UNITED STATES

The two candidates with the highest vote totals in the first round will face each other in the deciding second round.

It seems Apple is catching up with the backlog of new iPad '3' orders. The estimated shipping time on their website currently stands at 5-7 weeks, which is a dramatic improvement from the initial 3-4 week wait period

Brazilian cities continue to require parking in new developments, to the chagrin of builders and environmentalists.

President Obama is urging Congress to prevent a planned interest rate increase on federal student loans, weighing in on the latest budget showdown.

Investigators looking into the recent Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia have interviewed some of the Colombian prostitutes who allegedly met with agents last week before President Obama's trip to Cartagena, Colombia, ABC reported.

The names of two senior Secret Service agents who lost their jobs due to the Colombia prostitution scandal are now out in the open.

Last week, Mitt Romney got in trouble for talking about riding horses. This week, President Barack Obama is in trouble because he used to eat dog meat.

Stocks rose on Friday, putting the S&P 500 on pace for its biggest gain in the past five weeks, after earnings from a slew of bellwether companies propelled what has been a solid earnings season to date.

The International Monetary Fund is eyeing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, a bloc of countries commonly known as BRICS, to meet its goal, set by the institution's managing director Christine Lagarde, to raise at least $400 billion of additional funds to safeguard the global financial system against the euro zone sovereign debt crisis.

Honeywell International Inc. (NYSE: HON) Friday reported higher first-quarter earnings as strong sales to aerospace customers and increased revenue from petrochemical producers offset higher costs.

The intense smell of pot that usually blankets a popular quad at the University of Colorado-Boulder on April 20 was replaced by the smell of fish-based fertilizer Friday morning.

Myanmar President Thein Stein hopes to achieve a resolution with Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda about Myanmar's debt.

Fearing a trade war, a Spanish oil executive is asking Madrid to take a cautious approach to how it responds to Argentina's seizure of two subsidiaries of a Spanish oil major .

World leaders sharpened their condemnations of the bloodshed in Syria on Thursday, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging the United Nations to adopt a resolution similar to the one that enabled the NATO operation in Libya.

McDonald's Corp. met analysts' expectations in first-quarter revenue and profit growth, as economic troubles in Europe did not to put a dent in the world's largest restaurant chain's balance sheet, the company reported on Friday.

As the U.S. Supreme Court ponders the fate of healthcare reform in the current election year, a study released on Thursday shows that one in four working-age Americans went without insurance at some point in 2011, often as a result of unemployment and other job changes.

Babies conceived through certain fertility treatment techniques are about one-third more likely to have a birth defect than babies conceived without any extra help from technology, according to a review of several dozen studies.

In a seeming effort to profit from the latest European disaster, large investors are causing some unusual movements in the U.S. securities markets.

China has provided some assistance to North Korea's missile program, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday, a week after the hermit state's failed rocket launch triggered international condemnation.

South Korea, Japan, the United Nations and the U.S. believe that North Korea intends to develop ballistic missile tests and have roundly condemned Pyongyang’s program.

Haitong Securities Co. (SHA: 600837), China's second-largest brokerage by assets, raised HK$13 billion ($1.7 billion) in the largest public offering in the world so far this year, media reports said Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.