US: Politics makes strange bedfellows, and none more unlikely than Newt Gingrich and Hillary Rodham Clinton. A decade ago the speaker of the House and the first lady were engaged in open political warfare.
Mr Gingrich worked to scuttle Ms Clinton's ambitious reform of the US healthcare system, and she took to deriding his "Contract for America" as a "Contract on America". Now in their new roles as Republican elder statesman and Democratic senator for New York, they have started working together on a number of issues and this week appeared jointly on Capitol Hill to promote new healthcare legislation.
The encounter was all the more intriguing given that both are said to be aspiring candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign.
"We're at the stage in our lives where getting some good things done for the country strikes us as a pretty important way to spend your time," said Mr Gingrich, who has warned fellow-Republicans that anyone who thought Hillary could be easily defeated in 2008 "has total amnesia about the Clintons."
The legislation they were promoting is not contentious; it would reduce paperwork in the medical system by moving patients' health information to computer databases.
But behind the scenes Mr Gingrich and Ms Clinton are also working on military reform, and they have found so much in common that Senator Clinton remarked that people seeing them would think: "The end is near!"
The unusual pairing reflects that of former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, who have toured the world on a joint appeal for tsunami victims and are now so close that Barbara Bush joked that Mr Clinton was her son. At a joint appearance with Mr Bush snr in Washington on Thursday, Mr Clinton remarked in jest that they "will stop at nothing to get another president in the family."
The collegiality of the Clintons with their new Republican friends is all the more remarkable given the bitter partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are challenging several of President Bush's judicial nominations and fighting his choice of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.
Yesterday Senator Barbara Boxer of California threatened to use a procedural device to block a Senate vote on Mr Bolton, whose nomination was referred to the full Senate by the Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday without a recommendation. Republican Senator George Voinovich of Ohio made a scathing assault on Mr Bolton, calling him "the poster-child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be."
A vote is unlikely before next week's much-anticipated showdown over judicial nominations, with the Republican majority moving towards what has been called the "nuclear option". Urged on by religious conservatives who want more anti-abortion judges in the US court system, the Republican leadership is preparing to change the rule that allows the minority to filibuster a nomination.
On Thursday they rejected a Democratic offer to confirm two judicial nominees who were filibustered last year and two other nominations.
Majority Leader Bill Frist said Democrats should not be allowed to decide who got confirmation votes and who did not. The Judiciary Committee meanwhile voted 10 to eight along partisan lines to approve the nomination of former Alabama attorney general William Pryor to the federal appeals court.
Mr Pryor was blocked by a filibuster in Mr Bush's first term by Democrats who argued he was too extreme for a lifetime appointment.
"We stand here on the precipice of a constitutional crisis," said Senator Charles Schumer, who called the approval of Mr Pryor "a stage-setter for an attempt to undo what the Senate has been about for over 200 years."