White House News

WASHINGTON - President Bush is keeping tabs on the Gulf Coast's recovery from Hurricane Gustav while monitoring the threat from two other looming storms, Hanna and the even more-powerful Ike.

WASHINGTON - President Bush "rarely was the voice of realism" on the Iraq war and "too often failed to lead," according to a new book by Bob Woodward examining how the president handled the war effort during some of the conflict's most difficult years.

WASHINGTON - President Bush is poised to punish Moscow for its invasion of Georgia by canceling a once-celebrated deal for civilian nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Russia.

KIEV, Ukraine - Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that Georgia will join NATO and backed its attempts to rebuild from its war with Russia on Thursday, using a trip to former Soviet republics as a show of U.S. support for their pro-Western leaders.

WASHINGTON - The federal highway trust fund will run out of money this month, requiring delays in payments to states for transportation construction projects, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said Friday.

WASHINGTON - U.S.-led forces are achieving a "slow win" in Afghanistan, but the less-than-decisive approach must be accelerated soon, a key American commander there said Friday.

TRIPOLI, Libya - The United States and Libya sealed a historic turnaround in their troubled relations with a meeting between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

WASHINGTON - Jack Abramoff, the once powerful lobbyist at the heart of a far-reaching political corruption scandal, was sentenced to four years in prison Thursday by a judge who said the case had shattered the public's confidence in government.

WASHINGTON - Soldier suicides this year could surpass the record rate of last year, Army officials said Thursday, urging military leaders at all levels to redouble prevention efforts for a force strained by two wars.

WASHINGTON - With recommendations from his top military advisers in hand, President Bush is weighing when to resume a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and at what pace, the White House said Thursday.

WASHINGTON - The government of Mexico has voluntarily suspended shipments of meat and processed poultry to the United States after U.S. officials raised concerns about the quality of Mexican food processing and inspections, an Agriculture Department official said Thursday.

WASHINGTON - Pushing back against an increasingly aggressive Moscow, President Bush said Wednesday the U.S. will send an extra $1 billion to Georgia to help the pro-Western former Soviet republic in the wake of Russia's invasion.

WASHINGTON - About 85 percent of the marketing materials that private insurers use for their prescription drug plans fail to meet all of Medicare's guidelines for those products, federal auditors said Thursday.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Buffing his administration's reputation for handling hurricanes, President Bush viewed toppled trees and downed power lines in Louisiana on Wednesday and declared that the government's response to Hurricane Gustav was "excellent" — much better than during Katrina.

WASHINGTON - Gasoline-powered lawnmowers blamed for summertime air pollution will have to be cleaner under new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency.

WASHINGTON - The United States admitted fewer Iraqi refugees in August than in the previous record-setting month, but remains on pace to meet the Bush administration's goal of 12,000 by the end of September.

WASHINGTON - When the next generations of $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills roll off the presses, there should be some way for blind people to tell them apart, a federal judge said Thursday.

WASHINGTON - The United States welcomed Europe's involvement in the Russia-Georgia dispute as laid out Monday in decisions by European Union leaders in an extraordinary summit meeting at Brussels.

WASHINGTON - Federal mining officials on Wednesday asked prosecutors to decide whether criminal charges are warranted in the deaths of nine people in last year's collapse of the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah.

WASHINGTON - Those who have moved back to New Orleans in the three years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city are likely to have higher incomes and more education than people who haven't come back, demographic data shows.

WASHINGTON - President Bush hailed as a major achievement Monday the turnover of control Iraq's Anbar province to Iraqi forces, saying the once-violent region had been "transformed and reclaimed by the Iraqi people."