Another Democrat is retiring, though liberals in the party probably won’t be shedding any tears: Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana—an outspoken centrist, budget hawk, and favorite of the Washington press corps—announced on Monday that he will retire when his term expires this year. Bayh cited excessive partisanship as his cause. "Congress is not operating as it should," he lamented at a press conference, adding, "the people's business is not getting done." He said he does "not love Congress" and is "not motivated by strident partisanship or ideology."

Heading into the last half of Monday's snowboard cross final, 33-year-old Seth Wescott made up a huge deficit to catch Canadian Mike Robertson. "That kind of gap, most people—well, really, nobody, overcomes that," said America's snowboard coach, Peter Foley. Wescott made up the distance over a series of four turns and five jumps that can sap speed if not handled correctly—and win the gold if they are. "I'd made some mistakes in there earlier in the day," Wescott said. "I knew if I came back and executed it correctly, I could do it. It wasn't a situation of looking for a miracle at all." American skier Bode Miller took home a medal on Monday as well in his first event in Vancouver, the men’s downhill. Miller took home the bronze, while the winner, 32-year-old Didier Defago of Switzerland, became the oldest man to win the downhill.

The Taliban's top military commander was captured in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces in Pakistan. American officials have described the Afghan commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials. The officials said his capture had provided a window into the Taliban and could lead to the capture of other senior officials. Most immediately, they hope he will provide the whereabouts of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who is the group’s spiritual leader.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Monday that Iran is “becoming a military dictatorship.” In a speech at a Qatar university, Clinton said Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has become so powerful that it has supplanted the government. The U.S. announced Thursday that it would impose sanctions on a construction company, run by the Guard, whose profits are said to fund Iran’s nuclear program. Aides to the secretary said she would be pushing China to join the sanctions and pressing Saudi Arabia to reassure China that any oil shortfalls resulting from the sanctions would be covered by the Saudis. China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, currently opposes the sanctions. Clinton stressed that Iran’s nuclear program was not peaceful, as the country claims: "I would like to figure out a way to handle it in as peaceful an approach possible, and I certainly welcome any meaningful engagement, but... we don't want to be engaging while they are building their bomb."

A series of just-released letters and telegrams from  John F. Kennedy to a young Swedish woman named Gunilla von Post show the famously philandering president in a softer light. Von Post released a book discussing the affair in 1997, and now 11 letters and three telegrams shed further light on the star-crossed relationship that began when the pair met on the French Riviera in 1953, prior to Kennedy’s marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. Von Post was only 21, Kennedy 36. The summer after his marriage, Kennedy wrote to von Post, “I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks—with you as crew.” The letters are up for auction beginning today at LegendaryAuctions.com, where bidding starts of at $25,000 and are expected to go for at least $100,000.

On the third day of heavy fighting in the insurgent stronghold of Marja, the number of insurgents in the area has dropped by about half, American and Afghan commanders said today. Of the 400 Taliban fighters estimated to be in Marja when the Afghan-American operation began early Saturday, about a quarter have been killed and a similar number appear to have fled the area. Local Afghans were offering help ferreting out Taliban fighters—including most of the leaders—and hidden bombs, commanders said, but the Associated Press reports that the 15,000 allied troops faced sniper fire and their advance was reduced to a crawl. And intense fighting on the ground continued much of the day, suggesting that there were plenty of Taliban insurgents with fight left in them. The operation has been marred by reports that a NATO missile killed as many as 12 civilians.

Would you let a researcher analyze your vaginal fluid, toenail clippings, and breast milk? For months, scientists have been dispatching door-to-door emissaries across the country to recruit pregnant women willing to do just that. With several hundred participants so far, the National Children's Study aims to enroll 100,000 pregnant women in 105 countries, then monitor their babies until they turn 21 in the largest long-term study of children’s health yet. The study—which was authorized by Congress in 2000 and is projected to cost about $6.7 billion—will examine how environment, genes, and other factors affect children's health, addressing questions on subjects from ranging from asthma to autism.

Microsoft unveiled on Monday the Windows Phone 7 Series—a new operating system that will appear on phones around the holidays later this year. “Windows Phone 7 Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we've been waiting for.,” Gizmodo says, calling it “the most groundbreaking phone since the iPhone.” The People hub “might be the best social networking implementation yet on a phone,” Gizmodo says, and the phone will link to Xbox Live for games. “Now that Microsoft has filled in its gaping chasm of suck with a meaningful phone effort, the three most significant companies in desktop computing—Apple, Google and Microsoft—now stand to occupy the same positions in mobile. Phones are officially computers that happen to fit in your pocket.”

Palin Mania topped Danica Mania at Daytona International Speedway yesterday. Fans immediately mobbed Palin, a VIP guest for the race, when she arrived for the drivers meeting. She chatted with RNC Chairman Michael Steele, shook hands, and smiled big. When NASCAR President Mike Helton acknowledged her as a special guest, she got the largest ovation from the room, packed with drivers, team members, support personnel, and onlookers. As she tried to make her way out, Palin kept stopping for her fans, who shouted, "We love you, Sarah!"

Donald Trump thinks the Nobel Committee should strip Al Gore of his Nobel Peace Prize. "With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore," the tycoon told members of his Trump National Golf Club in New York's Westchester County in a recent speech. "Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn't care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America's stupidity." The country club crowd of 500 stood up and cheered.

Things are looking even worse for Toyota, to say nothing of Toyota owners: New complaints have brought the total of alleged deaths from faulty vehicles up to 34, according to government numbers. Over the past four months, Toyota has recalled 8.5 million vehicles worldwide due to problems with sudden acceleration, and three congressional hearings are planned to address the crisis. From 2000 to 2009, complaints were received regarding 21 deaths supposedly linked to Toyota vehicles, and over the past three weeks 13 more have been reported. New complaints are also pouring in regarding the 2010 Prius model, but the company has yet to comment.

Oscar season will say goodbye to one of its most time-honored traditions after this year, as Barbara Walters has announced that she will no longer host her annual Oscar special. "I think I'm sick of them," Walters said on The View today. "I feel I've been there, done that. 29 years is enough." For nearly three decades, Walters' interviews with nominees have been a staple of awards season, but Walters said she thought that waiting until next year to end on the special's 30th anniversary would be "cliché," adding, "I felt it was enough."

As it turns out, orchestrating a break-in may not be the best way to prove your innocence. That’s the lesson American cyclist Floyd Landis may learn the hard way after a French judge issued an international arrest warrant, accusing Landis of hacking into the computer system of an anti-doping lab. “He was summoned by the judge, he didn’t come, so he’s now under an international arrest warrant,” explained Pierre Bordry, the head of France's anti-doping agency. Landis was stripped of his Tour de France title in 2006 when he “tested positive for banned testosterone,” according to the agency. He has since been trying to prove his innocence in the matter,  searching for documents he says would exonerate him. “It seems that [Landis] made all he could to enter into our computer system to try to prove the laboratory was wrong […] the judge traced a network of hackers back to the ringleader,” Bordry said.

At least 18 people were killed in a head-on collision of two trains in Halle, Belgium, near the capital, Brussels. The trains crashed during morning rush hour, and photos showed the front cars of both trains pushed into the air from the force of the collision. Overhead power lines were severely damaged, and many trains running between Brussels and the southwest part of the country have been cancelled. It’s unclear what caused the crash, and though an investigation has been launched, the first priority is getting medical care for the victims. Belgium experienced snow and freezing temperatures over the weekend, which could be a factor in the accident.

Porn star Joslyn James claims she got pregnant by embattled golf pro Tiger Woods twice while Woods’s wife Elin was pregnant herself. James, 32, says their affair lasted from 2006 to 2009, and that she miscarried near the same time Elin gave birth to the Woods’s first child. James says she then had an abortion one year ago, ironically near the birth date of the couple’s second child. James says she never told the golfer about the pregnancies: "I just didn't want to ruin anything… Actually, the day I was going to tell him, I had a miscarriage. After I lost the baby I didn't want to talk about it." Woods recently attended a sex rehab clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

The first major campaign of the American troop surge in Afghanistan moves ahead: U.S. and Afghan efforts to retake the city of Marja from insurgents was slowed  Monday because of resistance from Taliban snipers. The offensive pits about 15,000 American, British, and Afghan troops against hundreds of Taliban insurgents. On Monday, an Afghan general said that the troops have largely contained the area and that local residents are helping them to find mine locations.

It took two overtimes and a couple of emergency pothole repairs for Jamie McMurray to finally eke out a victory in the Daytona 500. It was McMurray’s first in NASCAR’s most famous race as he finished just ahead of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Greg Biffle came in third, followed by Clint Bowyer and David Reutimann. A six-car accident on the seventh lap set the tone for a dramatic evening, but more surprising was the 1 hour and 40 minute delay about halfway through the race. Officials spotted a hole in the track pavement—it was last paved in 1978—and stopped the race to fix it. But even after the repairs, the patch began to crumble again and racing was halted a second time.

The U.S. is drawing down the number of troops providing relief to Haiti, where hundreds of thousands were left injured and homeless by the January 12 earthquake that ravaged the country. For the past month, American troops have provided urgently needed medical care, delivered life-sustaining relief to villages, and controlled air traffic in Port-au-Prince’s tiny airport. But some responsibilities are being turned back over to the Haitian government, and troop levels are down to 13,000 from 20,000. About 70 percent of troops in Haiti are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many will be deployed again to those wars—wars that had left the military overtaxed before the Haitian operation.

The health-care industry in America has seen explosive growth in recent years, but finding enough doctors to keep up with demand has been difficult. That's all changing, however, as nearly two dozen medical schools have either recently opened or are in the process of opening, an 18 percent increase in the nation's total that could help fuel a new wave of American-educated doctors. “Huge numbers of qualified American kids were not getting into American medical schools or going abroad to study,” Dr. Lawrence G. Smith, dean of the proposed Hofstra University School of Medicine, told the New York Times. “I think it was a kind of wake-up call.” A number of factors are behind the rise in med-school applications, according to the Times, including anticipation that health-care legislation will lead to a rise in insured patients looking for quality care, and the prospect of abundant jobs when baby boomers in the field begin to retire from their medical positions.

Doug Fieger, lead singer for The Knack, died in Los Angeles on Sunday at age 57. He's best remembered for singing "My Sharona," which rose to no. 1 on the charts in 1979 to become one of the great one-hit wonders of its time. The catchy ode to sleeping with extremely young women, which Fieger co-wrote, enjoyed an extremely long life in the pop world. Run DMC sampled it for their hit "It's Tricky" in the 1980s and the 1994 movie Reality Bites gave it another revival when it included the song on its soundtrack. The Detroit-born Fieger suffered from lung cancer in 2004 and later brain cancer, which, according to Variety, was diagnosed after he forgot the lyrics to "My Sharona" onstage in Las Vegas.

Greece's overwhelming national debt has set off yet another global economic crisis—and just like the last one, American banks are at the center of the story. According to the New York Times, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. banks played a key role in postponing Greece's day of reckoning while it racked up more debt by using a variety of complicated financial tactics reminiscent of the mad science that sparked the subprime mortgage crisis. Just months before the current crisis, in November 2009, Goldman president Gary Cohn led a group of banks in offering Greece a way to refinance their health-care debt, but it was hardly the first of such efforts. In 2001, Goldman Sachs engineered multi-billion dollar loans for the government hidden behind currency trades to help it skirt the EU's deficit rules. “Politicians want to pass the ball forward, and if a banker can show them a way to pass a problem to the future, they will fall for it,” Gikas A. Hardouvelis, an economist who's studied Greece's accounting, told the Times.

Seeking every last bit of support ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, the Republican leadership is reaching out to Tea Party activists who may still be wary of falling in line with the GOP. Many members of the Tea Party movement still feel that to remain true to their grassroots identity, they cannot affiliate too closely with the political establishment. But Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who was denied a speaking slot at an April Tea Party protest, is meeting with 50 Tea Party leaders from at least a dozen states this week in an effort to convince them that the Republican Party, too, is a grassroots organization. "It is not a melding [of the movement with the GOP]," said Karin Hoffman, founder of a South Florida Tea Party group called DC Works For U. "It is not an effort to absorb it. We're still maintaining our autonomy."

Utah state Senator Chris Buttars says he believes he has discovered the cure for senioritis: cut 12th grade altogether. Pitched as a cost-cutting measure, his proposal to eliminate the final year of high school—or at the very least make it optional—has surprisingly gained some traction in the state, which is struggling with a $700 million budget shortfall. “The bottom line is saving taxpayer dollars while improving options for students,” said state Sen. Howard A. Stephenson, a Republican and co-chairman of the Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee. “The more options we give to students to accelerate, the more beneficial it is to students and taxpayers.”

For the first time since the war began, Afghan soldiers outnumber the U.S. and NATO soldiers fighting alongside them as they battle to clear Marja, the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. And this time, instead of winning the territory only to abandon it later and allowing insurgents to return, the troops plan to hold the farming area for as long as it takes to install a government there and a local security force to keep the citizens safe. With development projects ready to go, large numbers of civilians will move into Marja once the invasion is over. James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, said Sunday that this operation will be the first to demonstrate the new strategy in Afghanistan, one that focuses on not just security, but also economy and governance. Obama is watching the fight closely, and the operation has won the approval of the GOP, which otherwise has a contentious relationship with the president. The counterinsurgency push is high-stakes for Gen. Stanley McChrystal: This is the first offensive conducted since he asked for a 30,000-troop surge.

Until Sunday night, no Canadian had ever won a gold medal on home soil. But Alexandre Bilodeau, a 22 year old from Montreal, broke that streak by taking the men's moguls on the second day of competition in Vancouver. "The party is just starting for Canada," he said. It was Canada's third medal of the Games, while the United States leads the pack with six. Two Winter Olympics had come and gone in Canada—Montreal 1976 and Calgary 1988—without anyone winning gold for the host nation.

Samuel P. Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, is backing a number of candidates, but one politician he won’t be stumping for is the man who made him famous: Sen. John McCain. “I don’t owe him shit,” Wurzelbacher said in an interview with PA Public Radio reporter Scott Detrow. “He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it.” As for President Obama, Wurzelbacher told a crowd in Harrisburg to lay off the personal attacks, saying that ties to the “birthers” would hurt the Tea Party cause. And in some ways, he actually kind of likes Obama: “I think his ideology is un-American, but he’s one of the more honest politicians. At least he told us what he wanted to do.” Wurzelbacher says that 200 politicians have asked for his official stamp of approval, but he’s taking his time. Wurzelbacher says he must have a 20-30 minute conversation in which he grills lawmakers to “make sure they’re straight.”

Is Bode Miller set to repeat his 0-fer from the Torino Olympics? The American skier failed to win the gold in his first event in Vancouver, the men’s downhill. It wasn't a complete bust though, as he won the bronze. "I wanted to let it go. I was definitely fired up. I went out of the start like I wanted to win this thing. This is a unique opportunity to feed off the crowd's energy and all the energy around the whole Games. I'm gonna keep doing it and hopefully I'll make less mistakes, and if I make less mistakes, I'm gonna be on top," Miller said. The winner, 32-year-old Dider Defago of Switzerland, became the oldest man to win the downhill.