As U.S. President Barack Obama starts his second term, the world's business and political elite pines for greater American engagement to tackle a thicket of security challenges.

On separate occasions in recent days, lawyers on opposite sides of a U.S. Supreme Court fight over same-sex marriage took an elevator to the fifth floor of the Department of Justice, entered a large conference room and made a pitch to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and other top Obama administration lawyers.

The slow progress of investigations into battery problems on Boeing Co.'s 787 Dreamliner jets suggest the new plane could be grounded for months, raising fears that the financial hit to Boeing will be greater than had been initially predicted.

A flagship British scheme to get banks lending is likely to prove underwhelming unless the benefits spread beyond the mortgage market and into small business investment.

A photo circulating on jihadi online forums says it all: a plane flying into the Eiffel Tower with Sept. 11 written in Arabic in red letters alongside.

Get ready for The Barack and Bibi Show, Part Two. With crunch-time looming in the Iranian nuclear standoff and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still smoldering, the fractious relationship between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be tested in coming months like never before, as both leaders move into new terms in office.

Previous budget dramas in Washington produced bargains that made it look like Congress was making great strides, without actually doing so.

The Obama administration is likely to rely mostly on existing rules and on flexing executive power to execute its second-term environmental agenda, sidestepping Congress as it sets about radically reducing greenhouse gases generated by major polluters.

The world is awash in easy money, with consequences that are starting to worry some central bankers and business leaders at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF), though so far inflation fears seem overdone.

Republican U.S. President Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Fifteen years later, Democratic President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” That wasn't exactly President Barack Obama's message in his second inaugural address on Monday.