Shortly after eleven o'clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden....

With Japan suffering from electricity shortages this summer, Michio Kuniyuki has stepped up his conservation patrols of Rikkyo University. As he has done these past six summers, Mr. Kuniyuki spends his days making sure the lights and air-conditioning have not been left on in empty classrooms. Whenever he finds students in a classroom, he turns off the air-conditioning and inquires about the lights...

Never lose track of the load.

It was drilled into everybody who worked for Carlos “Charlie” Cuevas. His drivers, lookouts, stash house operators, dispatchers -- they all knew. When a shipment was on the move, a pair of eyes had to move with it.

Cuevas had just sent a crew of seven men to the border crossing at Calexico, Calif. The load they were tracking was cocaine, concealed in a custom-made compartment inside a blue 2003 Honda Accord...

Don’t worry about the House’s failure to vote on John Boehner’s debt plan Thursday night. That’s Boehner’s problem, not the country’s. True, I suppose we should devote a moment to reflecting on how terrible it’s gotten when a speaker with a lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union of 94 can’t pass a bill in his own party because he and it are “too left wing.”...

A new coalition of influential Christian groups is ramping up pressure on President Obama and Congress to shield the poor from spending cuts in the debt-limit struggle, with one organization launching an advertising campaign Tuesday on Christian radio stations in politically important markets...

While researching the Marquis de Sade several years ago, I came across an intriguing biographical tidbit: that crazed French libertine, whose string of luridly violent works gave rise to the term “sadism,” actually began his literary career as a travel writer. In 1775, Sade embarked on a yearlong grand tour of Italy, and wrote an enormous (and enormously tedious) manuscript about the journey entitled “Voyage d’Italie.” The rambling opus, filled with ruminations on Florentine museums and Neapolitan customs, was never completed. Sade’s attention wandered to more carnal pleasures, and in 1777, he was arrested for a long list of unsavory imbroglios, including one that historians call the Little Girls Episode. Sade was thrown into the prison of Vincennes, and would spend most of his remaining life incarcerated. “Voyage d’Italie” soon joined a range of half-finished manuscripts from his youth, scraps of verse and staid dramatic pieces, none of which Sade ever had the discipline to bring to fruition.

From a strictly literary point of view, prison was the best thing that ever happened to the marquis. It was only behind bars that Sade was able to knuckle down and compose the imaginative works upon which his enduring, if peculiar, reputation lies...

On a recent wind-whipped morning, a steel-hulled behemoth arrived at a desolate stretch of India’s western coast groaning with enough coal to power a city of one million people for more than two weeks. The ship, the Vanshi, was carrying coal from Indonesia, a two-week trip across the Indian Ocean. India has its own abundant reserves of coal, which raises a question: Why did India need to go so far to get something it already had?...

As Washington continues to debate a debt deal, the Obama administration has been preparing the country for the worst, with officials essentially saying the sky is about to fall.

But so far, oddly enough, nothing has happened. Despite warnings that a deal would need to be brokered by Sunday night before the Asian markets opened, stocks merely stumbled on Monday — the type of weakness usually associated with soft corporate earnings instead of an economic apocalypse...

President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner escalated their battle over the national debt on Monday, pressing their arguments in a pair of prime-time television addresses as Congress remained at a loss over how to keep the United States from defaulting next week for the first time...

For the past 30 years, kids have been ripping into their Happy Meal boxes with glee. Starting this September, they will find some changes...