AP - Like sweet, sultry samba music, Rio hit all the right notes. Chicago had Barack Obama. Tokyo had $4 billion in the bank. Madrid had powerful friends. But none of that mattered. Rio de Janeiro had the enchanting story ? of about 400 million sports-mad people on a giant untapped and vibrant continent yearning, hoping, that the Olympics finally might come to them. And the International Olympic Committee was hooked.
AP - Eight months in office, Barack Obama has now pushed closer than any other president in generations to creating a basic health care safety net for working Americans. Yet the fate of legislation delivering on his goal is far from certain: Republicans are nearly unified in opposition, Democrats hardly united in support.
AP - At a pivotal point in the administration's Afghanistan strategy, President Barack Obama and his top Afghan war commander met privately aboard Air Force One Friday for a talk the White House described as productive.
AP - Medicare recipients could see higher premiums for prescription drug coverage as a result of changes to complex provisions in a Senate health care bill, a senior Republican said Friday.
AP - Ratna Kurniasari Virgo lay surrounded by death for 40 hours ? trapped with a broken leg between the collapsed walls of her college and the bodies of her dead friends. Her rescue Friday was a rare tale of survival two days after a massive Indonesian earthquake killed at least 715 people and left nearly 3,000 missing under the rubble of tens of thousands of buildings.
AP - A CBS newsman who prosecutors said was desperate and deep in debt was charged Friday with trying to blackmail David Letterman for $2 million in a plot that forced the late night comic to acknowledge having sex with some of the women who have worked for him.
AP - The husband of former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has quit his oil field job on the North Slope. Todd Palin's resignation as a production operator for oil giant BP PLC comes almost two months after his wife stepped down as Alaska governor and shortly before the release of her highly anticipated memoir in a deal rumored to be worth millions.
AP - Just 15 months after they were married, golf star Greg Norman and tennis great Chris Evert announced they have separated. The announcement Friday comes three days before Norman is to captain the International team at the Presidents Cup in San Francisco, where wives of the captains take on a visible role.
Reuters - An Organization of American States mission returned to Honduras on Friday to start work on negotiating an end to a standoff triggered when President Manuel Zelaya was ousted and exiled in a military coup.
Reuters - A "super typhoon" bearing down on the Philippines has slightly changed course and is only expected to clip the far north of the archipelago later on Saturday, officials said.
visit www.HeadLines.BZ
