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SAN FRANCISCO - California Attorney General Jerry Brown, a likely Democratic candidate for governor next year, faces political blowback no matter how he rules on the undercover videotaping by conservative filmmakers at offices of the community group ACORN in southern California.

WASHINGTON - Look for Republicans to continue to press for a measure that would require everyone to list their citizenship status on 2010 census forms.

The Democratic majority in the Senate blocked a GOP amendment Nov. 5 that, its partisans said, would have produced solid numbers on how many undocumented aliens live here.

BEIJING - Was Mao Zedong the Abraham Lincoln of China?

In an attempt to convince President Barack Obama of its claim to Tibet, the Chinese government has likened the 1959 Communist takeover of the area to the American Civil War, inferring that Mao freed Tibetans from slavery much as Lincoln ended slavery in the United States.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate announced this week that the state has a plan to reduce the prison population that will satisfy a judicial panel of judges.

Brad and Janell live in the bushes near in Golden Gate Park. In the last two years, they have heard the pitch from the Homeless Outreach Team, they've been rousted by the dawn patrol, and they've huddled under a tree during drenching rain and numbing cold.

SAN FRANCISCO - And they won't leave.

Even if it means a roof over their heads or a bed to sleep in every night.

KABUL - First came the Brezhnev Market. Then the Bush Market.

Now Afghans are beginning to call their notorious bazaar full of chow and supplies bought or stolen from the vast U.S. military bases by the name of the current American president, a modest counterweight to his Nobel Peace Prize.

In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings last week, the spotlight is suddenly on the military's overstressed mental health care system.

Questions are emerging about how a few hundred military mental health counselors are treating thousands and thousands of men and women in the armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The humble potato has become the symbol of a new revolution sweeping Cuba.

The vegetable has been eliminated from the thick brown ration books that Cuban nationals relied on for nearly 50 years to purchase government-subsidized groceries, part of the socialist country's attempt to ensure equal access to such staples as rice, beans and cooking oil.

Early -- very early -- one morning last week, state Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod wandered to the back of the ornate Senate chambers and expressed a feeling shared by many of the other people in the room.

"I would rather stick my finger in a light socket," she said, "than spend another hour in here."

LAS VEGAS - Even the men who hand out "nude girls direct to your room" cards stopped their hawking long enough to do some gawking at the "stripper-mobile" as it rolled down the Las Vegas Strip on this week.