PETER BAKER

The day before Thanksgiving, President Barack Obama reassured Americans there was “no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.” Seven days later came the deadliest terrorist attack in America since Sept. 11, 2001.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel arrives at the White House on Monday for his first visit in more than a year, both leaders have reasons to put the past behind them. They will discuss a new security agreement and ways to counter Iran.

After years of holding back, former President George H.W. Bush has finally broken his public silence about some of the key figures in his son’s administration, issuing scathing critiques of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

President Barack Obama pledged Friday that he would not sign another temporary spending measure after the one passed this week, a move to try to raise the pressure on Congress to reach a long-term budget deal.

The U.S. government has concluded that the passenger jet felled over Ukraine was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile launched from rebel-held territory and most likely provided by Russia to pro-Moscow separatists, officials said Friday.

President Barack Obama's new plan to fight climate change depends heavily on states' devising individual approaches to meeting goals set in the nation's capital, a strategy similar to the one he used to expand health care, often with rocky results.

For two years, President Obama has boasted that he accomplished what his predecessor had not. "I ended the war in Iraq," he has told audience after audience. But a resurgence by Islamic militants in western Iraq has reminded the world that the war is anything but over.

A president who often shies away from talking about race is set to deliver his own speech Wednesday from the Lincoln Memorial.

President Barack Obama's government Thursday was reviewing the implications for U.S. aid to Egypt after the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi, and under U.S. law it has no choice but to cut off financial assistance to the country if it determines that he was deposed in a military coup. Egyptian officials argued that what happened was not a coup but a popular uprising.

The disclosure of the government's vast surveillance of American telephone records Thursday and further revelations alleging that Internet companies are being tapped served as a potent reminder that President Obama continues to deploy many of the national security tools he inherited from his predecessor even as he seeks to turn the corner in the way the United States responds to terrorism.