Sohaib Athar was jolted upright by the low-flying buzz of helicopters passing over his home next to Abbottabad's Jalal Baba auditorium. In this sedate garrison town ringed by jagged peaks, the gentle thrum of the day is reduced to a whisper by night. "The helicopter was circling around for five to six minutes," Athar tells TIME. "It's not commonplace here." In what soon became among the world's most read tweets that day, Athar alerted his Twitter followers: ...

When Melissa Rothrock, 33, decided in the spring of 2009 that she wanted to become the first in her family to go to college, she knew a traditional program was out of the question. The mother of four children--one of them just an infant--couldn't afford a babysitter, and her husband was on the road for days at a time as a truck driver. An online ad targeting stay-at-home moms got her thinking about distance learning. She filled out her information, ...

Even before the sun had risen, the crowd attending the beatification of Pope John Paul II had overfilled the square around the St. Peter's basilica. By the time dawn broke, the faithful had spilled down the road towards the Tiber and into the side streets around the Vatican, where the ceremony — the first major milestone towards sainthood — was set to take place. Many had spent the night, in tents or on blankets spread over the ...

For seventy million users of Sony's PlayStation Network, this is a weird time — one in which they're being simultaneously deprived of the shoot-em-ups they crave and used as pawns in an epic conflagration between Sony and a shadowy, wily opponent. It started on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th, when a post on Sony's PSN blog noted that the PlayStation Network and Qriocity service — which the PlayStation 3 console relies on for multiplayer PlayStation 3 ...

The last time Syrians took on their ruling Ba'athist regime it was 1982. The protesters then were Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez al-Assad was president. And there was no such thing as a camera phone. Assad mercilessly crushed the revolt in the city of Hama, killing perhaps 10,000 , and according to local lore, turning one mass grave into a car park, such being his contempt for those who dared defy him. In 2011, Hafez's son and ...

In Washington on Monday, Hillary Clinton unveiled the State Department's 10th annual report on modern-day slavery, which evaluates the efforts of every nation to combat the crime. For the first time, State ranked the antislavery efforts of the U.S. alongside those of 174 other countries. The U.S. rated itself as being in full compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act . But the report appears to have ignored a new congressional mandate to identify specific cases of ...

Liz, a Shi'ite in her late 20s, is afraid to leave her house. She says that the last time she went out, government-hired thugs stopped her car at one of the many checkpoints that litter Manama, the capital of Bahrain. They pulled her out, asked for her identity card and tried to ascertain one thing: whether she was Sunni or Shi'ite. "It's pure racial profiling," she says a few days later, sitting in her family's living room in ...

Harvard in the spring is usually a beguiling vision of academe as it ought to be. Blossoms and youthful aspirations flower under the warming sun; the beauty of old buildings and young people complement each other in striking harmony. This year is different. TIME'S Boston Bureau Chief, Gavin Scott, offers this description of the concerned, uncertain and defiant mood of the Cambridge campus a week after the occupation of University Hall. HARVARD Yard was a mosaic of confused activity as ...

For the second time in three harrowing days, a hydrogen explosion at one of Japan's crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant blew the roof off a containment building — this time on Monday morning at reactor unit No. 3. Eleven workers at the plant were injured, and the force of the blast apparently damaged a pump that workers had brought in to douse the reactor's fuel rods with seawater — the stopgap method they are ...

A long time ago—I think it was at an annual meeting of the Christian Coalition in the mid-1990s—the Republican stalwart William Bennett introduced a parade of his party's candidates for President by warning the audience to be wary of pandering politicians. "And if a candidate tells you only things you want to hear," he said, "if he asks nothing of you, then give him nothing in return, certainly not your vote, because he is not telling you ...