REPUBLICAN presidential candidates used their first big televised debate to lash out at President Barack Obama — but not each other.

DESPITE a spate of discouraging economic reports, US President Barack Obama insisted yesterday he is not afraid of the country slipping into a double-dip recession. But at the same time he displayed impatience, saying the pace of the recovery has “got to accelerate”.

THE list of Republicans hoping to unseat president Barack Obama next year grew longer yesterday when former senator Rick Santorum announced his intention to elbow his way into an increasingly crowded field of Pennsylvania Avenue aspirants.

The Republican Party’s search for a challenger in the 2012 presidential race seems stranger by the day.

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama told supporters in his hometown of Chicago that he needed their help to “finish the job” as he kicked off a massive fundraising campaign for his 2012 re-election bid.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has become the second major Republican to announce a challenge to President Barack Obama in 2012, declaring he will “put America back on a course of greatness”.

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has officially opened his quest for a second White House term, calling on his supporters to reconnect after two tough years and prepare for a battle to protect his crusade of change.

President Barack Obama launched his re-election campaign today in an email to 13 million supporters.

Barack Obama locked up enough Republican votes to ratify a new arms control treaty with Russia that will cap the former Cold War foes’ nuclear warheads and restart on-site weapons inspections.

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama, whose approval ratings have taken a hit over heated debates on healthcare reform, will address Congress tonight in an attempt to regain control of one of his top legislative priorities.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain will name the youngest and first female governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate today, US media reported.

Barack Obama cranked up his campaign in the final days before the Democratic convention, drawing closer to naming a running mate and attacking what he said was Republican rival John McCain’s habit of questioning his “character and patriotism”.

Barack Obama went back on the offensive with presidential opponent John McCain over his approach to the Iraq war today.

Four children have died after a school bus and two other vehicles crashed in Minnesota.

Authorities have called off the search for bodies following the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

With the search for bodies over at the site of an interstate bridge collapse, US authorities will now focus on removing tons of wreckage from the Mississippi River.

Fears that an interstate bridge collapse in Minnesota might produce dozens of deaths eased today as US authorities said the number of missing, once thought to be as many as 30, was just eight.

Officials in the US were warned as early as 1990 that a bridge which collapsed into the Mississippi River was “structurally deficient”.

SCOTT CAMERON never imagined his modest memorial to US troops in Iraq would transform a quiet street into the latest front of the nation’s tense debate about the war in Iraq.

Authorities were today trying to determine what caused a teenager to gun down his grandfather, put on the man’s police-issue belt and bullet-proof vest, and drive his marked squad car to a high school, where he began shooting his classmates at will.

A neo-Nazi teenager who called himself the Angel of Death went on a shooting rampage on a remote US Indian reservation yesterday, killing his grandparents and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired.