Amid hundreds of rocket and mortar explosions that killed dozens of people throughout the country, Iraq held parliamentary elections. Large numbers of Sunnis, who had boycotted previous elections, voted. “We…
CIA director Leon Panetta admitted that the agency, initially under orders from then-Vice President Dick Cheney, kept secret from Congress the existence of a special counterterrorism program for eight years.…
An American cattleman. President Barack Obama visited Cairo and addressed the Muslim world in a 55-minute speech that the White House arranged to be televised, text-messaged in four languages, and…
President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a Bronx-born, divorced, childless, diabetic, Hispanic federal judge on the U.S Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to replace Justice David Souter on…
Caught in the Web, 1860. The Department of Justice released four Office of Legal Counsel memos, issued in 2002 and 2005, to address CIA concerns that interrogation methods used on…
President Barack Obama announced new military policies for Pakistan and Afghanistan, reserving, as had George W. Bush, the right to attack the tribal areas of Pakistan, but adding that the…
President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, offering a broad outline of a massive spending plan paired with $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. “Now…
One million people fled New Orleans to avoid Hurricane Gustav, which landed in Louisiana as a weakened category-2 hurricane and caused relatively little damage. Mississippi officials ordered people still living…
A 7.9-magnitude earthquake centered in Sichuan Province, China, left 50,000 dead and 5,000,000 homeless. Outside Beichuan Middle School, where 1,000 students and teachers died, parents waited for the bodies of…
Caught in the Web, 1860. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered an offensive against the Mahdi Army, a large Shia militia allied with cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in the oil-rich southern…
Responding to rocket attacks on Ashkelon, once the largest seaport of Canaan, Israel sent tanks, troops, and fighter jets to northern Gaza. Fifty-four Palestiniansâ??eight of them children and sixteen of…