Silvio Berlusconi reacts as Michelle Obama holds out her hand for a formal handshake Photo: AFP/GETTY

The meeting between the pair at the opening reception for the G20 summit in Pittsburgh bore all the hallmarks of a classic US-European impasse, with the American president in the middle, looking daggers at his Italian counterpart.

While Mrs Obama exchanged hugs and kisses with Browns, the Sarkozys, the Medvedevs and Germany's Angela Merkel, she didn't appear to want to come too close to Mr Berlusconi.

Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- A top White House adviser said first lady Michelle Obama is planning to make a dramatic presentation when she offers the closing argument for the bid by her hometown of Chicago to win the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“There won’t be a dry eye in the room,” said Valerie Jarrett, who plans to travel with the first lady to Copenhagen for the Oct. 2 International Olympic Committee vote.

Quoted via Politico:

Pushing for health care reform didn’t turn out so well for the last first lady in a Democratic White House.

But with a retooled staff, and an under-the-radar summer behind her, Michelle Obama plans a packed autumn that aides say will include a “dedicated focus” on health insurance reform — the same issue that brought such headaches to Hillary Clinton.

“She will do things that fit in with what she cares about, like health care reform and the implications it has for family and kids,” said Camille Johnston, Obama’s director of communications. “She will spend her time focusing on where policy and people intersect.”

For the health care reform push, which got something of a reboot last week with President Barack Obama's address to Congress, the aim is for the first lady’s imprimatur to put a friendly face and a noncontroversial spin on a complex, highly partisan issue.

She won’t get into the weeds on health care, pushing specific details or plans as Clinton did. Instead, she’ll make the soft, soccer-mom sell, highlighting the need to eat healthy, exercise and get preventive care. On Friday, Michelle Obama will appear at an event where women and families will talk about the health care system, and she will deliver remarks that will “amplify the president’s message on the need for health insurance reform,” according to the White House. more

First lady and Windy City native Michelle Obama will lead a delegation to Denmark next month in a final push for Chicago's Olympic bid. But her husband, immersed in the battle for health care reform, remains noncommittal on making the trip.

"It is with great pride that I will go to Copenhagen to make the case for the United States to host the 2016 Olympics," Michelle Obama said in a statement Friday. "There is no doubt in my mind that Chicago would offer the world a fantastic setting for these historic games, and I hope that the Olympic torch will have the chance to burn brightly in my hometown."

Is First Lady Michelle Obama working to bring her passion for fresh fruits and vegetables to the streets of the nation’s capital? Or at least to a stretch of Vermont Avenue near the White House?

It certainly sounds like it.

First Lady Michelle Obama harvested vegetables with students from Bancroft Elementary School. Getty ImaCity officials say that Sam Kass, a White House chef and a one-time personal culinary czar for the Obamas, showed up at a community meeting last week to support the efforts of a nonprofit group that is hoping to bring an open-air farmers’ market to a spot near the White House. The market would be open to the public every Thursday from Sept. 17 through Oct. 29.

The teenager had a to-the-point question for Michelle Obama. “I wanted to know, like, why did you want to come out here to meet us?” The query came at the end of a visit by the first lady to Mary’s Center, a Washington-based health clinic founded in 1988 to serve mothers and tots recently arrived from Latin America. Today the centre provides everything from prenatal care to adult-literacy programmes to 14,000 families — many of them new immigrants, all struggling financially.

America's First Lady Michelle Obama and daughter MaliaIn an economically and culturally mixed neighbourhood two miles north of the White House, the centre isn’t exactly a hot spot for tourists, much less the political elite. But a dozen or so teens from its after-school programme had been assembled in one of the classrooms — blue, plastic-and-chrome chairs drawn into a large, loose circle — for a friendly chat with one of the globe’s shiniest political stars. “Why?” seemed a reasonable enough question.

If you think First Lady Michelle Obama gets scrutinized on her overseas trips, just wait till she hosts spouses of international leaders at a summit in Pittsburgh Sept. 24-25, where the global economic crisis will top the agenda.

The "Pittsburgh Summit 2009" is a meeting of the G-20, the Group of Twenty, an organization established in 1999 to bring together major world leaders to deal with global economic issues. The G-20 gathered in London last April.

Michelle Obama shells peas with fifth gradersWASHINGTON - It was the ultimate photo op - 36 smiling fifth graders eating a healthful meal they'd cooked themselves at a picnic table in the first lady's garden. The story line was as simple as it was seductive: They came. They planted. They harvested.

In three short months, Michelle Obama had accomplished what other food advocates could only dream about. Good food was no longer just virtuous. It was cool.

That was easy. Now what?

WASHINGTON - -- When Michelle Obama decided to leave her job at a corporate law firm, her first stop at City Hall was the office of Susan Sher, then the City of Chicago's second-ranking lawyer.

Sher was so taken with the young lawyer that she hand-delivered Obama's résumé to the mayor's deputy chief of staff, Valerie Jarrett. "She's really impressive," Sher told Jarrett. "You should meet her."

Obama soon had an offer in hand. So began an enduring professional and personal relationship in which Sher, 61 and the first lady's new chief of staff, has played patron, mentor, friend and adviser.

Sher would again be instrumental in hiring Obama at University of Chicago Medical Center, where Sher was general counsel and Obama worked directly for her as a vice president for community affairs. more

WASHINGTON — She has become one of the Obama administration’s most visible surrogates on health care, announcing the release of $851 million in federal financing for health clinics, calling for tougher nutritional standards in the government’s school lunch program and urging Democrats to rally around the president’s efforts to revamp health care.

The high-profile emissary? Not Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, or Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House health policy adviser. It is the first lady, Michelle Obama.