At the centre of a tightening web of death threats, sex-crime accusations and high-level demands for a treason trial, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange threatened to unleash a “thermonuclear device” of completely unexpurgated government files if he is forced to appear before authorities...

Passions are supposed to recede with time as wisdom and maturity, but the Supreme Court’s willingness to hand the presidency to George W. Bush looks even worse than it did 10 years ago, when passions flared and pundits feared for the future of the republic. The obvious problem with making Bush president was the fact of the Bush presidency, a catastrophe in so many directions at once that presidential historians argue today about whether Bush was the worst president in American history or merely the worst since Grant, Buchanan, or Johnson (Andrew, not Lyndon)...

This is an installment from our on-going series on the adventures of American diplomats and the people they monitor. The red button below will take you to another random episode...

IT doesn’t really matter whether Serendipity, the restaurant on East 60th Street in Manhattan, was already serving footlong hot dogs in 1975, or its frozen hot chocolate. Neither Nan Talese nor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would have ordered them anyway. “I don’t think I noticed what either of us had,” Ms. Talese, the longtime editor, said there recently — the first time she had returned since that long-ago meeting. “We were there to talk about books.”...

Call it the revenge of George W. Bush: The GOP temporary tax cut has exploded nine years later, forcing Democrats to duck and cover. Howard Kurtz talks to the Bush aides behind the plot. George W. Bush set the trap just over nine years ago, and the Democrats are still trying to extricate themselves..

NASA is holding a press conference today at 2pm to announce a major finding in their research in astrobiology, and speculation is high the agency said the finding "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." The news has leaked now, and while the discovery is not extraterrestrial life, NASA has indeed uncovered an entirely new form of life that "doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living" on Earth...

It’s been years since I thought about -- really thought about -- “Doonesbury,” Garry Trudeau’s Russian novel of a comic strip, in which dozens of characters loop in and out of one another’s orbits, sketching a portrait of their times...

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Tonight, Hanukah begins. The word – Hanukkah – is lovely, but what’s the festival itself for? What does it do?

With 2 million jobless workers set to lose unemployment benefits this month, the kind of extension that Congress routinely approved in the past has fallen victim to partisan deadlock — and the consequences could be serious for the U.S. economy...