With the Senate headed toward a final vote on an immigration bill this week, a leader of House conservatives is asking his colleagues to support a free-market plan aimed at bridging the gulf between the versions in the two chambers. The proposal by Rep. Mike Pence , provided to TIME ahead of an unveiling speech at the Heritage Foundation, is arguably less compassionate than the version being debated in the Senate and supported in principle by President ...

Early on in his newly released memoir, George W. Bush writes with great credibility, and a welcome absence of histrionics, about his slow-motion turn toward faith. There was no fiery epiphany. There was a growing comfort with the calming release of prayer, a gradual appreciation of the moral truths contained in the Bible. There were doubts too. "If you haven't doubted, you probably haven't thought very hard about what you believe," he writes. And that principle is ...

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Florida. Seven-year-olds can't understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult's face is telling them something is very wrong — and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels' class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can ...

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it. One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during ...

Osama bin Laden, the glowering mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed thousands of Americans, was killed in an operation led by the United States, President Barack Obama said Sunday. A small team of Americans killed bin Laden in a firefight at a compound in Pakistan, the president said in a dramatic late-night statement at the White House. A jubilant crowd gathered outside the White House as word spread of bin Laden's death after a global ...

Have you seen a shift in the past 20 years in the public's attitude toward service? I think so. I hope so. Many schools include a service project as part of their curriculum, and many corporations have in-house projects for their employees or give them time off to do volunteer work. There's a greater understanding about the importance of giving back. Presidents Carter, Clinton and Bush recently feted you for making volunteerism important. What was that like? First, it was a lot of fun to ...

Twas election night all over again. The halls were decked, the pundits were quacking, Democrats said Florida was still too close to call. By the Sunday 5 p.m. deadline, the counting still wasn't done, but in a dramatic signing ceremony at 7:30, secretary of state Katherine Harris certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes. But even as Bush asked Dick Cheney to head a transition team and named Andrew Card his chief of staff, the Democratic faithful were ...

From time to time, I have felt Dick Cheney's pain. We are both about the same age--I am some months older--and we both had our first heart attacks in our mid-30s. Over the years, we have been similarly inconvenienced by heart attacks. The elephant has stepped on his chest four times, and on mine twice. Cheney has had one multiple-bypass operation; I have had two of them. We have both had angioplasties, with stents. A couple of years ago, I ...

President Obama on Wednesday signed a law that makes it a federal crime to assault an individual because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity.He cited the work of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and others "to make this day possible." Later Wednesday, Obama stood with Shepard's parents and relatives of Byrd at a separate White House event honoring passage of the expanded hate crimes law. Noting reports of 12,000 crimes based on sexual orientation over ...

The Senate passed groundbreaking legislation Thursday that would make it a federal crime to assault an individual because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity. The expanded federal hate crimes law now goes to President Obama's desk. Obama has pledged to sign the measure, which was added to a $680 billion defense authorization bill. President George W. Bush had threatened to veto a similar measure. The bill is named for Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming teenager ...