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Three days of intense pressure persuaded House GOP leaders to give in and go along with a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut and extend unemployment compensation benefits. Congress convenes on Friday in hopes of approving the stopgap measure.

As with everything happening in Congress these days, the deal reached Thursday to pass a 2-month extension of a payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed wasn't a "done deal" until one more step was taken.

The one-time dissident who went on to be his country's president, "spent his life removing chains of oppression, standing up for the downtrodden, and advancing the tenets of democracy and freedom," says Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

If your child was conceived with a donor egg, should you tell her? What and when should you tell? A new study finds that donors and recipients often don't think that through before the child is born, even if they are relatives or good friends.

The two-month extension means Congress and Obama will need to negotiate a longer-term deal to continue past February the tax holiday and other policies like federal unemployment insurance benefits and continued higher payments to doctors who accept Medicare patients. Boehner's position going into those negotiations has arguably been weakened.

The Obama administration is trudging ahead with policies designed to protect the integrity of scientific research. But critics of the process say the policies that have been released so far don't do enough to prevent political manipulation of science.

Back in the 1970s, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration grew increasingly concerned about the casual use of antibiotics in livestock production. Now, in the quiet days before Christmas, the agency quietly withdrew a proposal to regulate the industry's use of the drugs.

The Assad regime has been saying it is battling armed gangs and terrorists. It says today's attacks prove its point. Regime opponents are saying the government may have been behind the bombings.

No one is sure whether the Imperial woodpecker is extinct--the two-foot-tall relative of the Ivory-billed woodpecker lives in a remote mountain range in Mexico, and was last credibly spotted in the 1990s. Tim Gallagher, editor of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, describes a hair-raising expedition to try to save the woodpecker and make it home unscathed.

By tracking the blinking light of distant stars, NASA's Kepler space telescope has identified the first Earth-sized exoplanets, and another which orbits its star in the "Goldilocks zone," where liquid water--and possibly life--could exist. Principal investigator William Borucki talks about the newly discovered worlds.