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.
Toughening its stand, the Pakistani government lashed out at the United States on Tuesday for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, saying that the United States had made “an unauthorized unilateral action” that would be not be tolerated in the future...
Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target. Two of bin Laden’s protectors were already dead, shot by the Navy SEALs carrying out the raid, and one of the U.S. helicopters sat crippled in the courtyard. Pakistan’s military, which had been kept in the dark about the operation, was scrambling to respond to reports of explosions and gunfire at the one-acre compound...
Republicans pulled controversial "forcible rape" language from a pending bill, but they're trying a backdoor maneuver to ensure the legislation achieves the same effect...
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...
