Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) says he is altering his version of the $774 billion health-care bill to make insurance more affordable for middle- and low-income Americans, who would be required to purchase coverage. Baucus backed down over his colleagues' criticism that the bill would require people to purchase insurance who couldn't afford it, and the concession may have smoothed the way for the bill to finally pass the Finance Committee. “Affordability—that, I think, is the primary concern,” Baucus said. “We want to make sure that if Americans have to buy insurance, it’s affordable.” Two sources told CNN that Baucus plans to get the money for subsidies from the $28 billion surplus in the plan, after Democrats filed 564 amendments to his plan last Friday. In the original plan, people in poverty (defined as $22,050 yearly income for a family of four) would have been expected to pay 3 percent of their annual income on insurance premiums. Baucus said the subsidies will now "be more generous." Baucus also said he will lessen the impact of a proposed tax on high-end insurance policies by raising the limits of what would be taxed, though he did not elaborate.

President Obama wrapped up his media blitz Monday night with an appearance on Late Show With  David Letterman. The president had an irreverent answer for Letterman when he asked if the virulence of the health-care debate was fueled in part by his race. "First of all, I think it's important to realize that I was actually black before the election," Obama said, provoking big laughs from the audience. Letterman quipped: "How long have you been a black man?" The 40-minute interview tackled mostly serious topics. Obama said he has not yet decided whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, and addressed the sobering unemployment numbers, calling it a "big problem" for at least another year. The president starts participating in the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week.

The recession has damaged the reputation of America as the land of opportunity as the number of foreign-born residents dropped for the first time since 1970, according to a U.S. Census survey. In 2008, about 38 million immigrants lived in the U.S., about 100,000 fewer than the year before. The fall is within the margin of error, but shows a turnaround from the big increases of earlier years. The U.S. foreign-born population increased by about one million people every year between 2000 and 2006. Hispanics have historically had a higher employment rate than whites and blacks in the U.S., but that has changed since the current recession has hit Latin American immigrants particularly hard. The data also showed that median income fell in 27 states across the U.S., and the rate of home ownership also dropped.

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya is holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa after he slipped across the border and back into his home country to the surprise of supporters and opponents alike. Hundreds of supporters waited outside the embassy, and authorities have imposed a 15-hour curfew to prevent violence from breaking out. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Zelaya and the de facto government to "dialogue." "[We traveled] for more than 15 hours... through rivers and mountains until we reached the capital of Honduras," Zelaya said of his surprise return. Brazil's foreign minister said his country had no part in the leader's return.

Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, who fascinated the world with their 1984 five-month-long, grueling chess battle, will meet for a historic rematch on Tuesday in Spain. The two grand masters faced off 25 years ago in what was seen as representing an ideological battle. Kasparov, only 21 at the time, was cast as the face of reform while Karpov played the role of the old Soviet Union. The two still hold opposing political views, but have become closer over the years. "Many of my friends forgot about me when I was jailed," said Kasparov, who was jailed for leading an anti-Putin protest in 2007. "Karpov tried to visit me." Karpov said they were "totally opposite in every area of life." The two players have been holed up preparing for the series of blitz and semi-rapid games over four days, which may be watched by as many as 10 million people online. Kasparov, 46, no longer plays competitively, and is worried his lack of recent match experience might handicap him against Karpov, who at 58 is no longer ranked in the top 100 players.

In a blistering attack in The Wall Street Journal, the senior staffer who hired on speechwriter Matt Latimer to the Bush administration writes that his tell-all book reveals "foolishness and vanity" from a man who thought himself more important than he was. Bill McGurn writes that Latimer portrays former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld well in the book because he's on Rumsfeld's "payroll" for writing his memoirs, and because of a scene at the end of Latimer's book where Rumsfeld tells him "You were my star." McGurn says if Bush had told Latimer he was a star, "we would have a very different book." He also writes that Latimer tries to inflate his importance and credibility by writing about riding on Air Force One and his office in the West Wing, but that he was kicked out of his office and was "not important." Fighting words.

The new December 2009 international climate bill will not include greenhouse-gas emissions targets, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso announced. The international climate bill is being created by 190 countries to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that put a ceiling on emissions targets in industrialized countries. Such emissions limits were established in order to keep worldwide temperatures within a safe range. The countries don't have enough time to work out a plan before the bill’s December deadline, Barroso said. “Unfortunately, it’s now impossible for several reasons to have a complete agreement on all the binding targets...That is not realistic anymore,” said Barroso. A universal understanding of the best ways to monitor emissions is not in place and many see this year’s agreement as one of many ”building blocks” needed to create a future plan. The European Union wants an international commitment to reducing emissions levels to 20 percent lower than they were in 1990 by the year 2020.

Richard Holbrooke doesn't have an easy job, and despite his best efforts, it may be inevitable that America loses the battle in Afghanistan. If anything, George Packer's New Yorker profile of the State Department's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan shows the circumstances conspiring to tie Holbrooke's hands. Holbrooke's counterterrorist strategy in Afghanistan is to funnel American aid money through the Afghan government in order to encourage citizens to trust and rely on their government. However, his efforts have been hampered by the tension between the desires of America, locals, and the Afghan and Pakistani governments, which have created a situation so delicate that he dare not address the problems head-on. In April Holbrooke alluded to the ties between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Taliban, which alienated Pakistani generals. Meanwhile, Indian officials have made it clear that discussion of terrorism in Kashmir, key to stability in the region, is verboten, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai doesn't want to talk about the corruption in his government. There's no good solution, and because the lack of the stability in the region poses a direct threat to the U.S., Holbrooke says that withdrawal is "just not an acceptable course of action."

Democrat-turned-independent Senator Joe Lieberman is attempting to revive the House climate-change bill in the Senate by increasing funding for coal and nuclear-power plants, possibly garnering support from Republicans and more conservative Democrats, but likely distancing himself from liberals. "Without a nuclear title that's stronger than in the House climate-change legislation, we're not going to be able to get enough votes to pass climate change," Lieberman said. Considering many environmentalists' disdain for those power sources, the Connecticut senator's fifth attempt to pass a climate bill in Congress is not likely. California Senator Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that stripped Lieberman of his seat for his political flip-flopping in campaigning for John McCain, however, is reportedly expected to introduce a global-warming bill by the end of the month that will also include a nuclear title.

President Obama may not be sure whether the United States needs more troops in Afghanistan, but his top general is: The Washington Post has obtained a confidential memo to the White House from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, in which he warns that failure to add more troops in the next year “will likely result in failure.” McChrystal says he wants to implement a new counterinsurgency strategy, like the Iraqi surge, in which troops spend “as little time as possible in armored vehicles or behind the walls of forward operating bases." The White House is considering his plan among several others.

London's museums may be following in New York’s footsteps, instituting voluntary but suggested donations in place of the city’s traditionally free galleries. After a recent trip to New York City, Mayor of London Boris Johnson said he was impressed by the city’s pay-what-you-want system, saying, “It might be a good idea for people to price the value of their visit. I think it would work extremely well and I think we should do it.” The comments came as part of a panel discussion with actor Kevin Spacey, among others, on the precarious state of post-recession arts funding. Concerned at future generations’ support of museums, Johnson said, “arts and culture are not a luxury, they are part of this city’s DNA.”

It wasn't enough that Annie Le was strangled to death in her Yale lab. The New York Post reports that accused murderer Ray Clark allegedly broke Le's bones in order to squish the body through a wall opening the size of a computer screen, into a utility space inside a bathroom wall. According to an unnamed source, Le's body was "like mush" when it was found wedged between pipes in the utility space. Clark's allegedly hasty clean-up of the murder scene led him to accidentally set off a fire alarm, and the two rookie cops who talked to him afterward thought he was acting suspicious. Clark was later seen trying to hide equipment that turned out to contain blood spatters. The motivation for Clark's alleged murder may be his "control freak" tendencies toward the lab, according to the source, and the fact that he "had issues" with how Le kept her lab and mice. "She wasn't clean and it made him mad," the source said.

Bank of America missed a noon deadline Monday to turn in documents and other evidence to a congressional investigation over their takeover of Merrill Lynch last year. The committee is considering issuing a subpoena to force the bank to turn over the documents, and the bank says it will send a representative to Congress. Meanwhile, Bank of America is close to reaching an agreement with the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to scrap its loss-sharing pact, which was to help the bank digest Merrill Lynch. Officials want Bank of America to pay between $300 million and $500 million to end the tentative agreement which was announced in January. Bank of America is also asking that it be allowed to pay back $20 billion of its $45 billion taxpayer-funded loan, which would remove it from the lists of banks receiving "exceptional" assistance from the government.

After weekend arrests made in Colorado and Queens, the FBI says it prevented a terrorist attack in New York City. Authorities arrested the plot's suspected ringleader, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old airport shuttle driver, in Denver on Saturday night. Zazi's father, Mohammad Zazi, was also taken into custody, and both are expected to appear in court in Denver on Monday. Zazi had been under surveillance by the FBI and CIA for a year leading up to his arrest, and allegedly traveled to Pakistan twice for al Qaeda explosives training. Nine handwritten pages detailing the manufacture and detonation of explosives were found in Zazi's possession, according to the FBI. The FBI also arrested Ahmed Afzali, an imam in Queens who allegedly made false statements to officials about his contact with the Zazis. He is also due in court Monday morning.

Perhaps it was good practice for his meetings this week with Muammar Qaddafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? President Obama shook hands and spoke briefly with New York Governor David Paterson at an event near Albany on Monday, after weekend reports that Obama has personally asked Paterson not to run for reelection. Paterson greeted Obama at the airport in Albany, where the president was speaking at a local community college. "By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world," Obama predicted in his speech. "We used to be No. 1. We should be No. 1 again."

Ever since Jaycee Dugard emerged from her 18-year captivity under Phillip Craig Garrido, people have asked if he also raped the daughters that they parented. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Dugard herself is saying no. “She’s saying he didn’t touch her kids,” one law-enforcement source says. Dugard’s aunt has described the daughters as “clever, articulate, curious girls who have a bright future ahead of them.” The source also tells the Chronicle that Dugard is telling authorities that Garrido “hadn’t touched her in years.”

“Yes we can” almost wasn’t: According to a new book, President Obama didn’t originally like his campaign slogan when David Axelrod introduced it during his Senate race in 2004 and almost nixed it, until Michelle intervened. “Trust me,” she said, “It will work.” Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage also alleges that Michelle was a crucial voice in convincing Barack to choose someone other than Hillary Clinton as his running mate. "Do you really want Bill and Hillary just down the hall from you in the White House?" she reportedly told her husband. "Could you live with that?"

Getting ready to carve the world’s first Michael Jackson memorial jack-o’-lantern? You might be out of luck. Record-breaking rain in New England has destroyed many pumpkins, causing local growers to fear for this year’s crops. Overwatered seedlings have set harvests back a crucial two weeks, so many pumpkins won’t be big enough or orange enough by Halloween. Some growers have already lost their crops while others are waiting to see if their green pumpkins will turn orange in time. Pumpkin carvers, smashers, and aficionados need not fear that New England’s pumpkin deficiency will ruin Halloween. Pumpkins in gourd-heavy states like Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, Ohio, and Michigan will make it to stores on time, though they may be pricier than usual: 13 percent of pumpkins—which are a $250 million crop in the United States—are made into pie filling. The rest are turned into decorations.

Reports of Katie Couric's impending resignation were greatly exaggerated. Despite some of the lowest ratings in the newscast's history, Couric will stay on at CBS until her contract expires in 2011, in large part due to what her executive producer calls "superb work" during the election, which included an in-depth interview with veep contender Sarah Palin. The show Couric anchors nightly, however, isn’t the one she had hoped to do: “I came over to do a different kind of newscast,” Couric tells The New York Times. Moving forward, Couric will be playing to her strengths with a new web show featuring interviews with media figures such as Glenn Beck in addition to the nightly newscast, which will continue to feature some of her franchises, including the financial investigation series "Follow the Money." Couric also wants to add happier stories to the newscast because "the news can be so depressing now."

There are still secrets coming out of the Clinton White House. Contents of interviews with Bill Clinton—kept in his sock drawer until he moved out of the White House—have been revealed in Taylor Branch's new book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President. After Clinton became president, he asked the Pulitzer Prize-winning Branch to record an oral history from the Oval Office on a continuing basis. After each session, Branch would give the audio tape to Clinton, then pop a new one in his recorder and recap their conversation on his ride home. Among the revelations: Clinton said he had the affair with Monica Lewinsky because he "just cracked" from personal and political pressure; Boris Yeltsin almost created an international incident in 1995 during a diplomatic visit to D.C. when he got wasted and ventured onto Pennsylvania Avenue to hail a cab in his undies; Clinton and Al Gore fought just after Gore lost the 2000 elections—Clinton felt underutilized while Gore thought Clinton's scandalous shadow had dragged him down, and the two "exploded" at each other; and George Bush was "unqualified to be president... but he had shrewd campaign instincts." Clinton and Branch have spent hours on the phone since Branch sent him the book's proofs. "I think it's fair to say he's nervous," Branch said, adding, "I didn't change anything that he asked me to change."

For the second year in a row,  Mad Men, which was nominated for 16 awards, won Best Drama Series at Sunday's Emmy Awards, hosted by How I Met Your Mother star Neil Patrick Harris. Alec Baldwin of the NBC Series 30 Rock, which was nominated for 22 awards, won Best Actor for the second year in a row, but the show still held some surprises. Toni Collette won Best Actress for her portrayal of a woman with multiple personalities on Showtime's United States of Tara, while Kristin Chenoweth won Best Supporting Actress for Pushing Daisies, which was canceled. Jon Cryer won Best Supporting Actor for Two and a Half Men. Cable series dominated the nominations: 99 nods went to HBO series. HBO's series Grey Gardens won three Emmys, including one for lead actress Jessica Lange.

Out of thousands of submissions from teams from 186 countries, a winner has been declared in the $1 million Netflix contest, which asked competitors to improve its movie recommendation system using a data set of 100 million movie ratings by 10 percent or more. The challenge began in October 2006, and the winners are a seven-person team of statisticians and computer engineers who merged to pass the 10 percent threshold of the contest in June. They submitted their proposal 20 minutes before a competing team who also just barely made the 10 percent mark. The two were at a dead tie, but BellKor took the $1 million prize since they finished first. Netflix declared a new contest to model individuals' "taste profiles" from a data set of more than 100 million entries of ages, gender, ZIP Codes, and movie ratings. Half a million dollars will be awarded to the leading group after six months, and another half million to the leader after 18 months.

Some lucky rats have overcome paralysis. A study published in Nature Neuroscience used a three-pronged treatment to get rats with damaged spinal cords to walk again. HealthDay News reports that scientists injected rats with paralyzed legs with a drug that enhances spinal nerve circutry, put them on a slow-moving treadmill and applied electrical currents to the protective membrane of the spinal cord, below the injury. Several weeks of treatment enabled near-normal weight-bearing walking and running, although the rats could only do so when hooked up to electric stimulation on a treadmill. Up to this point, research into spinal cord injuries has focused, with limited success, on re-growing nerve fibers, not rehabilitation.

President Barack Obama and his team have been relentlessly courting the favor of moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, and it looks like their work is paying off. “He’s always eliciting my views,” she told The New York Times, “wondering, you know, what my concerns are.” Snowe, like every Republican in Congress, has not endorsed either health-care bill in the Senate, but signaled in the interview that she might be willing to do so, calling the bill "budget neutral" and repudiating conservative claims that Obama is supporting big government. “I’ve gotten an impression that he would, you know, probably do less than more,” she said. It's still unclear if Snowe would defy her party and provide Democrats with the 60th vote they need to block a filibuster. "I’m going to support the right policy,” she said. “People really want to get something done.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is pressing the West’s buttons before he arrives at the United Nations in New York this week: Iran’s state-run news agency has quoted Ahmadinejad as saying he is proud over the outrage his denial of the Holocaust has caused in the West. According to the IRNA, Ahmadinejad said angering the world’s “professional man slayers”—that’s the West—is a source of “pride for us.” On Friday, Ahmadinejad questioned whether the Holocaust was a “real event.”

Relief for the news industry may be on the way. The Hill reports that President Obama said he's "happy to look at" bills that would offer tax breaks to news organizations that restructure themselves as nonprofits. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has already introduced S. 673, called the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which has earned one co-sponsor, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, and would give tax breaks to news outlets restructuring as 501(c)(3)s. For his part, Obama criticized the state of modern journalism. Although he conceded that quality journalism is "critical to the health of our democracy" the president is "concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void, but not a lot of mutual understanding."

The Taliban might not be on the ticket, but the fraud-ridden Afghanistan elections have been a boon for the terror organization. Systematic cheating and fraud gives the Taliban ammunition against President Hamid Karzai, who they say is hopelessly corrupt and a puppet of foreign powers. The Taliban's reclusive leader, Mohammad Omar, denounced "the so-called elections which are fraught with fraud and lies" in a statement online Saturday. The Taliban at first discouraged voters with threats of violence, a tactic that was largely successful as only 39 percent of registered voters showed up, The Washington Post reports. Officials have ordered a partial recount, while Karzai supporters have blamed foreign diplomats for exaggerating the election fraud incidents.

Federal agents have charged three men in a terror probe that reaches from Colorado to New York to Pakistan. Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan national and airport shuttle driver, was arrested with his father outside of Denver. Investigators say they found notes in Zazi's handwriting about how to make a bomb, and also found his fingerprints on batteries and a scale that could be used to make explosives. Zazi admitted receiving weapons training from al Qaeda, but denied plotting a terrorist attack. An acquaintance of the two men, Ahmad Wais Afzali, who is from Flushing, New York, was also arrested. All three will appear in court Monday. Officials are investigating several people for a plot to detonate improvised explosive devices in the United States. The plot may have involved a major transportation center, officials said. The three men were picked up for giving federal agents false statements and face up to eight years in prison.

European leaders are questioning the U.S.'s commitment to reaching a global agreement on climate change, noting that the government has dragged its feet over setting specific targets for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. The leaders have little hope that Congress, embroiled in a health-care debate, would act on a bill before the international talks in Copenhagen in December. Some are worried Copenhagen might be a repeat of President Clinton’s mistake in Kyoto in 1997, where he signed an international agreement that was repudiated by the Senate for making too few demands on developing countries. European nations have already pledged to cut their emissions by 20 percent by 2020.

The county fair is safe again. A schizophrenic killer who escaped in Washington state during a field trip to the county fair has been recaptured, authorities say. Phillip Paul, who confessed to killing an elderly woman because "voices" told him to, was the subject of a massive manhunt after he slipped away on Thursday. Paul also briefly escaped in 1991, when he injured the same police officer who recaptured him on Sunday. Paul was committed to a mental institution after he confessed to the murder in 1987. Authorities worried his medication would wear off and he would become dangerous if he wasn't captured soon.

Barack Obama wants the Pentagon to review the U.S.'s nuclear-weapons doctrine to prepare for deep cuts to the country's arsenal, The Guardian reports. The president rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the review as not consistent with his goal of eventually banning nuclear weapons entirely. He wants the new plan to contain the option of reconfiguring the arsenal to contain hundreds instead of thousands of strategic warheads and narrowing the range of conditions under which the U.S. can use nuclear weapons. The review should be finished by the end of the year. Obama will be chairing a session of the U.N. Security Council on Thursday addressing global nuclear disarmament.

Embarrassed about your lack of best man, spouse, or boss? Do what some Japanese do: hire a professional stand-in. The Guardian reports that in Japan, the rent-a-buddy service sector is growing. Over the past eight years, the number of agencies providing parents for engagement parties, mourners at funerals, and, in this economy, phantom bosses has doubled to 10 with Office Agent, the best-known company, employing 1,000 people. The popularity of such services underscores a Japanese cultural aversion to publicizing personal difficulties. The rentable people aren't pricey either. One company charges the modest fee of $161 to show up at a wedding party, and extra if the fake friend is required to speechify or sing karaoke.

Should Jon Stewart be worried? Late Show host David Letterman has been enjoying something of a revival, fueled in large part by his political interviews. In addition to hosting President Obama on Monday night, Letterman will interview Bill Clinton on Tuesday, found himself earlier this year in a war of words with Sarah Palin, and famously went after John McCain during the campaign after the candidate canceled on him. “When he began in television, Letterman was virtually apolitical,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse. “Now he’s moved to the point where he could be called a political comedian.”

More embarrassing details from the Bush regime emerge from former speechwriter Matt Latimer's tell-all book. Former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld had to be talked out of editing his own Wikipedia page, or as he called it, “Wika-wakka,” according to the book. Rumsfeld also watched YouTube clips that mocked his press conference appearances. Karl Rove allegedly spread rumors that a senator who was one of Obama’s potential running mates had abused his wife. Latimer also provides readers with some Bush admittances like, “I haven’t watched the nightly news one night since I’ve been president,” and his more surprising refusal to “tell some gay kid in the audience that he can’t get married” during a 2008 address at Furman University.