The Watchmen

The US Senate has passed a sweeping healthcare reform bill, bringing Barack Obama a step closer to enacting one of his signature campaign promises and to meeting a goal sought by US presidents for decades.

The early-morning vote in the first Christmas Eve session for decades came after months of intense negotiations by the president's allies in

WASHINGTON — A con artist convinced the CIA and other US agencies in 2003 that he could decode secret messages sent by Al-Qaeda through Al-Jazeera broadcasts, Playboy magazine reported.

Duped by claims that "bar codes" on Al-Jazeera television contained targeting information for Al-Qaeda attacks, former president George W. Bush's administration raised the terror alert and cancelled several transatlantic flights in December 2003, the report said, citing former CIA officials

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – A woman jumped over a barricade at the start of Pope Benedict's Christmas Eve mass on Thursday and lunged at the pope, who was knocked to the floor in the confusion but then resumed the service apparently unharmed.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the woman, who he described as

Quasimodo in Number 10, hunched, scowling over his desk, has devised yet another plan to police, to increase surveillance, to indulge his obsession with extending his short-lived control over as many people as possible. Gordon Brown, who now seems to have lost his last tenuous grip on reality, wants the European Union to police the carbon emissions of the whole world. That is the leitmotif of New Labour – and, by extension, all Westminster – government: control, bans, obs

The US military prison in Guantanamo Bay may stay open for another year despite President Barack Obama's pledge to close the infamous detention center by 2010.

Recent calculations show that the US administration's timetable to close down Guantanamo by January 2010 has to be revisited over legal and financial issues surrounding the relocation of camp, The Associated Press reported.

Opponents to Obama's plan to buy and upgrade a prison in the State of Illinois to a super-ma

AUSTIN -- The Texas Department of State Health services has about four months to destroy blood samples taken and stored without permission from millions of babies.

State law allows the department to collect those blood samples for routine disease testing, but the state's been hanging on to millions of blood samples since the testing began in 2002.

Dad Michael Neff says blood samples taken from his two daughters should have been destroyed.
He fears the state might have use

President Obama has issued an amendment to Executive Order 12425, designating the international law enforcement agency Interpol as a "public international organization," thus extending diplomatic immunity to the law enforcement group

The amendment to the Executive Order -- which does not need to be put to the senatorial test of "advise and consent" -- rea

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Consumer spending rose for a second straight month in November as incomes recorded their biggest gain in six months, but a surprise drop in new home sales was a reminder that the economic recovery would be bumpy.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday spending increased 0.5 p

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has issued new Internet regulations, including what appears to be an effort to create a "whitelist" of approved websites that could potentially place much of the Internet off-limits to Chinese readers.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Techonology ordered domain management institutions and Internet service providers to tighten control over domain name registration, in a three-phase plan laid out on its website (

Police concerns that media-hungry terrorists would attack Michael Jackson's trial as a "soft target" led to a request for federal help, according to FBI files kept on the late pop star. The documents also show that the FBI helped facilitate interviews in the Philippines by California authorities investigating Jackson over allegations that he had sexually abused boys.

The FBI monitored Jackson for more than a decade, but the files contain no major revelations about his priv