Najam Sethi is no stranger to official harassment and death threats. Since the 1970s, the prominent Pakistani journalist has been charged with treason three times. He has been held incommunicado and even tortured. In more recent years, his name has appeared on a series of hit lists drawn up by militants enraged by his outspoken opposition to religious militancy. For the past two years, Sethi and his family have been forced to live under police protection. The hostile ...

Clarification Appended: June 30, 2011 Here's some good news for consumers who feel themselves trampled by soulless banking and credit giants: on July 21, a new consumer-protection agency will open its doors in Washington, with the mission of making everything from mortgage documents to credit statements fairer and easier to understand and generally giving the little guy more power against the financial corporate juggernauts. Here's the bad news: it's not clear that President Obama will be able to appoint ...

Advertisers and marketers spend millions of dollars trying to get inside women's minds--for good reason. Female consumers are responsible for buying or influencing the purchase of 85% of all goods and services nationwide. Now Mary Lou Quinlan, former CEO of ad agency N.W. Ayer, has produced Just Ask a Woman, a breezy distillation of 3,000 "listening interviews" about women's purchasing decisions. Among her insights: Men move quickly in and out of a store. Women notice everything about a shopping experience--and ...

So who would you like to hack today? A bank, a website, a corporation or perhaps a government agency that's rubbing you the wrong way? The hacktivist group LulzSec is taking requests. Or maybe you'd like to get your hands on some stolen credit-card accounts to boost your personal spending level or purchase some malware that will divert a business's payments from its vendors to you. A malware seller called Zeus not only can do that but ...

In Hollywood, they say, any bureaucrat can give the thumbs-down to a film proposal, but the ones with real clout are those who can flash a thumbs-up and make it happen. That power used to be the exclusive preserve of the studio moguls. Not anymore. While studios still control the financing, today the man with the golden thumb is Michael Ovitz, an agent and martial-arts buff who works in quiet but irresistible ways. Nearly everyone in show business agrees that ...

On the Hawaiian island of Molokai, pregnant women who want a doctor in attendance when they give birth fly to neighboring Oahu or Maui. The five Molokai doctors who once delivered babies have stopped doing so because malpractice insurance would cost them more than the total of any obstetrical fees they could hope to collect. Will County, Ill., last week closed its forest preserves until it can get a new liability policy on them--if that can be done at all--and ...

A new study delays doomsday, but there is still a crisisThe visions of an imminent energy Armageddon that seemed so plausible right after the 1973 Arab oil embargo have gradually faded, but the serious questions remain: How much oil does the world have left? When will it run out?Firm answers are difficult to come by; witness the Central Intelligence Agency's forays into the slippery field of oil forecasting. In his drive for a conservation-oriented energy program early last year, President Carter leaned heavily on a CIA ...

Fears are growing for the safety of a well-known Pakistani journalist who has been missing for 39 hours now and, according to an international advocacy group, is believed to be in the custody of the Pakistan's controversial Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence . Human Rights Watch declared that Saleem Shahzad, a reporter working for the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online and Adnkronos International, the Italian news agency, could be subject to mistreatment and even torture while in custody. While ...

As the news of Osama bin Laden's death moves from exhilarating novelty to accepted reality, one group in the U.S. government will emerge as key to the win: the Central Intelligence Agency. From the earliest identification of a Bin Laden courier, the pursuit of leads, the assessment of evidence and the execution of the raid in Abottabad, Pakistan, the CIA can rightly claim the most credit for finding and killing the world's most wanted terrorist. Taking credit for ...

Americans are forever grumbling about government gridlock. But the whole game changes when a credit-rating agency begins to echo them. On April 18, Standard & Poor's, one of those mysteriously powerful firms that grade the financial strength of bond issuers, announced that it was starting to wonder whether the mighty U.S. government could be counted on to repay its creditors. It was a big moment: the first time in seven decades of monitoring Uncle Sam that S&P had sounded such a warning. "The ...