President U S

When Nasser Baker's mother received a call from his school this month and began jumping and screaming, he thought she had seen a spider. But when he learned that his South Los Angeles charter school had chosen him as one of 12 students headed to Washington, D.C., for the presidential inauguration, 10-year-old Nasser started jumping up and down too.

A day after President Bush was nearly struck in the head by flying footwear at a Baghdad news conference, U.S. Secret Service officials faced questions Monday about how an Iraqi television reporter was able to hurl not one but two shoes at the president without the agents responsible for protecting him being able to move into the line of fire.

From Hollywood's perspective, there's a cloud over Barack Obama's inaugural. Now the question is whether the weather that day will simply be overcast or stormy. Obama's selection of Orange County mega-pastor and bestselling author Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his swearing in has hit liberal Hollywood in one of its sorest spots: the passage of Proposition 8, California's ban on gay marriage, which Warren strongly supported.

Locals here sometimes call Barack Obama a kamaaina, the Hawaiian word for native-born or one who has lived here for some time. Chicagoans, of course, think of him as a South Sider who often wears a White Sox cap. Both are correct, and both illustrate an increasing pull on the future 44th president by those who want to use his native-son status for marketing advantage. So far, Chicago seems to be winning the battle.

For Patrick Hicks, it was a teachable moment that he would share with his social studies class in Grosse Pointe, Mich. For Chris Berkley, it was an opportunity to honor a former president who had gone to grade school with his grandfather. For Jeff Myers, a fellow alumnus of the University of Michigan, it was a way to show respect for a former Wolverine. They -- and thousands of other citizens -- honored the memory of Gerald R.

President Bush, joining thousands of average Americans who started the New Year by saying goodbye to an old president, stopped Monday at the U.S. Capitol after returning from his Texas ranch to pay his respects to Gerald R. Ford. Wearing a dark suit and gray tie, Bush was joined by First Lady Laura Bush and a small contingent of White House aides that included Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Shortly after 3 p.m.

At his independent bookstore in this famously left-leaning town, Neil Coonerty offers bestsellers from both sides of the political spectrum. But there's freedom in owning your own shop: You can make fun of those you don't like. Over three decades, the 60-year-old former Berkeley radical has skewered his share of conservative authors and politicians -- along with others whose ideas he didn't think were worth the paper they were printed on.

YOU get the overall impression of a lot of guys in ties -- some of them Bush administration officials, some of them journalists and some lawyers -- in the four-part "Frontline" series "News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin," beginning tonight on PBS. That everybody appears, in close-up, to belong to the same 9 o'clock dinner reservation is a controlling metaphor for what emerges, in the first hour, anyway, as a Washington potboiler among various corridors of power.

Honest Abe usually is associated with Washington, D.C.; Springfield, Ill.; Gettysburg, Pa.; or Kentucky, his birthplace. But Redlands? The quaint San Bernardino County community houses the only Lincoln memorial west of the Mississippi, thanks to oil magnate Robert Watchorn. "There were many parallels in the lives of Lincoln and Watchorn," said Larry Burgess, historian and director of the A.K. Smiley Public Library and Lincoln Memorial Shrine.

Marking George Washington's 275th birthday, President Bush on Monday linked the ideals of the first president to the war being fought by the 43rd, saying Washington's goals guided the nation's quest to extend freedom beyond its borders. "George Washington's long struggle for freedom has ...