Around 2 a.m. Wednesday, elders in the Somali village of Galkayo said they began hearing an unusual sound: the whirl of helicopters. It was the culmination of a daring and risky mission by about two dozen members of the Navy Seals to rescue two hostages — an American aid worker and her Danish colleague — held by Somali pirates since October. The commandos had dropped down in parachutes under a cloak of darkness while 8,000 miles away President Obama was preparing to deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. The commandos hiked two miles from where they landed, grabbed the hostages and flew them to safety...

...Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors...

Bill Gates said Thursday that the county’s has got to hike taxes and the wealthy should shoulder a greater burden of the increase, while he rejected any close correlation between job creation and the level of taxes...

It’s been a month since North Korea’s Kim Jong-il met his maker, but the outside world has yet to hear whether Kim Jong-un, his young successor, has any plans to chart a different future for the impoverished nuclear state.

But according to a new book that hit shelves in Japan last week, the new ruler’s half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, has an idea—one that has kept him from returning to Pyongyang. In My Father, Kim Jong-il, and I, author Yoji Gomi, a reporter at Tokyo Shimbun newspaper, reveals three interviews and 150 email exchanges he’s had with Kim Jong-nam—many of them critical of the policies adopted by his father’s regime. In those correspondences, Kim Jong-nam spoke of his conviction that reform is the only way forward for North Korea, and questions whether his half-brother can better the lives of his countrymen...

On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”...

K Street boom days have come and gone.

A bad economy and rigid stalemates on Capitol Hill took its toll on big firms for the second year in a row, with seven out of the 10 biggest lobbying groups reporting flat or negative revenues in 2011, a significant contrast with the double-digit growth many of the same firms experienced in the mid-2000s, according to recently filed federal lobbying reports...

During howling winter weather two years ago, the thousands of windmills dotting Denmark and its coastline generated so much power that Danes had to pay other countries to take the surplus...

When an expert on autism argued that a new definition of the disorder being prepared by the American Psychiatric Association could restrict the number of patients currently diagnosed as autistic, he set off a firestorm of criticism and debate...

This weekend, hundreds of millions of Chinese will return to hometowns to celebrate the Chinese New Year of the Dragon. But the annual pilgrimage is marked by the annual struggle at the train station...

House and Senate leaders abandoned plans to move on SOPA and PIPA on Friday — the surest sign yet that a wave of online protests have killed the controversial anti-piracy legislation for now and maybe forever...