The largest government bailout in U.S. history was born before dawn on Sept. 17, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke woke up at 6 a.m., checked his BlackBerry and saw the very thing he had dreaded: the futures market in free fall. Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner had spent the past year staving off one disaster after another, for the most part working behind the scenes. Earlier in the month, they had let ...

Sudan's President, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, reckons that being on the run is easy. In March, the International Criminal Court indicted al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the conflict in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have died since 2003 in a campaign that the Bush Administration described as government-sponsored genocide. The ICC indictments, the first to be handed down against a sitting head of state, obligate the world's nations to ...

Muammar Gaddafi and his family could be hit with war-crimes indictments within the coming weeks for his brutal crackdown against unarmed protesters in eastern Libya last February, turning him and his top officials into international fugitives — and probably burying any hope of a ceasefire deal or an arrangement for quiet exile for Gaddafi and his family as a way of ending the war. As if to emphasize the regime's defiance on Wednesday, Gaddafi loyalists shelled the ...

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 ...

France: In Search of Bin Laden's Urologist Osama Bin Laden may be in less danger from smart bombs than from kidney stones, according to a report in the French daily Le Figaro. In a report picked up throughout Europe the Paris paper and Radio France International claimed the Saudi terrorist checked himself into Dubai's American Hospital in July, where he spent 10 days undergoing urgent treatment to his ailing renal system. "Intelligence sources believe that bin Laden ...

Just about every day, I am reminded that I haven't quite decided who I am. This morning I filled out the application for an International Driving Permit: circle Miss, Mrs. or Ms. You would think that by now, I would know which it is. So I did an unscientific survey of married friends and found that none of them had a clue either. At work and out in the world, I'm Ms. Gibbs; at my daughters' school and the pediatrician, ...

Egyptian activists, most of them young, were out in force in the midday sun on Friday, Feb. 19, their flags and posters raised high, their chants rippling across the pavement at the arrival terminal of Cairo International Airport. They had come out in a startling show of support for a candidate who has yet to declare his candidacy for the presidency of Egypt. Indeed, Mohamed ElBaradei, who until recently held the top position at the International Atomic Energy ...

Worldwide production of illicit opium, coca leaf and cannabis is many times the amount currently consumed by drug abusers. Some governments do not have control of the narcotics growing regions, and prospects in several countries are dampened by corruption, even government involvement in the narcotics trade. --From the U.S. State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, February 1985. The compound, hidden deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle, 400 miles southeast of the Colombian capital of Bogota, was called ...

As police investigate the motive behind the latest suicide bombing in Indonesia, the country is once again facing the specter of another wave of attacks by extremists. While recent bombings have targeted individuals rather than large groups, the trend has some analysts worried that the current threat could be harder to stamp out. "This is part of a pattern of do-it-yourself jihad," explains Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert at the International Crisis Group. "It falls under the ...

As questions swirled around its accounting practices, Tyco International, an industrial and services conglomerate with $36 billion in annual revenues--and a beaten-down stock price--said last week it would split into four companies in a bid to "unlock tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value." The company's combative CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, predicted the breakup would add 50% to the stock price. Going him one better, Don MacDougall of J.P. Morgan Chase said the move would make the stock worth $80 ...