GOP chastises Obama’s speech over Israeli-Palestinian issue

President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world on Thursday faced mixed reaction abroad — and a very clear directive at home from Republicans and conservatives: The United States cannot ruin its relationship with Israel. Speaking in Cairo, Egypt, the president took on the heated and controversial Palestinian-Israeli conflict by reaffirming that the U.S

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Buchenwald survivors see Obama as family

A long narrow road winds through a thick forest up a hilled called the "Ettesberg," on the outskirts of Weimar in central Germany. The road goes on for miles through the forest, but every once in a while you see an old railway station, a tower, or an old structure withering in the German rain. This road was named “the trail of blood,” by inmates of the infamous concentration camp Buchenwald, because of the death marches they were forces to undertake as they were deported to work as slave laborers for Nazi Germany’s defense industry from 1937 to 1945.

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The 5 Big Health-Care Dilemmas

Max Baucus, the Senate’s point man on health care, sounds supremely confident when he talks about the odds that Congress will pass its most sweeping piece of social legislation since the New Deal. “Meaningful, comprehensive health-care legislation passes this year. That’s a given,” he declares, sipping a bottle of water in his functionally furnished hideaway office just steps from the Senate chamber

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Your Move, China

If North Korea has in the past made a habit of annoying China, its only ostensible ally in the world, what must Beijing be thinking now? For most of the past six years, China has been the host and chief promoter of the so-called six-party talks. Their explicit goal: to get North Korea to give up its nuclear-weapons program

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Egyptians await Obama, saying, ‘It can’t all be rainbows and roses’

Languishing in a Cairo prison last year, a prisoner noticed that every day, the prison staff would clean the adjacent cell, even though there was no one in it. Why, the prisoner asked his guards, did they do it It’s for Barack Obama, they responded.

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White House: No slight meant to Nancy Reagan on stem-cell issue

The White House did not intend to show any disrespect toward Nancy Reagan when it failed to invite the former first lady — a vigorous supporter of stem-cell research — to a bill-signing ceremony on the subject, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday.

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