Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boards a plane in Israel on Sunday ahead of his Washington visit.

Elise Labott
CNN State Department Producer

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for an immediate resumption of peace talks with Palestinians Monday before meeting with President Barack Obama.

"My goal is to achieve a permanent peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians and soon," Netanyahu said in a speech to the Jewish Federations of North America. “I say to Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority: Let us seize the moment to reach an historic agreement, let us begin talks immediately,”

Netanyahu said he would work for a lasting peace with the Palestinians, promising "great concessions" as long as they don't compromise Israel's security.

“With the support of the United States, peace can become a reality,” Netanyahu said, hours meeting with President Obama to discuss the peace process and Iran's nuclear program.

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Clinton said Friday she did not come to Pakistan for happy talk.

CNN

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday she did not come to Pakistan for "happy talk."

Her three-day trip is aimed at getting frank, open discussions going about the fight against terrorism - and that includes presenting U.S. concerns, she said.

In an interview with CNN, Clinton said it's time to "clear the air" with a key U.S. ally. She added, "I don't think the way you deal with negative feelings is to pretend they're not there."

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With U.S. attention focused on Pakistan's security issues, will Hillary Clinton be able to press Islamabad's rulers to address a controversy involving rural poverty and modern-day slavery?

E. Benjamin Skinner
Time

As Hillary Clinton pays her first visit to Pakistan as Secretary of State, an unfolding hostage crisis will test the Obama Administration's rhetoric on human rights in the region. Officials at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad say at least three landlords have held as many as 170 bonded farmworkers at gunpoint on their estates in the country's southeast Sindh province since late September. With U.S. attention focused on getting Pakistan to deal with huge security issues to Washington's satisfaction, will Clinton be able to press Islamabad's rulers to address a controversy involving rural poverty and modern-day slavery?

The crisis began after the workers' advocates successfully petitioned three district courts to declare as illegal the debts that the landlords were using to compel the workers into indentured servitude. Those debts average around 1,000 Pakistani rupees — roughly $12. The hostages, a third of whom are children, some as young as 4 months old, are landless peasants, known as haari in Urdu. According to Ghulam Hyder, a spokesman for Pakistan's Green Rural Development Organization, the landlords have killed one hostage already and are threatening to kill the others unless they drop the cases and return to work. The landlords also abducted Amarchand Bheel, an advocate for the laborers, as he traveled to court to plead their cause.

A 2004 study by the International Labour Office (ILO) estimated that there are up to a million haari families in Sindh alone, the majority living in conditions of debt bondage, which the U.N. defines as modern-day slavery. Last fall, Pakistan's Daily Times newspaper quoted the labor minister of neighboring Punjab province as saying that landlords hold millions of forced laborers in "private prisons" across the country.

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Jill Dougherty
CNN

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived Wednesday in nuclear-armed Pakistan, a country hit hard by terrorism, economic crisis and rising sentiment that it is paying too high a price for its partnership with the United States in fighting extremists.

Clinton is expected to meet with top Pakistani officials, including president Asif Ali Zardari, but a major challenge during this visit is to convince Pakistanis that the U.S. wants a partnership that goes beyond fighting al Qaeda and other extremist groups.

Talking with reporters en route to Pakistan, Clinton said she wants to "turn the page" on what has been, in the past few years, "primarily a security-anti-terrorist agenda."

"We hold that to be extremely important, and it remains a very high priority," she said. "But we also recognize that it is imperative that we broaden our engagement with Pakistan."

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Workers of the Afghan Election Commission check ballots in Kabul earlier this month.

Elise Labott
CNN State Department producer

-While Senator John Kerry is getting most of the praise from the White House for convincing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to accept an election runoff, senior State Department officials say Secretary Clinton also spent hours on the phone with Karzai, Kerry, US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and others both in Washington and in the region to bring about the result.

-Officials say when they realized Kerry was going to the region, Clinton and Special Representative Richard Holbrooke discussed how he could be a useful actor. Holbrooke briefed Kerry for two hours.

-Before Senator Kerry arrived in Afghanistan Secretary Clinton called Karzai and his chief rival, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Secretary Clinton and President Karzai had what is described as a "very honest, wide ranging 40 minute conversation" where she laid out why it was important for him to accept the runoff. She made it clear the road ahead with the international community, particularly the U.S. would be more difficult if he didn't accept it.

-In this discussion, Karzai laid out hs concerns. Clinton also drew on her own political experience in the conversations, something she regularly does in her discussions with leaders.

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Nancy Gibbs
Time Magazine

If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That you voted the same way he did. That if you got breast cancer, he might be asked to sign the form authorizing a mastectomy. That your son was heading to college but not your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket money.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely. It's expected that by the end of the year, for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women — largely because the downturn has hit men so hard. This is an extraordinary change in a single generation, and it is gathering speed: the growth prospects, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are in typically female jobs like nursing, retail and customer service. More and more women are the primary breadwinner in their household (almost 40%) or are providing essential income for the family's bottom line. Their buying power has never been greater — and their choices have seldom been harder.

It is in this context that the Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with TIME, conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess how individual Americans are reacting. Is the battle of the sexes really over, and if so, did anyone win? How do men now view female power? How much resentment or confusion or gratitude is there for the forces that have rearranged family life, rewired the economy and reinvented gender roles? And what, if anything, does everyone agree needs to happen to make all this work? The study found that men and women were in broad agreement about what matters most to them; gone is the notion that women's rise comes at men's expense. As the Old Economy dissolves and pressures on working parents grow, they share their fears about what this means for their children and their frustration with institutions that refuse to admit how much has changed. In the new age, the battles we fight together are the ones that define us.

A Quiet Revolution

In the spring of 1972, TIME devoted a special issue of the magazine to assessing the status of women in the throes of "women's lib." At a time when American society was racing through change like a reckless teenager, feminism had sputtered and stalled. Women's average wages had actually fallen relative to men's; there were fewer women in the top ranks of civil service (under 2%) than there were four years before. No woman had served in the Cabinet since the Eisenhower Administration; there were no female FBI agents or network-news anchors or Supreme Court Justices. The nation's campuses were busy hosting a social revolt, yet Harvard's tenured faculty of 421 included only six women. Of the Museum of Modern Art's 1,000 one-man shows over the previous 40 years, five were by women. Headhunters lamented that it was easier to put a man on the moon than a woman in a corner office. "There is no movement," complained an activist who resigned her leadership position in the National Organization for Women two years after it was founded. "Movement means 'going someplace,' and the movement is not going anywhere. It hasn't accomplished anything."

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President Bush, left, ducks a shoe as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki tries to protect him.

Elise Labott
CNN State Department Producer

"Certainly from our standpoint this gives us a sense of momentum when the United States has accolades tossed its way rather than shoes."

That's the take of Hillary Clinton's State Department on President Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, according to her spokesman, Assistant Secretary PJ Crowley.

Crowley was referring to an incident last December, when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during his final visit to Iraq during his administration.

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Elise Labott

CNN State Department Producer

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi made the rounds in Washington just as President Obama's national security team shifted its attention to Pakistan.

This week Secretary of Defense Williams Gates called the Afghan border with Pakistan the "epicenter of jihad." And the renewed focus on Pakistan suggests that Obama has a new role for Pakistan in the battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

After all, in developing a strategy for "Afpak," Obama acknowledged the United States cannot win in Afghanistan without cooperation from Pakistan, the suspected hideout of Obama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders.

Which is why the buzzword of both Qureshi and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week was "partnership," as in the United States and Pakistan are united in a "strategic partnership" against a common enemy.

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CNN obtained this photo of a U.S. helicopter above Forward Operating Base Keating in the Nuristan province

Ed Hornick
CNN

Mountainous terrain and harsh weather in remote parts of Afghanistan have proven a deadly combination for the U.S. military in its push to reduce mounting violence in the country.

On Saturday, Taliban militants attacked American and Afghan troops in the Nuristan province in eastern Afghanistan. Eight American troops and two members of the Afghan national security forces were killed, according to the Pentagon.

It was the largest number of Americans killed by hostile action in a single day since July 13, 2008, when nine troops died, according to CNN records.

The fighting was so fierce that at one point U.S. forces "had to collapse in on themselves," a U.S. military official with knowledge of the latest intelligence reports on the incident told CNN. These revelations about the battle that engulfed Forward Operating Base Keating are a further indication of how pinned down and outmanned the troops were. Watch more on the attack in rural Afghanistan »

The base was scheduled to be closed in the next few days, CNN has learned. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, wanted to cede remote outposts and consolidate troops in more populated areas to better protect Afghan civilians.

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CNN

The flag-draped coffins of at least four U.S. soldiers killed during a weekend onslaught against a U.S. military outpost in Afghanistan were scheduled to arrive Tuesday at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the military said.

The bodies will include Sgt. Joshua J. Kirk of South Portland, Maine; Spc. Michael P. Scusa of Villas, New Jersey; Spc. Christopher T. Griffin of Kincheloe, Michigan; and Pfc. Kevin C. Thomson of Reno, Nevada, according to the Air Force mortuary affairs office. The dignified transfer ceremony also might include other fallen service members.

Coverage of the troops' return is allowed with the permission of their families under a policy the Obama administration instituted this year.

Click here to keep reading and find out where some of the key players in the debate stand...