US dominance is likely to weaken by 2025 as India and China grow stronger, a new Washington intelligence report says.

The Indian navy is given formal approval by the United Nations to go after pirate ships in Somali waters, the BBC learns.

Supporters of Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr stage protests in Baghdad against a deal to allow US troops to remain in Iraq.

Popular Burmese comedian and activist Zarganar is sentenced to 45 years in jail in the latest of a string of imprisonments.

At least 15 people are killed as insurgents attack the Somali capital, Mogadishu, witnesses say.

The 3,000 extra UN troops being sent to DR Congo must be elite soldiers from Europe, the UN's ex-peacekeeping chief says.

A bill to extend Russia's presidential term from four to six years wins the overwhelming backing of MPs.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Retired Marine Gen. James Jones emerged as a leading contender for White House national security adviser as President-elect Barack Obama worked on Thursday to assemble his foreign policy team.

LONDON (Reuters) - Euro zone demand is plunging and price pressures vanishing, business surveys showed on Friday, while central bankers weighed the bleak prospect of deflation.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush spoke with U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Friday and the top U.S. law enforcement official sounded well after collapsing during a speech, the White House said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Friday signed into law an extension of unemployment benefits, the White House said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Followers of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr marched on Friday against a pact letting U.S. forces stay in Iraq until 2011, toppling an effigy of President George W. Bush where U.S. troops once tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc lost more than one-quarter of its market value on growing worries over whether it has enough capital to withstand billions of dollars of potential losses and despite new support from its largest individual investor.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Verizon Wireless said on Thursday that some employees had gained unauthorized access and viewed a personal cell phone account held by President-elect Barack Obama that is now inactive.

Drew Peterson has met with a prominent divorce attorney more than a year after his wife, Stacy, disappeared, his lawyer confirmed to CNN today. Police have said that the former Bolingbrook, Illinois, police sergeant is a suspect in his wife's disappearance, which investigators have labeled a "potential homicide." Peterson maintains his wife left him for someone else.

Skeptical senators grilled auto executives at a hearing today, calling them short sighted and unimaginative, as they seek a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout to ward off looming bankruptcy, CNNMoney reports. "Their board rooms in my view have been devoid of vision," said Sen. Chris Dodd.

Former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the position of attorney general, according to two prominent Democrats involved in transition matters.

An 8-year-old Arizona boy suspected in the deaths of his father and another man told police he found the two men dead upon arriving home from school, according to a portion of a videotaped interview released Tuesday by authorities.

Almost 700,000 U.S. children lived in households that struggled to put food on the table at some point in 2007, the highest number since 1998, according to a federal report.

It was heartwarming, in a way, to see Sen. John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama together the other day.

Two weeks after losing his bid for the presidency in an electoral landslide, Sen. John McCain is beginning the thorny transition back to life out of the spotlight as he weighs his future role in the Senate.

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The Bush administration said Wednesday that it was changing its nearly-moribund mortgage rescue plan in an effort to spark more lenders and homeowners to participate.

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The volume of shoppers is expected to decline sharply during the 2008 holidays due to such factors as the financial market meltdown and a shorter season, according to a retail industry survey released Wednesday.

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"Brother, can you spare a dime?" During the Great Depression, ten cents could buy a little something for those really hard up.

If mortgage lending was the Wild West during the boom years, foreclosure-prevention counseling is the lucrative new frontier of the bust.

An internal CIA probe has concluded that agency officials deliberately misled Congress, the White House and federal prosecutors about key details of the 2001 downing of an airplane carrying U.S. missionaries in Peru, according to a senior lawmaker who called yesterday for a new criminal inquiry i...

The Bush administration is finalizing changes to the Endangered Species Act that would ensure that federal agencies would not have to take global warming into account when assessing risks to imperiled plants and animals.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey collapsed last evening while delivering a speech to a prominent legal group and was rushed to George Washington University Hospital.

The financial system, which had recently shown glimmers of improvement, is unraveling again.

Barack Obama was famously able to impose discipline and control over his presidential campaign, but it didn't take long for him to discover that running a transition is something quite different.

For the first time, a federal judge ordered the release yesterday of detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay after evaluating and rejecting government allegations that five men were dangerous enemy combatants.

If beleaguered U.S. automakers did not have enough problems, Michigan Rep. John D. Dingell, their greatest congressional champion, was dethroned yesterday as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee by Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, an advocate of stiff measures against global war...

Staff Sgt. Brian Schar got behind the wheel of a white Chevy Colorado yesterday and went for a spin. The vehicle remained snugly parked in a room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Northwest Washington, despite the large screens in front of the truck, which showed a street-level view of...

Two years after the federal government recommended that patients in emergency rooms and doctors' offices be routinely tested for HIV, the advice is generally not being followed, according to a large number of studies presented this week at a conference in Arlington.

Thomas A. Daschle, a former Senate majority leader and a confidant of President-elect Barack Obama, will be nominated as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and will take on a broader role as the administration's health policy chief, said several sources close to the transition...

LONDON -- Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs. "This technique has great promise," said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used bot...

Last weekend, the bike went nowhere, the running shoes sat in the closet and Brian Boyle took a minute to reflect on the season just ended and the lifetime ahead.

The Prince George's County Council adopted one of the nation's most sweeping restrictions on the sale of cigars yesterday, an effort to curb a growing trend among urban youths of using hollowed-out cigars to smoke marijuana.

BEIJING, Nov. 18 -- Under fire for not having the resources to better protect consumers at home, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is deploying staff members abroad to work directly with importers and foreign regulatory agencies to guard against contaminated animal feed, counterfeit drugs, to...

A new federal ban on the use of the controversial chemical phthalate in teethers, pacifiers and other children's products won't apply to goods already in warehouses or on store shelves, federal safety regulators said yesterday.

Montgomery County Council member Phil Andrews yesterday introduced what he called an alternative to a proposed ambulance fee that would earmark money from fines raised by red light and speed cameras to pay for fire-rescue equipment and pedestrian safety programs.

You don't hear much about mentally ill people being locked in the attic by misguided relatives anymore. There are no "insane asylums" where patients go for counseling but end up getting a lobotomy instead. Words such as "warehouse," "snake pit" and "cuckoo's nest" are no longer used to describe most...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A gene related to a hormone secreted by the body's fat cells may lower the risk of colon cancer, a discovery that could reassure people with a family history of the disease, researchers said on Tuesday.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists have unearthed the remains of a large meat-eating dinosaur with a breathing apparatus much like a modern bird, fortifying the link between birds and dinosaurs and helping to explain the evolution of birds' unique system of breathing.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new AIDS vaccine research center dedicated to solving one of the stickiest problems holding back development of such a vaccine will open in California, researchers announced on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fast new genetic flu test from Applied Biosystems Inc and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA extended the mission of the busy Phoenix lander Monday, saying it will operate the lander until it dies in the cold and dark of the Martian winter.