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Just one day after a federal report revealed that 1 in 7 U.S. families struggled to get enough to eat last year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urges lawmakers to reauthorize school nutrition programs that help feed the nation's schoolchildren.

Facing political pressure from the Gulf Coast oyster industry, the FDA has backed off a plan to require that raw Gulf of Mexico oysters be treated to rid them of a potentially deadly bacteria found in warm-water oysters. The plan had sparked anger in Louisiana — especially in New Orleans.

The National Security Agency has been working with Microsoft Corp. to help improve security measures for its new Windows 7 operating system, a senior NSA official said on Tuesday.

Wanda Eileen Barzee pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City. The case against Barzee's estranged husband, Brian David Mitchell, is working its way through the courts.

In the run-up to the financial crisis, the U.S. and China reinforced each other's bad habits. President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, on Tuesday agreed to address the imbalances that helped bring about the financial crisis. But change won't come easily.

A flood of people came forward in the last days before an amnesty program expired Oct. 15. The total far surpasses the number of people who disclose offshore accounts in a typical year — about 100 — and comes amid a broad U.S. crackdown on international tax evasion.

Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman has withdrawn his concession in the close 23rd District Congressional race as New York election officials begin counting paper ballots.

In places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, international relief workers say they are being much more actively targeted by a murky assortment of insurgents and criminal gangs. Some 260 aid workers were killed, kidnapped or seriously injured in 2008, the highest annual toll in 12 years. This year is on track to be similarly bad.

The pace at which people fell behind on their mortgages slowed during the summer for the third consecutive quarter, but the overall delinquency rate hit another record, a new report shows. For the three months ended Sept. 30, 6.25 percent of U.S. mortgage loans were 60 or more days past due, up 58 percent from a year ago.

The Internal Revenue Service says more than 14,700 taxpayers fessed up and disclosed they had tried to hide money in offshore bank accounts during its recent amnesty program