Tobacco smoke contamination lingering on furniture, clothes and other surfaces, dubbed thirdhand smoke, may react with indoor air chemicals to form potential cancer-causing substances, a study found.

Banking is based on trust. The banks get our paychecks and hold our savings; they know where we spend our money and they keep it private. If we don't trust them, the whole system breaks down. Yet for years, Wall Street CEOs have thrown away customer trust like so much worthless trash.

"That is an incredibly muscular vision of when you would overrule precedent," which usually guides justices in new cases, Harris says. "That makes it look like this is a court that's ready to go."

The US Treasury in conjunction with the Department of Housing and Urban Development should put in place for the next 18 months a home price insurance program providing a form of catastrophic loss protection for homebuyers taking a chance on the current housing market.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation's top uniformed officer, made a strong appeal for allowing gays to serve openly in the military, a shift that highlighted the Pentagon's growing support for lifting the "don't ask, don't tell" law.

State and local ordinances known as Jim Crow laws in at least 11 Southern states prohibited interracial interaction in most areas of public life - restaurants, schools, courtrooms, buses and trains, movie theaters, even reform schools. Starting 50 years ago Monday, students across the South decided to change that.

President Barack Obama will propose on Monday a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011 that projects the deficit will shoot up to a record $1.6 trillion this year, but would push the red ink down to about $700 billion, or 4% of the gross domestic product, by 2013, according to congressional aides.

Since retiring, Justice O’Connor has been warning about the threat to judicial independence from big-money state judicial campaigns and attack ads paid for by special interests hoping to influence future court decisions. The Citizens United ruling promises to make that problem worse, possibly much worse.

Wage and benefit costs, both before and after adjusting for inflation, grew more slowly in 2009 than in any year since the U.S. government began tracking data in 1982, as double-digit unemployment weakened workers' ability to command higher pay.

Children exposed in the womb to chemicals in cosmetics and fragrances are more likely to develop behavioral problems commonly found in children with attention deficit disorders, according to a study of New York City school-age children published Thursday.

Corporations facing criminal prosecution could face reduced penalties if they meet standards for tackling white-collar crime at their companies, under changes proposed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

During his campaign, President Obama declaimed that he’d back single payer -– if we were starting from scratch. One thing’s clear from the recent Massachusetts election upset: it’s time to start from scratch.

Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe's premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to "brain aging," brain damage, early-onset Alz­heimer's, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union's environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol."

The first casualty of the president's political debacle will likely be Timothy Geithner, the severely over-confident treasury secretary well known as a lapdog of Wall Street.

That smell, however, also could make them - and their passengers - sick. That's because the plastics and textiles used in vehicle interiors contain a number of harmful chemicals, including antimony, bromine, chlorine, and lead.

The Supreme Court today overturned a century-old restriction on corporations using their money to sway federal elections and ruled that companies have a free-speech right to spend as much as they wish to persuade voters to elect or defeat candidates for Congress and the White House.

A common household chemical found in everything from sofas and carpets to pots and pans has been linked to an increased risk of thyroid disease, in the first major study carried out on its effect upon health.

Here's the reality: The proposed tax is both fully justified and not remotely as big as it should be.