WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Friday delayed an overseas trip to focus on the final drive for healthcare reform as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the sweeping overhaul next week. Obama pushed back a scheduled March 18 departure on his first overseas trip of the ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political standing is "perilous" because of divisions within his coalition over efforts to pursue peace with the Palestinians, a senior U.S. official said on Friday. Israel's announcement this week, during a visit by U.S. ...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The coalition of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki held a wide lead on Saturday in early results from Baghdad, the major prize in elections Iraqis hope will stabilize a nation riven by years of sectarian warfare. The Iraqi National Alliance (INA), a fellow Shi'ite bloc with ...

It said in a report on its website Google had drawn up detailed plans for closing its Chinese search engine. The newspaper cited a person familiar with the company's thinking as saying that, while a decision could be made very soon, Google was likely to take some time to follow through with its ...

The police said a man and two women were released from custody in the southern county of Waterford late on Friday where they had been detained as part of an investigation into a "conspiracy to murder an individual in another jurisdiction." The police declined to give details except to ...

According to the Journal's online report, a 31-year-old mother from Colorado named Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was one of seven people detained in Ireland on Tuesday. Irish police said they were arrested in connection with a plot to kill cartoonist Lars Vilk because of his 2007 drawing depicting the ...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican rallied around Pope Benedict on Saturday, dismissing suggestions he had tried to cover up priestly child abuse in Germany. "It's rather clear that in recent days there have been people who have searched -- with notable tenacity in Regensburg and Munich -- ...

SAARISELKA, Finland (Reuters) - The foreign ministers of Turkey and Sweden condemned on Saturday a vote in the Swedish parliament that defined the early 20th-century killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who is holding informal talks with foreign ...

BOSSASO, Somalia (Reuters) - French navy officers handed over 22 suspected Somali pirates to semi-autonomous Puntland's authorities and they will be arraigned in local courts, officials said on Saturday. Foreign navies have been deployed off the Gulf of Aden since the start of 2009, operating ...