Rooting for Failure  —  I just spent 15 minutes on my local health care exchange and realized that I could save a couple hundred dollars a month on my family's insurance.  Of course, I live in Washington State, which has a very competitive market, a superbly functioning website …

HealthCare.gov will meet deadline for fixes, White House officials say  —  Administration officials are preparing to announce Sunday that they have met their Saturday deadline for improving HealthCare.gov, according to government officials, in part by expanding the site's capacity so that it can handle 50,000 users at once.

Airlines Urged by U.S. to Give Notice to China  —  WASHINGTON — On the same day that China scrambled fighter jets to enforce its newly declared air defense zone, the Obama administration decided to advise American commercial airlines to comply with China's demands to be notified in advance of flights through the area.

Pressure builds on Boehner for NSA vote  —  House Republican leaders are under pressure to allow a vote on legislation that would curb the National Security Agency (NSA).  —  Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has defended the NSA's spying programs, but a growing bloc of his conference is signing …

U.S. man in hot water in Dubai over parody video  —  (CNN) — It was intended as a piece of comedy, but it's turned into a drama.  —  A young American living in the United Arab Emirates has been imprisoned since April, his family says, for posting what was intended to be a funny video on the Internet.

Venezuela's Maduro vows stricter business inspections  —  (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro said a stricter wave of inspections for suspected price-gouging would begin on Saturday in an aggressive pre-election “economic offensive” aimed at taming the highest inflation in the Americas.

Peter Kaplan, Who Brought a Cutting Edge to The New York Observer, Dies at 59  —  Peter W. Kaplan, who in his 15 years as editor was credited with making The New York Observer both pertinent and impertinent as it gleefully chronicled the every move and shake of the city's movers and shakers, died on Friday in Manhattan.

Former KKK Leader And His Mother Indicted After Alabama Cross Burning  —  A 28-year-old alleged “former Exalted Cyclops” of the Ku Klux Klan and his mother have both been arrested and are facing federal charges relating to a 2009 cross burning in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Ozark, Ala.

Revisionaries  —  How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids' textbooks.  —  Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas.  When he greeted me at the door one evening last October …

CNN/ORC Poll: Jump in percentage of those saying things not going well  —  Washington (CNN) - Americans views on the state of the nation are turning increasingly sour, according to a new national poll.  —  And a CNN/ORC International survey released Friday also indicates that less than a quarter …

The Sun on Sunday lied about me last week.  Have they learned nothing?  —  Not a big deal in the scheme of things, but it's still the same fecund bone-yard of gossip, poison and lies  —  The Sun on Sunday, which is of course the News of the World with a different hat on, lied about me last week.