President Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met at the White House on Monday and pledged to maintain strong ties after the U.S. withdraws the last of its troops, but nagging concerns remain about Iraq's security and neighboring Iran.

It happens every four years: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict crops up as an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich brought it to the fore this year when he told The Jewish Channel, a cable channel, that the Palestinians were "an invented people."

He's the hottest topic in sports and now Denver Broncos quarterback is a word, kind of.

The online Global Language Monitor, which professes to track what's hot in the world of words, announced today that is has declared "tebowing, the act of 'taking a knee' in prayerful reflection" during an athletic activity is now "an English language word."

It's the kind of news that parents of a premature baby would grasp at: One of the world's smallest preemies, born weighing a mere 9.8 ounces, is now a 22-year-old college student who's living a normal life.

But doctors who deal with low birth weight babies say parents shouldn't think that sort of bright future is assured.

The United States Supreme Court added another red-hot rocket to its docket on Monday, all but ensuring that it will resolve a major immigration case just weeks before the major parties hold their conventions next summer.

The court agreed to hear a challenge to a controversial Arizona law that targets people suspected of being illegal immigrants. This is a setback for the Obama administration, which had urged the justices to wait for the lower courts to thoroughly examine the constitutionality of the issues in the case.

Over the course of the recession, 7.5 million Americans lost their jobs, and some of them were unfortunate enough to collect more than one pink slip. Serial layoffs can be personally devastating, but they can also darken a resume and raise concerns for potential employers.

Al and Michelle Ford of St. Paul, Minn., know about multiple layoffs all too well. Their version of the Great Recession started about a year before the official one was declared.

Melissa Block speaks with Robert Perito, the director of the Security Sector Governance Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace, about the effectiveness of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, in Iraq over the years. Perito says the teams had a lot of problems from the beginning, but they got better with time.

There's trouble brewing within Britain's ruling coalition after Prime Minister David Cameron's veto of changes to an E.U. treaty to save the euro and the eurozone. Liberal Democratic Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said he was "bitterly disappointed" by the veto. Parliament debated the move — and Britain's place within Europe — Monday.

This just in: After 15 years of deliberation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to decide whether it will approve a genetically modified salmon for human consumption.

Now there's a catchy lead. But the truth is, the long-running regulatory saga of AquaBounty's application to sell salmon with a growth hormone gene from one fish plus an antifreeze gene from another — which help it grow twice as fast as typical farmed salmon — does not seem headed toward a conclusion.