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) - Democrats in the US Senate strove to lock down support to prevail in a landmark first test vote of President Barack Obama's top domestic priority, remaking the US health care system.

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 - 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.

BRUSSELS (AFP) - Incoming EU president Herman Van Rompuy kept a low profile as the 27-nation bloc's leaders faced flak for picking him and a little-known British peer to lead a revamped Europe on the world stage.

ROME - Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, an Italian museum director said Friday.

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.