THE HILL: Cindy Sheehan is about to start another anti-war camp. This one will be in Washington, and it could conceivably last for months. The problem? “I’m kind of over the whole camping thing,” she admits.

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POLITICO: Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are headed to the White House for a meeting on jobs Thursday, and they’ll have a few words to say about how President Barack Obama is doing his. The 43-member caucus is fighting through one of the most difficult periods in its 39-year history, and some members and aides said they’re getting far too little support from the nation’s first black president — a man they once believed would be their strongest champion.

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THE HILL: Democratic control of Congress has prompted the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) to change its tune on estate tax repeal and support a less ambitious approach. The powerful lobby for small businesses has accepted that it can’t win an outright repeal of the tax in this political climate. So it has backed bipartisan legislation that would create a 35 percent tax on estates worth more than $5 million.

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THE HILL: Frustrated at seeing their legislative agenda stymied, unions are becoming increasingly active in competitive Democratic Senate primaries. Across the country, labor groups are using their organizational muscle early against candidates whom they see as having walked away from their agenda.

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WASHINGTON POST: An outside review of a U.N. panel -- promised after flaws were uncovered in the panel's most recent report on climate change -- will not recheck that report's conclusions and will instead focus on improving procedures for the future, officials said Wednesday. U.N. officials defended their decision, saying that there is still no reason to doubt the most important conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In a landmark report in 2007, the panel found "unequivocal" evidence that the climate was warming.

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WASHINGTON POST: Most big employers plan to shift a larger share of health-care costs to their workers next year, according to a survey to be released Thursday. Many say they may charge more to cover spouses, tighten eligibility standards for their health plans and dispense financial rewards or penalties based on the results of certain lab tests. At some companies, employees who are overweight could be excluded from the most desirable plans.

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WASHINGTON POST: President Obama made an impassioned case Wednesday for his health-care proposal, delivering a folksy, partisan argument for reform as industry groups prepare a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to defeat it. Stripping off his suit jacket and pushing up his sleeves within minutes of entering a stuffy high school gym in this St. Louis suburb, Obama criticized his Republican opposition, Washington's wasteful spending and rising insurance premiums. He spoke with evident anger about "political gamesmanship" in Washington leading to "terrible consequences," as he evoked the outsider's message that he delivered successfully in his 2008 campaign.

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WASHINGTON POST: The federal government has spent the past half year seeking to roll back its emergency efforts at propping up the financial markets -- with the notable exception of its involvement in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As the government has pledged more and more money to cover the companies' losses, it has assured the public that planning was underway for overhauling the firms so the bailouts would end. As recently as December, the Obama administration said it expected to release a preliminary report on how to remake Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac around Feb. 1.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: The recession and the ongoing jobless recovery devastated much of the private-sector work force last year, sending unemployment soaring, but government workers emerged essentially unscathed, according to data released Wednesday by the Labor Department. Meanwhile, the compensation for state and local government employees continued to easily outdistance the wages and benefits for workers in private business, a separate Labor Department report showed.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: The simmering feud between the White House and the Supreme Court is getting a little hotter - and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are helping fan the flames. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s impromptu portrayal Tuesday of President Obama's attacks on the high court during the State of the Union address as "very troubling" drew a brusque retort from the White House, which called the court's campaign finance ruling the real problem, and from Democrats eager to attack the court.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: The Obama administration promised increased transparency in government but has rolled back rules proposed by the Bush administration that expanded the financial disclosure statements required of labor unions and their leaders. Since President Obama took office, the Labor Department has rescinded or delayed three sets of rules proposed by the George W. Bush administration that would have required unions and their leaders to more specifically detail their finances, according to a review of records by The Washington Times.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Head lice are itchy, nasty nuisances that can be hard to get rid of. Can a pill provide relief? A new study has found that in tough cases, an oral medication kills the parasites more effectively than a prescription lotion applied to the scalp. The study, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, compared ivermectin -- an antiparasitic drug used for human river-blindness cases and animal parasites -- with a lotion containing the insecticide malathion.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Nearly two-thirds of those who undergo an invasive heart test called cardiac catheterization when they do not have diagnosed heart disease receive a clean bill of health, suggesting that the expensive procedure -- which exposes the patient to substantial amounts of radiation -- may be overused, researchers reported Wednesday. Such elective testing accounts for only about 20% of all cardiac catheterizations, but the findings reported in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest that better ways should be found to identify patients who actually need the procedure.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Vaginal birth after caesarean, or VBAC, is reasonably safe and should be more widely available, a National Institutes of Health advisory panel concluded Wednesday. Such deliveries once accounted for 25% of U.S. births among women with a previous caesarean delivery, but have now fallen to less than 9%. Many women would like to attempt a vaginal delivery, however, and the panel's consensus statement is expected to increase their access to the option.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Promoting a new initiative to reduce waste in Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs, President Obama traveled to suburban St. Louis on Wednesday to keep up momentum behind his push to complete work on a health overhaul this month. Obama redoubled his warning that failing to step up regulation of the insurance industry as part of a broader healthcare overhaul would leave more Americans struggling with rising premiums.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Google Inc. broke a long silence in its clash with China on Wednesday as its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said that the Internet search giant was talking to Chinese officials and that he expected "something will happen soon." Schmidt's statement, made during a media summit in Abu Dhabi, marked the first time Google acknowledged talking to the Chinese government since it unleashed a global firestorm in January by revealing it had been the victim of major cyber attacks originating from China.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Federal inspection of the runaway Toyota Prius that took a wild ride on a San Diego County freeway was delayed several hours Wednesday when a California congressman insisted that someone from his office witness the examination. A team of inspectors from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was already at Toyota of El Cajon examining the car -- which reportedly had a stuck accelerator, causing it to speed for half an hour before the driver got it stopped -- when a staffer from the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) arrived in the late morning.

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NEW YORK TIMES: A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

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NEW YORK TIMES: With Democratic Congressional leaders and the White House struggling on Wednesday to finalize the details of major health care legislation, House Democrats were desperately trying to prevent another of President Obama’s top legislative priorities – an ambitious overhaul of student loan programs – from becoming a casualty of the health care battle. But Democrats in the Senate, where the private student lending industry has strong allies, predicted on Wednesday night that the education bill would not be part of an expedited budget measure containing the final revisions to the health care legislation. Some Democrats said that such a move would stall the student loan changes at a minimum for several months, and perhaps kill the overhaul altogether.

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NEW YORK TIMES: Two research teams have independently decoded the entire genome of patients to find the exact genetic cause of their diseases. The approach may offer a new start in the so far disappointing effort to identify the genetic roots of major killers like heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. In the decade since the first full genetic code of a human was sequenced for some $500 million, less than a dozen genomes had been decoded, all of healthy people.

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NEW YORK TIMES: Dispassionately, the baby-faced young man recounted his killings: two women and one man, first beaten senseless with a stick, then stabbed to death with a short knife. The man, Dahiru Adamu, 25, was crouching on the floor in the sprawling police headquarters here, summoned to give an accounting of the terrible night of March 7, when, he said, he and dozens of other herdsmen descended on a slumbering village just south of here and slaughtered hundreds with machetes, knives and cutlasses in a brutal act of sectarian retribution.

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NEW YORK TIMES: House Democratic leaders on Wednesday banned budget earmarks to private industry, ending a practice that has steered billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to companies and set off corruption scandals. The ban is the most forceful step yet in a three-year effort in Congress to curb abuses in the use of earmarks, which allow individual lawmakers to award financing for pet projects to groups and businesses, many of them campaign donors.

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NEW YORK TIMES: Setting the stage for intense political maneuvering in the weeks to come, early results in Iraq’s elections on Thursday indicated that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s coalition was likely to win a plurality in an exceedingly close race. But even as the preliminary results were about to be broadcast to the public, a coalition of Shiite parties called the vote-counting process into question, challenging both the transparency of the ballot counting and the computerized system being used to tabulate the votes.

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NEW YORK TIMES: They are the most wired vehicles on the road, with dashboard computers, sophisticated radios, navigation systems and cellphones. While such gadgets are widely seen as distractions to be avoided behind the wheel, there are hundreds of thousands of drivers — police officers and paramedics — who are required to use them, sometimes at high speeds, while weaving through traffic, sirens blaring.

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