Politics News

CHICAGO - Barack Obama appears to be enjoying his last few weeks of pondering the nation's problems without being held accountable for them.

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama, soon to be the first black U.S. president, is on the road to making good his pledge to have a Cabinet and White House staff that are among most diverse ever, although some supporters are asking him to go even further.

WASHINGTON - The California congressman in discussions with President-elect Barack Obama to become U.S. trade representative played a role in President Bill Clinton's commuting the prison sentence of a cocaine dealer. The cocaine dealer's family had made $15,000 in political donations to the congressman and hired Clinton's brother-in-law for $200,000 to help free Carlos Vignali.

WASHINGTON - Imperiled automakers and their union worked feverishly Wednesday to sell a skeptical Congress on a $34 billion aid plan, promising labor concessions and restructuring. The Senate's Democratic leader said there still weren't enough votes to tap the $700 billion federal bailout fund to prop up the foundering Big Three.

ATLANTA - A double digit win in Georgia's U.S. Senate runoff could make Saxby Chambliss a star in a Republican party hungry for fresh leadership. Just weeks ago, he was battling for political survival after neither he nor his Democratic opponent got more than 50 percent of the vote in the general election, forcing Tuesday's runoff, which Chambliss won handily.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Cameos by President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President Dick Cheney have brought star power to a hurricane-delayed battle between Democrats and Republicans for an up-for-grabs U.S. House seat.

WASHINGTON - An unauthorized strain of genetically modified cotton was accidentally mixed in with other harvested cotton in Texas last month, but government officials said Wednesday they do not believe the incident poses safety concerns.

WASHINGTON - A federal judge wants the Justice Department to explain its involvement in an American's imprisonment in the United Arab Emirates, where the man's family says he was held and tortured only days after being interviewed by FBI agents.

WASHINGTON - The amount of U.S. greenhouse gases flowing into the atmosphere, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, increased last year by 1.4 percent after a decline in 2006, the Energy Department reported Wednesday.

UNITED NATIONS - A letter signed by 112 former presidents and prime ministers urged U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday to return to Myanmar and press its military junta to free all political prisoners.

LONDON - British police say a trash collector can hold on to the mound of mutilated cash he found stuffed into a wastebasket in the English town of Lincoln earlier this year.

OSLO, Norway - An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join nearly 100 nations in signing a treaty Wednesday banning the disputed weapons.

WASHINGTON - A cigarette maker and a smoker's widow squared off for the third time at the Supreme Court on Wednesday over a $79.5 million punitive damages award, but the real battle was between the justices and their counterparts on Oregon's high court.

WASHINGTON - A Massachusetts girl's awful experience on a school bus is at the heart of a case argued in the Supreme Court Tuesday over limits on lawsuits about sex discrimination in education.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to let the nation's older power plants draw in billions of gallons of water for cooling without installing technology that would best protect fish and aquatic organisms.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin has added to her financial disclosure forms two free trips that she took nearly two years ago but failed to report. Palin, who was Republican presidential candidate John McCain's running mate, made the disclosures last month, but after Election Day when she and McCain lost to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The trips were first revealed in a story by The Associated Press in October.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Still popular in Florida, former Gov. Jeb Bush said Wednesday that he's interested in the seat Sen. Mel Martinez is giving up, and the field of possible candidates could quickly narrow to make way for the president's younger brother.

WASHINGTON - Imperiled automakers and their union worked feverishly Wednesday to sell a skeptical Congress on a $34 billion aid plan, promising labor concessions and restructuring, but the Senate's Democratic leader said there still weren't enough votes to tap the $700 billion federal bailout fund to prop up the foundering Big Three.