Politics

Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday used a tribute to 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass to renew the call for equal voting rights for people who live in the nation's capital.

The House voted late Wednesday to delay sweeping food safety rules that would require farmers and food companies to be more vigilant about guarding against contamination.

The statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass that’s standing in the atrium of a Washington government office building has been a symbol-in-waiting – until now. The Civil War-era icon’s image is about to move to the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, where it will be one of only three statues of African-Americans in the complex.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday made his second call to the Afghan president in 24 hours to ease Hamid Karzai's anger over the rollout of the Taliban's new political office in Qatar - a rift that temporarily delayed U.S. talks with the militant group set to begin later this week.

In the darkened stacks of a nondescript building in the suburbs outside Washington, dozens of federal employees wearing protective gloves spend day after day sifting through millions of pages of secret documents, some of them nearly a century old. The 70 staffers of the National Declassification Center are charged with deciding – anonymously and quietly – which of the nation’s old secrets can be laid bare for the world to see.

Homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure must wait too long for their loan modification applications to be reviewed by some of the nation's top mortgage servicers, according to a report released Wednesday. Such delays can plunge borrowers deeper in debt.

Republican lawmakers have a message for those who want the party to soften its emphasis on social conservatism in hopes of reaching a wider national audience: Not so fast.

FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged Wednesday that the bureau has used unmanned aerial drones for surveillance in the United States and suggested that government needs to develop guidelines as their use grows.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Wednesday she’s changed her views and now supports gay marriage, becoming the third Senate Republican to do so.

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday urged Congress to move carefully before making any changes that might restrict the National Security Agency programs for mass collection of people's phone records and information from the Internet.