Retail Sales Plummet  —  Price-slashing failed to rescue a bleak holiday season for beleaguered retailers, as sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending, according to new data released Thursday.  —  Despite a flurry of last-minute shoppers lured by the deep discounts …

Little Blue Pills Among the Ways CIA Wins Friends in Afghanistan  —  The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women.  His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity …

Expansion of Clinics Shapes a Bush Legacy  —  NASHVILLE — Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers …

Bush Revokes Pardon Of GOP Donors' Relative  —  President Bush took the remarkable step yesterday of reversing a pardon that he granted the day before to a Brooklyn, N.Y., real estate developer, whose relatives contributed more than $40,000 to Republicans before his clemency petition was filed with the White House.

Poll: Obama is man Americans admire most  —  WASHINGTON — A month before his inauguration, Americans choose Barack Obama as the man they admire most in the world, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.  It's the first time a president-elect has topped the annual survey in more than a half-century.

Blagojevich Attorney Asks Illinois Panel to Subpoena Emanuel and Others  —  An attorney for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) has asked the legislative panel considering impeachment of the governor to subpoena more than a dozen witnesses, including President-elect Barack Obama's incoming chief of staff.

Barack Be Good  —  Times have changed.  In 1996, President Bill Clinton, under siege from the right, declared that “the era of big government is over.”  But President-elect Barack Obama, riding a wave of revulsion over what conservatism has wrought, has said that he wants to “make government cool again.”

Bush a catalyst in America's declining influence  —  The president oversaw a period of eroding economic and political power, in which the rise of China, India and others was a major factor, but assisted by an aversion to him and his policies.  —  Reporting from Washington …

Obama Follows a Tradition of Testifying for Prosecutors  —  Every president for more than three decades has had to talk with federal prosecutors at one time or another.  President-elect Barack Obama may have set a land-speed record by giving his first interview to investigators even before taking the oath of office.

Jindal in 2012?  —  Bobby Jindal is seen by many in his party as the Next Big Thing, a political comer who at 37 offers competence, reform and a fresh face for a Republican Party in dire need of all three.  —  But even as he basks in the media glow from his maiden foray to Iowa last month, Jindal is far from a sure thing in 2012.

Harold Pinter, Playwright of the Pause, Dies at 78  —  Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday.  He was 78 and lived in London.