THE HILL: Sens. Dick Durbin and Charles Schumer are each considering proposals to rein in the minority’s power to filibuster. The second- and third-ranking Senate Democrats are talking separately with junior colleagues about a move to make majority government easier.

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POLITICO: When Mitch McConnell speaks these days, he expects House Blue Dogs to be listening. It’s not that the Senate minority leader imagines himself to be E.F. Hutton, but he’s very much part of a newly launched Republican shadow war to block health care reform by playing on the nerves of wavering Democrats across the Capitol.

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POLITICO: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wants to revive the bipartisan Gang of 14 — this time for health care reform, not judicial nominees. But most of his moderate Democratic colleagues aren’t rushing to R.S.V.P. Graham said Tuesday that a coalition of Republican and Democratic senators could rescue the Senate from an institutional disaster brought on by the use of the parliamentary maneuver known as reconciliation to finish the health care bill.

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WASHINGTON POST: The company at the heart of a growing recall of processed foods knew that its plant was contaminated with salmonella but continued to make a flavoring and sell it to foodmakers around the country, according to inspectors at the Food and Drug Administration. Managers at Basic Food Flavors of Las Vegas learned on Jan. 21 that samples taken a week earlier from their Nevada facility tested positive for salmonella, a potentially deadly bacterium, but they kept shipping their product to foodmakers, according to FDA inspection records.

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WASHINGTON POST: With his country's economy stalled, crops unplanted and a million people without homes, Haitian President René Préval began a visit to Washington Tuesday to focus on how U.S. and international donors can help the beleaguered nation recover from a devastating earthquake. The Haitian government is racing to finish a blueprint on which it will to base its requests for potentially record-breaking aid commitments at a United Nations conference this month. The Jan. 12 quake killed more than 200,000 people, and the Inter-American Development Bank has estimated that the damage could hit $14 billion.

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WASHINGTON POST: Not long after Eric Massa joined Congress in January 2009, several male staff members began to feel uncomfortable with the sexually loaded language their boss routinely used, according to accounts relayed to the House ethics committee. As the months passed, rumors began to circulate in the office that the married New York Democrat had sexually propositioned young male staffers and interns -- allegations, according to two sources with knowledge of the inquiry, that included Massa groping at least two aides.

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WASHINGTON POST: The nation's governors and state school chiefs will propose standards Wednesday for what students should learn in English and math, from kindergarten through high school, a crucial step in President Obama's campaign to raise academic standards across the country. The blueprint aims to replace a hodgepodge of state benchmarks with common standards. The president has aggressively encouraged the states' action as a key to improving troubled schools and keeping the nation competitive. Instituting new academic standards would reverberate in textbooks, curriculum, teacher training and student learning from coast to coast.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: Nearly a dozen business groups that oppose President Obama's health care overhaul bill are spending millions of dollars to put pressure on vulnerable, fence-sitting House members in their districts. Employers for a Healthy Economy, which counts health insurers, manufacturers, retailers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce among its members, said it is spending between $4 million and $10 million on television ads that ask House members to oppose the Senate's health bill.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: A top Chinese official said Tuesday that Beijing will not use its vast holdings of U.S. government debt for political gain, just a few days after a forecast projected that the U.S. national debt is on course to triple to $20 trillion over the next decade. China holds the world's largest cache of foreign exchange reserves, which soared more than $450 billion last year to reach $2.4 trillion at year's end. Concerns about Beijing's plans for its holdings have peaked in recent weeks after Chinese military officials suggested using that debt to pressure the United States in other policy areas.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: Tales about the White House's hot-tempered, foul-mouthed chief of staff are legion, from Rahm Emanuel's mailing of a dead fish to a pollster to a lawmaker's accusation that Mr. Emanuel berated him over a vote in the shower at the congressional gym. Mixing mockery and scorn, the Obama administration Tuesday dismissed new accusations about Mr. Emanuel from Rep. Eric Massa, a freshman New York Democrat who has formally resigned his seat amid a growing ethics scandal and charges of sexual misconduct involving his staff.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: It wasn't long ago that Marco Rubio and Tim Pawlenty -- two rising Republican stars -- supported legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions. But in recent weeks, both have begun to express doubts about whether cars, factories and power plants have anything to do with global warming. The shift by Rubio and Pawlenty -- as well as other prominent Republicans -- reflects the rising power of climate change skeptics in the GOP, where global warming is becoming a litmus test for conservatives.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: For 90 tense minutes last month, Sheriff Mike Lacy in Utah tried to prevent yet another person connected to the theft of Native American artifacts from committing suicide. Two defendants had already taken their own lives after federal authorities charged 24 people in June with looting Native American sites in the West.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Using e-mail, YouTube videos, phony travel documents and a burning desire to kill "or die trying," a middle-aged American woman from Pennsylvania helped recruit a network for suicide attacks and other terrorist strikes in Europe and Asia, according to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed Tuesday. Colleen R. LaRose, who dubbed herself "JihadJane," was so intent on waging jihad, authorities said, that she traveled to Sweden to kill an artist in a way that would frighten "the whole Kufar [nonbeliever] world."

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LOS ANGELES TIMES: Improbable as it seems, the brightest spot so far in the nation's spotty economic recovery is a sector long considered all but dead -- good-old-fashioned manufacturing. Factories are churning. Exports are up. Even though jobs are the bleakest aspect of the overall economy these days, factory payrolls have turned positive.

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NEW YORK TIMES: The movie “Bait Shop” had too much boozing to earn the extra rebate from Florida’s “family friendly” program of incentives for film production. “Confessions of a Shopaholic” was, well, just too violent. “There’s a scene where the woman is fighting over shoes and she is beating another woman with a shoe,” said Lucia Fishburne, the state’s film commissioner, adding: “We err on the side of conservative.”

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NEW YORK TIMES: For a few days last fall, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood celebrated a big victory: the tiny advocacy group had successfully pushed the Walt Disney Company to offer full refunds to everyone who had bought the company’s popular Baby Einstein videos from June 2004 to September 2009. But it did not take long for trouble to follow. The group has been evicted from the Harvard-affiliated children’s mental-health center in Boston that had housed and sponsored it for more than a decade.

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NEW YORK TIMES: Rafaela Espinal held her first poolside chat last summer, offering cheese, crackers and apple cider to draw people to hear her pitch. She keeps a handful of brochures in her purse, and also gives a few to her daughter before she leaves for school each morning. She painted signs on the windows of her Chrysler minivan, turning it into a mobile advertisement.

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NEW YORK TIMES: One of the world’s foremost experts on comparing national school systems told lawmakers on Tuesday that many other countries were surpassing the United States in educational attainment, including Canada, where he said 15-year-old students were, on average, more than one school year ahead of American 15-year-olds.

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NEW YORK TIMES: An aging hospital on an Indian reservation in Arizona could teach the rest of the country lessons in providing better obstetrical care to women who have had a C-section.

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NEW YORK TIMES: As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff members, according to a new Security Council report. The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program’s Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009 — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors.

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NEW YORK TIMES: For anyone who cares about medical costs — which is to say anyone who cares about the take-home pay of American families or about the budget deficit — President Obama’s health reform plan is a terribly mixed bag. It does so much less than the ideal plan would do. It would not come close to eliminating Medicare’s long-term budget deficit. It would reduce that deficit only if a future Congress did not tinker with the various taxes and spending cuts scheduled to be phased in over the next decade.

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NEW YORK TIMES: Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders, people involved in the talks said. The industry is politically influential in his home state and a significant contributor to his campaigns, records show. The Senate Banking Committee’s chairman, Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, proposed legislation in November that would give a new consumer protection agency the power to write and enforce rules governing payday lenders, debt collectors and other financial companies that are not part of banks.

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NEW YORK TIMES: In a move that could bring an end to the $40 cup of coffee, Bank of America said on Tuesday that it was doing away with overdraft fees on purchases made with debit cards, a decision that could cost the bank tens of millions a year in revenue and put pressure on other banks to do the same. Bank officials said that effective this summer, customers who try to make purchases with their debit cards without enough money in their checking accounts will simply be declined. Debit purchases account for roughly 60 percent of overdrafts at Bank of America, the nation’s largest issuer of debit cards.

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NEW YORK TIMES: A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe, kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects. But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group, which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.

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