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cnn.com — Despite the drop in President Obama's approval ratings, Republican policies are still not as popular as Democratic policies, according to a new national poll. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey indicates the GOP has gained some ground in polls in recent months, but Democrats still hold the advantage on key issues such as the economy and health care. Fifty-two percent of people questioned say the president's policies will move the country in the right direction. An equal percentage feel the same way about the policies of the Democrats in Congress.

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msnbc.msn.com — Seven months after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is reshaping the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by pushing it back into some of the most important areas of American political life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices and redistricting after the 2010 census. As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush’s appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination.

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nytimes.com — Flanked by his counterparts from Mexico and Canada, President Obama reiterated his commitment to pursuing comprehensive immigration reform, despite his packed political agenda and the staunch opposition such an initiative is likely to face. But in the most detailed outline yet of his timetable, the president said that he expected Congress, after completing work on health care, energy and financial regulation, to draft immigration bills this year. He said he would begin work on getting the measures passed in 2010.

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latimes.com — Pledging more oversight and accountability, the Obama administration announced plans Thursday to transform the nation's immigration detention system from one reliant on a scattered network of local jails and private prisons to a centralized one designed specifically for civil detainees. The reforms are aimed at establishing greater control over a system that houses about 33,000 detainees a day and that has been sharply criticized as having unsafe and inhumane conditions and as lacking the medical care that may have prevented many of the 90 deaths that have occurred since 2003.

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news.bbc.co.uk — A key Senate panel has voted in favor of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The majority-Democrat Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-6 to back 55-year-old Ms. Sotomayor. Her nomination will now go to the full Senate, where she is expected to be confirmed as the court's first Hispanic justice in a historic vote next week. Her nomination has been vocally opposed by a chorus of Republicans who believe she is too liberal. But correspondents say Ms Sotomayor is unlikely to alter the ideological balance on the court as she is set to replace retiring Justice David Souter, a liberal.

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hosted.ap.org — For the first time in years, more Americans than not say the country is headed in the right direction, a sign that Barack Obama has used the first 100 days of his presidency to lift the public's mood and inspire hopes for a brighter future. Intensely worried about their personal finances and medical expenses, Americans nonetheless appear realistic about the time Obama might need to turn things around, according to a new poll. It shows most Americans consider their new president to be a strong, ethical and empathetic leader who is working to change Washington.

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npr.org — President Obama's signature on a massive $5.7 billion national service bill, which triples the size of the Clinton-era AmeriCorps program, harkens back not only to the days of FDR's New Deal but to an idea imbued in the American psyche since the country's earliest days. AmeriCorps has grown to some 75,000 members since the program, envisioned by President Clinton as a "domestic Peace Corps," was enacted in 1993. The new legislation provides funding to boost the number of volunteers to 250,000 over the next eight years and defines five categories of service: aiding the poor, improving education, encouraging energy efficiency, strengthening access to health care and assisting veterans.

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nytimes.com — One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study. Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades, according to a report by the Pew Center on the States, the first breakdown of spending in confinement and supervision in the past seven years. As states face huge budget shortfalls, prisons, which hold 1.5 million adults, are driving the spending increases.

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hosted.ap.org — There's still a year before Americans start filling out their census forms. But even before President Barack Obama has named a new director for the U.S. Census Bureau, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have begun bickering about how that person will carry out the once-a-decade job of cataloging the country's population. The trouble started with Obama's surprise nomination of Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire to head the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. Gregg once voted for a broader budget measure that would have abolished the agency, and he also opposed increased funding for the 2000 census. Gregg's record raised concerns about his commitment to an accurate census count, a priority for minority groups that have historically been undercounted.

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nytimes.com — Senator Judd Gregg, named by President Obama as the choice for commerce secretary, once supported eliminating the department he is to lead. He differs with his boss-to-be in favoring oil drilling on the coast of an Alaska wildlife refuge. He promotes a lighter touch with China than does the president. And he disagrees with him in backing private accounts for Social Security. Given all that, Mr. Gregg, a deficit hawk from New Hampshire who is the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, certainly fits with Mr. Obama’s professed desire to create a cabinet with conflicting views. If confirmed, he will be at the top of the list of administration officials having fundamental differences with a president who is enlisting them to advance his agenda.

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