On the same day Republicans surrendered a symbolically significant seat in the Senate, the Sarah Palin wars erupted again inside the party. Leaks followed by trash-talking followed by recriminations.

The latest Palin flare-up began in Vanity Fair with a lengthy article by Todd S. Purdum examining the Alaska governor's past and her potential future. The controversy migrated instantly to the Web and the blogs -- it was, in fact, made for the viral communication that dominates today's politics -- and became even more intense, nasty and personal.

The Palin controversy highlights personal enmities and strategic disagreements among Republicans. The victory by Democrat Al Franken over Republican  Norm Coleman for a U.S. Senate seat representing Minnesota, though long anticipated, drives home the degree to which Republicans are now a true minority party. Together, the controversies are another double blow to the weakened party.

President Barack Obama, buoyed by a domestic victory on climate policy, faces his first foreign test on the issue next week at a forum that could boost the chances of reaching a U.N. global warming pact this year.

Obama, who has pledged U.S. leadership in the fight against climate change, chairs a meeting of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters at the G8 summit in Italy on July 9. Known as the Major Economies Forum, the grouping includes 17 nations that account for roughly 75 percent of the world's emissions, making any agreement from its leaders a potential blueprint for U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December.

Meetings of the forum, which Obama relaunched earlier this year, have so far failed to achieve major breakthroughs. Developing countries want their industrial counterparts to reduce emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, while rich nations want developing states to commit to boosting their economies in an environmentally friendly way.

Health care spending in the United States has been growing at more than 7 percent a year, far faster than the economy itself has been growing.  President Barack Obama has called growth in medical spending “a ticking time bomb for the federal budget.”

In his press conference Tuesday, Obama pledged that the health insurance overhaul that he is proposing “brings down the crushing cost of health care. We simply can't have a system where we throw good money after bad habits. We need to control the skyrocketing costs that are driving families, businesses and our government into greater and greater debt.”

But as Congress designs the massive insurance overhaul, there’s reason to doubt that it will find the willpower to control this spending.

It has tried — and failed — in the past.

For much of the last year, Ford Motor has been the strongest U.S.-based automaker. But with Chrysler already out of bankruptcy and General Motors possibly six weeks away from its own exit from bankruptcy, Ford could soon find itself in the weakest position of the traditional Big Three.

The problem for Ford is that its strength was only relative to the greater problems at GM and Chrysler. Ford built its cash reserves not through profits, but by mortgaging most of the company's assets before the credit crisis of 2008 cut off funding for the other automakers.

That pile of cash gave Ford the ability to ride out the sharp plunge in auto sales without turning to the government for help -- at least so far. But it also left Ford with about $32 billion in debt on its books at the end of the first quarter. Ford has gone from the automaker with the most cash on hand to the one with the most debt on its books.

Four Guantanamo Bay detainees have been released and resettled in Bermuda, U.S. officials said Thursday. The four are part of a group of 17 Chinese Muslims who have been in legal limbo at the military detention center in Cuba.

Abdul Nasser, one of the four detainees who landed in Bermuda early Thursday morning, issued a statement through his lawyers, saying: "Growing up under Communism we always dreamed of living in peace and working in free society like this one. Today you have let freedom ring."

It's the first time since 2006 that the U.S. has successfully resettled any of Guantanamo's population of Uighurs (WEE'-gurs) whose fate has been wending through the courts for years. The U.S. government had determined that they weren't enemy combatants and should be released. But China resisted their release and it had been unclear where they would go free.