Story gallery: Reaction

The news that a woman has been named deputy prime minister of Afghanistan made headlines around the world Wednesday, but perhaps nowhere did it mean as much as in a small clinic here, halfway down an alley swirling with noise, donkeys and dust, miles from the Afghan border.

They rose with the sun, scrubbed their cheeks and picked their way over pebbly paths to the schoolyard.

Two months into the war against terrorism, Americans continue to display a level of unity, optimism and confidence in the nation’s leadership rarely seen in the last 40 years, a Times Poll has found.

As the Taliban unravels and its soldiers retreat, a worried Pakistan was struggling Wednesday with an impossible task: sealing off its 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan, a porous line that slices through ancient tribal territories and desolate mountain ranges.

The Taliban is on the decline, and so is Iran’s need to build new camps for refugees, the government’s top official on Afghan issues says, a policy shift that the United Nations fears may be premature.

For Afghan refugees on the run from bombing, starvation and the approaching winter, the price for legally entering Pakistan has finally been established: a leg, an eye, an arm or a few pints of blood.

President Bush’s top political advisor met Sunday with the country’s entertainment titans in Beverly Hills in an attempt to enlist Hollywood in persuading the world that Americans are the good guys in the war on terrorism.

States throughout the country are seeing a dramatic increase in citizen requests for permits to carry concealed weapons, with some reporting the volume of applications has more than doubled since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Nearly 20% report nonlethal problems in a Florida study

Beijing sees opportunity to improve troubled ties between two nations

Screeners’ work, attitudes criticized

The New York Stock Exchange is preparing “contingency” plans to deal with the possibility of a terrorist attack on its Wall Street home, exchange Chairman Richard Grasso told a gathering of financial industry executives gathered in Boca Raton, Fla., Wednesday.

To U.S. authorities, the three men are illegal immigrants from a volatile region who were arrested in roundups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Seeking to better explain its anti-terror campaign both to jittery Americans and to skeptics abroad, the White House is launching a public relations drive in which President Bush will address the nation and play host to several key foreign leaders next week.

Inside a concrete-and-glass laboratory at the Naval Postgraduate School, a computer simulation of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network is beginning to take shape.

Need to give Ben Cardin a piece of your mind?

To most Americans, it is a conundrum.

Lawmakers confronted the Bush administration on Tuesday about its decision to put out an extraordinary terrorist warning earlier this week, questioning whether the FBI’s alert could do more to alarm than protect an already anxious public.

After more than three weeks of inconclusive bombing in Afghanistan, the Bush administration is facing the same question that reverberated through the last two major U.S. military engagements: Can air power do the job by itself?

Prime Minister Tony Blair urged Britons on Tuesday to stiffen their resolve as a new opinion poll indicated a drop in public support for the U.S.

Attorney Sam Eber scoured the edges of the World Trade Center, his eyes darting over wads of dirty paper in search of any familiar shred.

Increasingly alarmed about the detention of hundreds of people as part of an anti-terrorism investigation, Arab-American and human rights groups demanded Monday that the government reveal who are jailed, where they are kept and on what charges.

Necessity is the mother of invention, but war is often a surrogate mom.

In remote parts of this sprawling base, Marines and sailors are training to fight on a different kind of battlefield -- an urban area where the enemy is more likely to be armed with a chemical agent or a bomb strapped to his chest than an AK-47.

In the era of anthrax and suicide hijackers, how much safety can society afford?

Deborah Walker is angry, and she’s not the only one. She has carried the mail for 16 years.

After long flight, it takes 7 seconds to deliver cargo

Officials fear millions of Afghans will be without enough food

Hoping to patch up bitter differences born of two decades of war, several hundred Afghan leaders representing exiled political groups, monarchists and anti-Taliban forces have gathered in this frontier city to discuss the creation of an alternative government for Afghanistan.

Responding to a call for better use of National Guard troops at airports, federal officials have broadened their duties to include patrolling airport perimeters and parking areas, the Transportation Department said Tuesday.

While American forces hunt for senior Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, the Pentagon fears that some on its most-wanted list may already have slipped away.

About a dozen Afghan tribesmen, resplendent in their traditional turbans and robes, settled themselves into garden chairs on the front lawn of Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani’s walled villa on Monday afternoon to haggle over their role in the future of their country.

In this bustling village near the front lines of the war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, smugglers supply everything from cigarettes to shoelaces, a druggist moonlights as a member of the secret police and the ultimate source of authority is a man with a private army and the power of a feudal lord.

The head-to-toe robe that women in Afghanistan are compelled to wear by the Taliban regime is to many the most overtly sinister symbol of the absolute subjugation of that country’s women.

President Bush calls Osama bin Laden “the Evil One” and exhorts the Taliban regime in Kabul to “cough him up.”

Navy Secretary Gordon England said Wednesday he has authorized the Marine Corps to add 2,400 troops to help form a brigade to fight terrorism in the United States and overseas.

Before Sept. 11, smallpox had been conquered, plague was a chapter in Medieval history, and anthrax was a heavy-metal band.

With more than $1 billion pledged to help the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the nation’s nonprofit organizations are struggling to decide exactly who should qualify for assistance.

Sen.

The Bush administration on Monday proposed to aid the beleaguered insurance industry and have the federal government pay the bulk of its claims for terrorist attacks over the next three years.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on Monday positioned himself as a key ally in the fight against Osama bin Laden’s terror network and received strong support from British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the creation of a Palestinian state.

A week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, structural engineers met at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany, and wondered aloud about how to build taller skyscrapers.

Long before he disappeared, Leobardo Lopez Pascual had learned to be invisible.

A procession of large turbaned men with grim visages, thick beards and dusty robes has passed through Hamid Karzai’s gate in this southwestern Pakistani city for the last few weeks.

Vice president is kept hidden for security reasons

Concerned citizens across America had an unprecedented dialogue Thursday with U.N.

Even under heightened security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, scores of machines to detect bombs in checked baggage at U.S. airports are idle or underused, a federal investigator told Congress on Thursday.

Hours after being deployed to stifle unrest over the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan, paramilitary troops opened fire Thursday on a crowd attempting to storm a jail and free pro-Taliban activists.

As Prime Minister Tony Blair toured the Middle East, a London-based radical Islamic group called him “a legitimate target” for assassination because Britain has joined the U.S.

The world’s largest Muslim organization handed the United States a diplomatic victory Wednesday, avoiding condemnation of the U.S.

The four Afghan civilians killed in a U.S. bombing raid Tuesday worked with OMAR, the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation, a U.N.

As top representatives from the world’s largest Muslim organization gathered here Tuesday for an emergency summit, support emerged for a tentative backing of U.S. military action, as long as the endorsement is coupled with a demand for more attention to the Middle East peace process.

Leaders of Muslim and Arab-American advocacy groups are braced for a backlash if U.S.

If Americans were expecting flag burning or rock throwing after the bombardment of Afghanistan, it hasn’t happened in most of the Arab world -- at least not yet.

Will Billy Blazes be a hot item?

Tom Ridge opens the White House Office of Homeland Security today, one day after the U.S. military strike that has likely raised the nation’s need for protection to new heights.

Law enforcement officials nationwide are bracing today for what the FBI calls the “high possibility” that terrorists will attempt a retaliatory strike against Americans in response to the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan.

In a visit designed to bolster support for the cause in a key nation bordering Afghanistan, British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday reassured Pakistan’s military government that it “made the right choice” in joining the international coalition against terrorism.

No guns in the cockpit, the Bush administration decided today, saying pilots should concentrate on flying their airliners and let trained air marshals defend against possible terrorists.

A bipartisan trio of senators on Thursday introduced a bill calling for tighter controls on U.S. visas in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, a proposal they called a common-sense effort to keep potentially dangerous foreign nationals out of the country.

The U.S. government has committed itself to paying in full the nearly 6,000 families who lost a loved one in the Sept. 11 attacks, an unprecedented move, legal experts say.

American Airlines on Tuesday matched a promotion by archrival United Airlines aimed at luring back skittish business travelers, leading to the first widespread fare sale by major airlines since the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

Military personnel would get their largest pay raise in two decades, development of a missile shield would continue and a new round of base closures would be permitted under legislation the Senate approved Tuesday.

Fifteen years of U.S. pressure preceded Pakistan’s extradition this week of a man indicted in a deadly 1986 Pan Am hijacking, but the hand-over of the remaining four hijackers could face further delays, according to officials here.

A federal health agency said Monday that it had arranged for the maker of a smallpox vaccine to deliver millions of doses next year -- two to three years ahead of schedule -- as a hedge against one of the most feared forms of potential biological attack.

The outpouring of more than half a billion dollars to help families of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is prompting debate among the agencies that have lined up to help -- from the best way to give out money to how solicitations should be worded.

The Internet’s oversight board plans to devote its annual meeting in November to assessing the security of the domain name system crucial to directing Web traffic and e-mail and how to respond to any threats.

A boy spends hours in front of a television set watching news coverage about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington have left cities and small towns scrambling to prepare for what U.S. officials say could be the next round of danger: biological or chemical attacks that most rescue workers are ill-equipped to handle.

Rui Satamura’s high school yearbooks evoke bitter memories -- of being called a “Jap” and spending two years in an Arizona internment camp.

Plunging into a new kind of war against terrorism, U.S. leaders are preparing to police the world with economic pressure tactics and far-flung engagements that go well beyond the military mobilization around Afghanistan.

Accountants, computer experts and fraud investigators have risen to the forefront of the new war against terrorism.

Anxiety high; security measures grow; business travel drops

A little more than a week after a deadly, unexpected attack on American soil, entertainment giants joined in an unprecedented patriotic broadcast carried by all the networks.

It’s an odd site: attendants at Disneyland politely asking visitors to have their bags searched as they stream into the world’s most famous theme park.