World Politics

In July 2011, after the U.S. froze $800 million in aid, Pakistan's defense minister threatened to pull troops from the Afghan border.

In 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn looked like France's next president. A New York arrest ended that — and exposed how French political culture shielded

A Chinese official posted intimate messages to his public Weibo instead of privately, and became a symbol of corruption in the social-media age.

A 2011 projection said India could become the world's second-largest trading nation by 2050. What it assumed, and what 40-year forecasts are worth.

Teenage girls are training as cartel hitwomen in Mexico, where organized crime has become an employer of last resort for the young.

Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki urged attacks on American business leaders and officials. He was killed by a US drone strike months later.

Anthony Weiner's sexting scandal imploded his career: the hacked-account lie, the looming resignation, and what it says about power and lying.

Ilyas Kashmiri was reported killed in a 2009 drone strike, then gave an interview. A June 2011 strike in South Waziristan may have finally got him.

In May 2011 Pakistan asked China to take over Gwadar port — and hinted at a naval base. Beijing said no. Inside the new Great Game.

Through most of 2011, political media obsessed over whether Sarah Palin would enter the 2012 Republican primary — until she announced in October she would not.

A Diebold technician stole $200,000 from Bank of America ATMs and replaced the cash with photocopied $20s. It took ten months to catch him.

In May 2011 Trump walked away from a 2012 run, mocked at the Correspondents' Dinner and eclipsed by bin Laden. Four years later, he didn't walk away.

Arrested at JFK in May 2011 and denied bail, the IMF chief resigned within days. The charges were later dismissed; a civil suit settled.

Omar bin Laden, the al-Qaeda chief's fourth son, denounced the Abbottabad raid as 'criminal' and reserved the right to sue the U.S. over his father's killing.

A catch-up phone call, a courier who drove 90 minutes to use a cellphone — and a tall man pacing a walled courtyard. How the CIA zeroed in on Abbottabad.

After the SEALs left Abbottabad, cameras got inside bin Laden's compound: bloodstained floors, scattered belongings, and the wreckage of the burned helicopter.

After the Abbottabad raid, Salman Rushdie called for Pakistan to be declared a terrorist state — the sharpest version of a question Washington was dodging.

After the Abbottabad raid, Pakistan faced pointed questions from Washington and humiliation at home — the competence-or-complicity trap the ISI couldn't escape.

Bin Laden's Abbottabad hideout sat about a mile from Pakistan's elite military academy — a custom-built compound with 14-foot walls and no phone or internet.

Why was bin Laden called 'Geronimo'? The raid code word, what it actually meant, and the backlash from Native Americans who found it offensive.