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Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeared together at a question-and-answer forum before the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans, Louisiana. Asked his biggest regret after leaving office, Bush said he now wonders whether he should have tried to get Saddam Hussein to leave office at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. He told the gathering, "I've thought a lot about it, but at the end of Desert Storm, the question was should we have kind of kept going on that road to death and all this slaughter until Saddam Hussein showed up and...

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, said Sunday he had few regrets about his White House campaign and no second thoughts about picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. “I don’t have a lot of regrets about it. I think we ran an honorable campaign,” McCain said on “Fox News Sunday.” The Arizona senator added that he was proud of things he had accomplished during the campaign and the people he surrounded himself with. In addition, he argued, the campaign may have made him “more effective here in Washington in these very difficult times.” Asked...

GENEVA - The United Nations has expressed regret that undercover Cuban officials attended a U.N. news conference on human rights, where they sought information on a French journalist asking critical questions about Fidel Castro's regime. Elena Ponomareva, spokeswoman for the global body's European headquarters, said she was unable to prevent two Cuban diplomats from entering the Oct. 11 news event with Jean Ziegler, a U.N. rights expert who was preparing for a mission to the communist-run island. The U.N. strictly prohibits government officials from attending news conferences unless they are explicitly invited and included among those presenting. Previous run-ins have...

Both chambers of the Commonwealth of Virginia's General Assembly passed a resolution saying government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history; and . . . the abolition of slavery was followed by . . . systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding." The General Assembly also expressed regret for the "exploitation of Native Americans." If Richmond schools did a better job instilling values, Denise Armstrong says, she...

NEW YORK - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin opened a visit to New York on Friday by expressing regret for having criticized the slow redevelopment at the World Trade Center site, saying he will "never again refer to that site as a hole." Nagin was in town for a two-day pitch to the New York investment community to get business in his hurricane-ravaged city. While on a stage with the Rev. Al Sharpton and representatives of a New Orleans delegation, Nagin addressed comments he'd made in a recent "60 Minutes" broadcast, where he branded ground zero "a hole in the...

BESET by low ratings and an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, US President George W. Bush concluded today that perhaps all his trash talk in the war on terror was not such a good idea. At a news conference with his British ally Tony Blair, Mr Bush expressed regret for calling for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to be brought in "dead or alive" and taunting Iraqi insurgents by saying "bring 'em on". The blunt-speaking Texan said it was "kind of tough talk that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe a little...

YAHK, British Columbia (AP) -- A Vietnam war-era deserter who was caught crossing into the United States and held for a week says he made a mistake when he fled the Marine Corps in 1968. "When I was 18, I wasn't aware that duty and honor would mean as much to me as they do now," Allen Abney, 56, said Monday in this southeast British Columbia town. "Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have done what I did 38 years ago," he said. "It wasn't worth it, all the pain I caused my family." Abney was arrested March 9...

Abstract: In an interview on CNN's Situation Room Friday, Robert Novak said he "probably" regrets writing the column that revealed the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. NOTE: The complete text of this article is available only to subscribers.

NEW YORK - Shortly after tasting freedom for the first time in nearly three months, New York Times reporter Judith Miller went for a massage and a manicure. She enjoyed a martini, a steak dinner and the fresh air. That was the easy part. The once-jailed reporter's subsequent return to the paper's 43rd Street newsroom, where she was viewed as a polarizing figure, was fraught with anxiety. She found her co-workers "confused and perplexed" about her jail term for protecting a Bush administration source, and about her paper's apparent inability to rein in the Pulitzer Prize- winner, according to a...

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Friday he regretted any misunderstandings caused by his comments earlier this week comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis. The White House, Senate Republicans and others had called for an apology after Durbin's comments Tuesday. Durbin made the comparison after reading an FBI agent's report describing detainees at the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures. ''If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their...

<p>LOS ANGELES -- Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, appearing at a debate here aimed at the state's increasing population of ethnic minorities, on Tuesday expressed regret that he once supported legislation to deny driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants and to deregulate the state's electricity market.</p>

I think of all the parishes closing because of a lack of priests and I have been part of the cause, part of the problem.A resigned priest on his deathbed By Frederick Heuser The doctor has just left my hospital room. I saw the sadness in his eyes as he tells me the bad news. The cancer had spread through most of my body and further treatment would be useless. He said he would put my wife in contact with the hospice program to make the time I had left as comfortable as possible. “As comfortable as possible”—that phrase...