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SACRAMENTO - Former campaign treasurer Kinde Durkee agreed Tuesday with a recommendation by federal prosecutors that she be sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing $7 million from as many as 50 political clients, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Such a punishment "is a just and appropriate sentence," says a court filing by Durkee's attorney, Daniel V. Nixon, on the eve of her sentencing. The 15-page filing, set to be considered Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller in Sacramento, is the first detailed explanation Durkee has offered about what happened to the money she stole.

Warren Buffett: party boy? It's no secret that the octogenarian Oracle of Omaha knows how to get down. He plays pingpong at shareholder meetings for his investment firm Berkshire Hathaway Inc. He plays the ukulele on television. He has sung songs while dressed as a paperboy, a rapper and rocker Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses. Now, the multibillionaire financier can have even more good times, with his purchase Friday of discount party goods retailer Oriental Trading Co. The mail-order merchant sells a cornucopia of more than 40,000 party supplies, crafts, school supplies, toys and novelties directly to consumers.

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NEW YORK — More checks are in the mail for financier Bernard Madoff's victims, nearly four years after his epic Ponzi scheme collapsed. Irving Picard, the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Madoff's firm, mailed checks worth nearly $2.5 billion Wednesday. The distribution satisfies about half of the allowed claims filed by Madoff investors, Picard's office announced Thursday. The average payment: slightly more than $2 million. The trustee's office says it has now distributed a total of $3.6 billion to Madoff victims.

The U.S. Postal Serviceis in trouble, and there's no telling whether it will survive. It's been battered by the Internet and a dragging economy, besieged by commercial competitors and stymied in its efforts to trim a costly web of post offices and delivery routes. On Aug. 1, it defaulted on a $5.5-billion payment to the U.S. Treasury for future retiree health benefits. Some think that it's time to privatize the service, bringing an end to one of our oldest federal institutions. The outlook is grim, though the crisis is not unprecedented.

While thumbing through the household mail one recent day - a bill from the vet, a statement from the bank, 47 come-ons for low-interest credit cards and a birthday card from Grandma - I pondered the following riddle: Why is it that the same conservatives who harped on how an obscure provision of the U.S. Constitution should have invalidated the healthcare reform act never talk about the provision that gives the federal government responsibility for...

Few members of Congress want to take away your Saturday mail delivery or close your underused local post office - or at least, not shortly before election day, when such actions might come back to haunt them. That explains a lot about why Congress has cravenly failed to take the necessary action to put the U.S. Postal Service on a path to solvency, instead forcing it to default last week on a required $5.5-billion payment toward the health benefits of future retirees. The irony is that one of the best and boldest routes Congress could take is also the one that largely absolves it of responsibility: It should let the post office solve more of its own problems.

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AURORA, Colo. - Before the movie theater massacre last week, the suspected gunman had been seeing a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado and mailed her a package containing a notebook, according to a motion filed by James E. Holmes' public defenders. In the filing released Friday, Holmes' lawyers say that after law enforcement executed a search warrant at the University of Colorado-Denver this week and seized the package addressed to Dr. Lynne Fenton, someone leaked information about it to the media - including allegations that Holmes had alerted law enforcement to it. The release of such information would violate a gag order issued by the judge in the case.