1 of 3. Former U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney stands onstage for remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, March 15, 2013.

OXON HILL, Maryland | Fri Mar 15, 2013 7:47pm EDT

OXON HILL, Maryland (Reuters) - At a gathering for conservatives to plot their future, there was a stark reminder of the past on Friday as failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney made his first public speech since election night.

"I am sorry that I won't be your president," Romney told the audience of the Conservative Political Action Conference, "but I will be your co-worker and I will stand shoulder to shoulder beside you."

Since he accepted defeat to President Barack Obama in the early hours of the morning on November 7 in Boston, Romney has largely vanished from view. He is occasionally spotted on the ski slopes with his family, pumping gas, or shopping at Costco.

He and his wife Ann have retired to La Jolla, California, where the Romney family keeps a home, although they did give an interview to Fox News last month.

The former Massachusetts governor was the first losing presidential candidate in nearly 25 years not to be in Washington on Inauguration Day.

Looking tanned since his time off the campaign trail, Romney delivered what sounded very like his campaign speech. He told vignettes about the Americans he met as he traveled across the country on the way to his eventual defeat.

Romney said he realized the awkwardness of his position.

"As someone who just lost the last election, I'm probably not the best person to chart the course for the next election," he said.

ROCKY RELATIONSHIP

Romney has never had a simple relationship with the conservative base, which always suspected he was too moderate on healthcare, abortion and other issues.

In past years, Romney won the conference's straw poll for preferred presidential candidate, but audiences like CPAC are often filled with the sort of Republicans who were most suspicious of his conservative credentials.

Appearing at the same event last year, Romney declared himself to be "severely conservative." That strained formulation did not warm conservatives' hearts and led to ridicule from some in the media.

For many gathered at a hotel here south of Washington, the lesson from Romney's loss is a simple one: Republicans nominated a candidate who wasn't conservative enough.

On Thursday, Texas Governor Rick Perry, once Romney's rival in the presidential primary, told the crowd: "The popular media narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideas, as evidence by the last two presidential elections. That's what they think, that's what they say. That might be true if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012."

"The fact is the base didn't come out for him," said Bob Vander Plaats, the president of the Family Leader and a prominent social conservative in the early-voting state of Iowa. "No matter how much we did to push our base towards him that was a hard rope to push."

Romney was received warmly by the audience and the former candidate thanked them for their "earnest support."

He did have one warning for conservatives.

"We particularly need to hear from the governors of the blue and purple states," he said, advising conservatives not to give up on the states where he lost to Obama.

Romney mentioned two governors — New Jersey's Chris Christie and Virginia's Bob McDonnell — who were not invited to participate in the influential conference.

Both governors have been criticized for taking positions that part with Republican orthodoxy. But a Reuters/Ipsos online poll on Friday showed Christie as the Republican with the best rating against possible 2016 Democratic opponents Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden. [ID:nL1N0C76P2]

LARGELY IGNORED

Since his defeat, Romney has rarely been mentioned by conservatives.

Speaking a few hours before Romney, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee, centered his remarks on the federal budget and made no mention of his former running mate.

In the aftermath of the last campaign, Republicans have set about refashioning their image, moving away from Romney's campaign positions.

Romney's campaign was marked by a hawkish view on immigration and was hindered by his remarks in secretly recorded video deploring nearly half of all Americans as "victims."

Now, Republican congressmen are playing leading roles in trying to reform immigration laws and leaders are encouraging reaching out to African-American and Hispanic voters, two groups that backed Obama by wide margins.

Influential Republicans like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal have called on their party to embrace the people Romney appeared to reject in his infamous "47 percent" remarks about voters who receive government aid.

Despite his downfall, Romney was undeterred.

"It's fashionable in some circles to be pessimistic about America, about conservative solutions, about the Republican Party," Romney said. "I utterly reject that pessimism."

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Claudia Parsons)

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1 of 12. Newly elected Pope Francis I, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, meets cardinals in the Clementine Hall in a picture released by Osservatore Romano at the Vatican March 15, 2013.

VATICAN CITY | Fri Mar 15, 2013 7:57pm EDT

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis on Friday urged leaders of a Roman Catholic Church riven by scandal and crisis never to give in to discouragement, bitterness or pessimism but to keep focused on their mission.

Since his election on Wednesday as the first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years, Francis has signaled a sharp change of style from his predecessor, Benedict, and has laid out a clear moral path for the 1.2-billion-member Church, which is beset by scandals, intrigue and strife.

"Let us never give in to the pessimism, to that bitterness, that the devil places before us every day. Let us not give into pessimism and discouragement," he told the cardinals who chose him.

The Vatican on Friday strongly denied accusations by some critics in Argentina that Francis stayed silent during systematic human rights abuses by the former military dictatorship in his home country.

Spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told reporters the accusations "must be clearly and firmly denied".

Critics of Jorge Bergoglio, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, allege he failed to protect priests who challenged the dictatorship earlier in his career, during the 1976-1983 "dirty war", and that he has said too little about the complicity of the Church during military rule.

Setting out a clear and forceful moral tone in the early days of his papacy, Francis on Thursday told the cardinals they must stick to the faith's Gospel roots and shun modern temptations, otherwise the Church risked becoming just another charitable group without its divine mission.

Francis has given clear signs already that he will bring a new broom to the crisis-hit papacy, favoring humility and simplicity over pomp and grandeur.

OFF THE CUFF

On Friday he spoke to the cardinals in Italian from a prepared text but often added off-the-cuff comments in what has already become the hallmark of a style in sharp contrast to the stiffer, more formal Benedict.

Francis called the princes of the church "brother cardinals" instead of "lord cardinals" as Benedict did. Lombardi said Francis was still taking his meals with other prelates in the Vatican residence where the cardinals stayed during the conclave. "He just sits down at any table where there is a free spot, with a great sense of ease."

Another notable difference from the formal Benedict is the new pope's outgoing nature and sense of humor.

On Friday, he hugged cardinals, slapped them on the back, broke into animated laughter and blessed religious objects one cardinal pulled out of a plastic shopping bag.

In the afternoon, he slipped out of the Vatican for the second straight day, this time to visit a fellow Argentine, 90-year-old Cardinal Jorg Mejia, who had suffered a heart attack.

On Thursday morning, the day after his election, he left quietly to pray at a Rome basilica and to pay his bill at a residence where he had been staying before the conclave.

Earlier in the Sistine Chapel, in another sign of humility, Francis stopped cardinals who tried to kneel before him.

But his message was serious. The role of Church elders, including himself, was to set an example and pass on faith and values to younger people without being distracted by the temptations of wordliness.

"We are in old age. Old age is the seat of wisdom," he said, speaking slowly. "Like good wine that becomes better with age, let us pass on to young people the wisdom of life," he said.

TRIBUTE TO BENEDICT

He made a point of paying tribute to Benedict, who shocked the Church last month by becoming the first pontiff in some 600 years to resign instead of ruling for life, saying he had "lit a flame in the depths of our hearts" with his courage and example.

Morale among the faithful has been hit by a widespread child sex abuse scandal involving Catholic priests and in-fighting in the Church government or Curia, which many prelates believe needs radical reform.

Francis is seen as having a common touch and the communication skills that the aloof Benedict lacked.

Whereas Benedict delivered his first homily in Latin, laying out his broad vision for the Church, Francis adopted the tone of parish priest, focusing on faith.

"When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we proclaim Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly," he told the massed ranks of cardinals clad in gold-colored vestments.

"We may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, all of this, but we are not disciples of the Lord (if we don't follow Jesus)," he added, speaking slowly in Italian.

The new pope signaled immediately his intentions for the papacy when he adopted the name of St. Francis of Assisi, who gave up a life of privilege in the 12th century to follow a vocation of poverty.

He urged Argentines not to make costly trips to Rome for his inauguration next week but to give money to the poor instead.

No Vatican watchers had expected the conservative Argentinian to get the nod, and some of the background to the surprise vote has already trickled out, confirming that cardinals wanted a pastoral figure to revitalize the global Church but also someone who would get the dysfunctional Vatican bureaucracy in order.

French Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard told reporters: "We were looking for a pope who was spiritual, a shepherd. I think with Cardinal Bergoglio, we have this kind of person. He is also a man of great intellectual character who I believe is also a man of governance."

After more than a millennium of European leadership, the cardinals who chose Francis looked to Latin America, where 42 percent of the world's Catholics live. The continent is more focused on poverty and the rise of evangelical churches than questions of materialism, rising secularism and priestly sexual abuse, which dominate in the West.

Francis' inaugural Mass will be held next Tuesday, with many world leaders expected to attend.

(Editing by Barry Moody and Giles Elgood)

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Apollo 11 crew's portrait session shows astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin in this July 1969 handout photo courtesy of NASA.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Jan 3, 2013 11:08pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronaut Neil Armstrong may not have been speaking entirely off the cuff when he delivered the most iconic quote in the history of manned space flight.

Armstrong wrote out the sentence, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," before blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in July 1969, his brother now says, according to the transcripts of a documentary recently aired on BBC Two.

Because of a radio communications glitch, millions of people watching on television as Armstrong became the first human being to step onto the surface of the moon never heard him utter the word "a" before man.

Armstrong, who died in August at the age of 82, had always maintained he composed the words after touching down on the moon on July 20, 1969, while he waited to leave the Eagle lunar lander.

But Armstrong's younger brother Dean, speaking in an interview for the documentary, "Neil Armstrong - First Man on the Moon" aired on Sunday, said that was not entirely accurate.

"Dean told me that Neil shared the words with him shortly before he left for the Cape, so maybe a couple weeks before the mission," producer Chris Riley told Reuters.

An Armstrong family spokesman did not reply to a request from Reuters for comment.

"I find the timing of Dean Armstrong's revelation to be curious," said Robert Pearlman, owner and curator of CollectSpace.com, a space history website.

"Why wait until after his brother died? He was interviewed for Neil's authorized biography in 2002 and apparently never mentioned this story, despite Neil giving permission to his family and friends to speak openly," Pearlman said.

Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," which served as a template for an HBO miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, said Armstrong was asked many times over the years when he came up with the quote and always replied that it was spoken spontaneously.

"He had said that many times publicly before I wrote my book, so I never asked him when he made up the quote," Chaikin said.

In the documentary, Dean Armstrong said he and his brother were up one night shortly before Neil left for Florida playing the board game, Risk, Riley said.

Dean said Neil slipped him a piece of paper with the sentence "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," written out and asked Dean what he thought of it, Riley said.

Dean replied, "Fabulous," a transcript of the documentary shows.

Riley, who was commissioned to produce the documentary after Armstrong's death, said he doesn't see it as raising any real questions about the astronaut's integrity.

"Anybody making that historic step onto another world as a human being would have appreciated the significance of it, as Neil did, and would have given it some thought beforehand. It wasn't something that just sort of came to him as he headed down the ladder. But I don't think he fully decided what to say until maybe after landing," Riley said.

The documentary, produced in partnership with PBS's NOVA is due to air in the United States later this year.

(Editing by Tom Brown)

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