House of Representatives Republican leaders have offered President Barack Obama a three-month reprieve to a looming, market-rattling debt crisis.

By John Riordan, New York

Mitt Romney will step up for the most important speech of his Republican US presidential campaign tonight, after a fiery warm-up from a running mate who said President Barack Obama was “grasping at a moment that has already passed.”

Four years on, the sad truth is that despite the initial ‘cause for great rejoicing’, Barack Obama has not delivered on his election promises, argues Niall Ferguson

Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle-income taxpayers.

Republican presidential rivals Rick Perry and Mitt Romney tangled over their records on creating jobs in a campaign debate that marked a contentious new turn in the race to pick a challenger to President Barack Obama next year.

US President Barack Obama said Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have reached an agreement with him to raise the government’s debt ceiling and avoid a default.

The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives has adopted a dramatic 2012 budget plan that would cut the country’s debt by revamping the decades-old system that guarantees medical insurance for Americans over 65 and to the poor and disabled.

SIX weeks ago, on January 16., an 84-year-old Englishman set out on a raft, built here in La Gomera in the Canary Islands, to drift 2,800 miles across the Atlantic to Eleuthera Island in Bahamas, tracing the route upon which a ship’s 18-foot long jolly boat carried the survivors of the 41 crew of an English cargo vessel sunk by a German ship disguised as a merchantman (but then drawing back the deck-cowlings to reveal cannons and machine guns) during World War 11.

The Democratic-controlled US Congress has approved historic legislation extending healthcare to tens of millions of Americans who lack it and cracking down on insurance company abuses.

A former financial adviser to Michael Jackson has revealed he was the person who recently turned over to executors $5.5m (€3.5m) which had been “a secret between Michael and me”.

A US man has been accused of stashing his 98-year-old mother’s dead body in a freezer in their home so he could keep cashing her Social Security cheques.

Answer: According to the Irish Taxation Institute, self-employed persons carrying on their own businesses (including farmers, publicans, solicitors and shopkeepers) are obliged to file a tax return, as well as persons in receipt of income where some or all of the tax on that income cannot be collected through the PAYE system.

US President George Bush said today that even though the state of the union is strong, he understands why some Americans are worried in a time of war and job cuts.

Hampered by huge budget deficits and an unpopular war, US President George Bush today called for training 70,000 maths and science teachers to improve US competitiveness with booming Asian nations and declared that America must break its dependence on Mideast oil.

Citing hopeful signs from Lebanon to Afghanistan, President George Bush said today that democracy is beginning to spread across the Middle East and that authoritarian rule is “the last gasp of a discredited past".

The chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, today embraced the notion of overhauling the tax system in the United States and said that some form of a consumption tax – such as a national sales tax – could spur greater economic growth.

Stocks stumbled today as mixed economic news and further hints of higher interest rates from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan kept buyers at bay.

Jeremiah Ford

Laying out his second-term agenda, US President George Bush has pledged to confront governments that promote terror and pursue weapons of mass destruction and hailed the success of elections in Iraq as proof of democracy’s march.

In the final push, President George Bush and his opponent Senator John Kerry are saying more about less.

Union chiefs have warned against expectations of an early settlement to civil service strike action in Northern Ireland.

THE White House said yesterday the federal budget deficit would balloon to a record $455 billion this fiscal year after absorbing heavy costs from the war in Iraq. It also said it would climb a further $20 billion in 2004, a presidential election year.

President Bush sent Congress a €2.07 trillion spending plan today that would accelerate tax cuts to bolster the weak economy, overhaul some of the US government’s biggest social programmes and shower billions of additional dollars on defence and homeland security.

A policeman was killed and four other people were injured today when a parcel bomb tore through a government office in central Thailand.