It's hardly surprising that President Barack Obama chose to schedule a White House visit by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the dead of night Monday, because right now Obama has little to show for his 10-month effort to revive a Mideast peace process. The Israeli leader's refusal to abide by Washington's demand for a complete freeze of settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — and the Palestinian refusal to enter talks without one — has ...

President Obama announced Friday that he will lift a 22-year-old ban on entry into the United States for people infected with HIV/AIDS.

U.S. President Barack Obama says the war in Afghanistan isn't going to end up like Vietnam. A majority of Americans don't agree and don't want to get in any deeper, but even they don't like the alternative.When Obama took office, there were about 38,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. He's raised the number to 65,000 and is said to be considering adding another 40,000 more. And he resists the comparison between the two conflicts. "Each historical moment is different. You never ...

Rock bands, including REM and Pearl Jam, want to know whether their music was played at the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a hard-hitting, wide-ranging speech Wednesday for a conservative gathering, Cheney targeted the administration's decision-making process on how to proceed in Afghanistan, saying Obama has failed to give troops on the ground a clear mission or defined goals and appeared "afraid to make a decision." "The White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are ...

President Barack Obama has a personal stake in the outcome of Monday's meeting in Vienna between Western and Iranian nuclear experts on the future of Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium. That's because, Administration sources tell TIME, Obama personally weighed in three times during secret, multiparty negotiations with the Iranians over the last four months — in what has become not just a test of Iran's nuclear intentions but also a test of Obama's effort to limit Iran's nuclear ambitions through a combination of sanctions ...

There's an air of mystery hanging over President Obama's war council, which meets in secrecy yet again this week to discuss a new strategy for Afghanistan in the highly secure White House Situation Room. But senior officials closely involved in the decision-making process reveal that the president and his team are grappling with one particularly urgent question: Will Gen. Stanley McChrystal's push for 40,000 more U.S. troops really secure Afghanistan McChrystal, who has been joining the president's war council by ...

President Obama will again huddle with his national security team on Wednesday to decide how many more troops — if any — to send to Afghanistan. But making the decision will be the easy part, the real challenge will be getting those extra boots onto the ground. If he ends up embracing Army General Stanley McChrystal's call for 40,000 more soldiers, deploying them in Afghanistan will take up to a year. The first bottleneck between the Oval Office ...

If you thought Barack Obama was the hottest world leader out there, think again. Because the King of Bhutan is sooo dreamy. Even if you don't know much about Bhutan, one glance at the Hottest Heads of State blog, and you'll know why the monarch of this tiny Himalayan kingdom came in at #3 on the website's "scientific and unbiased ranking of world leaders in order of hotness." Think of it as Tiger Beat's global politics edition. Why ...

The White House said it had no comment Monday in response to the upcoming release of a new Michelle Obama action-figure doll. The 6-inch doll is made by New York toymaker Jailbreak Toys and is set for release on November 20, but the company began work on the new product six or seven months ago, according to Jason Feinberg, Jailbreak Toys' 32-year-old founder. "The entire political scene was a little rosier at the time," Feinberg said in a phone interview, ...