Hillary Clinton

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Israel and the West Bank next week for her first trip to the region as America's top diplomat, Israeli and Palestinian officials said Monday. The Israeli officials said Clinton would arrive in Israel on March 2 for two days of meetings with leaders. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the visit had not been announced by the State Department, which had not released Clinton's schedule for next week.

The Obama administration intends to spend most of a $900-million Palestinian aid package on support for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, rather than in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip communities that were badly damaged in the recent weeks-long Israeli offensive, a State Department official said Sunday. Robert A.

The Obama administration has already concluded that a diplomatic overture to Iran, one of the central promises of the president's election campaign, is unlikely to persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear ambitions. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates in a private meeting Monday that it is "very doubtful" a U.S.

The Obama administration moved closer Thursday to resuming diplomatic contact with Iran as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed an international meeting on Afghanistan that could bring U.S. officials face to face with their longtime adversaries. Clinton suggested that the United Nations host a meeting on Afghanistan on March 31 that would include "key regional and strategic countries," as well as NATO members and other world powers and international groups.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Mexico in two weeks as part of an Obama administration effort to bolster its neighbor in its bloody war with organized crime cartels and quell mounting U.S. anxiety over cross-border violence. The announcement Friday of Clinton's planned visit came just days after President Obama signed a spending bill that provides $300 million in additional aid for Mexican President Felipe Calderon's crackdown on drug gangs.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ventures south of the border this week at a moment when the tricky dynamics of the U.S.-Mexico relationship are on full display. It's too soon to call it a rough patch, but a flap over cross-border trucking and unwelcome words about the drug war have led Mexico to push back against its powerful neighbor recently. The trade dispute got tetchy last week when Mexico raised tariffs on scores of U.S.

In candid comments aimed at reassuring a sensitive neighbor, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton accepted Wednesday that the United States shares blame for Mexico's drug violence, and promised more equipment and support to help the country's war against traffickers. Clinton said the U.S. has a duty to help since it is a major consumer of illicit drugs and a key supplier of weapons smuggled to cartel hit men.

Arriving amid heated preparations for Lebanon's parliamentary elections, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed support Sunday for a Western-backed coalition in a close race against an alliance led by Hezbollah and supported by Iran and Syria. Clinton's brief visit to Beirut, the first since President Obama took office, was a sign of how important it is to Washington that Lebanon not return to factional fighting. The three-hour stopover came as the U.S.

Former President Clinton will be named special U.N. envoy to this impoverished Caribbean nation that has been mired in political and social turmoil for decades, his spokesman said Monday. An official announcement is expected from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today, Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna said. Clinton is popular among many of Haiti's poor because as president in 1994, he used the threat of military force to oust a dictatorship there. U.S.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will soon announce that gay American diplomats will be given benefits similar to those of their heterosexual counterparts, U.S. officials said Saturday. In a notice to be sent soon to State Department employees, Clinton said regulations that denied same-sex couples and their families the same rights and privileges of straight diplomats were "unfair and must end," because they harm U.S. diplomacy.