The US government is dramatically escalating its response to the financial crisis by planning to invest $250 billion in the country’s banks, forcing nine of the largest to accept a Treasury stake in what amounts to a partial nationalization.
News that European governments also planned to take stakes in their banks and anticipation of new U.S. [...]

The United Nations is calling for urgent action to ease the global food crisis that officials say threatens to push millions of people across the globe into poverty and to the brink of starvation.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Tuesday addressed an international food summit in Rome urging world leaders to boost food output by 50 percent [...]

The secret history of spies in space is about be revealed.
The new documentary "Astrospies" will delve into the U.S. Air Force’s Cold War-era space reconnaissance program and its Soviet Union counterpart during a Tuesday edition of the series NOVA on the Public Broadcasting System.
"We used to have a joke in the program," said former astronaut [...]

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 [...]

Telecommunications carriers shut down some covert surveillance lines established by the FBI because the bureau failed to make timely bill payments, a Justice Department review found Thursday.
In five of the bureau’s 56 field offices, an audit by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General found hundreds of delinquent invoices, potentially threatening the integrity of [...]