President Obama is halfway through his first 100 days in office and he's still enjoying a honeymoon with the American public, according to an average of recent polls. Obama's job approval rating stands at 61 percent in a new CNN poll of polls, which averaged seven national surveys conducted over the past two weeks. "Obama's support is not as high as it was during the transition period and immediately after the inauguration, but approval from six in ten ...

President Obama signed an executive order Monday repealing a Bush-era policy that limited federal tax dollars for embryonic stem cell research. Obama's move overturns an order signed by President Bush in 2001 that barred the National Institutes of Health from funding research on embryonic stem cells beyond using 60 cell lines that existed at that time. Obama also signed a presidential memorandum establishing greater independence for federal science policies and programs. Critics of the Bush administration argued the former president ...

A top congressional Republican on Sunday criticized President Barack Obama's expected decision to reverse the Bush administration's limits on embryonic stem-cell research, calling it a distraction from the country's economic slump. "Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy This is job No. 1. Let's focus on what needs to be done," Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, told CNN's "State of the Union." Obama's move, scheduled for Monday morning, is part of ...

For a handful of CIA operatives who were on the frontlines of the war on terror in the early months and years after 9/11, it's the stuff of nightmares. After all, they did their job as their political masters defined it, using tools and techniques approved by their lawyers. Then came an election, and a new set of political masters, who have begun second-guessing everything they did before. Suddenly there is lots of talk about "violations" and "wrong-doing," the promise ...

President Obama on Thursday called for a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. health care system, warning that soaring medical costs present "one of the greatest threats not just to the well-being of our families ... but to the very foundation of our economy." Obama made his remarks while addressing a group of lawmakers, doctors, hospital officials and advocates at a White House summit on health care reform -- one of the president's top domestic priorities. In a surprising and emotional ...

Europeans were among the loudest cheerleaders for Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. Soon after he won the Democratic candidacy 200,000 people turned out in Berlin to hear him speak. But now that he is settled in the White House, many Europeans feel snubbed. Just six weeks into his presidency, Europeans are already fretting that Obama has yet to visit Europe. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, flew west for her first foreign trip, spending a week in ...

Ah, sweeps week — that time of year where plot lines get thrown out the window as network executives feverishly pray that ratings will follow them through the roof. Four weeks a year, networks inundate the TV-viewing public with a veritable flood of plot-twisting, cringe-inducing, shark-jumping moments in the hopes they'll tune in — please, just tune in — in order to give the networks a vital boost during the critical periods when Nielsen Media Research takes its regular ...

Here's a scary fact to add to today's gloomy stock-market headlines: bank stocks might actually be providing a boost to the market, even as it tumbles to new lows. By at least one measure, financial firms are making the bad earnings caused by the economy look a bit rosier. Late last week, Goldman Sachs cut its earnings expectations for the stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500. Collectively, Goldman thinks, those companies will earn $40 a share this year, down ...

If it feels like big companies are doing more than their fair share of letting employees go these days, that's not just because mass layoffs at blue chip firms are the ones that make headlines. New research suggests that in times of recession, large employers disproportionately lose workers, while small companies, as a group, fare better. "It's definitely the case that large firms are downsizing much faster in recessions," says Giuseppe Moscarini, an economist at Yale University who conducted ...

Top Democrats have expressed concern over President Obama's plan to draw down nearly two-thirds of U.S. forces in Iraq by August 2010, while some key Republicans are offering praise. At issue: Obama plans to leave between 35,000 to 50,000 residual forces in the war-torn country, serving in a training or advisory role to the Iraqi military. All U.S. troops have to be out of Iraq by December 31, 2011, under an agreement the Bush administration signed with the Iraqi ...