking ouzo at night. I could not have been more wrong.

First of all, it’s colder here in the winter so Greeks tend to bundle up and complain about the weather instead of lounging on some beach. Anyone living in Ithaca would consider Greece’s winter temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit to be springtime weather, but Greeks believe that this is Antartica.

Abdallah Hajji and Lofti Lagha knew the worst was not behind them when they boarded a plane from Guantánamo Bay detention facility back home to Tunisia in 2007. After being held in Guantánamo under suspicions of terrorist involvement, the two Tunisian nationals were independently cleared as non-enemy combatants and released back into the hands of the Tunisian government, according to a report published by Human Rights Watch. Despite pleas by the detainees to forgo the repatriation and known reports of torture in Tunisia, the U.S. government went ahead with the transfer. To no one’s great surprise, Hajji and Lagha were both viciously tortured in Tunisian prisons — all of which could have been prevented.

To the Editor:

Re: “Killing Satire in Cold Blood,” Opinion, Jan. 30

I just wanted to reassure Mr. Gault that political satire is not dead. In an interview with The Washington Post entitled “Obama Interested in D.C. Schools,” the president said that he was going to use his [position] “as leverage to get kids and parents and teachers excited about the possibilities of an education.”

The punchline? The Obamas are sending their daughters to Sidwell, a school of choice for the Washington elite.

Where were you the day political satire died? I was at home watching the inauguration, of course.

I saw it all go down. I watched President Obama address both America and the world with such purpose, integrity and humility that one thing became abundantly clear: he killed satire in cold blood.

With Clinton’s philandering and Bush’s floundering, the past 16 years have been an all-you-can-eat buffet of political buffoonery for columnists, pundits and comedians alike.

But the electoral process giveth, and the electoral process taketh away.

On January 20th I watched a green helicopter fly away with my meal ticket.