Politics News

BETHESDA, Md. - Fresh from his weeklong trip through Asia, President Barack Obama is taking time to catch up on dad duty.

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama will have scant time to rest up from his eight-day Asia trip. On Saturday, two days after his return to Washington, the Senate plans a make-or-break vote on his hard-fought plan to overhaul the nation's health care system. Obama also confronts a difficult choice on strategy and troop levels in Afghanistan, which will be criticized no matter what he decides.

WASHINGTON - It's the hottest ticket in town. Just don't ask the White House who got them.

WASHINGTON - There may be additional e-mails that could have tipped off law enforcement or military officials to the Fort Hood shooter before he went on his deadly rampage, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Friday.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - President Barack Obama's health reform faces a landmark first test in the US Senate Saturday as Democratic leaders strive to lock down support for a vote that would allow them to launch a formal floor debate on the proposal.

WASHINGTON - The Senate ethics committee on Friday admonished Democratic Sen. Roland Burris for misleading investigators about his maneuvering to get Barack Obama's old Senate seat from the governor who was ousted for trying to sell it.

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department intends to drop manslaughter and weapons charges against one of the Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, prosecutors said in court documents Friday.

WASHINGTON - There may be additional e-mails that could have tipped off law enforcement or military officials to the Fort Hood shooter before he went on his deadly rampage, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Friday.

WASHINGTON - A retired State Department worker and his wife accused of a decades-long plot to spy for Cuba pleaded guilty Friday in a deal that will leave him behind bars for the rest of his life but gives her a chance at freedom in six years.

ROME - Italian police on Saturday arrested two Pakistani men accused of providing logistical support for last year's terror attacks in Mumbai, officials said.

PERUGIA, Italy - Prosecutors are expected to request life in prison for an American student and her former boyfriend accused of killing a young British woman in Italy.

ROME - A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus. Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - A group of black Connecticut firefighters hopes to block promotions for white firefighters who won a discrimination case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (AN'-toh-nihn skuh-LEE'-uh) has said in a speech at Ohio State University the Constitution is best treated as an original document within the context of its historical creation, not as a text subject to modern reinterpretation.

FREDERICK, Md. - More than 150 years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued the notorious Dred Scott decision affirming slavery, a Maryland city unveiled a plaque Tuesday to educate visitors about the opinion and the local man who wrote it — and to quell a local controversy.

After emerging out of nowhere over the summer as a seemingly potent and growing political force, the tea party movement has become embroiled in internal feuding over philosophy, strategy and money and is at risk of losing its momentum.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The former top commander of US troops in Asia on Thursday strongly defended President Barack Obama against critics of his bow to Japan's Emperor Akihito, calling it a gesture of respect.

Congressional Democrats could be careening toward a head-on collision with the White House over $200 billion in leftover bailout money — money that Republicans think should simply be returned to taxpayers.