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President Bush reversed his stance on a congressional plan to help Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weather the mortgage crisis and to provide struggling homeowners with more affordable loans. White House press secretary Dana Perino said the president had decided it was not the time for a veto fight.

A federal rescue of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could cost taxpayers as much as $25 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. But its director said there is a better than 50 percent chance the government will not have to step in to prop up the companies.

Some legislators say oil speculation is driving up energy prices. But a report released Tuesday concludes that the spike in oil prices may have more to do with supply and demand.

When Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley challenged the state's 5.6 million residents to reduce their home electricity consumption by 15 percent, NPR's Richard Harris looked at ways his household could better conserve.

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama both addressed the National Urban League this weekend. Casting a shadow over their visit before the mostly black membership was the ongoing finger-pointing over race. The campaigns spent the weekend going back and forth over just how and why the issue came up.

The Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system has died of heart failure. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was 89. NPR's Anne Garrels recalls a rare interview she had with Solzhenitsyn just after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

Federal authorities have said Army scientist Bruce Ivins' guilt in the 2001 anthrax attacks could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. At a news conference, they said Ivins was the only person responsible for the attack that killed five people.

The Federal Reserve kept its target for the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge on overnight loans, unchanged at 2 percent. It said, however, that strains in financial markets had "increased significantly."

The Dow has fallen by nearly 450 points. A high London Interbank Offered Rate, the stock value of a money market fund that lost money in the Lehman Brothers collapse, and fears the government may be stretching itself too thin with the bailout of American Insurance Group may have all contributed.

There has been no relief for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Morgan's stock was down 43 percent at one point despite reports of ongoing talks with China Investment Corp., which already owns a nearly 10 percent stake in the investment bank.