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President Barack Obama’s embrace of a national database to store the DNA of people arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime is heartening to backers of the policy but disappointing to criminal-justice reformers, who view it as an invasion of privacy.

PERHAPS the only thing more surprising than President Obama’s decision to give an interview for “America’s Most Wanted” last weekend was his apparent agreement with the program’s host, John Walsh, that there should be a national DNA database with profiles of every person arrested, whether convicted or not. Many Americans feel that this proposal flies in the face of our “innocent until proven guilty” ethos, and given that African-Americans are far more likely to be arrested than whites, critics refer to such genetic collection as creating “Jim Crow’s database.”

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Lil Wayne, Ron Howard, Scarlett Johansson and Kim Kardashian are all on the same page when it comes to criminal justice reform.

They're among more than 100 entertainers calling on the president to focus on changing drug laws. Rap mogul Russell Simmons helped assemble the coalition of celebrities and civil rights leaders that presented a letter to President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

As details of his administration's global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known—a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected assassinations—President Obama has been compared to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action. "As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign," Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, "Barack Obama has become George W.

Not confronted with the stench of rotting bodies, the wail of fathers who lost their children, the cry of children who lost their mothers, the silence when whole families are shredded and burned by our freedom, the American liberal is free to imagine Barack Obama as both a grand leader and something of a friend. Thanks to an award-winning ad campaign, Obama the product - not the man, because who knows that? - is smart, hip and sophisticated, or everything George W Bush was not. But here's the thing with that, friend. Barack Obama is the US President, which is to say: A bad person. A murderer.

The Obama administration responded to years of pressure from immigrants rights groups on Friday with an announcement that it will stop deportations and begin granting work permits for some Dream Act-eligible students. "They pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper," President Barack Obama said of those young people in a press conference announcing the policy change.

t was not long ago when President Barack Obama's new drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, swept into Washington, D.C. and declared the "drug war" a public policy relic.

WASHINGTON — As President Barack Obama considered adding as many as 40,000 U.S. forces to a backsliding war in Afghanistan in 2009, Vice President Joe Biden warned him that the military rationale for doing so was flawed, a new book about Obama's expansion of the conflict says.

Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday.

By a 357 to 32 vote, the House approved legislation that will pay state governments to require DNA samples, which could mean drawing blood with a needle, from adults "arrested for" certain serious crimes. Not one Democrat voted against the database measure, which would hand out about $75 million to states that agree to make such testing mandatory.