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The South Carolina Supreme Court today ordered Governor Mark Sanford – the last holdout of GOP governors who refused stimulus money – to apply for the funds. Sanford, whose profile has risen on the back of this case, inciting talk of a 2012 presidential bid, said he would not appeal and plans to sign the applications for the funds on …

From our White House Photo Blog.

The White House this morning sent over paperwork for Sonia Sotomayor, who is in her third day of meet ‘n greets, to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the committee just now released her questionnaire online. Find it here.

Here’s my story in the new issue of dead-tree TIME on the five big questions that must be resolved.

Damascus

About an hour after Barack Obama’s excellent Cairo speech, I met with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, at his office here to talk about the speech and the Israel-Palestine conflict. We spoke for several hours and I will have a fuller accounting of our conversation in my print column next week. Meshal speaks some English, …

Barack Obama’s Cairo speech Thursday, by design and billing, was an address to the Muslim world. And in substance it hit all the requisite points, less shifting U.S. policies than better explaining them–on Israel, on nuclear proliferation, on the spread of human rights, on the war against Islamic radicals.

But the speech also …

The streets of Cairo are lined with police, thousands of them, standing erect every 20 or 40 feet, facing away from traffic to look for threats, even if that means looking directly at a wall. Instead of gun holsters, most wear water canteens on their belts.

At Cairo University, where Obama is set to speak, American protesters from …

Wow. Iran had a rock-em, sock-em presidential debate yesterday between the two top candidates for the job, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Say what you will about Iran, but it’s difficult to imagine another country in the Middle East, except Israel (and possibly Iraq), where this sort of public confrontation could take …

Damascus

The buildup for President Obama’s speech today in Cairo has been prodigious, and not least by the White House, which has held the sort of briefings for journalists that usually attend a State of the Union address and also plans to translate the speech into 13 languages. The expectations are enormous. Brother Howard Fineman, …

President Obama’s Cairo speech is very much a campaign event. Though the targeted audience won’t exactly be voting for him, they will be targeted in the same way that Obama targeted Wal-Mart moms in Ohio. Since many Muslims in nation’s like Iran and Turkey use cell phones as their primary computers, the speech text will be distributed in …

Until now, Barack Obama’s strategy on health care has been a conscious effort to avoid the mistakes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who delivered a 1,000-plus-page bill to Congress and then watched it get dismantled. Though Obama produced a health care plan during his presidential campaign, he has signaled since his inauguration that he is …

Seems the President will have to find another GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote for Sonia Sotomayor.

President Barack Obama, who during the campaign pledged to end the policy of don’t ask don’t tell, yesterday neatly avoided a political land mine that hamstrung President Bill Clinton’s first 100 days. Obama named Rep. John McHugh, a New York Republican, to be Secretary of the Army. The White House said the issue never came up in …