worldheadlines

NEW YORK - The dollar kept spiraling down Friday, hitting another low against the euro and dropping to a three-year record against the yen, as worries about the U.S. economy depress the currency and raise thorny issues in Europe about how to cope with the growing gap.
The euro flew past its previous high to hit $1.5238, before subsiding to $1.5194...

WASHINGTON - Northrop Grumman and the maker of Airbus planes beat out Boeing Co. to win a $35 billion government contract to build military refueling planes, the Air Force said Friday.
The selection of Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman and its Paris-based partner, European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., came as a surprise to Wall Street.
It is a big blow to...

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton discovered an unlikely foreign-policy role model this week: George W. Bush.
Democrats perpetually accuse the president of displaying contempt for international opinion and pursuing an arrogant and bullying unilateralism. As caricatures go, it's not an unreasonable portrait.
But Obama and Clinton, in their Cleveland debate on Tuesday, sounded every bit as belligerent as...

A White House official who serves as President Bush's middleman with conservatives and Christian groups was chastised Friday after admitting to plagiarism. His actions were criticized as unacceptable.
Timothy Goeglein, who has worked for Bush since 2001, acknowledged that he lifted material from a Dartmouth College publication and presented it as his own work in a column about education for The News-Sentinel...

Fidel Castro said Friday he helped choose candidates for Cuba's new government, but he asserted that his brother Raul is fully in charge as the new president. In his first comments since his brother assumed the presidency last weekend, the elder Castro appeared to be trying to quash speculation that he...

It made a big splash when scientists announced in 2006 that images from a NASA spacecraft indicated water apparently had flowed on the surface of Mars in the past decade but new research casts doubt on that finding.
Other scientists on Friday said new images and computer simulations strongly indicate that a landslide of sand and gravel...

FRIDAY, Feb. 29 (HealthDay News) -- There may be a link between rising rates of carbohydrate intake and obesity and the increasing number of esophageal cancer cases in the United States, a new study says.

Researchers noted that cases of esophageal cancer increased from 300,000 in 1973 to 2.1 million in 2001, which closely mirrors increases in carbohydrate intake and obesity over the same time.

Obesity is...

Respiratory disease medications Spiriva and Foradil capsules should be used with the intended inhalation devices and not swallowed, federal health officials warned on Friday.
These drugs were developed to facilitate breathing in patients with asthma and chronic obstructive lung disease, including chronic bronchitis and emphysema.
But the Food and Drug Administration said it has received several reports of the capsules being swallowed. The...

The government announced Friday that it has said goodbye to one of the world's greatest lifesavers — the original smallpox vaccine. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month made arrangements to dispose of its 12 million doses of Dryvax, and notified other health departments and the military to do the same by Feb. 29.
Dryvax — produced by scraping...

The Eagles have signed free-agent cornerback Asante Samuel.
The Eagles agreed to a six-year contract on Friday with Samuel, who spent the last five seasons with New England and had 16 interceptions the last two years.
Samuel also tied the NFL career playoff record with three interceptions returned for TDs
Philadelphia had only 11 interceptions last year and failed to score a defensive touchdown....

A Spanish court has decided to halt the prosecution of a key Argentine dirty war suspect charged with genocide and terrorism and instead extradite him to stand trial in his home country, officials said Friday.
Ricardo Miguel Cavallo is a former military officer who was considered a leading figure in the repressive military juntas that ruled Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s....

Federal prosecutors played secretly taped phone conversations Friday to show jurors that a former Navy sailor charged with leaking ship movements to suspected terrorism supporters used coded speech to discuss intelligence about military bases.
In the calls, Hassan Abu-Jihaad, 32, of Phoenix, speaks of "fresh meals" and "cold meals" in conversations with associates. A "fresh meal" referred to useful information, while "cold...

Stocks tumbled on Friday as another round of weak economic data added to U.S. recession fears and a record loss at insurer AIG underscored worries about more write-downs in the financial sector.
The major indexes fell more than 2 percent and ended the month in the red for the fourth month...

The U.S. Air Force has picked a Northrop Grumman-led transatlantic team over rival Boeing Co (BA.N) to start building a new aerial refueling fleet in a major upset, a prominent defense analyst said on Friday.
The plane offered by Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) and its European partner, Airbus parent EADS (EAD.PA), outperformed Chicago-based Boeing's aircraft in four of five areas, and...

The chief of the embattled Food and Drug Administration challenged Congress on Friday to quickly give his agency more teeth to regulate food safety.
"This is a time to not just be critical about what is not being done, but to collaborate on what must be done," FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach said in a speech at the National Press Club. "We...