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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Wednesday took responsibility for his party's loses on Election Night and said he is willing to work with congressional Democrats on the major issues during the last two years of his presidency."I'm obviously disappointed with the outcome of the election and, as the head of the Republican Party, I share a large part of the responsibility," Bush said during a East Room news conference at the White House."I told my party's leaders that it is now our duty to put the elections behind us and work together with the Democrats and independents on the...

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Iraq, racked by violence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and impoverished Haiti, Myanmar and Guinea are ranked as the most corrupt countries in the world in a new survey.Finland, Iceland and New Zealand are ranked as the least corrupt, with Denmark, Singapore and Sweden just behind.Berlin-based corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) ranks 163 countries based on perceived levels of corruption among public officials and politicians in its 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, was ranked last, just below Iraq, Myanmar and Guinea, reflecting what TI said was a high correlation between...

SPRINGFIELD, Missouri (AP) -- President Bush, working a southwest Missouri campaign crowd like a yell leader, blasted Democrats on Friday, saying they have no plan to keep Americans safe from terrorists.Bush said Democrats calling for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq aren't unpatriotic, just wrong. He said Democrats who voted against legislation to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists, the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program and the Patriot Act don't understand the stakes in the war on terror."If they say they want to win the war on terror, but call for America to pull out of what al Qaeda says is the...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A quarter century after the Reagan revolution and a dozen years after Republicans vaulted into control of Congress, a new CNN poll finds most Americans still agree with the bedrock conservative premise that, as the Gipper put it, "government is not the answer to our problems -- government is the problem."The poll released Friday also showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans perceive, correctly, that the size and cost of government have gone up in the past four years, when Republicans have had a grip on the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.Discretionary spending...

Most Americans do not believe the Bush administration has gone too far in restricting civil liberties as part of the war on terror, a new CNN poll released Thursday suggests.While 39 percent of the 1,013 poll respondents said the Bush administration has gone too far, 34 percent said they believe the administration has been about right on the restrictions, according to the Opinion Research Corp. survey. Another 25 percent said the administration has not gone far enough.Asked whether Bush has more power than any other U.S. president, 65 percent of poll respondents said no. Thirty-three percent said yes. Of those...

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Four aid workers were attacked in Sudan's Darfur region, beaten and given death threats, an official from the Medecins Sans Frontieres medical organization said on Tuesday. The MSF France team was attacked by around a dozen masked, armed men on a road between Zalingei and Nertiti near the violent central Jabel Marra region in Darfur on September 11. Three Sudanese staff were beaten and one international female staff was sexually harassed, MSF deputy head of mission Marc Galinier said. "They [the attackers] said we don't want any foreigners here," Galinier told Reuters. He said MSF France had...

The Democrat-backed resolution citing "no confidence" in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is mostly motivated by: Rumsfeld's performancePartisan politics

CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) -- U.S. foreign policy is furthering terrorism in the Muslim world, and negotiations are the only way to resolve the impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami told CNN while on a two-week visit to the United States. The reformist leader is widely viewed as moderate compared with new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As president, Khatami favored stronger U.S. ties. In an interview Sunday with CNN, Khatami said American policies have "only increased, and will only increase, extremism in our region." (Watch Khatami tie Bush's policies in the Mideast to a rise in terrorism --...

Seattle police were protecting temples and mosques Saturday after a suspected hate killing prompted fears of the Middle East crisis spreading to the United States. Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said a Muslim gunman killed a woman and wounded five others at a Jewish center in Seattle, Washington, Friday afternoon, and police were protecting mosques as well as synagogues out of fears of retaliation. A U.S. citizen, Naveed Afzal Haq, has been arrested and booked on a charge of murder and five charges of attempted murder. (Watch armed police take aim as panicked women run -- 1:44) The 31-year-old Muslim of...

Investigators are trying to find about 50 women who were photographed decades ago by a man now on death row for murdering two aspiring models in the early 1980s, authorities said Tuesday. Detectives are investigating whether the women were raped or killed between 1975 and 1984 by William Richard Bradford, said Los Angeles County sheriff's officials. They posted photos of the women on a department Web site in the hope that the public could help account for them.

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law Renee was diagnosed with a rare form of malignant breast cancer. Because of the nature and stage at which the cancer was detected, standard treatments were deemed insufficient. Thus, Renee is now in clinical trials using a regimen of chemotherapy drugs and radiation that should give her a better fighting chance. I am among many who are sufficient evidence of the power of prayer in the recovery from cancer. Many here will remember back to 2004 when I was diagnosed with malignant pancreatic cancer and later suffered a prolonged hospital stay with multiple complications...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal government should guarantee that all Americans have basic health insurance coverage, says a committee set up by Congress to find out what people want when it comes to health care. "Assuring health care is a shared social responsibility," says the interim report of the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, a 14-member committee that went to 50 communities and heard from 23,000 people. The committee describes its recommendations as a framework. The recommendations don't say who would pay for universal health coverage or how much it would cost. The concept of government-guaranteed coverage runs counter to...

I come to you all once again asking for prayers for another dear and kind soul close to me and mine. Deana is a wonderful young lady; the niece of my sister-in-law, and only 28 years in age. She has been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that has yet to be fully classified, but its behavior has many hallmarks of malignancy. The tumor was recently discovered on her hip toward her abdomen and has grown so large and so quickly that the doctors have no option but to perform chemotherapy before they will even consider surgical removal of the tumor....