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A day after he handed his resignation to President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says the war in Iraq wasn't going as well as had been planned, echoing President Bush's appraisal about recent progress in the conflict. Rumsfeld declined to give himself a performance grade.

President Bush visited Montana Thursday to help Sen. Conrad Burns' bid for a fourth term. Burns has been trailing his Democratic opponent, Jon Tester, mostly due to fallout from contributions Burns received from convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But the race is tightening; many see it as going down to the wire.

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals resigned Thursday after a male prostitute claimed on a Denver radio show that the two had had a three-year sexual relationship. While denying the claims, the Rev. Ted Haggard has also taken a leave of absence as pastor of his Colorado Springs mega-church.

The House of Representatives will be under new management in 2007, but leadership posts within each party are undecided. Maryland's Steny Hoyer wants to be Majority Leader, but Nancy Pelosi backing Rep. John Murtha. Republican Speaker, Dennis Hastert, says he won't run for a leadership post, creating room at the top for the new minority party.

Economist Milton Friedman died today in San Francisco at age 94. Friedman was a Nobel Prize winner and advised several presidents, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

Is America ready to elect a woman president? A majority of voters say yes. But for a woman, a presidential campaign could be filled with minefields. Michele Norris hears about those challenges from former Rep. Pat Schroeder, who considered a run for the White House in 1988.

For Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, winning the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature completes a turnaround from his being tried on charges of "insulting Turkishness." The charges against Pamuk, Turkey's most internationally renowned novelist, were eventually dropped.

The U.S. military is reporting that it has in its custody the body of an American soldier, believed to be one of the three missing since May 12. The soldier has not yet been identified. The search for the other missing U.S. soldiers continues, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell tells NPR's Robert Siegel.

The man British authorities charged with poisoning former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko has responded with his own accusations. Andrei Lugovoi, another former KGB officer, says Litvinenko was a British agent trying to get compromising materials about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto ended eight years of self-imposed exile Thursday and arrived in Karachi, where tens of thousands of supporters greeted her. The return was marred by at least two explosions near her motorcade, which was surrounded by supporters.