President-elect Donald Trump does not have the traditional cadre of Washington insiders and donors to build out his Cabinet, but his transition team has spent the past several months quietly building a short list of industry titans and conservative activists who could comprise one of the more eclectic and controversial presidential Cabinets in modern history.

More than half a century on, the cause of the crash remains unknown. Two recent commissions — the first of which I led, the second set up by the United Nations General Assembly in response to my commission’s findings — appear to have been stalled by a United States agency that may hold critical evidence pointing to the cause of the disaster.

Shortly after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Chief Justice Earl Warren, who oversaw the first official inquiry, was asked by a reporter if the full record would be made public. “Yes, there will come a time,” the chairman of the Warren Commission responded. “But it might not be in your lifetime.” It will soon be in ours — that is, unless the CIA, FBI or other agencies still holding on to thousands of secret documents from a series of related probes convince the next occupant of the White House otherwise.

Osama bin Laden liked to read about the New World Order — a conspiracy theory that holds that a secretive, rich and powerful group wants to rule the world.

The al Qaeda leader had a lot of downtime during his decade in hiding following his masterminding of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His reading list, as recovered by the raid on his Pakistani compound in 2011 and in part released by the U.S. government on Wednesday, offers some insight into his state of mind.

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.