President Barack Obama has told America it must make “hard choices” to reduce the cost of health care and the size of its financial deficit.

WHEN Barack Obama stood on the front lawn of Áras an hUachtarán on Monday morning, holding a hurley in his golfer’s grip and swinging it from the elbows like he was warming up in a batting cage, we all knew how he had come to be there.

A public inquiry into the murder of solicitor Rosemary Nelson in the North will today release its findings 12 years after she was killed in a loyalist bomb attack.

IF international climate change talks falter this week, chances for the United States approving its own carbon pollution-reduction plan will seriously erode, US Senator John Kerry warned yesterday.

Google has no right to “restructure copyright” in a deal which could see it monopolise the market by converting millions of copyrighted books for digital sale, Microsoft said.

There should be a full investigation into the controversial closure of the Visteon car parts plant in Belfast, Sinn Féin said today.

The United States Congress could act on a deal to help America’s failing car industry by the end of the day, the Senate majority leader said today.

The United States Congress balked at a rescue package worth $700 billion (€485bn) on Monday, because of the implications of providing government support for bad private investments. The Irish Government, on the other hand, effectively drew up a guarantee for the banks of €400bn, or $570bn.

LIBERTAS founder Declan Ganley used the London terrorist attacks of July 2005 to stress the importance of a security conference he was hosting later that year.

JUST as time forces us to accept that no relationship lasts forever, we must hope that no conflict can last forever either.

THE tribunal was back as the most popular show in Dublin this week. But this time it was not as a drama but as pure farce.

The Taoiseach used his address to the Joint Houses of Congress in Washington this afternoon to make a case for undocumented Irish immigrants to the US.

President Bush today insisted that violent interrogation methods for terror suspects were not torture.

US President George Bush, cheered on by Iraq war veterans and their families at the White House, urged politicians today to back his plan to withdraw some US troops from Iraq but keep at least 130,000 through to the middle of 2008 or longer.

New legislation for an inquiry into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane could be used to suppress the truth in all future public inquiries, it was claimed today.

The closing sentence of the most famous of Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America was, “And the rest you know.”

Europe’s foreign affairs chief Chris Patten, adding his voice to criticism of Washington, today called the US decision to bar opponents of the war in Iraq from reconstruction contracts “gratuitous and unhelpful” when unity is needed.

The United States Congress has given final approval for $87.5bn (€76.4bn) for military operations and aid in Iraq and Afghanistan, a day after Americans in Iraq endured their worst casualties since March.