Aaron's Daily WWW Newspaper

CHICAGO - Ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's plan to auction off President Barack Obama's vacant U.S. Senate seat marked the culmination of years of scheming for personal gain that included trying to extort a congressman and pressuring businesses to hire his wife, prosecutors alleged Thursday.

NEW YORK - Wall Street is pointing to a moderately higher open as the nation's unemployment rate rose in March but not as much as some investors had feared.

LAS VEGAS - Goodbye, numeric cell phone keypads. You're going the way of the rotary dial. Touch screens and QWERTY keyboards will take over from here, thank you.

BOSTON - Boston's NBC affiliate says it will air a local newscast instead of Jay Leno's new 10 p.m. talk show.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - Michael Vick is determined to return to the NFL after he finishes his prison sentence for bankrolling a gruesome dogfighting ring and he planned to describe those plans in court Friday, his lawyer and agent said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers slashed 663,000 jobs in March, lifting the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent, the highest since 1983, official data showed on Friday in a report underscoring the growing distress in the labor market.

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama was mobbed by cheering crowds after arriving in France Friday for a NATO summit, where he hopes to secure backing for his new strategy over Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress on Thursday approved budget blueprints embracing President Barack Obama's agenda but leaving many hard choices until later and a government deeply in the red.

(Reuters) - Google Inc may be in talks to buy internet start-up Twitter, the free micro-blogging service that allows people to send short text messages to a network of friends, the TechCrunch website said late Thursday

(Reuters) - U.S. banks that have received government aid, including Citigroup Inc, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co, are considering buying toxic assets to be sold by rivals under the Treasury's $1,000 billion plan to revive the financial system, the Financial Times said.

SEOUL/LONDON (Reuters) - North Korea is readying a controversial rocket for launch as early as Saturday, officials said, pushing ahead with a plan widely seen as a disguised long-range missile test.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has been indicted for corruption while in office, including trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat that was held by President Barack Obama, prosecutors said on Thursday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In an unusual political challenge to the Federal Reserve, the Senate on Thursday called on the central bank to disclose the names of institutions that receive emergency loans and pushed for a study to determine the "appropriate" number of regional fed banks.

LONDON (AFP) - South Korea expects North Korea to launch a rocket on Saturday if weather conditions permit, President Lee Myung-Bak said Friday, while warning the move was "not in their benefit".

STRASBOURG (AFP) - US President Barack Obama touched down in France on Friday to meet European leaders and drum up support for his new Afghan war strategy at the NATO alliance's 60th anniversary summit.

PHNOM PENH, April 3, 2009 (AFP) - Cambodian and Thai troops fought heavy gunbattles along their disputed border on Friday, leaving three soldiers dead in a major flare-up of a long-running feud over an ancient temple.

LILONGWE (AFP) - Pop icon Madonna failed in her bid to adopt a second child from Malawi after a court Friday rejected her application, warning that the case could open the door to trafficking in children.

LONDON (AFP) - World leaders battled Wednesday to hammer out their differences over how to fix the global economy, against a backdrop of violent demonstrations in which one man collapsed and died.

JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israel is not bound by the 2007 relaunch of US-backed peace talks with the Palestinians, new Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Wednesday, striking a hard line on his first day in office.

LONDON (AFP) - Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev promised Wednesday a new era in relations between the United States and Russia and made a milestone bid to agree far-reaching nuclear arms cuts.