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NEW YORK - President Barack Obama on Thursday traced his historic rise to power to the vigor and valor of black civil rights leaders, telling the NAACP that their sacrifice "began the journey that has led me here." The nation's first black president bluntly warned, though, that racial barriers persist.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon and Congress all but dared each other Thursday to a showdown over funding for fighter jets in a multimillion-dollar squabble that each side said they were fighting in the interests of U.S. security.

WASHINGTON - Sonia Sotomayor sped toward confirmation as the nation's first Hispanic justice Thursday, encouraged by Republican promises of a quick vote and cheered on by a Democratic senator's challenge to take on the Supreme Court's conservative wing when she arrives.

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominees rarely take risky or controversial positions when in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sonia Sotomayor is no exception.

WASHINGTON - Up one day. Down the next. Sometimes legislation to remake the nation's health care system moves in both directions at once.

WASHINGTON - The Senate on Thursday approved the most sweeping expansion of federal hate crimes law since Congress responded four decades ago to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is considering a plan to add 30,000 soldiers to the Army to bolster a force depleted by a growing number of troops who are wounded, stressed or for other reasons cannot deploy with their units.

WASHINGTON - Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who recently won his reverse discrimination case at the Supreme Court, said Thursday that an unfavorable ruling by Sonia Sotomayor and other judges "divides people who don't wish to be divided along racial lines." Ricci and his firefighting colleague from New Haven, Conn., Lt.