Speech

With his photogenic wife at his side and a willingness to make eye contact and engage in small talk, Xi Jinping looks more like an American politician than the gray suits who populate the upper ranks of Chinese politics. One of his first acts as head of the Chinese Communist Party last year was to ban long speeches, banquets and red carpets. But during his first months in power, Xi has proved himself more hard-line on a number of issues than his recent predecessors. He has tightened censorship in academia and the media, and spearheaded China's territorial assertions in the South China and East China seas.

WASHINGTON - Five years ago, when Americans had not yet made up their minds on their choice for president, Europe had. More than 200,000 people crowded the streets of Berlin - a favorite backdrop for U.S. politicians reaching for history - to hear then-candidate Barack Obama promise to turn the page on the unpopular policies of George W. Bush. "Germany meets the superstar," the news magazine Der Spiegel proclaimed on its cover. As he heads to Europe on Sunday for a visit that will culminate with a sequel to that Berlin speech three days later, Obama has been demoted to mere president.

WASHINGTON - The massive leaks about U.S. spying systems caused sharp political and legal aftershocks Tuesday as the Justice Department prepared to file criminal charges against Edward Snowden, a government contractor who has publicly admitted disclosing highly classified telephone and Internet data-gathering operations. The vast scope of the government surveillance sparked the first federal lawsuit challenging its legality, a bipartisan effort in the Senate to declassify secret court orders that authorize the operations, and requests from Google and Facebook for permission to disclose more about National Security Agency requests for users' emails and other online communications.

SAN FRANCISCO - Activists say an online campaign to curb misogynist content on Facebook could be a watershed moment for a growing movement to remove posts and images that promote violence against women on the Web. Women, Action and the Media launched the campaign last week, urging major companies to pull their advertisements from Facebook that could run alongside graphic language and images of rape, abuse and other violence against women. Heeding the call, more than a dozen advertisers, including Nissan Motor Co. and Nationwide Building Society, removed their ads from Facebook, while others, such as American Express and Unilever's Dove brand, pressured Facebook Inc. to remove the offending pages.

Many days, the sheer weight of Iszurette Hunter's clinical depression becomes more than she can lift. She clings to her bed in her South Los Angeles home. Important obligations slide away, including keeping appointments with doctors who are trying to control her asthma and high blood pressure. "I don't have no desire," she explains. As the nation seeks to extend healthcare coverage to millions of new and in many cases chronically ill patients, one of the great parallel challenges to controlling costs and improving delivery of care will be managing the mental health problems of people like Hunter.

SAN FRANCISCO - Apple Inc. unveiled a daring overhaul of its mobile operating system to kick off its annual developers conference, where it hopes to show critics that it has lost none of its innovative swagger. In addition to unveiling iOS 7, the company made a blizzard of other product and feature announcements that included upgrades to MacBook laptops and a new streaming radio service. As expected, there were no new iPhones or iPads, which are often announced separately. But the presentation seemed in spirit to also be a rebuttal to critics who contended that Apple had lost its innovative edge in the last year.

MEXICO CITY -- President Obama said Friday that he is “absolutely convinced” Congress will pass new immigration laws this year, projecting more confidence in his ability to work with Republicans from the Mexican capital than he has shown lately at home. In a speech to Mexican students, Obama said he has tried to “lift the shadow of deportation” from young people brought to the United States as children and said he wants to do more thorough comprehensive changes to U.S. immigration policy.

Many actors are finding easy money in doing voice-over work for radio and television commercials. But it is very unlikely that anyone landed an easier gig than Al Pacino, who didn't lift a finger to get a plum voice-over spot with Chrysler Jeep. The unmistakable voice of Pacino can be heard in the new television commercial touting the Jeep Grand Cherokee. In the spot, Pacino is giving an inspired speech about how life is a "game of inches. " If it sounds familiar, it is. The speech comes from a pivotal scene from the 1999 Oliver Stone movie "Any Given Sunday," which stars Pacino as an aging football coach.

Sitting across from his teacher, Edgar Martinez repeated the word he couldn't quite pronounce: "situation." "Sit-oo-a-shun," he said. "What happens with the tu?" asked the teacher, Lisa Mojsin, hired to help Martinez reduce his accent. "Chu," Martinez responded. "Yes, like chewing your food," Mojsin said, saying the word slowly: "Sit-chew-a-shun." "Wow -- that is another new one for me," said Martinez, 37, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager and lives in Los Angeles.

Sylvia O'Brion, 76, sat beside an oil lamp and wood-burning stove in her clapboard cabin on the sub-zero night, strumming her banjo and singing: "This is my home where the bobcats holler and the wild deer roam." She has lived in the primitive dwelling without running water or electricity on the slopes of Dead Fall Mountain her entire life. She shuns modern conveniences. She lives alone in one of the isolated pockets beyond the power lines in West Virginia.

On May 19, President Obama gave a commencement address at Morehouse College , a predominantly black men's college in Atlanta. His words and message were forceful, timely and uniquely befitting the first African American president. The president said what few others could say and still be considered politically acceptable. He debunked the notions of victimization and impotence so pervasive in talk about race, religion and ethnicity today, and encouraged the young black grads to "strive to do what's right … [to]

At times defensive, solemn, lawyerly and personal, President Obama on Thursday offered a rare glimpse of the burden that the nation's fight against terrorism has placed on the man who leads it. In a speech spanning nearly an hour, the former constitutional law professor addressed what is likely to be a central piece of his legacy, weighing what is "effective" and "legal" in warfare against what is "wise or moral. " Obama acknowledged that drone strikes he has ordered have killed innocent people.

Better late than never, President Obama has moved to establish more rigorous standards for the targeted killings of Americans and foreigners alike away from a battlefield. The need for what he called "strong oversight of all lethal action" was one theme of the president's address Thursday at National Defense University. Another, equally overdue, was his renewed determination to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and expedite the repatriation of dozens of inmates who have languished there despite being cleared for release.

WASHINGTON - As President Obama prepared to deliver a major speech on national security Thursday, his administration acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four U.S. citizens - one more than previously known - in drone missile strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. The disclosure Wednesday raised fresh questions about the secret drone campaign, a signature part of Obama's counter-terrorism effort, in which several thousand suspected terrorists, militants and others have been killed.

LAREDO, Texas -- A recent wave of kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo was prominently featured in a recent Sunday edition of El Mañana, one of the largest and most long-standing Spanish-language newspapers on the border. But the story carried no byline, and no residents were quoted or pictured. "People don't want to go out for interviews - they say, 'No, we may get kidnapped,'" said Ninfa Cantú Deándar, who runs the paper with her siblings. Because of threats from Mexican cartels, the paper - published in the twin cities of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas - is operating very differently these days.

John Green, bestselling and prize-winning author of young adult novels including "The Fault In Our Stars" and "Looking for Alaska," gave the commencement address at Butler University on May 11. It's witty, smart, thoughtful, and going viral; if you start hearing people in your life saying "happy birthday, sir," you can thank him. There's a YouTube video of the entire graudation ceremony -- Green begins speaking about an hour in -- and he's...

"The King's Speech" and "Black Swan" are indie hits in the U.S., but in Great Britain, they're just plain hits. The two low-budget specialty pictures took the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, respectively, at the British box office this weekend, beating such bigger-budget and seemingly more mainstream fare as "The Green Hornet" and "The Dilemma. " "The King's Speech," which stars Colin Firth as King George VI and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist, took the top spot for the third weekend in a row in the nation where the story takes place.

President Obama officially launched his re-election campaign with public rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday.With that launch came a re-tooled stump speech which both defended his record in office and laid out the contrast with Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The speeches in both cities were largely the same. Here's a full transcript of his remarks in Columbus, following the acknowledgement of local leaders. OBAMA: "I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today.  You guys will be the backbone of this campaign.  And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way -- door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Filmmaker William Friedkin, who's best known for such landmark films as "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist" in the early '70s, looks back on a long career directing movies, opera and theater in his new memoir, "The Friedkin Connection. " Why do you think Sonny Bono, whom you directed in the 1967 film "Good Times," was a genius, as you write ? Sonny Bono was a guy who created a number of No. 1 hit songs in the '60s. At first they might have sounded to a lot of older people like popcorn songs, bubble gum, but those songs, many of them, are really strong and they stand the test of time.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Millions of Pakistanis braved threats from militants and voted Saturday in national elections that marked the country's first democratic transfer of governance and appeared to put former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on track for a potential return to power. The elections change Pakistan's political landscape and probably will sideline the Pakistan People's Party, which has ruled the country for five years. But the results are not expected to lead to any major shift in U.S.-Pakistan relations because the country's powerful military still holds sway over crucial issues such as Pakistan's role in peace talks with insurgents in Afghanistan and the country's relationship with its nuclear archrival, India.