Washington - US President Barack Obama met Thursday with leaders of the credit-card industry, urging them to end unfair practices that are raising costs on indebted consumers, while US lawmakers are considering a wider crackdown on the sector.

Obama said he hoped to create a new system that "eliminates some of the abuses" including sudden interest-rate hikes and late-payment fees, which have added to unmanageable debts for some US consumers.

Washington - US President Barack Obama marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday by warning that preventing genocide in the future depends on the world's willingness to confront hatred wherever it arises.

"Bearing witness is not the end of our obligation. It's just the beginning. We know that evil has yet to run its course on earth," Obama said. "We've seen it, in this century, in the mass graves and the ashes of villages burned to the ground and children used as soldiers and rape used as a weapon of war."

Washington  - Barack Obama's campaign promise to recognize that the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire was genocide has left him in a difficult spot as president.

Since he took office, the influential Armenian-American community has been clamoring for Obama to follow through on the declaration and expressed disappointment that he did not do so during his trip in early April to Turkey.

Washington  - US President Barack Obama and key administration officials launched a full media blitz Wednesday to push for limits to climate-damaging pollution in the United States, coinciding with Earth Day.

Obama touted the importance of wind power during a trip to the US state of Iowa and called for a "new era of energy exploration," sounding a theme repeated by a series of cabinet members who testified before Congress on the same day.

Amman - Jordanian politicians and pundits on Wednesday welcomed US President Barack Obama's strong support for the two-state solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict - but queried the pressure he would put on the right-wing government in Israel.

"We are optimistic, but we should not go too far in this optimism," Mahmoud Mhaidat, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the Jordanian lower house of parliament, told German Press Agency dpa.

Chicago, Apr 22: An American man, who wrote a letter to US President Barack Obama about the dangers of smoking, was surprised to receive a reply from him.

Michael Powers, 54, whose dad had passed away 30 years back, wrote to Obama urging him to give up smoking, so that he could be there for his daughters.

When Powers, whose family has Waukegan roots, received the reply he could not believe it.

“When I first got it, I thought, ‘Hey, he wrote this’,” the Chicago Sun Times quoted him as saying.