The day Osama bin Laden died, his name was paired once again with the agent whose illustrious career he helped make possible. The Twitter trending-topics list--that social-media pulse meter that tracks what people are posting about most often--filled up with references to OBL's demise: "Navy Seals," "Abbottabad," "God Bless America." And one more: "Jack Bauer," the counterterrorism ace played by Kiefer Sutherland who foiled attacks in real time on Fox's 24. "Right now," quipped user Nick Schug, "Jack Bauer is ...

If Barack Obama had not chosen a life in politics, he might have made a fine psychotherapist. He is a master at taking what you've told him and feeding it right back. What I hear you saying is ... Open his book The Audacity of Hope to almost any page and listen. On immigration, for example, Obama first mirrors "the faces of this new America" he has met in the ethnic stew pot of Chicago: "in the ...

Even before the financial and home foreclosure crisis hit full stride, the number of homeless children in America had reached an alarming level. The National Center on Family Homelessness released a report today that estimates that one in every 50 American children was homeless between 2005 and 2006. That totals roughly 1.5 million kids. While the center provided no previous statistic to compare against that figure, a study conducted with different measures published in 2000 put the ...

A great day for the United States of America? A reminder of what a great power can do when its back is against the wall? A historic move by a lame-duck administration many thought could no longer solve any problems? It will be some time before we know whether this week will go down in history as all, or even some, of those things. But as the largest bailout in government history unfolded in almost dizzying waves over recent days, a very different view prevailed ...

By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world. Like so many epics, the story of the obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth began with a voyage. In 1956, along with Fidel Castro and a handful ...

Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits last week, a sign that layoffs are dropping and employers may be hiring more workers. The Labor Department says the number of people seeking benefits dropped 10,000 to 382,000 in the week ending April 2. That's the third drop in four weeks. The four-week average of applications, a less volatile measure, declined to 389,500. See TIME's special "Out of Work in America." Applications near ...

Fresh from Ellis Island, Stavros gets a job shining shoes at Grand Central Terminal. It is the last scene of Elia Kazan's film America, America, the story of a young Greek's fierce determination to immigrate to America. Quickly, but as casually as an afterthought, a young black man, also a shoe shiner, enters and tries to solicit a customer. He is run off the screen -- "Get out of here! We're doing business here!" -- and silently disappears. This interloper ...

Silly me. I had naively assumed that when a writer as well known and respected as Lerone Bennett Jr. came out with a provocative book arguing that Abraham Lincoln was a racist who kept more blacks in bondage than he ever emancipated, it would kick up a stir. After all, Bennett, the executive editor of Ebony and the author of such works of black history as Before the Mayflower , has long been one of America's most eloquent voices on ...

Among the army of burger flippers at work across America in the 1960s was a French chef putting his training to use at Howard Johnson's on Queens Boulevard in New York City. I worked for HoJo's from the summer of 1960 to the spring of 1970, doing my American apprenticeship, learning about mass production and marketing. The company had been started in 1925 in Massachusetts by Howard Deering Johnson, and by the mid-1960s its sales exceeded that of Burger King, ...

Trevor Douglas, 54, may soon lose his Orlando house. Sure, Douglas hasn't paid his mortgage in more than two years, which is what a Bank of America spokesperson tells me "is important to remember." It is. Still, if it happens, I will feel partially responsible. I helped push Douglas closer to eviction. Like many other home loans, Douglas' IOU was bought and sold numerous times and finally packed into a bond. So when his foreclosure notice finally arrived, the ...