U.S

Defense lawyers want to force a former CIA official who supervised what they called torture of al Qaeda captives to testify in the war crimes tribunal for five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the September 11 attacks.

President Barack Obama threatened on Tuesday to veto a defense policy bill in the House of Representatives that would authorize higher Pentagon spending and tie his hands on national security issues from nuclear arms reductions to handling war detainees.

Michelle Obama offered a pep talk on Monday to U.S. athletes who will be competing at the 2012 London Olympics while announcing a nationwide program to get more American children active.

Mack McDowell likes to spend time at the local knife and gun show "drooling over firearms," as he puts it. Retired after 30 years in the U.S. Army, he has lined his study with books on war, framed battalion patches from his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, a John Wayne poster, and an 1861 Springfield rifle from an ancestor who fought in the Civil War.

The controller of the Empire State Building has offered investors the opportunity to sell some of their shares and relieve some of the expected tax burden if a proposed initial public offering is approved before the end of the year, according to a federal filing on Tuesday.

A gunman shot and killed four people including a toddler girl in a Phoenix suburb on Wednesday afternoon before apparently committing suicide, police said.

It was not just U.S. Democratic voters who were looking forward to "hope and change" when Barack Obama became the 44th U.S. president.

The 2012 presidential election is more than six months away, but here is what we know so far: It is going to be close, it is going to be nasty, and the outcome could turn on a series of unpredictable events.

The space shuttle Discovery made its final voyage on Tuesday: a piggyback jet ride to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum annex in Virginia.

Cutting government programs is favored as the way to reduce the budget deficit by more than twice as many Americans as those who favor raising taxes, said a Reuters/Ipsos poll.