AP - Al Gore made his debut in the 2008 presidential campaign Monday night, encouraging voters to back Barack Obama because "take it from me, elections matter."

AP - Make more than $250,000 a year? Watch out. Barack Obama wants to raise your income taxes. Social Security taxes, too.

AFP - The quicker Iran responds to an offer from world powers aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff the better, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Monday.

AFP - The US Supreme Court Monday refused to hear an appeal by the last US horse abattoir against its forced closure, despite claims that American horse meat is greatly valued in Europe.

AP - Confined to the bench back in his high school basketball days, Barack Obama felt the fierce urgency of now.

Politico - The conservative Evangelical biographer of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay has moved on to a new subject: Barack Obama. And his new book, due out this summer, may lend credibility to Senator Obama's bid to win Evangelical Christian voters away from the Republican Party.

AP - Obama says he'll visit Iraq, Afghanistan before the November election ... Obama campaign looks for way to win presidency without Ohio, Florida

AP - Barack Obama's campaign envisions a path to the presidency that could include Virginia, Georgia and several Rocky Mountain states, but not necessarily the pair of battlegrounds that decided the last two elections — Florida and Ohio.

AP - Barack Obama says he is going to visit Iraq and Afghanistan before the November election.

AFP - Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen said Sunday there was no "obvious" way forward after his country's shock rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum that plunged the European Union into crisis.

AP - One momentous case down, another equally historic decision to go. The Supreme Court returns to the bench Monday with 17 cases still unresolved, including its first-ever comprehensive look at the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.