President Barack Obama told the nation Saturday his health care overhaul is financially sound, but a new analysis by congressional budget experts of emerging House legislation said it would increase deficits by $239 billion over a decade.
It was the sixth consecutive day Obama sought to keep the focus on his chief domestic priority in the [...]
The Treasury Department is scrapping plans to hire a cartoonist to lighten the mood of its employees who manage the nation’s $1.2 trillion debt, after a senator questioned its merits.
“Our training staff felt that at a time when employees are working extra hours, it might have been helpful,” said Kim Treat, a spokesman for the [...]
In his most recent remarks, President Obama has stopped mentioning what had been his mantra - that the House and Senate finish their health-care bills by the August recess - and switched to a less specific call to fast action.
A White House aide said the president isnt letting up.
The increased flexibility follows resistance by key [...]
The Obama administration is considering creating a special unit of professional interrogators to handle key terror suspects, focusing on intelligence-gathering rather than building criminal cases for prosecution, a government official said Saturday.
The official said the panel, which has not completed its work, has concluded that the unit of intelligence and law enforcement agencies should be [...]
Sonia Sotomayor might find it was easier to disarm Republican senators who have one eye on Hispanic voters than to sway Supreme Court justices who have lifetime appointments.
But Sotomayor’s self-assured performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee suggests that her very presence in the high court’s private conferences could change the conversation, in the same way [...]
Could it be that President Barack Obama’s Midas touch is starting to dull a bit, even among members of his own party?
Another Democrat, Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma, tells his local newspaper that Obama is too liberal and is “very unpopular” in his district.
Conservative House Democrats are balking at the cost and direction of Obama’s [...]
For the first time in Italy’s wine-steeped history, a city government has banned alcohol for those under 16 in an effort to curb drinking problems among youths.
Italy has no minimum drinking age, only a rarely enforced ban on serving alcohol in public to those under 16.
A measure approved in the northern city of Milan on [...]
The cheering thats coming from consumer groups — and the corresponding jeers from bankers — is because Barney Frank and Timothy F. Geithner (with strong encouragement from President Obama) are in a headlong rush to create a new agency to enforce federal consumer protection laws as they apply to financial transactions.
Emerging from the quiet of her convent, Sister Anastazja Pustelnik was confronted by a jarring image her smiling face on posters plastered around town to hawk the cookbooks that have made the 59-year-old nun one of Poland’s best-selling authors.
Today, her cookbooks are found in shops and online, their glossy covers showing Pustelnik with an apron [...]
Pope Benedict XVI spent an easy night after breaking his wrist in his Alpine vacation chalet and is learning to cope with the cast on his right arm, the Vatican said Saturday.
Benedict had surgery at the hospital of the nearby town of Aosta on Friday to set his right wrist, fractured when he fell overnight [...]
