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U.N. climate talks fell into crisis on Saturday after some developing nations angrily rejected a plan worked out by U.S. President Barack Obama and leaders of other major economies for fighting global warming. Countries including Venezuela, Sudan and Tuvalu said they opposed a deal spearheaded on Friday in Copenhagen by the United States, China, India, South Africa and Brazil at the summit. The deal would need unanimous backing to be adopted. The document "is a solution based on the same very values, in our opinion, that channeled six million people in Europe into furnaces," said Sudan's Lumumba Stanislaus Di-aping. "The...

Enacting health-care legislation in the face of overwhelming public disapproval may cost the party its chance of forging a sustainable majority. Barack Obama emerged from his meeting with Senate Democrats this week to claim Congress was on the "precipice" of something historic. Believe him. The president is demanding his party unilaterally enact one of the most unpopular and complex pieces of social legislation in history. In the process, he may be sacrificing Democrats' chances at creating a sustainable majority. Slowly, slowly, the Democratic health agenda is turning into a political suicide pact. Congressional members have been dragged along by momentum,...

Republican lawmakers said on Thursday they would try to block a Environmental Protection Agency proposal that opens the door to federal regulation of planet-warming gases. Last week, the EPA issued a ruling that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, clearing the way for the agency to regulate carbon without congressional legislation. Senator Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is leading an effort in the chamber to overturn the finding through a rarely used joint resolution of disapproval. Getting the proposal passed will be a heavy lift, since Republicans are a minority in both...

<p>We did something different on Fox News Sunday today. Instead of discussing the week's news--we brought something up that I suspect most people have never heard about.</p> <p>It is a 51-page end-of-life counseling book the Department of Veterans Affairs is now using--called "Your Life, Your Choices." I learned about it on Wednesday--in an article in the Wall Street Journal--under the title "Death Book for Veterans."</p>

Not only is Pelosi lying when she says protesters are bringing swastikas to these town halls, not only is she suggesting that American citizens are Nazis for having the effrontery to get in the way of Obamacare, but she's also saying that the alleged swastikas are obvious proof that these protests are manufactured by slick P.R. gurus. Meanwhile, Sen. Barbara Boxer insists the protests have to be fake because the protesters are too "well-dressed." Likewise, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says this is all "manufactured anger" because the protesters - he calls them the "Brooks Brothers Brigade" - are too...

Are decisions made by doctors who have treated the same patient for years to be over-ruled by bureaucrats sitting in front of computer screens in Washington, following guidelines drawn up with the idea of "bringing down the cost of medical care"? The idea is even more absurd than the idea that you can add millions of people to a government medical care plan without increasing the costs. It is also more dangerous. If this new medical scheme is so wonderful, why can't it stand the light of day or a little time to think about it? The obvious answer is...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad railed against the United States in a speech yesterday, showing little indication of embracing Washington's offer of engagement, a day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said time was running out. President Obama has offered to engage Iran in dialogue with the hope of reducing tension over Iran's nuclear program, which the West fears is aimed at developing a nuclear weapon but which Tehran maintains is peaceful.

After passing on dinner with the French president to take a date in the City of Light with his wife last month, President Obama took leave of his Russian hosts on Tuesday night to seclude himself in his Moscow hotel with Michelle and their daughters. The decision to brush off the Russians on one of his two nights here miffed some in the Moscow government who did not understand why he would not devote the scarce time to his hosts. Mr. Obama has seemed tired here, several times fumbling the pronunciation of Mr. Medvedev’s name and Mr. Putin’s title. Beginning...

Two groups on campus, Anns Race Alternatives (ARA) and Students Against Militarism (SAM), work within these mental limits to foster awareness and practical action necesary to counter the growing threat of war. Though the emphasis of the two p:roups differ, they share an aversion to current government policy. These groups, visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track. The Reagan administration's stalling at the Geneva talks on nuclear weapons has thus already caused severe tension and could ultimately bring about a dangerous rift between...

President Barack Obama hit the golf course after marking his first Memorial Day as commander in chief. The president's motorcade took him to Fort Belvoir in Virginia. That's where he went for a game of golf more than a week ago. Obama grabbed his clubs after he participated in Memorial Day observances at Arlington National Cemetery

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch believes the president has used code words indicating he wants to appoint an activist to the Supreme Court, who will push a liberal agenda. Hatch zeroed in on Obama's use of the word empathy in describing what he will look for in a new justice. In announcing Souter's retirement on Friday, Obama said: "I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes." Hatch said that statement translates into a partisan on the bench instead of an impartial arbitrator. "He...

Barack Obama has set his sights and heart on friendship with the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran and their radical allies. The name and policies of the occupant of the prime minister's office in Jerusalem do not matter - any more than Tehran's determination to complete its nuclear weapons program in defiance of the world, or even its first A-bomb test in a year or two, for which intelligence sources report Tehran is already getting set. Obama's Washington believes America can live with a nuclear-armed Iran – a decision probably taken first under the Bush presidency. But Israel...

A new Gallup Poll finds 48% of Americans saying the amount of federal income taxes they pay is "about right," with 46% saying "too high" -- one of the most positive assessments Gallup has measured since 1956. Typically, a majority of Americans say their taxes are too high, and relatively few say their taxes are too low. In this year's poll, slim majorities of both lower- and middle-income Americans say they pay about the right amount of taxes, while upper-income Americans tend to think they pay too much. The views of upper-income Americans have not changed in the past year,...

The United Nations Security Council met in emergency session last night as Western diplomats pushed for a robust response. The US was pressing last night for a formal Security Council resolution demanding compliance with existing UN sanctions and banning North Korea from importing luxury goods. China was expected to veto any effort to impose stronger sanctions. Gordon Brown called the launch completely unacceptable.

The United States, Japan and South Korea will view the launch as a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed in 2006 after Pyongyang carried out the nuclear test and other missile tests. That resolution, number 1718, demands North Korea "suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program." U.N. Security Council diplomats have told Reuters on condition of anonymity that no country was considering imposing new sanctions but the starting point could be discussing a resolution for the stricter enforcement of earlier sanctions. Both Russia and China, the latter the nearest the reclusive North has to a major...

Well, it's about time. The Beltway is waking up to the realities of President Obama's budget plan, which taxes, spends, and borrows as far as the eye can see. The president's vast new commitments in the areas of health care, energy, and education have already spooked small-government Republicans and the foreign investors who help finance America's public debt. Now even some Democrats are beginning to realize that the president's fiscal policies are unsustainable in the long--and maybe medium--run. What took them so long? The realities of the modern global economy require government to play a substantial role in ensuring the...

U.S. President Barack Obama is considering meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad this summer, a United Arab Emirates-based newspaper reported yesterday. The Al Khaleej daily based its report on Arab diplomatic sources in Cairo. They told the paper the United States was weighing holding the meeting, the first of its kind in nine years, as a measure to advance the Middle East peace process. Advertisement According to the report, the Obama administration is contemplating the move in the wake of a number of recent meetings between senior American and Syrian officials.

The last time President Obama went to Europe, he was greeted with raucous applause and 200,000 Europeans choking a Berlin square, chanting "Obama" and "Yes We Can." This time, as the president heads to London this week to press the Group of 20 nations for a global economic stimulus plan, he's likely to get a warm reception but cold comfort from many European leaders. European Union chief Mirek Topolanek, the recently ousted leader of the Czech Republic, calls the plan the Obama administration has been pushing "a way to hell." Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel is also a skeptic. "We must...

The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the U.S. health care system. At a recent congressional hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat whose own health plan would make benefits taxable, asked Peter R. Orszag, the president's budget director, about the issue. Mr. Orszag replied that it "most firmly should remain on the table." Mr. Orszag, an economist who has served as director of the Congressional Budget Office, has written favorably of taxing some employer-provided health benefits...

North Korea on Monday cut its military hotline to Seoul and put its million-man army at battle stations, ratcheting up tensions as South Korean and US troops began war games that Pyongyang warned could spark open conflict. UN forces last week tried to counter North Korean claims that the exercises were a smokescreen for an invasion by promising to keep the hotline open, giving Pyongyang advance warning of anything that could cause a misunderstanding.