If the U.S. economy had leaped from its worst five-month stretch in recent history to a record-breaking surge, Barack Obama could proudly announce, "The Great Recession is over." The country's finances have seen no such dramatic upturn, but in the movie business they're singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." The Hollywood hills are alive with the sound of money, and on this holiday weekend the cash registers were caroling with the top Memorial Day frame ever. Moviegoers ...

A day after President Barack Obama publicly endorsed India's claim to a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley poured cold water on any expectation of New Delhi's elevation anytime soon. "It is inconceivable that you could contemplate U.N. Security Council reform without considering a country like India," Crowley said Tuesday. "But we have to recognize ... this is a process that has been going on for some time, and it ...

When Barack Obama traveled to Texas this month to talk immigration, David Plouffe, his top message guru, decided to stay home and watch Twitter instead. While Obama spoke, Plouffe sat before two flat-screen televisions in the White House complex. One showed live footage of Obama in El Paso. The other flickered with a lightning-quick vertical ticker tape of people tweeting with the #immigration hashtag, reacting line by line to the President in real time. "I find it useful," ...

When President Barack Obama flew to Cairo two years ago to deliver a speech designed to start an American conversation with the Muslim world, it seemed an almost revolutionary act — and the enthusiasm of his reception was in sharp contrast with the Arab world's widespread hostility towards President George W. Bush. But as Egypt makes revolutionary changes of its own, the prevailing sentiment remains that Obama has been a bitter disappointment. "We were all so hopeful," says Islam Bakr, 52, a security ...

In the coming weeks, Ireland will host two of the world's most recognizable VIPs: Queen Elizabeth II and President Barack Obama. And as the country gets ready, the taxi drivers of Dublin are seeing the careful — and sometimes inconvenient — preparations up close. "The police have been down every manhole in Dublin twice at this stage," says one, describing the increase in security that includes the inspection of the city's sewers for bombs. Ireland is taking no ...

On March 15, President Obama unveiled his plan for reforming the nation's education system. The bulk of the plan, which looks to overhaul George W. Bush's frequently criticized No Child Left Behind law, advances the bold ideas with which this Administration has already become closely associated. The President wants to link billions of federal dollars to initiatives like ending the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, evaluating teachers and awarding performance bonuses to principals and teachers ...

When President Barack Obama announced on May 1 that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was among those who headed to the White House. The mood in Lafayette Park was joyous, ebullient, cathartic — though hardly the bacchanal of vengeful jingoism that some in the media have portrayed it to be, or an expression of "orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed" as David Sirota claimed on Salon.com. An outsider would have been struck ...

Chicago businesswoman Valerie Jarrett has earned all sorts of nicknames as an aide to President-elect Barack Obama — from "First Friend" to "big sister" to "the other half of Obama's brain." As co-chair of his transition team, Jarrett has spent the past week denying rumors, parsing policy changes and insisting that she doesn't know where she'll end up in the new administration

It is a bizarre historical coincidence. President Barack Obama announced to the world that Osama bin Laden was dead on May 1, the very same day that, 66 years earlier, the German government announced that Adolf Hitler was dead. It's fitting that two of history's great mass murderers share a day of death. Both embodied charisma and intelligence deployed in the service of evil--and both were utterly callous about the killing of innocents to further their causes. There are,... ...

Sometimes the tabloid route is best: Obama got Osama. President Barack Hussein Obama approved the attack that killed his near namesake Osama bin Laden the very same week that Obama revealed his long-form birth certificate, addressing a silly dispute that was really about something heinous and serious: the suspicion of far too many Americans that the President was not who he said he was, that he was a secret Muslim and maybe not even playing for our team. All such ...