Sarah Palin issued a scathing response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, alluding to a popular internet slang to describe what she thought of the speech.

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama moved swiftly towards the political centre with a State of the Union address that reached out to both parties and lacked major policy proposals.

PRESIDENT Barack Obama, under pressure from fiscal conservatives, will seek a three-year freeze on domestic spending in his 2011 budget that would save $250 billion (€177.5bn) by 2020, administration officials said.

US president Barack Obama has skipped jury service after being summoned in Illinois, it emerged today.

Hollywood star Michael J Fox is taking his embryonic stem-cell research campaign straight to the top - he will be attending US President George W Bush's State of the Union address next wee

Michael J. Fox will attend President George Bush’s State of the Union address next week as a guest of Rhode Island Rep. Jim Langevin.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates rushed back to Washington to give President George Bush advice on transforming US policy in Iraq after talks in the war zone with military and political leaders.

The Democratic Unionists may appoint a representative in the United States to put the party’s case directly to opinion-formers, the Rev Ian Paisley said today.

President George Bush is set to hail the elections in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories as evidence democracy is expanding, as part of his State of the Union address tonight.

Democrats challenged the buoyant picture of the US presented in President George W Bush’s State of the Union address, saying it belied a darker reality of lost jobs, rising deficits and mounting casualties in Iraq.

DEMOCRATIC presidential candidates opened their sprint to the New Hampshire primary yesterday with newly minted front-runner John Kerry pitching his experience and John Edwards laying claim to electricity in a contest thrown wide open by the leadoff Iowa caucuses.

US president George W Bush yesterday hailed the deaths of Saddam Hussein’s two sons as the clearest sign yet that “the former regime is gone and will not be coming back.”

President George W Bush’s deputy national security adviser became the second US official to apologise for allowing a tainted intelligence report on Iraq’s nuclear ambitions to find its way into a major speech by Bush before Congress in January.

Iraq’s ruling party newspaper today dismissed President Bush’s State of the Union speech as a “Hollywood farce”.

President Bush will pledge to accomplish America’s “grand purposes” in next week’s State of the Union address, White House officials said today.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned against US military action against Iraq, and said only the UN Security Council could sanction any attack.