Biggest Stories of 2011

For the first time in three years, the Nordman family is spending Christmas all together after Sgt. Jim Nordman returned home from Iraq in November.

About a week before he was killed in Iraq, Pfc. John Hart called his parents and said he was concerned because soldiers didn’t have enough protection. His parents’ efforts to help came too late for John, but have saved the lives of others.

More reporters are saying that editors knew about the phone hacking at News of the World, calling into question James Murdoch’s claims that he knew nothing when he led News Corporation’s British operations.

Author Hisham Matar is returning to Libya for the first time in 30 years. In part, he’s hoping to find his father, a dissident who was jailed under Moammar Gadhafi.

The Penn State University sexual abuse scandal has people asking why someone didn’t act sooner to stop the abuse? For instance, how could a grown man say he witnessed a rape and not call the police immediately? Psychologists say the “bystander effect” may be at play.

Penn State senior Alex Braunbeck was at the protests against Paterno’s firing and he wondered “does doing the right thing and being loyal for 61 years mean nothing in this society?”

In 1997, Peter Bergen produced the first TV interview with Osama Bin Laden. Now in a new film for the National Geographic Channel, Bergen chronicles the end of the Al Qaeda leader’s life.

Moammar Gadhafi, who ruled Libya with a dictatorial grip for 42 years until he was ousted by his own people in an uprising that turned into a bloody civil war, was killed Thursday.

Six months after Japan’s nuclear crisis, BBC reporter David Shukman made his way inside the exclusion zone that was evacuated during the disaster.

On Sept. 11 Michael Benfante carried a woman in a wheelchair down 68 floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center to safety. Everyone called him a hero, but ten years on he can’t stop thinking of the firemen he passed on the way down.