BARACK OBAMA

A police investigation into last month's Jakarta hotel bombings shows that militants also planned to use snipers to attack Barack Obama's convoy when the U.S. president visits Indonesia, an intelligence expert told Reuters.

Millions of Afghans went to the polls Thursday, defying Taliban threats of violence and sporadic attacks across the country to choose a president in the midst of a worsening war.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shrugged off on Thursday the impact of any sanctions targeting Iran's gasoline imports and suggested it would soon be able to meet its own needs, Iranian media reported.

A stabilizing U.S. financial sector may have freed the White House to trim its 2009 budget deficit projection but the still-record-breaking figure will not make it easier to sell healthcare reform.

The Obama administration will trim its budget deficit forecast for fiscal 2009 to $1.58 trillion, after scrapping money earmarked for bailing out more banks, officials said on Wednesday.

The Obama administration plans to transfer six prisoners abroad from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. official said on Wednesday, part of the effort to close the controversial facility by early 2010.

First lady, Michelle Obama, is on the spotlight again for her fashion, this time however not many people not many people are in favor of the mid-thigh shorts she chose to wear on a family holiday to the Grand Canyon.

U.S. consumers will see on Thursday the first signs of the biggest overhaul of the credit card industry in at least two decades, as companies will be forced to provide customers with more time to pay their bills and be required to give more warning of contractual changes.

Two years after the start of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, policy-makers from around the world gather this week to think about how to prevent it from happening again.

Americans remain skeptical of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform drive, but their views have not changed much after weeks of sometimes angry protests at public meetings, according to an NBC poll released on Tuesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama has started reaching out to some of Pakistan's most fervent Islamist and anti-American parties, including one that helped give rise to the Taliban, trying to improve Washington's image in the nuclear-armed state.

Banks are lowering bonuses to defuse popular outrage, but by curtailing employee incentives, compensation experts say the banks and the U.S. government are failing to fix practices that led to the financial crisis.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refrained from initiating new housing projects in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, hoping to reach common ground with Washington, a government minister said on Tuesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama, said Tuesday he saw encouraging signs of a softening of Israel's resistance to his call for a freeze on settlement-building in the occupied West Bank.

U.S. President Barack Obama, looking to jump-start the stalled Middle East peace process, will hold talks Tuesday with Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, who Washington hopes can help to get things moving.

A senior Iranian official said Tehran was ready for negotiations with the West on its disputed nuclear program based on mutual respect and without preconditions, state television reported on Tuesday.

The new director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, has one main goal for the giant research agency -- getting more money.

Lawmakers debating an overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system are focusing on proposals that would form healthcare cooperatives to help provide medical coverage.

President Barack Obama on Monday called the conflict in Afghanistan a war worth fighting as he sought to stiffen U.S. public support before an election there this week that will test his new strategy.

The government-run health insurance option favored by President Barack Obama is not essential to a healthcare overhaul as long as the final measure boosts competition, a top U.S. health official said on Sunday.

President Barack Obama will seek to shore up U.S. public support for the war in Afghanistan on Monday just days before an Afghan presidential election widely seen as a major test of his revamped strategy.