Two years ago on Aug. 25, the Democratic Party gathered in Denver energetic and confident of victory to nominate Barack Obama for president.
What a difference a deep recession, two wars, a yearlong argument over health care, a tea party movement, a massive deficit, a minor scandal or two, a muddled message and partisan gridlock can make.
Wes Minton of Dallas watched his roommate sit around, drink beer, and gain close to the classic freshman 15 at the University of Redlands in California last year.
As someone who had struggled with weight most of his life, he didn't want that to happen to him.
Some African-Americans with leukemia, lymphoma and other diseases are unable to have lifesaving stem cell or bone marrow transplants because of a critical shortage of black donors, doctors and health officials said. Of the 8 million people who have registered as potential donors with the National Marrow Donor Program, just 600,000 -- 7 percent -- are black. That severely limits a black's chance of being matched with a donor for transplant.
Declaring himself an ally of American students in a fight against commercial banks, President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed a new law designed to free up more money for higher education by ending the role of banks as "middlemen" in the college lending process.
Lucy Horton -- just one of the millions of Americans out of work -- rushes out of English class at Harper Community College, a requirement for the associate's degree she is seeking in search of a better life. As the 49-year-old leaves the Palatine, Ill., campus, her 19-year-old daughter is just arriving -- same subject, different generation.
Some African-Americans with leukemia, lymphoma and other diseases are unable to have lifesaving stem cell or bone marrow transplants because of a critical shortage of black donors, doctors and health officials said. Of the 8 million people who have registered as potential donors with the National Marrow Donor Program, just 600,000 -- 7 percent -- are black. That severely limits a black's chance of being matched with a donor for transplant.
The federal government is moving toward the most sweeping overhaul of college financial aid in decades. The House of Representatives voted for the measure as part of its passage of health care legislation Sunday. Under the proposal, private lenders would no longer make federally subsidized student loans. Instead, the government would make all such loans itself, instead of only some as it does now.
While Anthem Blue Cross proposed a 39 percent rate increase on thousands of its California customers, its parent company gave 39 of its executives more than $1 million each and spent more than $27 million on 103 lavish executive retreats, congressional investigators said Wednesday.
It was just a "playful night of gunfire," a top investigator for the Texas Rangers said. The nine bullets fired by two white men into a rural East Texas cafe -- leaving a black teenager dead -- had nothing to do with race, most insisted.History no longer agrees.
The Supreme Court's ruling last month giving corporations the right to spend freely on elections reflects a profound shift among the conservative justices on the importance of the First Amendment and the nature of corporations.
CHICAGO -- Far from the glitz of a star-studded charity telethon, an unemployed single mother of two has been putting in long days of work to help Haiti. Maria Pacheco, 42, has given food from her own pantry and sifts through donated clothes at a Little Village church.
Acknowledging Americans' frustration with the slow pace of the nation's economic recovery, President
Barack Obama
dedicated more than half of his first State of the Union address Wednesday night to pocketbook themes, from jobs to tax breaks to taming the national debt.
In a stunning upset, Republican Scott Brown, a little-known state senator just weeks ago, on Tuesday trounced Democrat Martha Coakley to win a Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat and jolt Washington's Democratic leaders with a victory that imperils President Barack Obama's agenda, led by his bid to overhaul the nation's health care system.
James E. Cheek, a Shaw University alumnus and youngest president in the school's history, died Friday. He was 77.
Baby, it's cold out there. And we're not just talking about the weather. At the University of California, Davis, and California State University, Sacramento, where hundreds of graduates picked up diplomas this month, it's a decidedly chilly job climate.
With unemployment still hovering in double digits, December graduates are facing one of the grimmest job environments in decades. They will need fortitude, college job counselors say.
The growing diversity of college campuses can be measured in numbers, figures and graphs. Abdul Suleyman hasn't seen the pie charts, but he has seen the cafeteria. "When I was a freshman, there were only three or four black guys," said the 22-year-old senior at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn. "People would have us confused. It went from that to now, there's maybe 15 of us."
Hopes that the U.S. economy is turning the corner were dashed Friday by new data showing that employers cut 85,000 non-farm payroll jobs last month, far more than the 8,000 that mainstream economists had expected.
Some of President Barack Obama's most fervent supporters are openly questioning the wisdom of his decision to increase U.S. forces in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops next year.
Announcing a major expansion of the war in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama on Tuesday said the swift deployment of 30,000 troops would be enough to break the Taliban before the soldiers begin coming home in mid-2011 -- a bet he is making because the U.S. cannot afford a drawn-out, costly campaign.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he's called "a war of necessity" in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy Newspapers.
All of us are keenly aware of the immediate struggles we face because of the current economic downturn. I'm sure many of your families are facing excruciating choices that, even a few years ago, would have been unimaginable.
College students graduating in December and May are likely to be the first in a generation to enter a job market featuring double-digit unemployment. That has colleges and universities across America scrambling this fall to revamp their career-placement offerings to help new grads land jobs.
Nearly a million and a half angry Facebook users are protesting recent changes to the Web site. The leader of the furious online mob? A smiling eighth-grader from Apex, N.C., who wears his baseball cap backwards and likes to play FarmVille. His parents were not aware of this.
MIAMI -- When the government releases third quarter growth figures Thursday, they are expected to show the U.S. economy is awakening from its deepest slumber since World War II. But double digit unemployment, a shaky housing market and banks that are still reluctant to lend, threaten to make any recovery tenuous at best.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Saturday declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, a procedural step designed to allow health-care providers to speed treatment and slow the spread of the disease.
FORT WORTH, Texas -- Phil Banker said he "freaked out" when he saw his bank account balance after buying a $100 cell phone with his debit card. The receipt showed that $1,919 was missing from his checking account. The money was spent in the Baltimore area -- a place he had never visited.
U.S. President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts" to strengthen global diplomacy, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday, in a surprise choice that comes less than nine months after Obama took office. The committee said Obama had created "a new climate in international politics." The panel praised the president for efforts to reduce the global stockpile of nuclear weapons, as well as his emphasis on multilateral negotiations and bigger roles for the United Nations and other international institutions.
Twenty-seven Jackson State University students in the Sonic Boom of the South have been suspended for two years following judicial hearings this week that found them guilty of hazing and moral turpitude.
Swine flu is not a danger for what it is, the experts say. It's a danger for what it could be.
That's why officials are pushing swine flu vaccine, which should start arriving as early as Oct. 6.
WASHINGTON -- Stung by accusations from some Democrats that bigotry underlies opposition to President Barack Obama and wary of further setbacks among minority voters, some Republicans are pushing back with a new mantra: We are not racists.
As a child in Armenia, Henry Gasparian witnessed firsthand the horrors of Nazi Germany. Two uncles were killed, his father wounded and a brother starved to death during the German invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union. So when Gasparian, 70, saw a poster of President Obama with a Hitler mustache near the entrance to the Edmonds Farmers Market Sept. 5, he concedes his reaction was "personal and emotional."
When college senior Kristina Webb, 23, decided to take an unpaid internship at a newspaper this summer, she thought she could make it work. She would live at home, get a part-time job, and cut back her spending. Her parents offered to help her pay for food and gas
With a flourish of new images -- from exploding stars to colliding galaxies and a new impact scar on Jupiter -- NASA officials finally pulled the wraps off the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday, almost four months after astronauts completed a final round of repairs and upgrades.
and 
