Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, buoyed by new-found support from the Obama administration, urged the Palestinians to "get a grip" and drop their settlement freeze precondition for restarting talks suspended since December.

On a one-day Middle East visit on Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed Israel's view that settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank should not be a bar to resuming negotiations -- contradicting the Palestinian position.

Problem is, the figure is wrong, according to an analysis of recovery.gov data by The Denver Post.

Although a Colorado Springs Head Start program reported it had created or preserved 269 jobs, the real number was three, according to an interview with a program manager. And although the largest private contract in the state funded with stimulus dollars was estimated at $166 million, the number was off by tens of millions, apparently because of a data-entry error, contract information shows.

The two candidates have been in a dead heat for weeks. The Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey poll showed Christie with a 1-point lead over Corzine, well within the margin of error.

Among likely voters, Christie pulled 43 percent and Corzine pulled 42 percent. The survey also showed Independent Chris Daggett becoming less of a factor, with his support dropping from 14 percent to 8 percent. But the poll data suggests Daggett's supporters are drifting toward Christie.

Speaking at a Sunday church service, Salva Kiir told worshippers in the southern capital of Juba that voting to remain part of Sudan would condemn them to being "second class citizens."

"I did not do anything for me to apologize for," Robert J. Callahan said a day after being forced to flee a university fair when demonstrators wearing the red and black of Ortega's Sandinista party threw fireworks to protest his comments.

Grimes is in good company. Nearly 1 in 4 Kaine backers in the poll support McDonnell, and the Republican is also benefiting from their largesse. As of Oct. 27, McDonnell had attracted nearly $500,000 from 87 individuals and organizations who had previously donated to Kaine, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign financing. Among those donors is Sheila Johnson, a Northern Virginia businesswoman who was one of Kaine's biggest backers but whose support for McDonnell led her to appear in one of his TV ads.

Some of those who have switched their allegiance say McDonnell has done a better job of talking about the pragmatic issues that also propelled Kaine -- transportation, education and the environment. But they also say his vow not to raise taxes particularly resonates amid economic uncertainty.

"The last governor's race, the state was flush with cash, things were going great, the economy was zooming, houses were popping out of the ground, home values were through the roof," said Purcellville Mayor Robert W. Lazaro Jr., a Republican and McDonnell supporter who also approves of Kaine. "Now it's a totally different economic picture, and the state is being challenged differently. We have to consider how to do business differently."

But this is far from being the whole story of Chirac, a truly likable man who was a bundle of debilitating contradictions and worthy impulses. Despite his political war with Washington and George W. Bush, Chirac is also the most American of all the French politicians I have ever met. [...]

For all its American echoes, the historic first prosecution of a former French president is an indelibly Gallic affair. It is a shipwreck not just of an aging politico who has lived rent-free in a Lebanese politician's spacious Paris apartment since leaving office, but also of the country's campaign finance system and the clans that manipulated it for personal gain. It is a tale of brutal personal conflicts over money, power and pride out of Balzac or, had he been French, Shakespeare.

The trial of Chirac could still be blocked by a procedural appeal. But his legacy is already being tarnished in other courtroom brawls. His former right-hand man, Charles Pasqua, was sentenced to a year in jail last week for taking bribes while interior minister. Pasqua immediately suggested that Chirac had secretly initiated the prosecution years ago to block him from running against Chirac for president.

At almost the same time, prosecutors were demanding the conviction of Chirac's former prime minister and political heir, Dominique de Villepin, on charges of having conspired to falsify documents intended to end the political career of Nicolas Sarkozy, who succeeded Chirac as president two years ago and who has vowed to hang "on a butcher's hook" those who plotted against him.

Khrushchev’s threats about Berlin made a powerful impression on Kennedy. Since the end of the war, some four million people, perhaps one-fifth of the population, had fled the economic misery and political oppression of Communist East Germany and escaped to the West. By 1961, the Communists had tried to close off all escape routes, but Berlin, divided between Western and Eastern zones with a subway train connecting them, provided a loophole. After the Vienna meeting, Berlin became an even greater obsession with Kennedy. He knew that the defense of the city and access to it was an inescapable test of American will as well as its commitment to NATO and Western Europe. But Berlin’s geographical position well within Soviet-controlled East Germany made it seem difficult to stand firm in a crisis without risking a nuclear confrontation. “We’re stuck in a ridiculous situation,” he told his aide,

"It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunited Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunited."

I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.[...]

[T]he president’s eloquence, his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him, has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.