Osama bin Laden was always the boss. (Not like this.) Videos released yesterday add to the supposition that his Pakistani compound was a “command and control” center for Al-Qaida and the global terrorist network it presided over. White House officials, perhaps too enthusiastically, say the trove of intelligence data recovered from Abbottabad amounts to a “small college library.”
He didn’t have to do chores, or tend to the livestock, but the videos and other interviews also shed more light on the spartan, quotidian, semi-caged existence of a terrorist leader left to watch himself on satellite TV and frolic with five young wives.
Who replaces bin Laden may not be as clear-cut a choice as the intelligence community once assumed. His No. 1 (in Star Trek parlance), Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been divisive, and rival factions within Al-Qaida may back other candidates.
Street-fighting between Muslims and Christians in Egypt has left 12 people dead and two churches aflame, the most violent eruption yet of long-suppressed sectarian tension after decades of Hosni Mubarak’s strong-arm rule.
Syria’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters reaches a new low: the killing of a 12-year-old boy. As the crisis deepens, it seems the Syrians are increasingly turning to Iran for moral support.
A bankrupt Greece would really like it if this was the year your high school’s Hellenic Culture Club, or whatnot, decided to peep in person at the crumbling ruins that make up the cradle of democracy.
Hundreds of people are still high-tailing it the fuck out of Memphis, ahead of a rising Mississippi that should hit its destructive high-water mark sometime on Tuesday.
The soft, underwhelming, mostly phantom field of Republican presidential candidates has big-bucks donors holding fast to their cash while they wait for someone credible to take on Barack Obama next year. That reticence is helping feed a “chicken-and-egg” spiral, some observers say, in which better candidates, sensing donors’ reticence, are also waiting to get in.
Dick Cheney isn’t sure if he wants a new heart.
Meanwhile, in sunny Los Angeles, more than a dozen former cops have become millionaires in the past decade after suing the city and the police department over myriad complaints of sexual harassment and racial discrimination on the job.
It’s just cancer, pussies! Justin Bieber tells his nervous crew that yes, in fact, we’re touring Japan.
“Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.”
Happy mother’s day. It’s raining, it’s pouring. Blah blah. Get some religion and quit yer bitchin’.
If radiation turned a lizard into Godzilla and a moth into Mothra, I’m somewhat concerned about what a Bieber might turn into.
Cool album cover. You’re lucky that you haven’t been drafted into a band called “Steve Humphrey and his Humparoos.”
Ah, pop stars and bad overdubbed movies. It’s like they were made for each other.