AP - On a day oil prices leaped to unheard-of highs, senators lined up Big Oil's biggest executives and pummeled them with complaints that they're pretending to be "hapless victims" while raking in record profits.

AP - Rep. Laura Richardson has an unusual perspective on the housing foreclosure bills moving through Congress: One of her own homes was threatened with repossession after she failed to pay the mortgage.

AP - Barack Obama criticized likely general election rival John McCain on Wednesday where it could hurt most — the Arizona senator's reputation as a champion of ethics. Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, raised the possibility she might carry her fight to the Democratic convention floor.

AP - President Bush's GOP allies in the Senate face election-season votes Thursday on both his long-pending war funding request and tens of billions of dollars backed by Democrats for veterans education and an assortment of domestic programs.

AP - People in Massachusetts suddenly are thinking the unthinkable: Who possibly could succeed Sen. Edward Kennedy, patriarch of the famed political family that has dominated the state for more than four decades?

AP - The Bush administration relied on a flawed study to conclude that research on a highly infectious animal disease could safely be moved from an isolated island laboratory to sites on the mainland near livestock, congressional investigators concluded in findings obtained by The Associated Press.

AP - The U.S. must be careful not to withdraw forces from Iraq too quickly because security gains could be lost, warn the nation's top two war generals.

AP - The House overwhelmingly rejected President Bush's veto Wednesday of a $290 billion farm bill, but what should have been a stinging defeat for the president became an embarrassment for Democrats.

AFP - Barack Obama Wednesday pledged that Democrats would unite to defeat Republican John McCain in November's presidential election as he celebrated a milestone on the road to his party's nomination.

AP - Sen. Edward M. Kennedy gave a thumbs up to well-wishers and kisses to relatives as he walked out of the hospital Wednesday, a day after learning he has a cancerous brain tumor.

AP - Sen. Edward Kennedy's diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor left Congress this week without its best dealmaker as well as its boldest liberal, a politician known simultaneously for his staunch left-wing positions and for his willingness to work with right-wing lawmakers to get legislation passed.

AP - Edward M. Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Arlen Specter — fighters and history-makers all. Their battles with age and illness are the hallmarks of the nation's oldest-ever Senate and reminders of the fragility of power.