Daniel Klaidman

President Obama moved Thursday to end the squawking among reporters and members of Congress about a wider shakeup of his AfPak team. In doing so, he was choosing between the lesser of undesirable outcomes for a president who disdains unnecessary drama.

President Obama knows he can't reshape the Supreme Court ideologically, but he can change its gender balance.

Fearmongering politicians are scoring cheap political points at the expense of the American people.

Eric Holder Jr. on investigating torture, closing Guantánamo … and a certain former vice president.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama vowed to roll back Bush-era abuses and restore the proper balance between security and freedom. A few days after being sworn in, he elated progressives by banning torture, beginning the process of closing Guantánamo, and putting military commissions on ice.

Obama doesn't want to look back, but Attorney General Eric Holder may probe Bush-era torture anyway.

Now in his second stint as foreign minister under Silvio Berlusconi, Franco Frattini is easily Italy's most serious politician. From his suite in Rome, Frattini chatted with NEWSWEEK's Daniel Klaidman and Barbie Nadeau about Italy's willingness to use soldiers in Afghanistan and his government's renewed commitment to resettle Guantánamo detainees as a gesture of "solidarity" with the United States.

With Gaza in flames, the prospects for a Middle East deal seem minuscule. But there is a way out, and both sides know what they must do.

Writing in The New York Times, columnist David Brooks lightly mocked the phenomenon as "O-phoria," the wall-to-wall coverage of Barack Obama's election—the insta-books, the quickie documentaries and, yes, the magazine covers.

Magnanimous in victory, Barack Obama invoked the words of our greatest healing president. Under a clear night sky in Chicago's Grant Park on Nov. 4, Obama quoted Abraham Lincoln's first Inaugural Address: "We are not enemies, but friends … Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." Then, in a vernacular perhaps more fitting to our times, he echoed the sentiment. "And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn—I may not have won your vote, but I...

In May, after Barack Obama got trounced in the West Virginia primary, our foreign editor, Nisid Hajari, had an idea for a story. Why not send one of our veteran foreign correspondents through the American South to take its pulse during this historic election?

Years ago, when I was a freshly minted foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, a colleague offered me a valuable insight into Israel's national psychology. The key word to know, he told me, was freier, which, loosely translated from the Yiddish, means sucker.

Five months ago, we sent Ramin Setoodeh to California to investigate the murder of a 15-year-old gay student by one of his classmates. The case, with its echoes of the Matthew Shepard killing, had made national headlines.

It is never easy to discern a person's core spiritual beliefs. Even Barack Obama, who has written two acclaimed memoirs and speaks comfortably about his faith, remains opaque on the subject.

Presidential campaigns eventually settle into contrasting narratives of the candidates' biographies, character and ideology. The central fault line in the seemingly endless Democratic race has been change vs.

Many months ago, my boss, Jon Meacham, came into the morning meeting with a project in mind. He asked us to launch a cover story on the legacy of divorce in America.

Periodically over the past five years I've gotten together with our Baghdad correspondents when they're back on brief home leaves. For most of that time, their reports from the front have been grim.

Former Justice Department lawyer Jack Goldsmith explains why he fought the White House's aggressive legal maneuvers in the fight against terror.

James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed.

As usual, Dick Cheney insisted on doing business behind closed doors. Last Tuesday, Senate Republicans were winding up their weekly luncheon in the Capitol when the vice president rose to speak.

As interest groups and senators squabble over his old memos, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts has spent most of August sequestered in the Justice Department preparing for his September hearings.

The memos were not exactly smoking guns, but they were sure to add fire to Judge John Roberts's confirmation hearings. When Roberts was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court by President George W.

The Terrorist Threat Integration Center had an imposing name, and a tough mission to match it. Headquartered in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., the agency was created two years ago by President Bush as a critical line of defense against terrorist enemies.

The street party in Martyrs' Square had dwindled to a few stragglers. By early last week, the thousands of young Lebanese protesters who had gathered in downtown Beirut were temporarily heading home.

Just two years ago, Donald Rumsfeld was the big man on George W. Bush's campus--the "matinee idol," as the president once called him--and Condoleezza Rice was just another obstacle for the Defense chief to run through.

The CIA had a question for the top lawyers in the Bush administration: how far could the agency go in interrogating terror suspects--in particular, Abu Zubaydah, the close-mouthed Qaeda lieutenant who was resisting standard methods?

Until a few weeks ago, Patrick Murray was just another ambitious Capitol Hill staffer. As a top aide to Rep. Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, Murray had a reputation as a sharp-tongued partisan lawyer.

The confirmation hearings of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general will spotlight long-running disputes within the president's legal team over the conduct of the war on terror.

With an eye on striking America, bin Laden's network is hard at work. On the trail of its targets and tactics.

America was under attack, and somebody had to make a decision. Dick Cheney, huddled in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House, had just urged the traveling George W.