Your customized headlines for Mon, Aug 6, 2012

The government last week pushed back against contractors on how they should brace for a nearly $1 trillion cut in federal spending, arguing that mass layoff notices are unnecessary and that warnings of contract terminations are overblown.

We want the pony. We want the Jet Ski. We want the big house on the beach, the big account at the bank (Swiss or otherwise), the big car in the garage (especially if that garage comes equipped with a super-cool elevator that lifts the car from one floor to the next.)

The U.S. economy lost 1.2 million jobs between June and July. But that's not how it got reported. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its jobs figures for July, it said the economy gained 163,000 jobs. So what gives?

OAK CREEK, Wis. — Federal authorities are investigating the fatal shooting of six people Sunday at a Sikh temple south of Milwaukee, an incident that shocked members of the nation's close-knit Sikh community.

David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser who was President Obama's 2008 campaign manager, accepted a $100,000 speaking fee in 2010 from an affiliate of a company doing business with Iran's government.

COLUMBUS, OHIO — There were 13 lawyers filling the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley last week, arguing over a sliver of a slice of the millions of votes that Ohio will count in the 2012 presidential election.

Three days after a scandal-plagued 2010 Las Vegas conference for employees of the General Services Administration, the president's Office of Government Ethics gave a clean bill of health to the GSA's ethics program.

Robert M. Groves was a transitional figure at the Census Bureau, which he headed for three years.

He presided over the 2010 Census, probably the last one to rely on paper questionnaires mailed through the U.S. Postal Service. And he was the first to write a blog (though he never got around to sending out tweets).