CONGRESS

Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda said on Wednesday he has no plans to testify before U.S. investigators, setting the stage for a possible showdown over a safety crisis that has rocked the automaker's reputation and results.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda said he believed North America chief Yoshimi Inaba was the logical choice to testify at the U.S. congressional hearings scheduled for later this month.

Toyota Motor said on Friday its embattled head is planning a U.S. trip early next month but would not confirm whether he would attend congressional hearings probing the automaker's safety recalls.

President Barack Obama convened a meeting of Top Republican and Democratic leaders on Tuesday in the White House and called on the two parties to focus on creating jobs and cooperating on battled economy.

President Barack Obama on Saturday appealed to fellow Democrats and rival Republicans to back a plan to use $30 billion in bank bailout funds to help small businesses.

A group of influential mortgage investors is intensifying efforts to encourage a new phase to U.S. housing stability plans that would give homeowners ability and incentive to pay their loans.

Toyota Motor Corp faced scrutiny from Congress over its biggest ever safety recall as investors, suppliers and consumers weighed the impact of an unprecedented halt in U.S. production by the No.1 automaker.

Congressional investigators on Thursday sought documents on Thursday from Toyota Motor Corp and U.S. safety regulators about a pair of safety recalls the automaker was racing to address.

Several Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday expressed concern that the merger of Exxon Mobil and XTO Energy would reduce competition in the oil and gas industries and increase the use of a controversial drilling technique that could pollute water supplies.

Members of the U.S. Congress begin 2010 scrambling to reduce the double-digit U.S. jobless rate, knowing their own jobs will be at stake in the November election if they fail to deliver.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday congressional Democrats were close to agreement on merging their healthcare bills but still faced challenges in blending the two approaches.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged U.S. lawmakers to create incentives for American households to weatherize their homes and said the program would essentially pay for itself.

If Congress does not pass a healthcare bill soon, the opportunity to reform the U.S. healthcare system will be lost for a generation, Vice President Joe Biden warned Tuesday.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says Congress may need to raise the U.S. federal debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that greenhouse gases endanger human health Monday, allowing President Barack Obama to show his commitment to act as a major climate change summit opened in Copenhagen.

U.S. congress has begun investigating climate scientists whose emails and documents were hacked into to see if their global warming theories have misrepresented the truth behind the cause of climate change.

President Barack Obama is paying a price for a recession that began before he took office, and fellow Democrats have started to balk at his legislative agenda and demand greater efforts to create jobs.

U.S. congress has begun investigating climate scientists whose emails and documents were hacked into to see if their global warming theories have misrepresented the truth behind the cause of climate change. Investigators have begun studying the 1,079 e-mails and over 3,800 documents that were hackers stole last week from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the U.K, Rep. Darrel Issa from California told the Wall Street Journal.

Executives from two major oil companies told Congress on Thursday that the U.S. government should open more offshore areas to oil and natural gas drilling so America can rely less on foreign suppliers.

The United States must combat China's trade-distorting industrial and currency policies with U.S. trade laws and by using the World Trade Organization, a congressional advisory body said on Thursday.

The U.S. Congress edged closer on Wednesday to creating new government powers to break up giant financial firms, which Europe is already doing, while a U.S. derivatives market crackdown got more complicated.