Judging by the front pages of Persian language newspapers neatly laid out at every Tehran newsstand, political scandal is in the air. President Ahmadinejad's closest aides, including right-hand man Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, are being accused of embezzlement, cronyism, collaboration with opposition forces, and even pagan rituals thrown in for shock value. Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, recently re-elected by a wide margin to his position by fellow members, asserted in public, "I wish for a strong Parliament" — ...

"Welcome to Memphis," boomed Ben Outlaw, the airport Hertz rental car bus driver, over the speaker system, "home of barbeque, the Civil Rights Museum, riverboats, Graceland and the 100-year flood. You can't beat that!" Indeed, regional tourists flocked to Memphis on Monday as the Mississippi River began to crest at 48 ft. — beating the flood of 1927's 45.9 ft. but still below the river's all-time high of 48.7 ft. in 1937. Laura Armstrong took ...

For months, the Washington press corps has referred to the House Republican freshman class as a monolithic entity. Depending on whom you ask, all 87 newbies are either heroes or extremists, holding Republican Speaker John Boehner's feet to the fire over conservative causes. They forced their leadership to pursue to $61 billion in cuts to the 2011 budget, far more than the $34 billion originally proposed. Their perceived intransigence helped House Speaker John Boehner milk $10 billion more ...

The budget compromise reached by the White House and Congress this weekend included a "historic amount of cuts," as House Speaker John Boehner and Senate majority leader Harry Reid said in their joint statement announcing the deal. "The largest annual spending cut in our history," boasted President Obama. Media coverage of the deal hailed the "sweeping" and "across-the-board" nature of the cuts. The Republican leadership has "shifted the focus in Washington away from spending and toward austerity" ...

Your official commencement speaker tackles the big themes, tells you to abjure greed, to play fair, to serve your community, to know thyself. Your more personally devoted commencement speaker agrees with all that. But he has special wishes for you too -- idiosyncratic, of course, what an educated daughter may have come to expect from an oddball. People always said that you resemble him. What he wishes you first is a love of travel. Travel will hold you back from ...

Republicans and Democrats deny that they want to see a government shutdown, but both parties accuse each other of secretly rooting for one. With the federal government perilously close to shuttering on March 4 if an agreement on spending cuts cannot be reached in Congress, neither side appears prepared to make serious concessions. And while a shutdown looms, it has become increasingly apparent that conditions are very different from the last time the government shut down over ...

Noel Lee's career is as colorful as his many sports cars: he quit a job in nuclear research to play folk rock before deciding in 1979 to make quality speaker wire. The CEO of Monster Cable spoke with TIME's AMANDA BOWER about how he built a company on a product that stores used to give away, as well as the wireless revolution and the NFL. TIME Your business card says "The Head Monster." Do other CEOs take you seriously? LEE ...

In recent weeks, opponents of Barack Obama's health-care-reform plans have criticized Britain's National Health Service in an effort to counter the President's proposals for greater government involvement in health care. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa suggested that his Democratic colleague Edward Kennedy would have been left to die in Britain because doctors would have refused the 77-year-old treatment for his brain tumor, and former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote in an article that ...

Nearly a year after the presidential election, the excitement of Barack Obama's campaign has faded into the reality of an Obama White House.Shortly after taking office, Carter's approval rating peaked at 75 percent but dropped to the low 40s in a little more than a year. He entered office weighed down by a sagging economy, and eventually, the energy crisis, the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis took a toll on his administration. "He ended his ...

Three days of mourning began in the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan on Monday, after dozens of people were killed in a militant attack a day earlier, state media reported. A man carrying explosives blew himself up Sunday as participants headed to a conference between Shia and Sunni groups in southeastern Iran, killing at least 42, state-run Press TV reported. The blast in the city of Sarbaz, in Sistan-Baluchestan, wounded 28 others, the semi-official Fars news agency said. Among those killed ...