Colorado: Michael Riley

WASHINGTON — As Rep. Jared Polis toured Iraq this week, he had something more than security conditions or troop withdrawals on his mind: the case of a man allegedly sentenced to death in a criminal court for membership in a gay-rights group.

An openly gay member of Congress, Polis has been investigating the treatment of gays in Iraq for several months, and last week he spoke through a translator by phone to a transgender Iraqi man who said he had been arrested, beaten and raped by Ministry of Interior security forces.

Human-rights groups tracking the issue also passed Polis a letter, allegedly written from jail by a man who said he was beaten into confessing he was a member of the gay-rights group Iraqi-LGBT.

Even though Blake Jones is on the edge of the green-energy movement, he was fearful staring at his company's books at the end of 2008.

The chief executive of Namaste Solar and its 55 employee-owners were feeling the effects of the recession firsthand as the frozen capital markets led to the delay or cancellation of one commercial project after another.

Jones enacted a hiring freeze at the solar-panel company in hopes of weathering the downturn.

After last week's passage of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Jones thinks they've made it.

The 34-year-old will introduce President Barack Obama at the bill's signing today after showing him solar panels his company installed on the Denver Museum of Nature

Obama in Denver

& Science about a year ago.

WASHINGTON — When Ken Salazar goes before the Senate today, he'll be interviewing for an interior secretary job that will put him in charge of 500 million acres of the West, gorgeous national parks and much of the country's energy riches, including coal and natural gas.

What he won't get is the power to set the kind of broad energy policy that was once the purview of Cabinet secretaries at the Energy and Interior departments — making them kings of their domains.

In fact, one paradox of the high profile for energy in President-elect Barack Obama's domestic agenda (he has named former Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner as his energy czar) is that he seems to be following George W.

WASHINGTON — When Ken Salazar goes before the Senate today, he'll be interviewing for an interior secretary job that will put him in charge of 500 million acres of the West, gorgeous national parks and much of the country's energy riches, including coal and natural gas.

What he won't get is the power to set the kind of broad energy policy that was once the purview of Cabinet secretaries at the Energy and Interior departments — making them kings of their domains.

In fact, one paradox of the high profile for energy in President-elect Barack Obama's domestic agenda (he has named former Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner as his energy czar) is that he seems to be following George W.