On March 15, President Obama unveiled his plan for reforming the nation's education system. The bulk of the plan, which looks to overhaul George W. Bush's frequently criticized No Child Left Behind law, advances the bold ideas with which this Administration has already become closely associated. The President wants to link billions of federal dollars to initiatives like ending the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, evaluating teachers and awarding performance bonuses to principals and teachers ...

Are you furious? If not, you should be. The giant financial institutions that make up Wall Street have been bailed out, thanks to trillions of dollars of our money, and are on track to hand out record-breaking multibillion-dollar bonuses while millions of regular folks are hurting. Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there's no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing "green shoots" in ...

AIG understated the amount of money it paid out to top executives after receiving federal bailout money, the attorney general of Connecticut says -- but AIG denies the accusations. AIG's Connecticut-based Financial Products unit paid $218 million in bonuses, not the $165 million that the company acknowledged this month, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal told CNN Saturday. However, CNN has previously reported that AIG paid $55 million in bonuses in December. A total of $450 million is expected to be paid ...

Twenty state attorneys general announced investigations Friday into the $165 million bonuses paid by insurance giant AIG last week, with Connecticut's top lawyer issuing subpoenas to CEO Edward Liddy and 11 other executives. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the Democratic chairman of the General Assembly's Banks Committee want Liddy and other executives to appear Thursday and bring with them "original or copies of documents regarding the AIG Financial Products Corp. retention bonus plan and any related contracts or agreements." ...

Barely a day goes by on Capitol Hill without some politician expressing a good measure of righteous indignation. It's less common for virtually every member of Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, to have the same target for his or her carefully calibrated anger. But when all that talk actually gets channeled into immediate action, then you know that something really historic is happening in Washington — and that Congress may well come to regret it. The unprecedented productivity on ...

Although Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told congressional leaders on Tuesday that he learned of AIG's impending $160 million bonus payments to members of its troubled financial-products unit on March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on Feb. 28. That is 10 days before Treasury staffers say they first learned "full details" of the bonus plan, and three days before the Administration launched a new $30 billion infusion of cash for AIG. ...

Insurance giant AIG will have to return to the Treasury Department the $165 million it just paid out in executive bonuses, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday in a letter to congressional leaders. "We will impose on AIG a contractual commitment to pay the treasury from the operations of the company the amount of the retention awards just paid," Geithner wrote. "In addition, we will deduct from the $30 billion in assistance an amount equal to the amount of those ...

Bank of America CEO and Chairman Kenneth Lewis has been issued a subpoena by the New York State Attorney General's Office, which is investigating whether the bank violated state law by withholding information from investors, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been highly critical of Wall Street firms in general and Merrill Lynch in particular for the way they have conducted themselves in the midst of a financial crisis. Last week, he accused ...

A U.S. Border Patrol helicopter went down Thursday night near the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been highly critical of Wall Street firms in general and Merrill Lynch in particular for the way they have conducted themselves in the midst of a financial crisis. Last week, he accused Merrill Lynch, which was acquired by Bank of America late last year, of secretly doling out big bonuses before reporting a ...