WASHINGTON — A security aide helping with arrangements during President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Mexico became sick with flu-like symptoms and three members of his family later contracted probable swine flu, the White House said Thursday. The disclosure from press secretary Robert Gibbs comes days after the White House played down risks to the U.S. delegation on the two-day trip ...

Chrysler filed for bankruptcy protection Thursday afternoon in New York, a move President Obama said would give the company a “new lease on life.” The president also announced that Chrysler has met his demand to strike a partnership with Italian automaker Fiat and said he thinks the alliance has a “strong chance of success.” You can order swine flu masks here &g...

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday left a key interest rate near zero and said it will continue to use all available tools to improve liquidity in credit markets and increase lending. Because the economy has continued to contract since the Fed’s last meeting in March, the central bank said it will continue to purchase mortgage backed securities and keep interest rates at historically low le...

The Dow soared to two-month highs and the Nasdaq Composite jumped to its best level of 2009 on Wednesday as Wall Street put a positive spin on an ugly GDP report and the Fed said it is beginning to see signs of hope amid the 17-month recession. Today’s Markets The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 168.78 points, or 2.11%, to 8185.73, the S&P 500 added 18.48 points, or 2.16%, to 873...

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year. Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 percent a year, will start to exceed supply as early as 2010 because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as ...

What is H1N1 (swine flu)? H1N1 (swine flu) is a type of influenza (flu) virus that causes respiratory disease that can spread between people. Most people infected with this virus in the United States have had mild disease, but some have had more severe illness, and there has been at least one death. Young children, pregnant women, and people with chronic diseases like asthma, diabetes, or heart di...

More than 100 schools from New York to California have closed down affecting 65,000 students as health and government officials raced to stop the spread of swine flu. Swine flu continued its spread across the United States Thursday, with at least 109 cases confirmed in more than a dozen states. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said it plans to no longer call the deadly flu “swine flu...

In response to an intensifying outbreak in the United States and internationally caused by a new influenza virus of swine origin, the World Health Organization raised the worldwide pandemic alert level to Phase 5 on April 29, 2009. A Phase 5 alert is a “strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitig...

The World Health Organization says the outbreak of swine flu in North America has “pandemic potential” because it can spread from human to human. What flu pandemics are and how they might be stopped or slowed down: — New forms of flu virus often appear first in livestock, particularly poultry and pigs. The vast majority of these animal viruses do not cross over to humans. You can ord...

OAXACA, Mexico  —  Almost two weeks before tests confirmed she was the first person to die of swine flu, doctors in the southern colonial town of Oaxaca couldn’t figure out what was wrong with a 39-year-old woman who arrived at their hospital gasping for air, her hands and feet blue from oxygen-starved blood. They administered antibiotics, but she only got worse. They hooked her to a ven...