Samantha Fields

Bunny Marlon Bundo is featured in a book by the vice president's daughter Charlotte and wife, Karen. But even pets in Washington cannot escape controversy.

Midterm elections are now less than two months away, and this week President Obama’s agenda is all about the economy. In Milwaukee on Monday, the president said, “I am going to keep fighting, every single day, every single hour, every single minute, to turn this economy around, and put our people back to work.”

In Monday's speech, the president proposed a $50 billion plan to invest in infrastructure across the country—from roads to railways and runways—as well as an expansion of the tax credit for research and experimentation.

Today, in Cleveland, the president will give another speech on the economy, and one of the major initiatives he’s expected to propose would allow businesses to write off 100 percent of their new investments in equipment and plants all at once—rather than over a number of years, which is how businesses can currently deduct investment expenses. The idea is that this would be an incentive for businesses to start immediately investing in goods they need, and hiring more workers.

East Coast residents are keeping watching Hurricane Earl this week as the storm heads away from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and up the east coast of the U.S., just in time to potentially disrupt Labor Day weekend. Earl is now a category 4 storm, with winds that have already hit 135 miles per hour.

At this point, Earl’s projected path shows it staying out at sea, parallel to the coast – big waves could reach North Carolina later today, and Long Island and Cape Cod by Friday. The National Hurricane Center is urging people along the coast from North Carolina to Maine to have a plan in case the hurricane comes ashore.

Now this is going to sound somewhat familiar… the White House is hosting direct talks, starting today, to begin brokering an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, ideally to be formalized within the next year. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas will be in Washington today for the first face-to-face talks in two years.

Expectations are low, and the inevitable question arises: is anything really new this time around?

For most people living outside of the Gulf, Hurricane Katrina was a tragedy represented by tens of thousands of nameless faces. People waved frantically from rooftops or crowded into the Superdome, returning home only to find their houses and possessions destroyed. However, for fans of the award-winning graphic novel “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge,” by Josh Neufeld, there are very specific names and faces attached to Katrina. Those people aren't just characters in a book either – they are real people. Five years after the hurricane, we follow up with two of them to see where their lives – and their city – are today.

For 71 years, Lou Gehrig has been the face of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, now most commonly known as "Lou Gehrig’s disease."

After getting the diagnosis of a disease that would quickly rob him of his muscle strength and control, Gehrig retired from baseball. At a ceremony honoring him at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, his voice full of emotion, he said, "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. That I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you." He died just two years later of the disease that now bears his name.

Now new research suggests that there is a possibility Lou Gehrig may not have had "Lou Gehrig’s disease," but perhaps something closely related.  

After a huge amount of publicity and hype, “The Big C” premiered on Showtime last night. The show is a comedy about something a lot of people don't like to talk about, let alone laugh over: cancer.

Laura Linney plays a middle aged woman who’s just been diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma, and given about 18 months to live. In the first episode, Linney's character, Cathy, confides her diagnosis to just one entity: the neighbor’s dog.

"I'm living the dream!" she shouts. "I'm here all year! Performing at Stage 4! Oh come on, come on, you gotta give it up for me a little bit. It's kind of funny? Death comedy." She laughs. And then starts to cry. 

The midterm elections are fast-approaching and many of the races are shaping up to be neck-and-neck. The Republicans have to gain 39 seats in the House and ten in the Senate in order to win majorities in both. But with public turnout for midterms usually very low, how much can these elections (or the campaigns leading up to them) help us predict the country's political future?

This Sunday, General David Petraeus will go on a media offensive in which he is expected to make the case for why we should not rush the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

However, this comes at a time when public support for the war is rapidly dwindling. Many Americans have fixed their expectations on what the president pledged in December 2009 when he ordered more troops to Afghanistan: “These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

Read a full transcript.

India's economy is on the rise, but with an estimated 421 million people living in poverty, its levels of malnutrition are still staggeringly high. The governing Indian National Congress Party is pushing to enshrine the right to food in the country’s constitution and expand the existing entitlement so that every Indian family would qualify for a monthly 77-pound bag of grain, sugar and kerosene.

We want to hear from you: Should government guarantee the basics of human survival? What would you make a basic human right?

Earlier this week in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley said that he wants to close the “open-door” admissions policy at the City Colleges, which allows students to enroll in classes regardless of past academic performance. He says the system can’t afford to keep spending $30 million a year on remedial classes for students who aren’t prepared to handle college level work.

But for many students, remedial classes are their way into higher education, better jobs and more opportunities. 

Mary Roach was determined to write the definitive 'sex in space chapter' in the history of space journalism. And although she gets into pondering what the pitfalls of sex in zero gravity might entail, her book "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void" also broaches issues that most earthbound humans have never considered. 

What would our world look like without paperback books? One publishing company has taken one step closer to the reality of eliminating paperback books entirely. Dorchester Publishing has decided to change its printing schedule, focusing first on e-books, followed by a print-on-demand run of paperbacks. The question is: will this be the trend for paperback book publishers to follow?

The Green Zone was established in Baghdad when U.S. troops invaded in 2003, and since then it has come to symbolize much of the American presence, both in Iraq and abroad. It is a fortress, a city within a city, and the headquarters of both American power and the Iraqi government.

Today we take a look at the Green Zone’s future and legacy as American troops continue their withdrawal from Iraq, and whether the Green Zone needs to be dismantled in order for the country to have true sovereignty.

The last time anyone got to hear Jerry Garcia play live was on July 9, 1995, when the Grateful Dead performed in Chicago. At the time, no one knew it be their last show: Exactly a month later – fifteen years ago today – guitarist Jerry Garcia died.

Today we take a look at the cultural impact Garcia and the Dead had (and still have) on music lovers, from the band's beginning in the '60s through today.

We want to hear from you. What are your favorite jam band experiences and what are your favorite jam band tracks?

Sixty five years ago today, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In a public statement justifying the use of the bomb that August, 1945, President Harry Truman said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished, in the first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

More than 140,000 people died in Hiroshima. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing 70,000 people. 

For more than 50 years, students who want to be doctors have dreaded two things above all else: organic chemistry and the Medical College Admissions Test – better known as the MCAT.

But there is one program out there that allows students to skip both of these prerequisites, though it’s been a pretty well-kept secret. The Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City admits a quarter of its class without the traditional pre-med background.

On a day where the temperature hits 95 degrees, the last thing most people want to do is cook dinner. But the summer’s long, takeout gets expensive and there are only so many salads one can eat before boredom sits in. So today, New York Times food writer Melissa Clark brings us a whole host of new, exciting, delicious and EASY summer recipes – leafy green salads not included. The best part? None of them require you to turn on the oven.

Share your favorite cold recipes for a hot day and show us what you've made!  Upload your pictures to our Facebook page.

If you’ve read any of Jennifer Egan’s previous work, you know that her writing style is rarely predictable. In her new book, “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” she takes that unpredictability to a whole new level.

When you think of the biggest natural disasters in U.S. history, what are the first things that come to mind? Certainly Hurricane Katrina, maybe one of the several San Francisco earthquakes, the great Chicago fire. However, most people have never heard of one of the most lethal: the heat wave of 1896.