SIMI VALLEY, Calif. – Republican Mitt Romney accused John McCain of using dirty tricks by suggesting the former Massachusetts governor wanted a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, in a spirited debate Wednesday night that underscored the intensity of their presidential rivalry.
Coming 24 hours after McCain defeated him in Florida, Romney vented his frustrations [...]

PROVO, Utah — The BYU College Democrats assembled Monday night in Diane Bailey’s apartment to watch the State of the Union address. Like so many college kids in America, they weren’t going to sit through a SOTU speech without turning it into a drinking game. So it was that every time the president said a [...]

CAIRO, Egypt – Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said.
In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut in the international communications cable had led to [...]

I am not the most organized person, so I am spending more than I can afford. But I am glued to it trying to see if guys out there figured where we are going. It bothers me, there is a lot of uncertainty, and hey, maybe someone has a crystal ball?
Unfortunately, the overall tone of [...]

WASHINGTON – The U.S. military is developing contingency plans to deal with the possibility that a large spy satellite expected to fall to Earth in late February or early March could hit North America.
Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, who heads of U.S. Northern Command, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the size of [...]

WASHINGTON – The state of their union? Icy. Rival Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama came within a foot of one another just before President Bush’s State of the Union speech without acknowledging each other.
It was quite a feat, given the packed House floor Monday night, the customary bear-hugging and jostling among other lawmakers. [...]

Sen. Hillary Clinton will win Florida’s Democratic presidential primary Tuesday, CNN projects, although party sanctions have stripped the state of its convention delegates and no Democrats campaigned there.
Published polls showed the New York senator and former first lady was heavily favored in the state.
Her leading rivals, South Carolina primary winner Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. [...]

MIAMI – Sen. John McCain won a breakthrough triumph in the Florida Republican primary Tuesday night, edging past former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and seizing precious campaign momentum for next week’s string of contests across 21 states.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was running third, and headed for the exits. Officials familiar with events said [...]

WASHINGTON – The FBI on Tuesday said it is investigating 14 companies for possible accounting fraud, insider trading or other violations in connection with home loans made to risky borrowers.
Agency officials did not identify the companies under investigation but said the wide-ranging probe, which began in spring 2007, involves companies across the financial services industry, [...]

COLUMBIA, S.C. – Barack Obama routed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the racially charged South Carolina primary Saturday night, regaining campaign momentum in the prelude to a Feb. 5 coast-to-coast competition for more than 1,600 Democratic National Convention delegates.
“The choice in this election is not about regions or religions or genders,” Obama said at a boisterous [...]

LONDON/PARIS (Reuters) – Societe Generale’s shock disclosure of a fraud that lost it $7 billion has left investors wondering about a link between the fiasco and Monday’s European stock market rout.
The sharp fall, which was followed by an emergency U.S. rate cut, came as SocGen tried to close out positions built up by one of [...]

DAVOS, Switzerland (AFP) – World business leaders and political powerbrokers wrapped up their annual gathering in Davos on Saturday by revisiting the issue of global economic uncertainty that clouded this year’s event.
International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was to lead a round-table discussion on the economic outlook for 2008 amid talk of a US recession [...]

KOLKATA, India (AFP) – India’s worst outbreak of bird flu spread as health authorities battled on Friday to stop it reaching the densely populated city of Kolkata amid heavy rain that hampered culling efforts.
Authorities reported the disease had affected two more districts, bringing the number hit by avian flu to 12 out of West Bengal [...]

MOSCOW – A suspected crime boss sought by the FBI for years has been arrested on a Moscow street in connection with a tax evasion probe into owners of a cosmetic-shop chain, officials said Friday.
Semyon Mogilevich, a Ukrainian-born Russian citizen accused by FBI officials of involvement in criminal enterprises ranging from securities fraud to weapons [...]

More than 3 million acres in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest would be open to logging under a federal plan that supporters believe will revive the state’s struggling timber industry.
Environmentalists, however, fear that the proposal will devastate the forest.
The Bush administration released Friday a management plan for the forest, the largest in the country at nearly [...]