John Brennan works underground. His basement office in the White House has low ceilings and no windows. It is an extra-secure enclave within one of the world's most secure buildings, with a keypad lock on its outer door, a gleaming steel safe in its anteroom and a prohibition on electronic devices, such as BlackBerrys and cameras, which could scoop up some of America's most sensitive secrets. The location makes sense. President Obama's top adviser on homeland security ...

Osama bin Laden's final night began with a group of four helicopters slicing through the night skies over Pakistan, making their way toward Islamabad from a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan. The mission, approved by President Obama on Friday morning, had been set for early Sunday local time, but was delayed by poor weather. Pakistani officials did not know they were coming. The small, elite force flew low and fast, using terrain-following radar to hug the folds and valleys to avoid radar detection. ...

Considering how closely tied their histories have been, the Taliban in Afghanistan have yet to release a statement on the death of Osama bin Laden. The group isn't being uncommunicative; it just doesn't quite know what to say for now. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told TIME: "We have not received any word from our leadership on Osama's death. I can't confirm that he is dead or alive. Because of some security problems, the Taliban has not had ...

Osama bin Laden's death is making waves around the world. But among U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, the country from which the al-Qaeda chief and 9/11 mastermind once declared war on the United States, there was barely a ripple. At a large recreational facility on Kandahar Air Field, about three dozen troops gathered around a pair of big-screen televisions Monday morning to tune into President Barack Obama's announcement. There were no impromptu cheers or chatter to be ...

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 ...

On Feb. 13, the day before she gave the first of two damning testimonials to Congress, Enron vice president Sherron Watkins spent the afternoon in a cluttered conference room in the Rayburn House building on Capitol Hill. It was a cram session of sorts, a final chance for Watkins, her attorney and congressional staff members to review the dozens of subpoenaed documents she would be quizzed on the next morning. As they ate cold pizza, someone drew her attention to ...

The women and children waited until early morning of April 28 and then they fled in their hundreds. Most of the Syrians walked the few short kilometers from their hometown of Tall Kalakh, a cluster of low-slung cream-colored homes scattered on a gently sloping hill, toward the sleepy Lebanese village of Al-Boqia'a just across the river that demarcates the border, a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Some carried whatever they could fit into a few plastic bags, ...

"What country is this?" Many bemused Americans might ask that question as they go about their work and play. Whether shopping for vegetables among the hundreds of Korean-run greengroceries in Manhattan, or stopping for the night at one of the innumerable Indian-owned hotels in California, Americans are increasingly finding that entire businesses have acquired a foreign-born flavor. Indeed, through a process that is at times too slow to be noticed and at others astonishingly quick, industrious newcomers have been carving ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in the leading French daily Le Monde. Despite the end of the 48-year state of emergency, signed this week by President Bashar al-Assad, protests were continuing Friday. It is just one more outward sign of the sinking faith in the regime's durability. Decrees are signed, but "security forces don't obey ...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's carefully cultivated image as a modest leader with reformist leanings, close to his people and understanding of their concerns, has taken a severe beating after a month of brutal security measures against a burgeoning civil protest movement for greater freedoms that has slowly stretched across the country. The tall, trim, blue-eyed father of three has responded to the uprising in his country, the greatest challenge to his 11-year rule, with a characteristic mix ...