Members of Vice President Cheney's staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official about health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said yesterday.

Raleigh, N.C., July 8 -- Jesse Helms, whose 30-year Senate career helped redefine conservatism, was remembered Tuesday as a gracious friend and formidable foe during a funeral service that packed a Baptist church and drew such dignitaries as Vice President Cheney and Cindy McCain, wife of Sen. John...

MISSOULA, Mont. -- The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

Soon after accepting the post of CIA director two years ago, Michael V. Hayden set an unusual goal for his scandal-beset agency: virtual invisibility.

The Bush administration is developing a long-range plan to empty the Guantanamo Bay military prison that could include asking Congress to spell out procedures for scores of suspected terrorists whom the government does not plan to bring to trial, administration officials and others familiar with...

MEXICO CITY, July 3 -- Sen. John McCain's trip to Colombia and Mexico this week made one thing clear: The shape of the United States' relationship with Latin America will hinge on the outcome of the 2008 election.

In his final months in office, President Bush is mounting a last-ditch effort to forge a new global deal to limit greenhouse-gas emissions but finds himself once again at odds with much of the rest of the world on how to address climate change.

The Bush administration told Congress last year of a secret plan to dramatically expand covert operations inside Iran as part of a long-running effort to destabilize the country's ruling regime, according to a report published yesterday.

With congressional leaders engaged in heated brinkmanship, the Bush administration yesterday gave a reprieve to thousands of doctors expecting to get hit Tuesday with a 10.6 percent cut in Medicare payments.

Last February, in the heat of the Democratic primary campaign, Sen. Barack Obama proclaimed himself "proud to stand" with Sens. Christopher J. Dodd, Russell Feingold and "a grass-roots movement of Americans" in opposition to President Bush's demand to offer telecommunications companies legal amnesty...

Two key architects of the Bush administration's controversial interrogation policies defended their legal positions yesterday, sparring with House Democrats over whether discredited Justice Department opinions led to mistreatment of military and CIA detainees.

The Senate, clearing a key parliamentary hurdle, yesterday voted to begin debating a broad revision of U.S. intelligence laws that includes a controversial plan to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that assisted in the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

Sen. Barack Obama and his surrogates continued to criticize Charles R. Black Jr., a top adviser to Sen. John McCain, on Tuesday for saying a terrorist attack before the November election would help the presumptive Republican nominee. But behind their protests lay a question that has dogged Democrats...

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to the Bush administration's request that it review a dispute between environmentalists and the Navy about whether training exercises off the Southern California coast endanger whales, dolphins and other marine mammals.

The airline industry and embassies of 34 countries, including the members of the European Union, are urging the U.S. government to withdraw a plan that would require airlines and cruise lines to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the United States, starting in August...

Senior lawyers inside and outside the Bush administration repeatedly warned the White House that it was risking judicial scrutiny of its detention policies in Guantanamo Bay if it did not pursue a more pragmatic legal strategy that considered the likely reaction of the Supreme Court. But such...

The Bush administration yesterday invoked executive privilege and refused to turn over key documents sought by a House investigative committee, escalating a fight over the White House role in U.S. policy on greenhouse-gas emissions and ozone air quality standards.

The House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, yesterday approved a sweeping new surveillance law that extends the government's eavesdropping capability and effectively would shield telecommunications companies from lawsuits for cooperating with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping...

Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman turned Bush administration critic, took to Capitol Hill yesterday to decry an insular and secretive White House that he said lied about the leaking of a CIA officer's name and "overstated" intelligence in the rush to war in Iraq.

House and Senate leaders agreed yesterday on surveillance legislation that could shield telecommunications companies from privacy lawsuits, handing President Bush one of the last major legislative victories he is likely to achieve.

If lobbyists find the path to their clients' riches obstructed by an implacably hostile federal official, they might achieve success by an end run or an appeal to more senior authorities. But a more extreme solution -- if the foe has high-level support -- is to pull strings at the White House and...

President Bush called yesterday for lifting the 27-year-old ban on U.S. offshore oil drilling, joining Sen. John McCain in endorsing an idea that Republicans hope will gain traction in Congress and on the campaign trail as the price of gasoline soars.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. plans to call today for the Federal Reserve to be given new, explicit powers to intervene in the workings of Wall Street firms to protect the financial system, adapting his vision of how the financial world should be regulated to reflect the lessons of the...

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down...

The Supreme Court said yesterday it will decide whether former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and top Bush administration officials are protected from a lawsuit filed by a Pakistani man who alleges he was abused after his arrest following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

LONDON, June 16 -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans Monday for new European sanctions against Iranian banking, oil and natural gas interests, signaling a growing willingness by Western allies to join President Bush in punishing Tehran for its nuclear enrichment program.

Senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus yesterday criticized a compromise plan for the proposed merger of the XM and Sirius satellite radio companies, saying the deal does not provide enough opportunities for minority-owned programming.

The Supreme Court's decision that detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a right to challenge their imprisonment before a judge revealed in vivid detail the justices' deep divide over the role of the judiciary in wartime.

PEMBERTON, N.J., June 13 -- Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) on Friday forcefully sided with President Bush in condemning the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to grant access to federal courts for the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, potentially muddying his reputation as a critic of the a...

In the days following the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush and his advisers sought to create an unprecedented parallel system to detain suspected terrorists far from the normal scrutiny of the U.S. judiciary. The naval base at Guantanamo Bay offered a way to indefinitely hold those individuals the...

A deeply divided Supreme Court yesterday ruled that terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to seek their release in federal court, delivering a historic rebuke to the Bush administration and Congress for policies that the majority said compromised, in the name of national security,...

Europe this month rolled out new restrictions on makers of chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems, changes that are forcing U.S. industries to find new ways to produce a wide range of everyday products.

MESEBERG, Germany, June 11-- President Bush said Wednesday he is confident the United States will reach an agreement on the role of U.S. forces in Iraq, calling opposition to a U.S. proposal part of the "noise" of a freer Iraqi society.

BAGHDAD, June 10 -- High-level negotiations over the future role of the U.S. military in Iraq have turned into an increasingly acrimonious public debate, with Iraqi politicians denouncing what they say are U.S. demands to maintain nearly 60 bases in their country indefinitely.

RALEIGH, N.C., -- Monday was the first day of the rest of your campaign.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has agreed to testify next week before the House Judiciary Committee about his assertions that top Bush administration officials misled him about their role in the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

Meet George W. Bush, time traveler. He's in Poland in 1939 as Nazi tanks advance on Warsaw, then flying with his Navy-pilot father to battle imperial Japan. He's alongside Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, William McKinley on his deathbed and Franklin D. Roosevelt on D-Day. He lingers with Ha...

With the country confronting a rising jobless rate, soaring gas prices and a shaky stock market, voters say their biggest concern is the economy. But it is the debate over Iraq that could define the contest between Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama.

Nearly 60 House Democrats yesterday urged the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to examine whether top Bush administration officials may have committed crimes in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists.

A historic leap in oil prices, tumbling stocks and the biggest jump in unemployment in over two decades pushed economic issues back to the forefront of the political debate yesterday. The cascade of grim economic news brought prompt responses from the presumptive presidential nominees, Sens. Barack...

President Bush, whose administration has been dominated by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global battle against terrorism, helped break ground yesterday on a $185 million facility for the U.S. Institute of Peace -- a government-funded think tank with the mission of preventing conflict and...

The top U.S. immigration enforcement official told a congressional subcommittee yesterday that the Bush administration will disclose more information about foreigners who die in the sprawling network of federal detention centers around the country.

To the victor go the headaches. There were no champagne toasts for Barack Obama after he clinched the Democratic nomination Tuesday night. His wife, Michelle, and a group of friends returned to Chicago on a separate plane. The senator from Illinois spent much of his post-rally time in Minnesota...

The chairman of a House investigative committee yesterday asked for copies of the FBI's interview of Vice President Cheney in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak investigation to determine whether Cheney instructed his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to leak the CIA officer's name to...

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, called yesterday for broad sanctions against Iran and a South Africa-style worldwide divestment strategy aimed at pressuring Tehran to abandon efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and encourage its people's democratic aspirations.

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

Vice President Cheney apologized for saying yesterday that he has "Cheneys on both sides" of his family tree -- on his father's and mother's sides, going back to the 1600s -- and adding, "And we don't even live in West Virginia."

Vice President Cheney apologized for saying yesterday that he has "Cheneys on both sides" of his family tree dating back to the 1600s, "And we don't even live in West Virginia."

Well, Rupert Murdoch may think Barack Obama is our next president, but first he's got an election to win.

Scott McClellan says he did not set out to write a memoir that was sharply critical of the White House. Indeed, one publishing industry insider described his early concept as "a not-very-interesting, typical press secretary book."

The people who should sit down and read Scott McClellan's blockbuster new book are the people least likely to take the time to do so right now. They are the aides to Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Clinton -- and perhaps the candidates themselves.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wants people to know: The Bush administration's policy toward North Korea has been carefully coordinated and developed by many people at different agencies.

I've interviewed Scott McClellan many times and never got him to say anything remotely interesting.

The Bush administration is pressing U.N. inspectors to broaden their search for possible secret nuclear facilities in Syria, hinting that Damascus's nuclear program might be bigger than the single alleged reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes last year.

Scott McClellan was the ultimate Bush loyalist. He went to work for George W. Bush when he was Texas governor in 1999, helped Bush gain the White House in 2000, and then came to Washington to defend the president for the next six years on such issues as the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.

With its oil and gas reserves in greater global demand than ever, Iraq has sufficient economic resources and "does not require extensive financial assistance," the Iraqi government said yesterday in a report to international backers.

A top lawyer for Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign said telecommunications companies should be forced to explain their role in the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program as a condition for legal immunity for past wiretapping, a statement that stands in marked contrast to...

COLORADO SPRINGS, May 28 -- President Bush acknowledged that his administration is "learning as we go" in building democracy in Iraq, as he used his final military academy commencement address on Wednesday to ruminate on some lessons from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Thank you. Mr. Secretary, thank you for the kind introduction. General Moseley, General Regni; Mr. Congressman, thank you. Academy staff and faculty, distinguished guests, and proud family members. I am so pleased to stand before the future leaders of the United States ...

I slipped away for the holiday weekend, and when I arrived in New York, the tabloids were going wild over Hillary's RFK reference.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" led by President Bush and aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going ...

DENVER, May 27 -- Sen. John McCain called for a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia on Tuesday, staking out a position on nonproliferation somewhat at odds with the policies of the Bush administration.

Sometime in the next few weeks, a special envoy of President Bush plans to meet with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose government sheltered Osama bin Laden and pursued a scorched-earth policy in southern Sudan that resulted in more than 2 million deaths.

Early in President Bush's second term, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convened a series of strategy sessions on how to persuade North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons programs. One key official, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, remained largely silent, four participant...

What does "exclusive" mean? The answer was at the heart of a highly sensitive memo by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2001, when Bush administration officials were keen to institute warrantless domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed former presidential adviser Karl Rove yesterday to testify about his alleged meddling in Justice Department operations, escalating a long fight over lawmakers' authority to question Bush administration aides.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, President Bush's nominee to lead U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, supports continued U.S. engagement with international and regional partners to find the right mix of diplomatic, economic and military leverage to address the challenges posed by Iran.

Five years ago, as troubling reports emerged about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a career lawyer at the Justice Department began a long and relatively lonely campaign to alert top Bush administration officials to a strategy he considered "wrongheaded."

Complaints by FBI agents about abusive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other U.S. military sites reached the National Security Council but prompted no effort to curb questioning that the agents considered ineffective and possibly illegal, according to an internal audit released...

Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with spe...

POSTVILLE, Iowa -- Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget's Catholic...

WATERTOWN, S.D., May 16 -- Sen. Barack Obama pushed back Friday against President Bush's implicit criticism of his approach to foreign policy, condemning his administration for not capturing Osama bin Laden and blaming its Iraq war policy for strengthening and emboldening Iran.

A controversial Bush administration nominee to the Federal Election Commission withdrew from consideration yesterday, providing a likely breakthrough to an impasse that has sidelined the political watchdog agency at the height of the primary season.

John McCain came clean yesterday about the superficiality and trivialization of campaign coverage and didn't let himself off the hook:

The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.

President Bush's financial fortunes appear to have declined over the past seven years, with his family assets dropping as low as $6.5 million, according to disclosure forms released yesterday.

JERUSALEM, May 15 -- On an emotional visit to mark Israel's 60th anniversary, President Bush on Thursday compared people seeking talks with Iran and radical Islamic groups to the Nazis' appeasers, provoking a political storm at home and accusations that he was politicizing the celebration.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne listed polar bears as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act yesterday, saying the loss of Arctic sea ice in a warming climate could drive them to the brink of extinction in less than four decades.

The House yesterday passed a final version of a new five-year farm bill by a vote of 318 to 106, a margin large enough to override President Bush's promised veto of the nearly $300 billion measure.

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

SOUTHAVEN, Miss., May 12 -- Vice President Cheney traveled to this Memphis suburb on Monday in an eleventh-hour effort by the Republican Party to hang on to a U.S. House seat that it has long held but that appears at risk of becoming the third Democratic gain this year.

Three months after President Bush raised the idea of allowing U.S. troops to transfer education benefits to relatives, the White House has finally sent a formal proposal to Capitol Hill.

Last September, career investigators at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel opened a probe into whether partisan politics were a factor in the Justice Department's prosecution of former Democratic Alabama governor Don Siegelman on corruption charges in 2006.

A federal judge in New York intends next week to review one of the Bush administration's most controversial legal opinions related to detainee interrogations, to decide if it has appropriately been withheld from public view.

Two Bush administration Cabinet members yesterday acknowledged gaps in the capability of U.S. hospitals to deal with a mass-casualty terrorist attack or other disaster, but they said a congressional effort to block pending Medicaid cuts will not fix the problem.

The Bush administration has not found disaster recovery files for White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, raising the possibility that messages sent before and after the invasion of Iraq may never be recovered.

A House Judiciary panel voted yesterday to subpoena vice presidential aide David S. Addington as part of a broad inquiry into the Bush administration's treatment of detainees.

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- At the end of a tattered, sunbaked runway dotted with large green tents here is a building aptly called the Expeditionary Legal Complex Courtroom, surrounded by coils of concertina wire, where the most notorious alleged terrorists in U.S. custody are supposed to face charg...

Dispatches from the twilight of a presidency: 7:13 a.m.: The South Lawn. President Bush, determined to dispel doubts about his relevance, grants an early-morning interview to Robin Roberts of ABC News's "Good Morning America." Joined by the first lady, he fields hard-hitting questions about . . ....

Hospitals in seven major U.S. cities would be overwhelmed if any of the cities were struck by a terrorist attack on the scale of the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and shortages of emergency room capacity and intensive care beds will grow worse if Bush administration Medicaid changes are...

President Bush's decision in 2002 to sign a farm bill loaded with billions of dollars of new agricultural subsidies triggered considerable criticism from GOP conservatives true to the party's anti-spending philosophy.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has ratcheted up her rhetoric against Iran, pledging recently to extend U.S. nuclear protection to friendly Arab nations against Iran's nuclear ambitions and asserting that if Tehran considers attacking Israel, "we would be able to totally obliterate them."

A senior regional Environmental Protection Agency official who had feuded with Dow Chemical over a toxic cleanup site in Michigan resigned Thursday under pressure from the Bush administration, according to published reports.

America's spy agencies for the first time would be tasked with gathering intelligence on threats to the nation's computer networks under a policy that could be detailed by the White House as early as next week, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

President Bush asked Congress yesterday to approve $770 million in new global food aid for the coming fiscal year, the centerpiece of an evolving administration response to a crisis that has sparked increased violence and hunger around the world.

TAMPA, April 29 -- Sen. John McCain on Tuesday rejected calls by his Democratic opponents for universal health coverage, instead offering a market-based solution with an approach similar to a proposal put forth by President Bush last year.

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, April 29 -- The first sign that Salim Ahmed Hamdan would not participate in his military hearing here Tuesday was his garb: a khaki prison uniform, instead of the sport coat and traditional Yemeni garb he wore the previous day.

The Bush administration has changed Environmental Protection Agency reviews of chemicals in a way that will delay scientific assessments of their health risks and open the process to politicization, congressional investigators said yesterday.