By BEN GOAD, The Press-Enterprise

WASHINGTON - Seeking to improve an education system he says is failing Indian country, a House lawmaker wants to overhaul the nation's tribal schools.

WASHINGTON - Transportation spending has long been considered one area where Democrats and Republicans could agree, and for months leaders in both parties have expressed optimism about the prospects of forging a deal on legislation to guide the nation's transportation policy into the coming years.

Earlier this year in Perris, Calif., an emaciated 3-year-old filly was found tied to a fence post, abandoned.

Villa Chardonnay, a nonprofit horse sanctuary in Temecula, agreed to take the animal, named her Hope and started trying to bring her back to health. Within 36 hours, Hope was dead.

WASHINGTON - It's shortly after 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. Inside the offices of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, the Darrell Issa investigation machine is in full swing. Phones ring continually. Aides with huge stacks of reports dart in and out of meetings.

WASHINGTON - Responding to a 2008 beef scandal in Chino, Calif., the federal government is pressing forward with a new regulation meant to increase the use of surveillance equipment in the nation's slaughterhouses.

WASHINGTON - House Republicans last month unveiled their Pledge to America, an ambitious and wide-reaching document that details their plans to shrink government, cut spending and repeal President Barack Obama's prized health care law, if voters return them to power next month.

The search for an effective weapon against armies of destructive bark beetles chewing through forests across the West has taken an unusual turn through rock music and into, of all places, the voice box of conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

Sen. Barbara Boxer is preparing to introduce climate-change legislation that would significantly alter the course of the nation's energy policy.

Passage of the bill would represent a defining moment -- both for the effort to curb global warming through pollution limits and for Boxer herself as she readies for what could be a tough 2010 re-election bid.

With California in the throes of a drought, Congress is being urged to ease federal pumping restrictions that are impacting the state's shrinking water supply.

WASHINGTON -- California's longest-serving representative in the U.S. Capitol will soon return home.The towering bronze sculpture of Thomas Starr King, a fiery Unitarian minister credited with keeping California in the Union during the Civil War, is being replaced in the National Statuary Hall Collection with a 7-feet-tall likeness of former President Ronald Reagan.