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President Obama started the first round of talks Friday about how to avoid fiscal calamity. He has been pushing to end Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, a plan strongly opposed by some House Republicans. But in the end, a deal with the House may come down to Speaker John Boehner and the president.

Several top government officials have been caught up in an embarrassing cheating scandal — including the defense minister, who resigned as a result, and the education minster, who is under investigation for her doctoral dissertation. An informal group of "plagiarism police" has undertaken the hunt.

For more than 150 years, a charity auction has kicked off the wine season in France's Burgundy grape-growing region. It's turned into an A-list rendezvous for international industry players — this year attracting former supermodel and first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and record prices.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is the son of a truck driver, an evangelical Christian, a former presidential candidate, and for months now a loyal surrogate for Republican Mitt Romney. He's also considered a top contender to become Romney's pick for vice president.

The thought of bagpipes usually conjures up images of Scottish men in skirts — not auto-rickshaws and South Asian spices. But no country manufactures more bagpipes than Pakistan, and no place in Pakistan makes more of them than Sialkot, a bagpipe-crazy city near India-administered Kashmir.

The 2008 GOP presidential nominee came to the defense of Hilary Clinton's longtime aide on the Senate floor. While Sen. John McCain didn't mention Rep. Michele Bachmann by name, he made clear he wants her to stop suggesting the aide is helping the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Queen of Versailles documents the rise and fall of David and Jackie Siegel, who lost their billions in the recession while building the biggest house in the U.S. Director Lauren Greenfield spoke to NPR about the film — and how the Siegels are an allegory for the overreaching of America.

The Bullitt Foundation's new Seattle headquarters, billed as the world's "greenest" building, is designed to be entirely self-sustaining. The developers hope it can inspire others to build this way.

China's ruling Communist Party has announced that disgraced senior politician Bo Xilai has been expelled from the party and faces criminal charges. His fall began when a local police chief told authorities about the murder of a British businessman.

South African Oscar Pistorius will run on artificial legs in the 400-meter Olympic sprint preliminaries in London Saturday. Pistorius is a double amputee who runs world-class times on his carbon-fiber limbs. Some question whether he has an unfair edge — so a lab studied his running motion.