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by Frank James

A quick guided tour of some of the morning’s most important, most interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.

The U.S. mortgage crisis hasn’t yet topped the magnitude of the savings and loan meltdown or the tech-bubble bust but is likely to take as long or longer to work through because of the complexity of the mortgage-backed securities.

The surge in U.S. troops has reduced violence in Iraq but the country appears more split along sectarian lines than ever with tribes, parties and militias often playing a greater role than the mostly ineffectual national government.

A backlog in Social Security disability cases has some applicants waiting as long as three years for a decision

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and the plan to hire more judges to hear the claims is stalled because of the standoff between Congress and President Bush over domestic spending. At a Univision Spanish-language debate, the Republican presidential candidates were more gung ho about U.S. efforts in Iraq and improvements there than they have been in prior debates, save for Sen. John McCain, who has long made the changes in the war a key campaign issue. Also, while they remained tough on immigration, they were more nuanced.

Sen. Barack Obama, traveling with media megastar Oprah Winfrey, drew the biggest crowd of the campaign, about 29,000 mostly African Americans at an event held at a football stadium in which she invoked the history making nature of Obama’s campaign. They drew a considerably smaller, less energized audience, however, in New Hampshire.

The New York Philharmonic plans to play in North Korea in what would be the first significant visit by a high-profile American cultural group, a event the State Department sees as an important opening by the secretive regime to the West.

More than 100 Guantanamo detainees have been transferred to their homeland of Saudi Arabia where they pass through a program meant to reintegrate them into society but whose critics say could permit anti-American jihadis to return to the streets.

Some companies are using laws meant to fight organized crime that fall under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act to instead battle union organizing efforts.

Theft of computerized personal information accelerated in 2007 compared with the year before, according to an analysis of data by USA Today.