this is an adventure

UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed on Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities.

As many housing experts and consumer advocates applaud the arrival of the Obama administration’s new foreclosure plan, worries remain that the strategy isn’t broad enough to help the most vulnerable Americans keep their homes.

It had been the great promise of Barack Obama. From the day he burst onto the national stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he sold a dream not only of bridging a racial divide, but of bringing the blue states and the red states into a single mythical, post-partisan United States. It was […]

WASHINGTON — Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, an early Obama ally with a record of working across party lines, is emerging as the president’s top choice for secretary of health and human services, advisers said Wednesday.