North Korea's nuclear program is "the most acute challenge to stability in northeast Asia," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday. But, Clinton said in a 45-minute address to the New York-based Asia Society, the Obama administration is prepared to seek a permanent, stable peace with Pyongyang as long as its government pursues disarmament and does not engage in aggression against neighboring South Korea. "If North Korea is genuinely prepared to completely and verifiably eliminate their nuclear weapons program, ...

President Obama says he'll talk to Iran if Tehran "unclenches its fist"; President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran is open to negotiations but only on a basis of "fairness and mutual respect." Both men's coded conditionals are a reminder that after three decades of mutual hostility, talking won't be easy. TIME tapped a number of Iran experts for perspective on some of the key questions facing U.S.-Iran diplomacy. When should talks begin Conventional wisdom holds that Obama should wait until ...

President Obama is vowing the loss of a Republican in his Cabinet will not stop his efforts to bridge the partisan divide. Sen. Judd Gregg said Thursday he was withdrawing his nomination as commerce secretary, citing "irresolvable conflicts" over the administration's stimulus bill and the upcoming 2010 census. Gregg didn't like some of the spending in the stimulus plan and had concerns the White House would take control of the census away from him, sources said. The population count ...

Taking no chances, President Obama is exerting last-minute pressure on Congress to approve his stimulus plan by highlighting stories of people affected by the economic downturn. The Democratic National Committee and Obama's Organizing for America are using Obama's vast e-mail list Friday to contact the president's political supporters and point them to a new Web page, where several of these stories can be viewed. The goal is to drum up public support for the measure as Congress prepares to vote ...

Friends, relatives and acquaintances were shocked to hear news reports that Beverly Eckert, the widow of a September 11 victim, was aboard the Continental flight to Buffalo, New York, that crashed Thursday night. "I am horribly saddened by this news," said Valerie Lucznikowska, a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Lucznikowska said she, Eckert and another woman traveled to Washington last Friday for a meeting between 9/11 family members and President Barack Obama. "I would very much like ...

A Continental commuter plane coming in for a landing nose-dived into a house in suburban Buffalo, sparking a fiery explosion that killed all 49 people aboard and a person in the home. It was the nation's first fatal crash of a commercial airliner in 2 1/2 years. Witnesses heard the twin turboprop aircraft sputtering before it went down in light snow and fog around 10:20 p.m. Thursday about five miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport. Continental ...

A female suicide bomber detonated in a crowd of primarily women and children on their way to a religious festival Friday, killing at least 35 people and wounding 45 others, an Interior Ministry official said. Two children were also killed in a separate incident when an old and unexploded mortar round exploded Friday morning just south of Baghdad. The children, who were younger than 15, were playing with the round when it exploded, a ministry official said. The deaths happened ...

Senator Judd Gregg ended his courtship with President Obama by resorting to one of the oldest lines in the book. "It's not about them," the New Hampshire fiscal conservative announced Thursday, describing the White House team. "It's about my own sense of who I am." All at once, politicos all over Washington had the same reaction: Yeah, right. This town knows a thing or ...

The courtship of Senator Olympia Snowe started in December with a phone call from Joe Biden. The Vice President-elect made sure Snowe had his home telephone number in Delaware so she would know how to reach him on weekends. In the weeks that followed, the two traded memos back and forth about how an economic stimulus package should work. "I had an infinite number of ideas, because they had been stored up," says Snowe, a Maine Republican who never ...

Acts of kindness will help pull the nation through its economic crisis, according to the woman who came to the rescue of a homeless Floridian who publicly appealed to President Obama. Chene Thompson, the wife of state Rep. Nicholas Thompson, R-Fort Myers, is letting Henrietta Hughes and her son stay in a house she owns in nearby La Belle rent free until they get back on their feet. "You don't have to be a politician to put forth a stimulus ...