USA
The Bush administration was gearing up for a full-court press to win public support for restructuring Social Security. The effort also is designed to pressure Congress to accept proposed private accounts. In the next 60 days, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and others are slated to make dozens of appearances at town hall-type meetings and other events, The Washington Post reported. The push occurs as opinion polls indicate support may be eroding for privatization - and as Senate leaders express doubts about meeting Bush's end-of-year deadline for voting on a plan.
Police in Chicago released sketches of two "persons of interest" in the in-home murders US District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's husband and mother. The men were seen near the victims' home the day of the slayings. In an interview posted on the Chicago Sun-Times website, Lefkow said: "If someone was angry at me, they should go after me. It's not fair to go after my family." She had been the target of a death threat by a jailed white supremacist Matthew Hale, as the result of a copyright case in which she first ruled in his favor but then had to carry out the decision of an appeals court to order him not to use another group's trademarked name for his organization.
Celebrity homemaker Martha Stewart is to be released Friday from the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, where she has spent the last five months after her conviction in a stock scandal. The fashion-trends icon now must serve five months of home confinement at her Bedford, N.Y., estate.
Speaking before a federal tax-reform panel, Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan said lawmakers might want to consider a consumption levy - such as a national sales tax - to be used in combination with an income tax to spur economic growth.
Pro basketball star Kobe Bryant and the woman who accused him of raping her at a Vail, Colo., hotel abruptly ended two years of legal jousting Wednesday by reaching an undisclosed out-of-court settlement.
Bush posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal Wednesday to Jackie Robinson more than half a century after the breaking of baseball's color barrier. In a ceremony at the Capitol, Bush joined House and Senate leaders in presenting the award to Rachel Robinson, the player's widow.
