Jon Huntsman: A Political Path, Paved With Detours

After losing an election for senior class president, the former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador to China dropped out of high school and joined a rock band ? not your typical path into Republican presidential politics. But friends and colleagues say Huntsman hasn't often done things by the book.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/01/135846743/jon-huntsman-a-political-path-paved-with-detours?ft=1&f=1014

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Bin Laden: From Millionaire's Son To Most-Wanted

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed thousands of Americans, was killed in an operation led by the United States, President Obama said Sunday. Bin Laden was 54.

A small team of Americans killed bin Laden in a firefight at a compound in Pakistan, the president said in a dramatic late-night statement at the White House.

Details about bin Laden's death are still emerging. But his life ran a fascinating trajectory: from the pampered son of a Saudi millionaire to the world's most-wanted terrorist.

In telling the story of Osama bin Laden, a logical starting point is the day he must consider his greatest triumph — Sept. 11, 2001.

Within hours of the attacks, U.S. officials were pointing to bin Laden as the prime suspect. President Bush said he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive."

Bin Laden at first denied responsibility for the attacks. But in December 2001, U.S. officials produced what they called a "smoking gun" — a video, showing bin Laden in his trademark camouflage jacket and white cap, lounging on a flowered sofa. According to the translation provided by the Pentagon, bin Laden makes clear he played a direct role in engineering the attacks.

Bin Laden is believed to have been born in 1957. He was the 17th of 57 children, according to research by the 9/11 Commission. His father made a fortune in the construction industry in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden grew up playing soccer, riding horses and running. The young bin Laden may have gotten his first taste of radical Islamist theory at university, in Jeddah. Peter Bergen, who has written extensively about al-Qaida, said bin Laden's years at King Abdul-Aziz University exposed him to influential Islamist thinkers.

"One of his teachers, Mohammed Quttb, was the brother of perhaps the Lenin of the whole Jihadist movement — Sayeed Quttb, who had died earlier in Egypt," Bergen said. "Another was a guy called Abdullah Azzam, with whom bin Laden would later go on to form a kind of prequel to al-Qaida, a group called the Services Office that was instrumental in getting Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan to fight against the Soviets."

The fight against the Soviets, following Moscow's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, was a defining struggle in bin Laden's life. He traveled to the region, raised money from other wealthy Muslims to finance the fight and engaged in at least one battle himself. The war in Afghanistan lasted 10 years — basically the whole of the 1980s. John Parachini, an expert on terrorism at the Rand Corp., said for bin Laden and millions of other Muslims, those years created a movement.

"In this period, there is an awakening throughout the Islamic world about fighting a great struggle — beyond the struggle that many fundamentalist Islamic groups were fighting in their own nations," Parachini said.

For bin Laden, that struggle found expression within the Salafi movement. Salafis believe that over the centuries, the message of Islam has been corrupted. They want a return to the "pure Islam" practiced by the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors. Bin Laden has presented himself as the embodiment of the Salafi movement — a spiritual leader, for whom war is a religious obligation, wherever Muslims are being oppressed. It's a powerful message. Millions of Muslims who don't support violent jihad still saw bin Laden as the most capable voice speaking out against corrupt national leaders and the West.

In 1989, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, bin Laden went home to Saudi Arabia. But his relations with the country's leaders soon soured. Bin Laden's passport — and eventually his citizenship — was revoked. So he left, and spent the next five years in exile in Sudan. John Parachini said those years, from 1991 to '96, were a critical time.

"Here is where the modern-day bin Laden really comes to the front," Parachini said, "because it's he, with his considerable wealth, operating in a weak state. So here you have this confluence of interest of a newly emerged Islamic state, and a newly emerged, subnational, loosely affiliated collection of people that we now know as al-Qaida."

But as bin Laden's influence grew, the U.S., the United Nations and Saudi Arabia all began pressuring Sudan's government to force him out. On May 19, 1996, he left. He found a home back in Afghanistan, and soon forged a relationship with the ruling Taliban. They needed his cash, and bin Laden needed a base where he could concentrate on building his terrorist network.

Peter Bergen met bin Laden during those years in Afghanistan. He's now a director at the New America Foundation in Washington. Back in March 1997, he was a producer for CNN. He and two other CNN staffers were picked up at dusk, blindfolded and driven through the night to meet bin Laden.

"When he came out of the darkness — he's 6-foot-5, walks with a cane — he didn't seem psychotic. He was quite intelligent, obviously. He seemed like a pretty serious sort of person," Bergen said. "It puzzled me, however, how he was going to pull off attacks against the U.S., given that we're sitting in a mud hut in the middle of the night in Afghanistan."

As it turned out, al-Qaida planning was already well under way for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 224 people were killed.

Two weeks later, the U.S. retaliated, launching Tomahawk cruise missiles against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan.

President Bill Clinton addressed the nation with this explanation: "Our target was terror. Our mission was clear: to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden, perhaps the pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terror in the world today."

Bin Laden, of course, did not die in the U.S. strikes. Instead, he spent the next three years preparing for what would be his most spectacular attack. Sept. 11 was a triumph for al-Qaida — but it also provoked swift retribution. On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces launched airstrikes on Afghanistan. Bin Laden was forced to go on the run. In the years that followed, bin Laden's ability to communicate with his followers was hampered. But bin Laden's message — his vision for jihad — remained ambitious.

"Bin Laden and his followers genuinely believe that what they are about is reformulating the global order," said Daniel Benjamin, now the State Department's point man on terrorism issues.

"They very much think of restoring Islam to the point of its greatest glory, 1,300 years ago. They want to have a single Muslim community stretching from the north Atlantic — or Spain — to Indonesia. They do think in these kinds of messianic terms, in the hope of recasting the globe," Benjamin said.

Benjamin believes that message resonated among Muslims around the world, because bin Laden cast his agenda as springing from religious — rather than political — motivations. Bin Laden is a deeply pious man, Benjamin said. And to top it off, he had the money and fundraising skills to finance his ambitions.

"So he really reshaped the struggle. He's managed to create both an authentic cause, an authentic ideology, and to find the means to carry it out," Benjamin said. "And I fear that the path that he hewed, he cut, is one that others are going to travel for some time to come."

The question now will be: What happens to the movement that Osama bin Laden helped create?

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135905649/bin-laden-from-millionaires-son-to-most-wanted?ft=1&f=1003

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Halperin's Take: What It Means (TIME)

The President's speech to the nation, announcing that Osama bin Laden has been killed by an American team in Pakistan, was strong, proud and passionate, and proved once again that Obama is capable of reaching the highest levels of gravitas and consequence his job demands. From one end of the American political spectrum to the [...] Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/84506156?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Obama Tries to Rebuild Hispanic Ties (WSJ)

President Barack Obama met last week at the White House with a group of Latino celebrities, the latest in a series of moves to re-build his ties to a fast- growing segment of the electorate heading toward 2012. Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/84461716?client_source=feed&format=rss

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At The Royal Wedding, Choreography Is Everything

It's finally actually time for the royal wedding, after all the talk and the runup. And now, you'll get to see what is likely to be a very carefully planned event, where even the movements of little children are scheduled to the minute.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/29/135810069/at-the-royal-wedding-choreography-is-everything?ft=1&f=1057

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Deadly Tornadoes Remain Hard To Predict

Butch Dill/AP

Residents survey the destruction after a tornado hit Pratt City, Ala., on April 27. Short-term forecasting of twisters like the ones that swept the South this week has grown increasingly accurate, but long-term forecasting remains highly unreliable.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/30/135849668/deadly-tornadoes-remain-hard-to-predict?ft=1&f=1003

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Flood-Threatened Ill. City Evacuated

Authorities in a southern Illinois city menaced by two dangerously swollen rivers say most of the city's remaining residents have heeded a mandatory evacuation order, prompted by river water seeping up through the ground behind the levee "kind of like Old Faithful."

Passing thunderstorms dumped rain overnight on the already waterlogged region, adding to the worries of emergency officials.

Cairo Mayor Judson Childs issued a mandatory evacuation order for the city of 2,800 residents late Saturday afternoon, hours after meeting with Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh, the Army Corps of Engineers officer tasked with deciding whether to blow a hole in the Birds Point levee in Missouri, downstream from Cairo, to relieve pressure on levees along the dangerously high Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He ordered remaining residents to leave by midnight Saturday due to a "sand boil" — or area of river water seepage — that had become dangerously large.

At 4 a.m. CDT, the Ohio River topped a 1937 record of 59.50 feet by reaching 59.59 feet at Cairo, the National Weather Service reported.

Jim Pitchford, a spokesman for Cairo's emergency services, told The Associated Press early Sunday that authorities had taken note of the new river level but were gratified that the boil area appeared to hold "stable" throughout the night. He said the seeping water was undergoing constant monitoring by corps officials.

"I'm happy to report that there's been no change in the past four hours. We continue to monitor the area and we have taken note of the gauge," he said of the record level on the Ohio River at Cairo posted on a National Weather Service website.

Pitchford said corps officials and others had been out checking the pumps during the night and earlier thunderstorms had since ended.

Police in Cairo also told AP early Sunday that they had no indication anyone had defied the mandatory evacuation order, but officers would go door to door in coming hours to make sure everyone was out who wasn't authorized to be there.

Walsh, who toured Cairo's levee area, had recently described the boil that has been growing since it was first spotted Tuesday as the largest he had ever seen, the Southeast Missourian newspaper reported. Sand boils occur when high-pressure water pushes under flood walls and levees and wells up through the soil behind them. They're a potential sign of trouble.

City clerk Lorrie Hesselrode described the boil as "kind of like Old Faithful," the famous geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. "There's so much water pressure it forces the water under ground."

"It's kind of scary. It's pretty big. We've had sand boils before but nothing like this. It is under control but other boils have popped up," she told The Associated Press.

The river is expected to crest in Cairo at 60.5 feet — a foot above the local record high — by Tuesday morning and stay there through at least Thursday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service. A flood wall protects Cairo up to 64 feet, but the corps fears that water pressure from the lingering river crest could compromise the wall and earthen levees that protect other parts of the city.

Earlier Saturday, Cairo police Chief Gary Hankins estimated that about 1,000 residents had remained prior to the mandatory evacuation.

The corps inched closer Saturday to blowing a hole in the Birds Point levee after a federal appeals court declined to stop the move. The corps moved a pair of barges loaded with the makings of an explosive sludge into position near the levee, which is on the Mississippi River just downstream from Cairo in Missouri, but said it hadn't decided that it needed to breach the 60-foot-high earthen wall to protect Cairo.

The 230 people who live in the southeast Missouri flood plain behind the Birds Point levee had already been evacuated from their homes, a spokesman for Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said. Some of the farmers whose roughly 130,000 acres of land would be inundated moved out what they could Saturday, assuming the corps will have no choice as the Mississippi and Ohio that feeds it rise.

"When the water hits this dirt, it's going to make a hell of a mess," one of the farmers, Ed Marshall, said as he packed up his farm office and hauled away propane tanks and other equipment. He said he was keeping an eye on the weather forecast, which called for several more inches of rain over the next few days. "If that happens, I don't believe they'll be able to hold it."

In Cairo, the mayor said he was relieved by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision early Saturday in St. Louis.

"I've been saying all along that we can't take land over lives," Childs said.

The state of Missouri had asked the court to block the plan to protect the farm land. Scott Holste, a spokesman for Nixon, said state officials there are now focused on protecting the homes, agricultural equipment and other property left behind in the heavily farmed flood plain below the levee. In addition to people evacuated from the floodway, as many as 800 were asked to leave surrounding areas.

"The entire area has been evacuated now," Holste said, adding that more than 500 Missouri National Guard troops are helping local law enforcement at checkpoints around the area.

It's unclear whether Missouri could pursue further legal action. Holste referred questions to Attorney General Chris Koster, whose didn't respond to phone calls or emails Saturday from The Associated Press.

The corps started moving the barges to a spot in Kentucky just across from the levee Saturday afternoon but was still weighing its options and monitoring the rise of the Ohio River in Cairo, which is just north of where the Ohio flows into the Mississippi, spokesman Jim Pogue said. The decision would be based on how high the river is expected to get, from new rain that could fall and water backing up in reservoirs upstream.

One key signal, he said, will be if the Ohio nears or reaches 61 feet at Cairo.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/01/135889054/flood-threatened-ill-city-evacuated?ft=1&f=1003

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A 'Radical' Plan To Cut Military Spending

This year the U.S. is expected to spend $700 billion on defense. That's twice what was spent in 2001, and as much as is spent on the rest of the world's militaries combined.

Defense is the U.S. government's biggest discretionary expenditure, but given the level of the national debt — and the drive to reduce government spending — calls are louder than ever to find cost savings.

Ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor says there are ways to reap major savings when it comes to defense. He recently wrote about the subject in an article titled "Lean, Mean Fighting Machine" for Foreign Policy magazine. He tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that the U.S. simply cannot afford "wars of choice."

"Emphasis on choice," Macgregor says. "If you look at all of the interventions that we have launched since 1945 — beginning with Vietnam in 1965 and moving forward — none of them have changed the international system at all, and none of them have directly benefited us strategically."

World War II was the last military event that really had a strategic global impact, he says. "Americans need to understand that these wars of choice, these interventions of choice, have been both unnecessary, counterproductive, strategically self-defeating and infinitely too expensive for what we can actually afford."

A 'Somewhat Radical' Plan

Macgregor recommends swift reduction of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that's just the beginning. In a plan he acknowledges as "somewhat radical," he proposes a 40 percent reduction of the defense budget in just three years. Forcing the Pentagon to adapt to a drastically smaller budget, he says, will streamline the organization.

If you look at the Soviets, the Royal Navy, British Army and various other military formations over the last couple centuries, Macgregor says, "what you discover is that most innovation — and the most positive change, an adaptation to reality — occurs not in a flood of money, but in its absence.

"That's when people have to sit down and come to terms with reality, and realize that they cannot go on, into the future, and do what they've done in the past," he says.

The nature of warfare has changed, too, he says. With new technology and different players, things can be done in other ways — and more cheaply.

Prioritizing Spending Cuts

Most of the current U.S. military effort and strategy is either self-defeating or simply unnecessary, he says. "It's spending that we don't need."

That call catches ears these days, as Congress and the Obama administration battle over spending cuts. Those cuts are often aimed at domestic programs, but Macgregor says any hope for implementing his proposal requires that the U.S. reconsider its priorities.

"We have to deliver the services that were promised under Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security," he says. "We cannot honor those obligations ... without reducing defense and reorienting our defense posture to a world that's very different today than the one in which most of these forces were created and invented."

Profiting From Military Industries

Military and the private defense industries in America are enormous, providing millions of jobs across a lot of states. That makes many members of Congress even more reluctant to scale back on the military budget — particularly at a time when the nation is looking to create jobs, not cut them. Macgregor says creating prosperity shouldn't depend on military profits.

"What we have right now are very powerful military bureaucracies tied to the defense industries that want to stay in business." They're larger than we need, he says, but congressional interests see military budgets as a way to sustain prosperity by redistributing the income from those industries.

"This is an enormous problem," Macgregor says, "but we've got to deal with it, because we can't afford it, and it will ultimately consume us over time."

Despite these challenges, Macgregor says his proposals do have some support on Capitol Hill. "That's very important," he says, "because I think there are Democrats and Republicans who can agree on these things."

Like Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Ron Paul (R-TX), Macgregor says — two people on opposite ends of the spectrum in domestic terms but who have come to similar conclusions on foreign and defense policy.

"And they are not alone," Macgregor adds. "There are many, many, many more. I think we will see more in the future as it becomes clear that we cannot deal with the domestic problem until we deal with the foreign and defense policy problem. That has to come first. Then we can begin talking seriously about what we have to do to restructure the debt."

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/30/135872891/a-radical-plan-to-cut-military-spending?ft=1&f=1003

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Bug News Roundup: Ant Rafts, Robot Caterpillars

Drop a clump of fire ants into water and they will assemble into a raft that stays afloat for weeks, according to a new study. Plus, a new soft-bodied robot is modeled after caterpillars that curl up and roll away from predators without joints. SciFri's "Pick of the Week" turns to insects and engineering this week.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/29/135840996/bug-news-roundup-ant-rafts-robot-caterpillars?ft=1&f=1007

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