Ny Safidinao

Congress and the White House marched closer to a showdown in court Wednesday after lawmakers rejected President Bush’s offer to let top aides be interviewed about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys only in secret and not under oath. A House Judiciary subcommittee responded to Bush’s offer by voting Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for Karl Rove, the president’s top political aide, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, along with their deputies; and for Kyle Sampson, who resigned last week as chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The vote gives Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, a powerful weapon in lawmakers’ fight to force the administration to explain why the eight U.S. attorneys were forced out of their jobs late last year. It allows him to issue the subpoenas to try to haul the aides up to Capitol Hill to testify under oath at any time. The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, is scheduled to vote Thursday on its own sub

In February, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) announced that Ford Motor has made changes to its $18,000 Fusion sedan , and better safety ratings--for front and side protection especially--have resulted.Ford is, of course, delighted about this, and the company's media Web site is now trumpeting "advanced safety" as one of the Fusion's biggest selling points. The IIHS sees improvement in the model, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) gives the Fusion four- and five-star safety ratings across the board. (NHTSA works with a scale of one to five stars.) But safety isn't the only reason the Fusion has made our list of 15 smart cars for teenagers. It is also inexpensive and has good gas mileage (23/31 city/highway, under optimal configurations). It has "very good" accident-avoidance capabilities (Consumer Reports says the most important factors in determining accident-avoidance capability are braking and emergency ha