President Barack Obama’s secretary paid taxes at a higher rate than he did in 2011 despite having a “substantially lower income,” the White House said Friday, casting the disparity as an argument for Congress to adopt the so-called “Buffett Rule.”

The commander of the Massachusetts National Guard said that rape allegations against him are part of a years-long “smear campaign’’ by a powerful group of senior officers who oppose his efforts to make them work a five-day week and to change a state law so they could be fired without a court-martial.

Rumors have floated that Iceland has forgiven the mortgage debts in its country. That’s not quite true.

Thirty years after Canada “brought home” its Constitution from Britain and controversially enshrined the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the nation’s fundamental legal framework has emerged as the No. 1 constitutional model for the world.

Egypt’s election commission struck down the candidacies of 10 presidential candidates on technical grounds, including the three major ones.

A perennial candidate, who has become the controversial Democratic nominee for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, said someone made him a handsome offer to drop off the ballot.

Embattled Alameda County, California, Supervisor Nadia Lockyer’s claimed that her email was hacked by an ex-boyfriend when a message from her email account landed in a reporter’s inbox: Her husband, California’s Treasurer Bill Lockyer, the message said, bought and gave her drugs years before she wound up in rehab.

Newt Gingrich was bit by a penguin.

Kim Jung Un spoke publicly for the first time.

Barack Obama told a gathering of leading executives in Colombia ahead of the Summit of the Americas that legalization of drugs could worsen the problem.