Pope Benedict XVI's trip this week to the United States will include high-profile visits to the White House, United Nations and Ground Zero. But no matter what political issues or media angles may be buzzing before take-off, the Vatican tends to stress the pastoral aspect of any papal journey. The six-day itinerary is above all stacked with church services, baseball stadium masses and Catholic institutional encounters to allow the pontiff to tend to his flock, and to the priests ...

Doaa Kassem, like most Egyptian women, is used to being catcalled and grabbed at by men in the crowded streets of Cairo. The 24-year-old executive secretary is well versed in women's rights, having studied the subject in Sweden, and she is bolder than most when it comes to dealing with her harassers. "I'm brave enough to stop them and tell them [what they're doing is wrong]," she says. Sometimes she even chases them down. Kassem may be brave, but ...

On the eve of a two-day summit with U.S. President Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says both countries are "moderately optimistic" about "resetting" their relations. In an interview with Italian media RAI and Corriere della Sera, Medvedev said relations "have begun to revive" after a period of significant deterioration during the administration of President George W. Bush. The top issue on the agenda for the two leaders, Medvedev said, is working out a new treaty on limiting strategic offensive nuclear ...

The last time Terry Williams can remember being headache-free was in December. A chronic migraine has plagued her ever since. So have balance and vision problems, a tremor in her left arm, a prickly sensation in her feet and a loss of childhood memories. The ailments, she says, began on April 11, 2007. Williams, then a 17-year flight attendant on American Airlines, noticed a "misty haze type of smoke" on flight No. 843 as it taxied toward a gate in ...

The big question about Barack Obama has always been this: Is he a risk taker? Domestically, he answered it months ago with his massive stimulus package. On foreign policy, we only just learned the answer. By taking on the Israeli government over the issue of settlement growth, Obama is showing that he's a gambler overseas as well. Despite the conventional wisdom that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is impossible anytime soon, he seems hell-bent on pursuing one. And if he ...

As she lobbies members of the New York Senate these days, the politician in Christine Quinn can understand what the gay rights activist in her sometimes cannot. NEW YORK (CNN) -- As she lobbies members of the New York Senate these days, the politician in Christine Quinn can understand what the gay rights activist in her sometimes cannot. "The fear of the unknown," is how she describes it. "This is a vote they've never cast before. And they don't ...

As congressional Republicans continued Monday to stoke the flames over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's accusation that the CIA lied to her about waterboarding, House Democrats appeared to be standing behind their leader. One of Pelosi's closest allies in the House, Connecticut Democrat John Larson, acknowledged to CNN that the speaker's news conference last week could have been better, but insisted there hasn't been any fallout among Democrats. "Perhaps it wasn't one of her best press conferences. But certainly everyone in ...

No one asked President Barack Obama directly about the elephant in the room on Wednesday. But he brought it up anyway, during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A British reporter asked Obama about the proper size of government stimulus spending, and the U.S. President decided to talk about the perilous balance of global trade. "In some ways, the world has become accustomed to the United States being a voracious consumer market and the ...

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, facing an international arrest warrant, is paying the price for pandering to the West, al Qaeda's second-in-command said in an audio statement released Tuesday. "I am not defending Omar al-Bashir or his regime, nor am I defending what it has done in Darfur and elsewhere," Ayman al-Zawahiri said in the statement released by al Qaeda's production company, as-Sahab Media. But, he said, "the issue isn't one of Darfur and solving its problems; the issue ...

Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail. Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people's lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call ...