President Barack Obama’s campaign and top Democrats on Sunday called on Mitt Romney to release more personal tax records and raised questions about his offshore assets that the Republican challenger’s campaign condemned as an “unseemly and disgusting” character assault. Democrats and Republicans tussled over the economy, but it was Romney’s offshore assets that Democrats seized [...]

Governor Rick Perry said on Monday Texas will not implement an expansion of the Medicaid program or create a health insurance exchange, placing the state with the highest percentage of people without insurance outside key parts of President Barack Obama’s signature law. The announcement makes Texas the most populous state that has rejected the provisions. [...]

Hillary Clinton confronted a painful legacy of the Vietnam War on Wednesday when she met a man who lost his eyesight and both hands to a cluster bomb as she made the first visit to Laos by a U.S. secretary of state in nearly six decades. The United States dropped more bombs on the Southeast [...]

Recession-plagued Spain unveiled new austerity measures on Wednesday designed to slash 65 billion euros from the public deficit by 2014 as Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy yielded to EU pressure to try to avoid a full state bailout. The conservative leader announced a 3-point hike in the main rate of Value Added Tax on goods and services [...]

Islamist militants destroyed two tombs on Tuesday at the famous 14th century Djingareyber mosque in Timbuktu, classified by UNESCO as a world heritage site, residents said. About a dozen militants arrived in an armored four-wheel drive truck, armed with pickaxes and hoes. They fired in the air to intimidate people and started smashing the tombs, [...]

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney acknowledged on Tuesday he is considering naming his choice to serve as vice presidential running mate earlier than usual to better compete with President Barack Obama. As they work from a short list of leading Republicans, Romney and his advisers say they are weighing whether he should announce his choice [...]

A decision by Egypt’s supreme court to overrule the president when he recalled parliament has raised the stakes in the power struggle between the long-repressed Muslim Brotherhood and the military which ruled for decades. Hours after the Islamist-led parliament met on Tuesday in open defiance of the generals who had ordered it dissolved last month, [...]

Syria’s ambassador to Iraq defected on Wednesday in protest at the military crackdown by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against a 16-month uprising, Syrian opposition sources said. Nawaf al-Fares, who has close ties to Syrian security, would be the first senior diplomat to quit the embattled government. There has been no comment from Damascus or Baghdad. [...]

Bangladesh Bank on Tuesday said that the two master circulars — one on loan classification and provisioning and another on loan rescheduling —  would not be revised to ensure international standard for the country’s banking system. The two circulars issued by the central bank recently will not make any harm to the country’s garment and [...]

Export earning stood at $24.28 billion in the just concluded 2011–2012 financial year, falling behind the annual target of $26.50 billion mainly because of economic crisis in the European Union and the United States. The annual growth of exports also slumped to 5.93 per cent in the financial year 2012 from 41.47 per cent growth [...]