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The Federal Reserve late Sunday opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe in a move to head off a broader financial crisis on the continent. Other central banks, including the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank, are also involved in the effort. The action reopens a program put in place during the 2008 global financial crisis under which dollars are shipped overseas through the foreign central banks. In turn, these central banks can lend the dollars out to banks in their home countries that are in need of...

(Reuters) - Nearly 40 million Americans received food stamps -- the latest in an ever-higher string of record enrollment that dates from December 2008 and the U.S. recession, according to a government update. "This is the highest share of the U.S. population on SNAP/food stamps," said the anti-hunger group Food Research and Action Center, using the new name for food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). "Research suggests that one in three eligible people are not receiving ... benefits." Enrollment has set a record each month since reaching 31.78 million in December 2008. USDA estimates enrollment will average 40.5 million...

Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland was in the Grand Canyon with his wife last week participating in activities that included white-water rafting, ABC News has learned. Other leaders of the Interior Department were focused on the Gulf, joined by other agencies and literally thousands of other employees. But Strickland’s participation in a trip that administration officials insisted was “work-focused” raised eyebrows among other Obama administration officials and even within even his own department, sources told ABC...

Fiscal Crisis: Now it's a done deal: Greece got its $146 billion bailout, which the U.S. will help pay for. But anyone who believes the Western world's financial crisis is over doesn't understand what's really happening. That may sound like a collective sigh of relief coming from Europe. After all, it appears that with Greece's pledge to mend its fiscal ways, the European Union might have turned a corner when it comes to its chronic deficits and exploding debt. But no problem has yet been solved, and more problems likely loom — not just in Europe, but in the U.S....

WASHINGTON—After months of criticism that it hasn't done enough to prevent foreclosures, the Obama administration is announcing a plan to reduce the amount some troubled borrowers owe on their home loans. Discuss COMMENTS (86) The multifaceted effort will let people who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth get new loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, a government agency that insures home loans against default. That would be funded by $14 billion from the administration's existing $75 billion foreclosure-prevention program. But it could spark criticism that the government is shouldering too much risk by taking on...

Bye bye, Cornhusker Kickback. Hello, special treatment for Tennessee and North Dakota. Democrats unveiling revisions Thursday to their health care overhaul bill decided to kill the extra $100 million in Medicaid funds for Nebraska that has become a symbol of backdoor deal making. But the 153 pages of changes to the massive health care package include extra money for hospitals in Tennessee that serve large numbers of low-income patients. And though the bill would revamp the nation's student loan system to make the government the only lender, one bank — the state-owned Bank of North Dakota — would be allowed...

A crew of midvalley census workers has fallen apart due to what several crew members described as chronic disorganization at the regional census office in Grand Junction. A district leader quit, a crew leader quit, an assistant crew leader was fired, and members say they haven’t received work for over two weeks. The local crew has apparently been replaced by a crew from Colorado Springs being housed at an Aspen hotel, even while the local workers still wait for a call about their next assignment. “This experience with the Census Bureau was three weeks in an insane asylum,” Boland fired...

Boston has received $12.5 million in federal stimulus funding for a sweeping new effort to combat obesity and reduce smoking, Mayor Thomas M. Menino said yesterday. “This funding will help us move closer to that goal and aid our citywide effort to reduce tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure,’’ Menino said in a statement. The mayor announced the funding at the John D. O’Bryant African-American Institute at Northeastern University. A total of $372 million in prevention grants has been awarded nationwide. The money will go toward, among other things, creating additional space for community gardens, expanding bike-share programs, and beefing...

They operate under names like Granny’s Junction. Inside, among cubbies for winter coats, boxes of Legos and kitchen tables surrounded by booster seats, they offer a lifeline to millions of working mothers and fathers. The nation’s home-based child care providers represent millions of single business owners –women, mostly – whose entrepreneurial spirit and operating ingenuity are surpassed only by their willingness to clean the noses and backsides of other people’s children. In Michigan, roughly 40,000 of the state's 70,000 day care owners were perhaps too busy changing diapers, reading stories and making lunches to notice a random piece of mail...

The room was very elegant, with candles, gilt-edged plates, gold embossed name cards and such. The menu: French Onion Soup with Croutons Rib Eye Roast with Shrimp Scampi Roasted Potatoes, Carrots and Mushroom Caps Seven Layer Salad Baked Alaska Wines offered: Sugarleaf Vineyards Petit Manseng 2008 Landmark Vineyards Syrah "Steel Plow" 2006 Fenn Valley "42 Ice Wine" 2008 Governors' Dinner Table Settings 2010 SERVICE PLATES - CLINTON STATE CHINA SERVICE, made by Lenox Inc., Trenton, New Jersey, 2000. Commissioned to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the White House. KING CHARLES SILVER FLATWARE, made by Gorham, Providence, Rhode Island, 1974; supplemented...

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a division of the National Institutes of Health, is giving Dr. Lynn Fiellin, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine, $3.9 million over five years to develop a video game to teach “sex, drug and alcohol negotiation and refusal skills" to children 9-14 years of age. The game will feature “virtual characters or avatars” that are guided by the children playing the game to make decisions about whether to engage in behaviors that put them at risk of being infected with HIV. The game’s effectiveness...

An income tax fraud scheme discovered during a drug raid Thursday night is expected to lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal tax refunds. “I wouldn’t be surprised it went into the millions,” Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin said during a news conference Friday. Agents went to a mobile home on Sligo Road, just off Egypt Road in the Rockledge community, Thursday night to raid a suspected methamphetamine distribution ring and discovered more evidence than expected in the tax scheme.

PICTURE 1: U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and General Motors Chairman Ed Whitacre speak with each other; PICTURE 2: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, left, talks with Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally, center, and Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman William Ford, Jr., right, during press days of the 2010 North American International Auto Show at Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan January 11, 2010. Chrysler LLC CEO Sergio Marchionne points to Chrysler displays as he talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (L) during Press Days of the 2010 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan January 11, 2010 in Detroit,...

Christmas vacation has not softened America's opposition to Obamacare, in fact according to Rasmussen voter opposition to the Health Care legislation making its way through congress is is now at its highest point 58%. Despite what the Obamacare apologists suggest, votes have a decent understanding of the bills and voter attitudes towards them have hardened. While several individual components of the plan are popular, reminding voters of what’s included in the plan has virtually no impact on support for the overall legislation. This suggests that there are not major surprises in the legislation that will cause people to change their...

<p>GMAC Financial Services is close to getting approximately $3.5 billion in additional aid from the U.S. government, on top of $12.5 billion already received since December 2008, according to people familiar with the situation.</p> <p>The announcement, expected within days, will coincide with GMAC taking additional steps to absorb losses related to its mortgage operations, these people said. The cleanup is designed to return the Detroit-based finance company to profitability in the first quarter of 2010, according to one of these people.</p>

The government has handed its ATM card to beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Treasury Department said Thursday it removed the $400 billion financial cap on the money it will provide to keep the companies afloat. Already, taxpayers have shelled out $111 billion to the pair, and a senior Treasury official said losses are not expected to exceed the government's estimate this summer of $170 billion over 10 years. Treasury Department officials said it will now use a flexible formula to ensure the two agencies can stand behind the billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities they sell...

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre. In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

Upset about FirstEnergy's pricey, hand-delivered light bulbs? You ain't seen nothing yetBy Kevin OBrien October 08, 2009, 3:59AM There was a time when you and I could be trusted to change a light bulb. In those days, powerful people who made weighty decisions understood that if a light bulb burned out, even the dimmest of us common folk would know enough to remove it from its socket, choose a suitable replacement and install it. Apparently all of the weighty decisions have been made, because powerful people have now worked their way down to telling us what kind of light bulb...

More than half the 14,000 jobs created or saved by the federal economic stimulus in Minnesota are in public schools. Federal and state officials are reporting about 7,400 full-time teaching and school support staff jobs linked to the stimulus through the end of September. The U.S. Department of Education issued a report Monday detailing 7,421 stimulus jobs in the state's education system. Minnesota Management and Budget officials counted 7,380 K-12 school jobs created or saved by stimulus spending of $634 million.

Denise Tejada bought a house last month at the age of 20, thanks in large part to a loan guaranteed by the Federal Housing Authority. This story offers a dramatic demonstration that, despite the housing bubble causing the worst economic downturn in generations, the ideology of home ownership is alive and well in the United States and still being supported by the government. Without question, Tejada's loan is toxic--to her and to the taxpayers who are backing the loan. Her house cost $155,000. Tejada's loan was apparently made on a micro-down payment of just 3.5%, the minimum down payment to...