Hillary Clinton

Brooke Shearer, a former journalist and personal aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton who had directed the White House Fellows program and served in the Interior Department, has died. She was 58. Shearer, who had cancer, died May 19 at her home in Washington, D.C., her family said. She was married to Strobe Talbott, a high-ranking State Department official in the Clinton White House who heads the Brookings Institution research and policy center in Washington.

Sidelined for the last month by a broken elbow, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wanted to make a splash with a much-touted speech Wednesday. State Department aides billed it as a major foreign policy address and distributed excerpts in advance in an apparent effort to raise her visibility as chief U.S. diplomat. In the speech, Clinton called for a new "architecture of global cooperation."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed concern Tuesday about suspected military ties between North Korea and Myanmar's ruling generals, saying they had the potential to destabilize the entire region. Clinton arrived in Thailand and met with Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva before a regional security summit on the island of Phuket. The secretary of State is expected to sign a nonaggression pact during the meeting of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's seven-nation tour of Africa reaffirms the administration's pledge to keep the long-neglected continent in its sights. On her first stops in Kenya and South Africa this week, Clinton stuck with the message of tough love that President Obama delivered in Ghana last month, balancing trade and development talk with the need to confront lawlessness and impunity. It's a good beginning to an Africa policy still in the making. Africa is an area where Democrats and Republicans have found agreement, although too often what they have agreed is to pay little attention to it. President George W. Bush's support for HIV/AIDS and malaria programs were widely hailed on the continent, even when his global "war on terror" made him personally unpopular.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, visiting Pakistan on a fence-mending tour, turned unusually blunt Thursday, accusing the government of failing to do all it could to track down Al Qaeda. Clinton told a group of journalists in Lahore that she found it "hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to." Al Qaeda, she said, "has had a safe haven in Pakistan since 2002." Clinton's three-day visit is her first to Pakistan since she became secretary of State, and its principal goal is to improve strained relations.

Peter Max, known for his colorful canvases and psychedelic portrayal of cultural icons, became friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton after the 1993 inauguration -- they told him they had posters of his on their dorm room walls in college. "I was beyond belief thrilled," said Max, who has painted 100 portraits of Clinton. Now, the Berlin-born, Shanghai-raised pop artist's work is on three floors of the museum of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark., for a show that begins Monday and runs through May 25. The show includes Max's depiction of presidents, American symbols such as the White House and the Statue of Liberty, and other images of his adopted country and beyond.

Former White House Chief of Staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty said in a deposition released Monday that he felt pressured to take action on the White House travel office but First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton did not tell him to fire its staff. And Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, who has emerged as a central figure in the firings, told the same House investigators the first lady had said to him the workers "ought to be gotten out."

With his acceptance speech Thursday night, President Clinton vigorously crystallized the themes that have carried him in less than two years from an abyss of political despair to a commanding advantage in his drive for reelection. What is less clear after this week's convention is whether he has truly convinced his party to follow him beyond election day on the course he laid out.

Touching on a fissure that divides their party, leading liberal Democrats--including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson--expressed disdain Tuesday for President Clinton's compromise with Republicans on welfare reform but told delegates to the national convention that they must fight for Clinton's reelection.