Marco Longari/AFP/Getty

Egyptians pray for closure as the former dictator and his two sons go back on trial.

In August 2011, Hosni Mubarak, deposed just six months earlier by the Egyptian revolution, traveled by helicopter to a Cairo courthouse to stand trial. Crowds massed outside the building to behold the spectacle, while tens of millions of people tuned in on TV as the former dictator, ailing on a rolling hospital bed, made his jarring appearance inside the court’s metal defendant’s cage. Facing charges over the deaths of hundreds of protesters during his last days in power, Mubarak was eventually convicted of being an accessory to murder and handed a life term in jail.

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There you have it. Amid questions about whether Kim Jong-un can follow through on his nuclear threats, a new Pentagon reports says the answer is probably yes. Eli Lake reports.

North Korea likely has nuclear weapons that can be delivered by ballistic weapons, according to a classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The assessment comes amid escalating rhetoric by Kim Jong-un threatening nuclear strikes on the United States. It’s the clearest statement yet that the boy leader poses a legitimate and imminent nuclear threat.According to the report, “DIA assesses with moderate confidence the North currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles however the reliability will be low.

Hussein Malla/AP, file

The civil war in Syria is undermining the Shiite movement. The fall of Assad could spell its end. By Jamie Dettmer in Beirut.

Hezbollah has always been a highly secretive organization—and a disciplined one at that.  Shiites who belong to Hezbollah are careful not to talk out of turn. But as fighting rages next door in Syria, Hezbollah appears even cagier than usual as Lebanon tries to contain the rising sectarian tensions linked to the Syrian conflict.Lebanon’s two largest political blocs—one led by Hezbollah and the other by the Future Movement—support opposing sides in the fight between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and rebels trying to oust him.

KimJae-Hwan/AFP/Getty

The bellicose threats from Pyongyang are the same as ever. But this time, South Korea isn’t going to let a provocation go by without retaliating. Gordon G. Chang explains why.

“This is a pattern of behavior we’ve seen out of the North Koreans many times,” Dan Pfeiffer, a senior White House adviser, said Sunday on ABC’s This Week.There is, from year to year, a sameness to the dire threats from Pyongyang. The assumption, therefore, is that this North Korean crisis, like ones in the past, will be contained. This time, however, it might not be so easy to wind down the crisis. The North Koreans appear determined to provoke South Korea again, and the South Koreans, for the first time in years, are now primed to strike back and even the score for Pyongyang’s deadly attacks in the past.

Xinhua/KCNA via Newscom

Pretty freaking scared, according to some experts. Then again, the question of whether North Korea can ‘miniaturize’ a nuclear weapon remains eerily unanswered. Eli Lake reports.

North Korea has tested a nuclear device underground three times since 2006. But that doesn’t mean it can launch an actual nuclear missile. This would require, among other things, the ability to miniaturize the components that cause a nuclear explosion so that they can fit inside a warhead, which then rests atop a missile. This is no easy feat—and the United States intelligence community is divided on the question of whether North Korea is at the point of pulling it off.

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The little Gulf country is giving some serious money to cash-strapped Egypt, but the question is, Why? Mike Giglio reports.

Egypt’s economy is in sharp decline, thanks in large part to its never-ending political unrest. In Washington, these dire economic straits have added new weight to a practice long favored by politicians looking to pressure the Egyptian government: the threat to cut off aid. Egypt receives more than $1 billion annually from the U.S., and amid concerns on Capitol Hill over President Mohamed Morsi’s commitment to democracy, legislators have pressed the Obama administration to freeze the funds.

Hussein Malla/AP, file

The civil war in Syria is undermining the Shiite movement. The fall of Assad could spell its end. By Jamie Dettmer in Beirut.

Hezbollah has always been a highly secretive organization—and a disciplined one at that.  Shiites who belong to Hezbollah are careful not to talk out of turn. But as fighting rages next door in Syria, Hezbollah appears even cagier than usual as Lebanon tries to contain the rising sectarian tensions linked to the Syrian conflict.Lebanon’s two largest political blocs—one led by Hezbollah and the other by the Future Movement—support opposing sides in the fight between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and rebels trying to oust him.

Reuters-Landov

A merger between terrorist groups spells even more trouble for Syrians caught in the middle. By Jamie Dettmer.

Syrians battling to oust President Bashar al-Assad shouldn’t settle for democracy as the reward for their sacrifices but should embrace strict Islamic sharia law when the Syrian regime has been finally defeated, says the emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.In a recorded audio message lasting 20 minutes and released yesterday to jihadi websites, Al-Baghdadi acknowledged that Al Qaeda has been involved in the fighting in Syria, confirming that the Jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, which has become one of the most effective and disciplined rebel formations in the civil war, is an extension of Al Qaeda in Iraq, otherwise known as the Islamic State of Iraq.

Laurent Rebours/AP

The Nobel laureate was exhumed so that his remains could be tested for poison. Mac Margolis reports that leftists believe Neruda could have been targeted during Chile’s dirty war.

For Chileans, 9/11 is a date with a meaning all its own. That’s the day, in 1973, when combat troops under orders of Gen. Augusto Pinochet attacked the La Moneda presidential palace, toppling the democratically elected government and installing a 17-year dictatorship. In that time, more than 3,000 Chileans are known to have died or “disappeared” at the hands of official security forces. But now comes word that Chile’s notorious guerra sucia (dirty war) may have claimed yet another victim, in a crime as telling as it was brazen.

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A loner for most of her political career, the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher faced vicious sexism, but she triumphed to transform the status of women in Britain. Just don’t call her a feminist. By Amanda Foreman.

The late Margaret Thatcher never called herself a feminist. In 1975, during her first tour of the United States as the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Thatcher refused to give the feminist movement any credit for her success. When asked by a reporter about her debt to “women’s lib,” she angrily replied, “Some of us were making it long before women’s lib was ever thought of.”Thatcher’s anger was understandable, she had climbed the treacherous road to political power on her own, without the help of any movement, interest group, or fan base.