President Obama said Thursday he expects top U.S. security agencies to submit by tonight their preliminary findings on the review he ordered on the attempted Christmas Day terrorist act. The president said he spoke this morning with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and John Brennan, assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, about the "human and systemic failures" that...

The Senate's Christmas Eve passage of health care reforms capped a year of legislative victories for the Democrats, including a $787 billion economic stimulus and measures to expand government health insurance for poor children and fortify workplace discrimination laws. But a great deal remains on President Obama's congressional to-do list for 2010 - beginning with the thorny negotiations required to reconcile...

LEXINGTON, Ky. | Water used to clean explosives overflowed twice at a Kentucky Army depot, and a worker was told to dump rainwater that collected in another part of the depot into the sewer, according to a report obtained by an environmental watchdog. The Washington-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says the years-old documents it recently received from the Army raise concerns about the...

ORLANDO, Fla. | It's not hard to find policy areas where fellow Florida Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist have differences. Gambling, restoring ex-felons' voting rights, abortion, the federal economic stimulus, energy and other issues. Mr. McCollum, the state's attorney general, is considered a conservative policy wonk, and Mr. Crist, the governor and Senate hopeful, is a populist who prefers to...

ENERGY GE chief tops White House visits Energy issues and people with a stake in them figure prominently in the latest batch of visitor records released by the White House. Those landing meetings with aides to President Obama include General Electric Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt, who has roughly a half-dozen scheduled meetings in the records. The records - released Wednesday - show that Mr. Immelt...

BOSTON | Republican Massachusetts state Sen. Scott Brown has repeatedly said he's opposed to higher taxes as he campaigns for the late Edward M. Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat. Higher fees are a different story. During his first year in office, then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a fellow Republican, proposed hundreds of millions in new and higher fees to help dig the state out of a $3 billion fiscal hole. Mr. Brown on Tuesday...

DAY OF RECKONING "America is at a day of reckoning that it never quite expected to face," Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review.com. "Not long ago, tired of eight years of Republican rule, terrified by the September 2008 financial panic, unimpressed by the campaign of John McCain, and mesmerized by the hope-and-change elixirs and landmark candidacy of Barack Obama, the American people voted for change....

Report: Rush Limbaugh taken to Hawaii hospital HONOLULU (AP) -- Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was taken to a hospital with chest pains on Wednesday, a Honolulu television station reported. Paramedics responded to a call at 2:41 p.m. from the Kahala Hotel and Resort where Limbaugh is vacationing, KITV reported. The station, citing unnamed sources, said the 58-year-old Limbaugh was taken to...

Former 9/11 Commission official Lee H. Hamilton said Wednesday the United States has made progress in uncovering and foiling terrorist plots since 2001 but that President Obama and Congress are too impassive in their efforts. "It takes political leadership to change that," said Mr. Hamilton, a former congressman and member of the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council. "Homeland security and the whole...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents could be declassified as the federal government responds to President Barack Obama's order to rethink the way it protects the nation's secrets. Among the changes announced Tuesday by Obama is a requirement that every record be released eventually and that federal agencies review how and why they mark documents classified or deny the release...