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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is heading to South Carolina on Thursday to make the case that economic measures he pushed through Congress despite stiff Republican opposition are helping to keep the deep red state — and others that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 — humming. Ahead of Biden’s visit to a state that he lost by nearly 12 percentage points in 2020, White House officials argued that if Republicans had their way, South Carolina, like many other Republican-controlled states, would have lost out on billions of dollars in investments and thousands of jobs. Biden will use his...

If you’re a poor person in America, President Trump’s budget proposal is not for you. Trump has unveiled a budget that would slash or abolish programs that have provided low-income Americans with help on virtually all fronts, including affordable housing, banking, weatherizing homes, job training, paying home heating oil bills, and obtaining legal counsel in civil matters. Gone would be $35 million in funding for well-known programs such as Habitat for Humanity and YouthBuild USA, fair housing planning, and homeless assistance, among other housing help for needy Americans. Other targets include funding for neighborhood development and a home-buying program through...

The Washington Post has built a sizable army of reporters to dig into every facet of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's life under orders of new owner Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and Democratic Party donor. Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward revealed Wednesday that the Post has assigned 20 staffers to Trump. In addition the paper plans a book. "There's a lot we don't know," he told the National Association of Realtors convention in Washington. "We have 20 people working on Trump, we're going to do a book, we're doing articles about every phase of his life," he added.

America looks different in 2016 than it did the last time Hillary Clinton ran for president: The economy has come out of free fall, the military has left the quagmire of the Iraq war, barriers to equality have toppled, and universal access to health care has become a reality. Tumultuous as they’ve been, the Barack Obama years have proved transformative — and the priority for Democratic voters should be to protect, consolidate, and extend those gains.

In the last assessment of the job market before the presidential election, the Labor Department announced Friday that the nation’s employers had added 171,000 positions in October, as well as more jobs than initially estimated in both August and September. The latest figures are probably good news for President Obama, as there was widespread suspicion that the previous month’s large drop in the unemployment rate — below 8 percent for the first time since he took office — might have been a statistical fluke. Even so, the numbers arrived somewhat late in the game to have a huge impact on...

(Reuters) - Employers stepped up hiring in October, a hopeful sign for the economic recovery and potentially an 11th hour boost for President Barack Obama's bid for re-election, even though the unemployment rate rose from near four-year lows. Over the past 12 months, hourly earnings for all workers are up just 1.6 percent, the lowest on records dating to early 2007. A measure with a longer track record that covers only production and non-supervisory employees was up only 1.1 percent -- the lowest on records dating to 1964. (Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Tim Ahmann)

(Reuters) - U.S. employers stepped up hiring in October and the jobless rate ticked higher as more workers restarted job hunts, a hopeful sign for a lackluster economy that has dragged on President Barack Obama's reelection chances. The employment data was the last major report card on the economy before Tuesday's presidential election, which pits Obama against Republican Mitt Romney. Romney has made the nation's feeble jobs market, which has plagued Obama since he took office in 2009, the centerpiece of his campaign.

Sick of the elections yet? So is four-year-old Abigael Evans from Colorado. Her mother, Elizabeth Evans, 27, posted a Youtube video of her daughter saying that she is tired of "Bronco Bamma and Mitt Romney." The 22-second YouTube clip, published yesterday, shows the little girl with a frown on her face and tears rolling down her cheeks, telling her mother she is tired of this election. Elizabeth Evans told ABC News that her daughter got emotional listening to NPR.

Newsweek plans to end its print publication after 80 years and will shift to an all-digital format aimed at online users starting in early 2013. Job cuts are expected. Newsweek's last U.S. print edition will be its Dec. 31 issue.

(Reuters) - Voters say that President Barack Obama performed better than Republican rival Mitt Romney by a substantial margin in their second debate, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday. Forty-eight percent of registered voters gave the victory to Obama, while 33 percent say Romney prevailed in the Tuesday debate, the online poll found. The poll reflects the broad consensus of debate observers who said Obama's forceful approach gave him the upper hand over Romney, who was widely seen as the victor in their first matchup on October 3.

President Barack Obama bounced off a strong debate performance to target women voters on Wednesday with a dig at Republican Mitt Romney's comment that he received "binders full of women" for cabinet jobs when he was governor of Massachusetts. Obama and Romney are eager to win over women in swing states such as Iowa and Ohio, where the Democratic incumbent was campaigning a day after his energetic debating rejuvenated his re-election campaign. "I've got to tell you, we don't have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented driven young women ready to learn and teach in these...

CAIRO — Libyan authorities have singled out Ahmed Abu Khattala, a leader of the Benghazi-based Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia, as a commander in the attack that killed the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, last month, Libyans involved in the investigation said on Wednesday. Witnesses at the scene of the attack on the American Mission in Benghazi have said they saw Mr. Abu Khattala leading the assault, and his personal involvement is the latest link between the attack and his brigade, Ansar al-Sharia, a puritanical militant group that wants to advance Islamic law in Libya.

A series of missteps by Republican nominee Mitt Romney in criticizing President Obama’s account of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, may make it far harder for him to continue using the incident as the heart of his wider complaint about the incumbent’s foreign policy record. Romney has seized on the coordinated attack, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, to back his contention that Obama has weakened the U.S. presence in the world and overseen an intentional diminution of American influence abroad. In an election likely to be decided on...

As he tries to engineer a comeback in this week's presidential debate, President Barack Obama needs to recognize two things. First, when it comes to politics, Mitt Romney treats himself as a product, not a person. Second, Republicans cannot defend their proposals in terms that are acceptable to a majority of voters. Romney, Ryan and the entire right know that their most deeply held belief – the one on which they won't compromise – is rejected by the vast majority of Americans. That's their faith that every problem in the economy and in society can be solved by throwing more...

Stories about Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Libya were prominently displayed on the front pages of major newspapers throughout the United States on Thursday morning. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, for example, both led with the story, meaning that editors placed it in the primary news position on their front pages. But The New York Times was not among them. The six stories on The Times’s front page included one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on...

Q: The President today sort of seemed like he was running through a litany of things that he could have or would have said at the debate. Was there any sort of reset in the campaign as far as the President either taking responsibility for his debate performance or coming out with a -- promising a more aggressive tone starting today? MS. PSAKI: Well, as we learned on Wednesday night, Mitt Romney is willing to say and do anything to become President, and we've certainly taken that into account over the last two days. Q: During the debate, was he...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday released an early look at its annual “benchmark revision” of its payroll data. When the preliminary revisions become final early next year, the official data should show that 386,000 more Americans were working in March than previously believed. The private sector did even better, adding 453,000 jobs versus previous estimates. ... There was one symbolic significance to the revision: If the preliminary figures hold, they would suggest that more Americans are now working than when President Obama took office. That doesn’t mean much for the broader economy — there are still more than...

When the mainstream media declares that Mitt Romney is finished, they expect everyone in the Republican Party to not just listen but to act accordingly. That’s the only way to respond to an astonishingly obtuse feature in Politico that centers on the willingness of GOP congressional candidates to embrace Romney. The story begins in this manner: You might think Mitt Romney’s flailing presidential campaign would send his party’s congressional hopefuls fleeing from the GOP standard-bearer. But in a curiosity of a bizarre campaign season, the opposite is happening. Few Republican House candidates have thrown Romney overboard — and many are...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Laying out the first plans for his party's presidential ticket, GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan took some factual shortcuts Wednesday night when he attacked President Barack Obama's policies on Medicare, the economic stimulus and the budget deficit.

President Barack Obama patiently sat through diatribes, interruptions and even the occasional eye-ball roll at the weekend Summit of the Americas in an effort to win over Latin American leaders fed up with U.S. policies. He failed. The United States instead emerged from the summit in Colombia increasingly isolated as nearly 30 regional heads of state refused to sign a joint declaration in protest against the continued exclusion of communist-led Cuba from the event. The rare show of unity highlights the steady decline of Washington's influence in a region that has become less dependent on U.S. trade and investment thanks...