Damascus, it seems, does not care for Barack Obama's advice. In a much anticipated policy speech on Thursday, May 19, the U.S. President urged Syria's President Bashar Assad to take steps toward political transition or else "get out of the way." Said Obama: "The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests." It wasn't as if no one was listening. That evening, people in Damascus sat in shops and cafs drinking mint tea and smoking ...

It was George W. Bush on the phone. His language was friendly but firm as he asked President Pervez Musharraf on Sept. 11 if Pakistan could help hunt down Osama bin Laden. The choices facing Musharraf were stark: if he refused, America would consider it the worst kind of betrayal, and Pakistan would suffer harsh consequences. If he agreed, there would be enormous trouble at home; many Pakistanis believe bin Laden is not a terrorist but a true warrior of ...

It was impossible to pinpoint the exact moment of the transformation, but by the time Russian President Dmitri Medvedev left the podium after his first big press conference on Wednesday, he had morphed into a lame duck. The problem was not so much that he failed to state his plans for re-election next year, but, as some members of his own circle now admit, the President seemed to be courting a constituency of just one man — ...

The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat used to be called "the great survivor." Syria's President Bashar al-Assad may be succeeding to the title. Many observers had expected Barack Obama to use a much-anticipated speech on the Middle East to call for Assad to step down, much as Washington has demanded that Muammar Gaddafi relinquish power in Libya. The signs were not good: the day before, the U.S. had slapped sanctions on Assad himself as well as ...

When her husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn was preparing to run for President of France five years ago, Anne Sinclair told a Paris newspaper that she was "rather proud" of his reputation as a ladies' man, a chaud lapin nicknamed the Great Seducer. "It's important," she said, "for a man in politics to be able to seduce." Maybe it was pride that inspired French politicians and International Monetary Fund officials to look the other way as the rumors about "DSK" ...

The war he had helped launch and justify raged on, the enemy's army had swept through his state capital only hours before and his successor as Virginia's Governor still hadn't been selected by the legislature, but Thomas Jefferson was going home, convinced that his work for America was done. It was the summer of 1781, five years since the July in Philadelphia when the author of the Declaration of Independence had, in two inspired weeks of writing energized by years ...

William Franklin Graham Jr., known to all the world as Billy, is now 80 years old, and has been our leading religious revivalist for almost exactly 50 years, ever since his eight-week triumph in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1949. Indeed, for at least 40 years, Graham has been the Pope of Protestant America . Graham's finest moment may have been when he appeared at President Bush's side, Bible in hand, as we commenced our war against Iraq in ...

The killing of President Park raises questions and tensions It was one of the most bizarre killings of a head of state in history. Late last week President Park Chung Hee, 61, strongman ruler of the Republic of South Korea since 1961, was shot at a dinner party by the chief of his own intelligence service in what was first described by a government spokesman as an "accident." Later, officials revealed that it was a well-planned assassination. Within hours of ...

Yemen's revolution has been a slow-burning one. Three months after an 18-day whirlwind of protests tossed Egypt's Hosni Mubarak from power, Yemen's youthful protesters are still in the thick of their own Arab uprising. However, though hounded and abandoned by senior members of his party, army and tribe, President Ali Abdullah Saleh somehow continues to cling to power. Time and again, Saleh has reneged on apparent agreements to step down. But time may now be running out as ...

From his office on the 38th floor of the ABC building in Manhattan, Fred Silverman can peer into the office of CBS President Robert Wussler, just across 53rd Street. Occasionally the two men wave at each other from the heights, like rival aviators saluting before a dogfight. But sometimes—when he is trying to woo a star away from another network or plan a secret strategy—Silverman, head of ABC's programming, draws his drapes: if he can look into Wussler's office, Wussler ...