The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 340 points before staging a late rally after a day of wild swings as investors weighed the impact of the crunch in the American credit market.
With his youthful face and tan-colored suit, Will Heaton barely looked his 29 years. But as the former Capitol Hill staffer stepped up to the wooden podium during his sentencing hearing today in D.C. federal court, he acknowledged that his youth hardly excused his actions.
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has bet his campaign on winning early in the primary season, and no place is more important to him than Iowa. He hasn't stopped running there, he says, since he finished second to John Kerry in 2004's first-in-the-nation contest. Though consistently in third place nationally behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the former North Carolina senator has had outsize influence on his opponents, staking out aggressive positions on issues from providing universal healthcare to rejecting contributions from lobbyists. During an Iowa bus tour last week, with his wife, Elizabeth, at his side, Edwards sat down with U.S. News.
Reading in the supermarket checkout line that the latest troubled starlet has gone into rehab?yet again?may inspire cynicism and eye-rolling. But on the front lines of addiction treatment, figuring out why rehab works, and why it often doesn't, is a serious matter. Just one fourth of drug and alcohol addicts get treatment, according to the nonprofit Network for the Improvement of Addiction Treatment (NIATx). And as many as half of people who do get help don't complete the full program.
AP - The death toll rose to 510 on Thursday in the magnitude-8 earthquake that devastated cities of adobe and brick in Peru's southern desert. Survivors wearing blankets walked like ghosts through the ruins. Dust-covered dead were pulled out and laid in rows in the streets, or beneath bloodstained sheets at damaged hospitals and morgues.
AP - Democrat Barack Obama, who accepts special interest money and played poker with lobbyist pals as an Illinois lawmaker, acknowledged Thursday that he swims in "the same muddy water" that corrupts Washington, but he pledged to reform the system if elected president.
At least two people are injured at the site of a mine rescue operation in Utah, according to CNN reporters at the scene. Utah Department of Natural Resources told CNN there had been some seismic activity and some rescue workers were injured. Six ambulances and a medical helicopter were called to the mountain, officials said.
Jenna Bush has gotten engaged to her boyfriend of two years setting up the possibility of a first White House wedding since Richard Nixon's presidency. Henry Hager, a former White House aide who used to work with Karl Rove, popped the question in Maine, the first lady's office said.
Michael Vick is considering joining two co-defendants who will ask a judge Friday to sign off on their plea agreements in a federal dogfighting case, according to a spokesman and published reports.
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