Daily Briefing
Deep buzz for the content-deprived
Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy- fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know, or at least enough to fake it.
Spectators at a Phillies-Mets baseball game broke into chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A" as news of Osama Bin Laden's death made its way through the crowd on Sunday night. When did Americans start yelling the name of their country over and over again to express joy or patriotic pride?...
From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 70 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers...
Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Sunday, was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical, violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century...
A long, long time ago — in the year 2003, to be exact — when Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye and twittering was still for birds, blogging was the now thing. For troops heading to war, it was a revelation. Through personal blogs, they could send letters home to friends and relatives in a single dispatch. They could mock commanding officers in ribald, and anonymous, prose. They could describe combat with the immediacy of Ernie Pyle, without the filter of actual editors. Many discovered, to their shock and glee, that thousands of strangers were reading their posts...
President Obama announced late Sunday that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, was killed in a firefight during an operation he ordered Sunday inside Pakistan, ending a 10-year manhunt for the world’s most wanted terrorist. American officials were in possession of his body, he said...
How the Arab Spring remade Obama's foreign policy...
On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth...
The walls in the basement of a building in Brooklyn’s Chinatown were whitewashed, and boxes of cleaning supplies were stacked on the red tile floor. But beneath the disinfectant smell, the unmistakable odor of fish lingered as the flimsiest calling card of a former tenant. That tenant, Yong Hao Wu, sold fish until October for his Howei Trading Company out of this shop on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park. Mr. Wu is now out of business and under arrest because the authorities have accused him of illegally importing thousands of live snakehead fish...
Seth Meyers, the featured funnyman at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, hemmed and hawed a bit before accepting the gig.
Though honored to join the ranks of past headliners including Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Conan O’Brien, Lewis Black and Jay Leno, Meyers, head writer on “Saturday Night Live” and anchor of the show’s mock news report, Weekend Update, had to think about it...
What a gift Werner Herzog offers with “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” an inside look at the astonishing Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc — and in 3-D too. In southern France, about 400 miles from Paris, the limestone cave contains a wealth of early paintings, perhaps from as long ago as 32,000 years...
