President Obama is not shy about showing off his jump shot on the basketball court, but on Tuesday night, it was his baseball skills that were put to the test. Obama, clad in a Chicago White Sox jacket and blue jeans, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in St. Louis, Missouri. His low pitch barely reached home plate and the mitt of St. Louis Cardinals star Albert Pujols. Obama became the fifth president ...

Correction Appended: July 12, 2009 A month after Melanie Blocker-Stokes gave birth, she stopped eating and sleeping. She had convinced herself that she was a terrible mother, and she was paranoid that the neighbors thought so too. Over two months, Blocker-Stokes was repeatedly hospitalized for postpartum psychosis; prescribed a cocktail of antipsychotic, antianxiety and antidepressant drugs; and treated with electroconvulsive therapy. Despite her family's efforts to help, Blocker-Stokes leaped to her death from the 12th story of a ...

Travel news, updates and deals for the week of April 20, 2009 AIRLINES & AIRPORTS Air Transfer. Short on time before your flight You can now make it to Newark or JFK airport from Manhattan in just 8 minutes for $99 on US Helicopter. You may also clear security and, if you're booked on Delta or Continental, check in your bags before choppering over all those suckers stuck in tunnel traffic. The dual-engine Sikorsky S-76B helicopters fly daily from two ...

Michael Jackson was the pride of Gary, Indiana, growing up, and on Tuesday his hometown paid tribute to the late entertainer with a memorial and celebration in his honor. They remembered him as not just the King of Pop or the musician who took Hollywood by storm, but as someone with an unmatched enthusiasm and talent for entertaining even as a little boy growing up in this city of about 100,000 in northwestern Indiana, 30 miles from downtown Chicago, Illinois. ...

A Cook County cemetery where hundreds of graves were dug up and allegedly resold has been declared a crime scene, meaning that relatives of people believed buried there will not be allowed to visit for several days, an official said Friday. "It would be the height of irresponsibility for me to invite people in, to raise expectations and then crash them," Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart told reporters in a news conference held at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, ...

The highly controversial no-warrant surveillance program initiated after the September 11 terrorist attacks relied on a "factually flawed" legal analysis inappropriately provided by a single Justice Department official, according to a report to Congress on Friday. The report was compiled by the inspectors general of the nation's top intelligence agencies, the Pentagon and the Justice Department. The report, mandated by Congress, provides fresh context to information previously leaked in press accounts and buttressed by both congressional testimony and books written ...

Four people face felony charges after authorities discovered that hundreds of graves were dug up and allegedly resold at a historic African-American cemetery near Chicago, Illinois, authorities said Thursday. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said the four would resell the plots in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, excavate the graves, dump the remains and pocket the cash. "This was not done in a very, very delicate way, folks," he told reporters at a news conference Thursday. "They would excavate a ...

Veteran actor Karl Malden, who won an Academy Award for his role in "A Streetcar Named Desire," has died at age 97, his manager said Wednesday. Malden died in his sleep about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, said his manager, Bud Ross. Malden appeared alongside Marlon Brando in two of director Elia Kazan's classic films of the 1950s -- "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On the Waterfront." He won the best supporting actor Oscar for "Streetcar," which was released in 1951, in ...

Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible. "When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think ...

If only our financial regulations were dumber! It's not a cry you hear often. But phrased a little differently, it may be the most cogent criticism of the convoluted regulatory approach of recent decades--and one that applies to most of the Obama Administration's financial-reform proposals. The argument goes like this: the biggest flaw in current financial regulation is not that there is too little of it or too much, but that it relies on regulators knowing best. We ...