"Why are you risking your life for a vacation?" a close friend gasped, aghast when I told her I planned to spend my post-election holiday in Cartagena, Colombia. In fact, few of my friends seemed to think it was a good idea: I couldn't convince any of them to share my rental house in the city's walled Old Town. If they had heard of Cartagena at all, it was only as the backdrop of the classic 1980s romantic caper Romancing ...

As President Barack Obama prepares to convene a health-care summit at the White House later this week, Administration officials are signaling that he intends to pursue a very different strategy for getting reform passed from the one used by his Democratic predecessor in office. Unlike the failed effort of 1994, when Bill and Hillary Clinton presented Congress with a detailed blueprint for reform — and never saw a bill reach the floor of either the House or Senate — Obama ...

The United Nations Sunday launched a special tribunal to prosecute the assassins of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The tribunal convened at The Hague more than four years after Hariri was killed in a massive car bombing in Beirut in February 2005. The Lebanese army was out in force on the streets of Beirut Sunday as people turned out to pay their respects to Hariri, who is buried downtown in the Lebanese capital. Four senior Lebanese generals ...

Rush Limbaugh brought a cheering crowd to its feet several times Saturday in Washington as he called on fellow conservatives to take back the country in the keynote speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are because we make the mistake of assuming that people know. What they know is largely incorrect, based on the way we're portrayed in pop culture, in the drive-by ...

Conservative activists on Saturday named former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney the winner of a poll for best 2012 GOP presidential candidate. The poll marked the third consecutive year Romney came out on top. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal placed second in the annual poll, conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The choices in the poll were: Florida Gov. Charlie Crist; former House speaker Newt Gingrich; former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee; Jindal; Texas Rep. ...

The reversal of two decades of policy on images of returning war casualties is an important and welcome milestone for the American people. NEWARK, Delaware (CNN) -- The reversal of two decades of policy on images of returning war casualties is an important and welcome milestone for the American people. The Pentagon's decision announced Thursday allowing media coverage of coffins of war victims returning to Dover Air Force Base -- if families agree -- restores to its rightful, honorable place ...

Four people in two states have been arrested as part of an investigation into the Final Exit Network, an organization that police believe helped a Georgia man end his life in June, authorities said Thursday. Black, a 55-year-old former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, isn't the only person who holds such firm beliefs, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which today released its annual hate group report. The center's report, "The Year in Hate," found the number of ...

President Barack Obama addressed Congress shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday, but a casual viewer might have believed it was actually morning in America. "Morning in America" was the theme of Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign, and it was front and center in Obama's most critical event since Inauguration Day. The president who has pledged to reverse much of Reagan's economic revolution took a page from the 40th president's playbook in his 52-minute speech, striking a defiantly optimistic tone that ...

A national poll indicates most Americans think President Obama will give a good speech Tuesday night in his address to a joint session of Congress, but expectations are not as high as they were for his inaugural address. Twenty-eight percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday morning said they think the president's prime-time address will be excellent. That's down from the 44 percent last month who thought the inauguration address by Obama would be ...

Hours after the lowest point of his boss's first two weeks in office, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs ended the first chapter of the Obama presidency and launched the second. At the end of his morning staff meeting — where his team had gathered to discuss the handling of issues from the first fortnight, including Tom Daschle's unexpected failure to join the Cabinet because of tax-compliance problems — Gibbs reminded members of his team what they had come to Washington ...