President Barack Obama has returned to the Washington area after a weeklong vacation on Martha's Vineyard.

The presidential aircraft returned to the capital Sunday evening from the first family's vacation spot off the Massachusetts coast.

While on the island, Obama played golf, took first lady Michelle Obama to dinner and went for a bike ride with his daughters. He also grabbed a deep-fried seafood lunch with pal and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

The vacation wasn't just all play. Obama on Tuesday announced he wanted Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to serve another four-year term. On Saturday he delivered a eulogy for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in Boston.

The first family plans another attempt at a vacation over the Labor Day weekend. This time, they'll head to Camp David, Md.

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President Barack Obama is wrapping up finitely detailed talks with his G-8 partners on economic and environmental challenges and turning to more photogenic events: meeting the pope and becoming the first black American president to visit a mostly black African country.

He was throwing in a televised news conference from Italy for good measure.

Obama, his wife and daughters were to meet Pope Benedict XVI shortly before leaving Italy late Friday for Ghana. The two men have spoken by phone but not met before, aides say.

In Ghana, officials expect a tumultuous reception for Obama, whose father was from Kenya. Because the first family arrives rather late Friday night, the main ceremony in Accra will occur Saturday, before he departs for Washington after a weeklong trip that started in Russia.

It will involve drumming groups and Ghanians "putting their best foot forward in terms of the cultural richness of an incredibly diverse country," White House adviser Michelle Gavin told reporters Thursday. To help accommodate the many who cannot attend, U.S. and Ghanian officials have scheduled "watch parties," radio broadcasts and video coverage in theaters, parks and other places.

"I do not believe that there is a way in which we could ever fulfill or assuage the desires of those in Ghana or on the continent on one stop," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

But first, Obama had some final business at the Group of Eight nations meeting in central Italy, where he has had mixed success in seeking accords on greenhouse gas emissions and other matters. He was to meet with several African leaders early Friday, then hold a news conference.

Ahead of Obama's meeting with reporters, world leaders committed themselves to a $15 billion initiative to help farmers in poor countries boost production.

According to a draft statement obtained by The Associated Press, the money will be distributed over three years. Not all of it is new funding, though, and several countries are already well behind in aid pledges to Africa made four years ago.

The initiative, which would significantly change the global approach to hunger, was launched near the end of three days of G-8 talks. The draft statement is to be endorsed by another 19 nations, including African countries, which are attending the meeting.

Later Friday, Obama had an audience scheduled with the pope, whose generally conservative views will not entirely mesh with Obama's. They are likely to discuss world poverty, the Middle East and other topics, aides say, but the visit will be largely personal and spiritual.

"There are issues on which they'll agree, issues on which they'll disagree and issues on which they'll agree to continue to work on going forward," deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough told reporters Thursday.

"Given the influence of the Catholic Church globally," he said, and "the influence of the Catholic Church and church social teaching on the president himself, he recognizes that this is much more than your typical state visit."

Obama is a Protestant seeking a new church in Washington.

He will become the third straight U.S. president to visit Ghana, a relatively stable democracy in a continent wracked by poverty and heavy-handed governments. But he is the first such president of African descent.

Obama chose Ghana, Gavin said, "because it's such an admirable example of strong, democratic governance, vibrant civil society." There's much to admire, she said, and to hold up as "a counter to what one often hears about Africa."

On Saturday, Obama will meet with Ghana's president, John Atta Mills, and address the nation's parliament.

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U.S. President Barack Obama's administration is not discussing a second stimulus plan to jolt the U.S. economy out of recession, a White House budget official told Congress on Wednesday.

"No one in the administration is talking about a second stimulus at this point," said Robert Nabors, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, who is tracking the effects of the economic recovery plan already in effect.

But the White House press secretary, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, suggested that could change if the country continues to lose jobs.

Nabors testified at a House of Representatives hearing on oversight of the $787 billion stimulus plan.

"What we are focused on right now is implementing the recovery act that Congress has already passed," he added.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama is "not ruling anything out, but at the same time he's not ruling anything in" on another stimulus.

"We continue to watch what's going on," Gibbs said. "I think the bottom line for the president is, if there are steps that he thinks, and his team thinks, need to be taken to improve our economy, we won't hesitate to do that.

Obama is meeting this week with leaders of the Group of Eight major industrial nations in L'Aquila, Italy, to discuss solutions for the languishing world economy.

World markets, which had been recovering since March, have recently lost ground, in part because comments by an Obama economic adviser were seen as signaling a U.S. recovery was farther off than hoped. The Dow average fell 1 percent on Wednesday but later pared some of its losses to 8,120.

Laura D'Andrea Tyson, an economist who advised Obama during the 2008 campaign and is a member of his economic advisory panel, said on Tuesday that the United States should be planning for a possible second round of fiscal stimulus that focused on infrastructure investment.

Nabors told the hearing Tyson did not represent the White House.

"She's an outside economic adviser. She does not work for the administration," Nabors said.

When he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law in February, Obama hailed it as key to creating and saving jobs during the longest U.S. recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But with the unemployment rate now standing at 9.5 percent, its highest in more than two decades, some are wondering if the various tax and spending measures can accomplish that mission.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said on Tuesday that U.S. leaders should be open to a second stimulus, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, also a Democrat, has said he sees no evidence another recovery package is needed.

Nabors said the country's losing 467,000 jobs in June was "unacceptable," but he noted that the rate of loss was much slower than during the first quarter of the fiscal year when the average monthly job loss was 691,000 jobs.

He said other indicators, such as orders for durable goods, were turning upward, showing the stimulus was having a positive impact and in the near future the country would see "genuine economic expansion and crucial job creation."

"There's got to be an exit strategy," Mr Obama said in an interview with the CBS "60 Minutes" programme on Sunday. "There's got to be a sense that this is not a perpetual drift."

Mr Obama's comments come as his administration prepares to roll out its new strategy for Afghanistan amid rising insurgent violence that has called into question the viability of a seven-year-old US-led effort to create a functioning democracy.


The US president announced last month that he would send 17,000 more US troops to Afghanistan this spring and summer in response to a deteriorating security situation, adding to the 36,000 already there.

"You know I think it is the right thing to do. But it's a weighty decision because we actually had to make the decision prior to the completion of (the) strategic review that we were conducting," he said.

US commanders have said that as many as 30,000 additional troops are needed to overcome a stalemate in parts of Afghanistan.

Mr Obama also signalled that the US was redefining its role in Afghanistan. While the Bush administration favoured a broad goal of promoting democracy, Mr Obama said his primary goal was simply to get Afghanistan to a point where it was not used as a site from which to launch attacks on the US. He narrowly defined the US mission in Afghanistan as: "making sure al-Qaeda cannot attack the US homeland and US interests and our allies. That's the number one priority."

"And in service of that priority there may be a whole host of things that we need to do," he said. "We may need to build up economic capacity in Afghanistan. We may need to improve our diplomatic efforts in Pakistan."

"We may need to bring a more regional diplomatic approach to bear. We may need to coordinate more effectively with our allies. But we can't lose sight of what our central mission is," he said.

Barack Obama senses that he's in the middle of a hurricane whose gale-force winds could blow history his way.

He doesn't mind acknowledging that he is learning as he goes, and he is not bitter about how little help he is getting from Republicans. But he will never again let bipartisanship become the defining test of his success.

And, yes, he is aware that the passage of his stimulus package, though a big deal three weeks into a presidency, is only a prelude to the "really tough" part. The next step, "getting credit flowing again" and averting "potential catastrophe in the banking system," may make the stimulus fight look like a friendly warm-up game.

The president offered his thoughts to a group of columnists whom he invited to accompany him Friday on Air Force One during his first visit home since he became president. He made his way west as his stimulus was nearing final passage in Congress, and to describe him as at ease would be merely to repeat one of the reigning cliches of his short presidency.

More striking was his sense that fate has handed him opportunities few presidents ever get and that his test will be whether he makes good use of his chance to bend history at one of its "inflection points."

"Leadership at those moments can help determine which direction that wave of change goes," he said. "I think it's very hard . . . for any single individual or politician to unleash historical momentum on its own. But I think when that historical wave is there, I think you can help guide it."

Asked if this were one of those moments, he replied, flatly, "yes." That may make the situation "scary sometimes," but it should also "make people determined and excited." Maybe that explains his good mood.

Yet Obama's purpose on Friday was not to play at being a philosopher of history but to stress his devotion to FDR-style pragmatism. "We will do what works," he said, reprising his administration's theme song. That "will require re-evaluation" and "some experimentation -- if that doesn't work then you do something else."

What clearly didn't work well was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's effort last week to lay out the administration's bank rescue plan. Obama offered no apologies. He argued that Geithner will keep working on an approach "over the next weeks, months, probably through the end of the year" because there is no "painless, quick fix here."

Obama is clear that he doesn't want to follow Japan's slow-moving bank rescue model from the 1990s, which "sort of papered things over, never really bit the bullet."

He's not ready to go down Sweden's road of temporarily nationalizing the banks. "You can make a good argument for the Swedish model, except for this fact: They only had a handful of banks," he said. "We've got thousands of banks. The scale, the magnitude of what we're dealing with is much bigger."

Yet on the continuum of Japan to Sweden, Obama is clearly closer to Sweden, and he pointedly refused to rule out the Swedish approach. "I think what you can say is I will not allow our financial system to collapse," he said. read more

Shepard Fairey, the street artist whose first solo exhibition opened Friday at the Institute of Contemporary Art, was arraigned Monday after being arrested on two outstanding warrants for graffiti-related charges.

Fairey's iconic "Hope" portrait of President Barack Obama hangs behind him in the photo at left.

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