The White House says Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser to President Barack Obama, will resign his post as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers this summer to return to teaching at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Goolsbee has been the face of the White House on economic news, and is a regular every first Friday of the month explaining the administration's take on the latest jobless numbers. Goolsbee served on the three-member economic council ...

John Brennan works underground. His basement office in the White House has low ceilings and no windows. It is an extra-secure enclave within one of the world's most secure buildings, with a keypad lock on its outer door, a gleaming steel safe in its anteroom and a prohibition on electronic devices, such as BlackBerrys and cameras, which could scoop up some of America's most sensitive secrets. The location makes sense. President Obama's top adviser on homeland security ...

Briefing reporters on the details of Osama bin Laden's killing in Pakistan, the White House's Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan remarked optimistically that "bin Laden's dead. The al-Qaeda narrative's becoming increasingly bankrupt." Financially, al-Qaeda may be heading for bankruptcy too. The terrorist network has been hit by a double whammy: the death of its charismatic leader and the Arab Spring, the popular and democratic uprising against cutthroat despots. No longer can al-Qaeda and its offspring sell itself ...

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it. One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during ...

Those starting on careers in the law will not be discouraged by information revealed by the appraisal of the estate of Levy Mayer of Chicago, who died in August, 1922. Taxes will be paid on a total of $8,499,097, and that sum was accumulated by the corporation lawyer from fees and investments of savings. Mr. Mayer was counsel for the " Big Four" packers, for most of the leading distillers and liquor dealers, for some theatrical managers. Although a lawyer ...

In what seemed at the time to be a significant scoop, the Wall Street Journal last Aug. 25 carried a story that began, "The U.S. and Libya are on a collision course again, and the Reagan Administration is preparing to teach the mercurial Libyan leader another lesson." White House Spokesman Larry Speakes described the report as "unauthorized but highly authoritative." That was enough to send U.S. news organizations scrambling after a yarn that promised to involve terrorist plots and possible ...

Syria's emergency law enshrines the autocratic nature of the Assad dynasty's rule. It restricts public gatherings and the free movement of individuals, it allows government agents to arrest "suspects or people who threaten security," it authorizes the monitoring of personal communications and it legalizes media censorship. It has been in place since the 1963 coup d'tat that brought the Baath Party to power. That plot was instigated in part by Hafez al-Assad, the previous President and father ...

Device for hauling up trapped Chilean miners 'works perfect' Chilean officials said Thursday the first test of a rescue capsule designed to rescue 33 trapped miners was carried out successfully. "We did a test with a capsule in a tube 12 meters long," said engineer Rene Aguilar. "We were trying to see how the capsule functions in the tube -- the wheels, the springs -- and that works perfect." Once one of the three drills working to reach the trapped miners breaks through, ...

A few years ago, an adviser went to Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum with a plan for a tall office building. "Only 90 stories?" the ruler of Dubai asked. The aide was sent back to the drawing board, with instructions to design the highest structure not just in Dubai, not just in the Middle East, but in the world. When the Burj Dubai has its grand opening in January, it will be an 818-meter monument to the visionary autocrat ...

Whatever Leon Panetta lacked in formal intel experience he would make up for with his political smarts. That was one of the chief points made in his favor when the Obama Administration named the former California congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff as its first CIA Director. So many CIA veterans were particularly not happy over the summer when they felt that Panetta had failed to protect the Agency from the political backlash over its Bush-era detention ...