PARIS (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy's center-right bloc suffered a comprehensive defeat in Sunday's local elections, but managed to cling on to power in one mainland region to avoid a whitewash, exit polls said. The Socialist party and its allies won some 54 percent of the vote at a national level, to give the left control of at ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has thrown trillions of dollars at the slumping housing market and it still looks wobbly. The government seized the two biggest mortgage finance companies and offered as much as $8,000 in tax breaks to entice home buyers, while the Federal Reserve has bought more than $1 trillion in mortgage-related assets as a way to ...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Certain blood cancers may be triggered by signals sent from surrounding bone cells, not by individual cells going bad, and interrupting those signals may offer a new approach to treating leukemia, U.S. researchers said on Sunday. "Cancer is generally thought to be a single cell going rogue. It does so by accumulating a series of genetic injuries ...

DUBAI (Reuters) - A U.N. conference rejected on Sunday trade restrictions on red and pink corals used in jewelry in what environmentalists called a new setback for endangered marine species. Delegates at the 175-nation meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Doha failed to back a U.S. and European Union proposal to limit trade ...