Legislature & national threat picture

While change can be slow on Capitol Hill, the new Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is already overhauling how public hearings into some of the nation's most sensitive matters are handled.

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina will begin this process Thursday with the committee's first public hearing, inviting the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicolas Rasmussen to testify on the current U.S. threat picture. Also known as the NCTC, the group was created after 9/11 to be the nation's hub for threat assessments.

New Senate panel chairman overhauls intelligence hearings