BERLIN -- Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for making change possible in East Germany as she visited what was once a fortified border crossing on Monday - retracing her steps on the night 20 years ago the Berlin Wall fell.

Martin Schram: Perhaps the best way to understand importance of this week's nuclear summit attended by 47 world leaders is recall the answers to two questions that were asked, a decade apart, of a man who wasn't even in Washington this week: Mikhail Gorbachev.

WASHINGTON - In unusually blunt remarks Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Russia is buying a one-way ticket to insignificance.

MOSCOW - Former President Boris Yeltsin, who hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union by scrambling atop a tank to rally opposition against a hard-line coup and later pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, died Monday at age 76.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Ronald Reagan was remembered with jelly beans, flowers and American flags on Sunday at memorials in his hometown and outside the mortuary where the former president's body lay.

America has almost 12 million illegal immigrants.

Stephen Hays Russell, guest commentary

Taylor Jones: It’s hard to “clear, hold and build” piles of rubble punctuated by poppy fields. Why re-enact the Charge of the Light Brigade? 

After emerging relatively unscathed from nine months in Iraq, staff sergeant Donovan Spieth was all but home safe. Then an accident on a motorcycle in Germany in June 2005 — a routine stop on the way back to the States — left him paralyzed from the chest down.

Muscles tensed. Silk entwined. Through music they float on air. Engulfed by the notes of Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Saint-Saens, the suspended acrobats sway, raising the orchestral experience to dizzying new heights.

CANNES, France - About a decade ago, when Leonardo DiCaprio was on the cusp of megastardom and Al Gore was the U.S. vice president, the two talked together about global warming.

CANNES, France - About a decade ago, when Leonardo DiCaprio was on the cusp of megastardom and Al Gore was the U.S. vice president, the two talked together about global warming.

Russia still is not much of a democracy, but that it’s even close is largely due to the energetic, if often erratic, efforts of its former president, Boris Yeltsin, who died this week at age 76.

WASHINGTON -The capital honored Ronald Reagan on Thursday with a procession by tens of thousands past his casket, quiet prelude to a majestic funeral shaped by his own hand. Visitors from the Reagan-era ranks of power and friendship flocked to his widow's side.

For conservatives and Republicans who are wondering what in the world happened to their party, we should recall June 12, 1987. That day, 21 years ago, President Ronald Reagan stood before the wall dividing East and West Berlin and directed his famous appeal to the leader of the then Soviet Union, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

MOSCOW - Mstislav Rostropovich played the cello with grace and verve - and lived his life offstage the same way. His death at age 80 takes away one of modern Russia's most compelling figures, admired both for his musical mastery and his defiance of Soviet repression.

Arizona history teachers struggle to find time to teach their subject thoroughly, finding too few days in the school year to cover the millennia from Sumerians to the Hohokam to al-Qaida.

Arizona history teachers struggle to find time to teach their subject thoroughly, finding too few days in the school year to cover the millennia from Sumerians to the Hohokam to al-Qaida.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. - At a sunset hilltop ceremony, a week of public mourning for Ronald Reagan came to a close with his three surviving children poignantly remembering their father - the 40th president of the United States - as loving and dedicated.

WASHINGTON - In a quiet, yet very public, moment of tenderness, Nancy Reagan visited her husband's casket in the Capitol Rotunda one final time before the funeral cortege departed for Washington's National Cathedral.

WASHINGTON - In a final hail to the chief beneath marble arches and somber skies, the nation bade a lingering goodbye to Ronald Reagan on Friday, mourners remembering his "lightness of spirit" and his stoic widow placing a tiny kiss on his casket before the westward journey to a hilltop grave.

LOS ANGELES - Luther Vandross and Coldplay stole some of hip-hop's thunder at the Grammys on Sunday night, but rap funksters OutKast still won album of the year for "Speakerboxxx-The Love Below" and Beyonce took home a record-tying five trophies.

VATICAN CITY - Pope John Paul II set an example of how to live life, a dynamic preacher who traveled the world, battled communism and proclaimed his moral code opposing abortion, casual sex and consumerism.