Item: For the second time in five months, the Pakistani authorities have angered the Central Intelligence Agency by tipping the Pakistani news media to the identity of the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad, a deliberate effort to complicate the work of the American spy agency in the aftermath of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, American officials said.
Mr. Keller questioned why Bin Laden would live in Abbottabad, unless he had some assurance of protection or patronage from military or intelligence officers. “At best, it was willful blindness on the part of the ISI,” Mr. Keller said. “Willful blindness is a survival mechanism in Pakistan.”
When the end came for Bin Laden, he was found not in the remote tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. He was hiding in the medium-sized city of Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy of the Pakistani Army.
UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest commercial health insurers, reported robust profits on Thursday. The company, which is the first of the major insurers to make public its quarterly earnings, is viewed as something of a bellwether for the rest of the industry.
In addition to besting Wall Street estimates, UnitedHealth’s results would seem to suggest that life under the new federal health care law may not be so bad for insurers after all.
Story, what little there is of it, here.
And note that it's not all that much different than this story, published about the previous quarter.




A Philadelphia professor is the subject of an investigation following allegations he hired strippers to take part in a symposium where he and students received lap dances, MyFoxPhilly.com reports.
Story here.
Why didn't they have these kind of classes when I went to school?





邀请全美畅销军事小说作家「Jim DeFelice」参与本作剧作制作的本作除了收录系列前作的的各个机种外还将收录战斗直升机和战艇等各式新型航空武器,世界最强战斗直升机「AH-64D Apache Longbow」阿帕奇战斗直升机登场,玩家们可以驾驶这架拥有超高性能的战斗直升机进行时速高达250公里的高速飞行或是使用30mm机关炮或是对地飞弹、可连续发射的火箭弹等压倒性火力进行超近距离的连续大破坏。
Philadelphia lefthander Cliff Lee told WIP radio in Philadelphia last week that he chose the Phillies over the New York Yankees this offseason because "some of the Yankee guys are getting older."
Cover concept memo
I have a new book coming out next year - The Helios Conspiracy - which features the return of Andy Fisher. The publisher bravely asked for my thoughts . . .
TITLE: The Helios ConspiracyAUTHOR: Jim DeFeliceSYNOPSIS:Irreverent FBI special agent and serial coffee drinker Andy Fisher investigates the murder of his ex-girlfriend, and discovers a plot to destroy a rocket carrying an American solar energy gathering satellite into space. The energy system, once implemented, would solve American energy problems. There's also as much gratuitous sex as I could sneak in.SETTING: New Mexico, New York City, Silicone* Valley (*pun; get it?)LEAD Characters: Fisher, an iconic and ironic FBI agent. Beautiful dead woman. Beautiful undead woman scientist. Evil white guys and suspect geeks.If you do have a particular scene/artist in mind:Maybe something using the sun and naked women . . .


Apparently, a diet is a diet, even if you are Viktor Bout, accused of being an international arms trafficker.After Mr. Bout appeared at a pretrial hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Thursday, his wife and his new lawyer suggested that Mr. Bout was suffering miserably in federal custody — largely because he was not getting enough food to satisfy his vegetarian lifestyle.
Mr. Bout, 44, was extradited from Thailand in November and is being held in the maximum-security wing of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. His wife, Alla Bout, said he contracted tuberculosis while he was detained in Thailand — where he was arrested — before he was extradited and, as a result, required a very specific nutritional intake.
But then I read further in the story:
Ms. Bout, who is living in New York and visits her husband for three hours each Monday, said he awoke daily at 5 a.m. to exercise in his cell. The remainder of his day, she said, is spent in pursuit of language and culture. Mr. Bout studies foreign languages, like Farsi and Hindi, for several hours, routinely translating foreign texts; he has taken up drawing and produces artwork that Ms. Bout, a designer, said she critiqued. All the while, classical music echoes in Mr. Bout’s small cell.
Clearly society stands to gain from Mr. Bout's continued incarceration and self-improvement. I say give him all the broccoli he can eat.
(Original story here.)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects fundamentalist church members who mount anti-gay protests outside military funerals, despite the pain they cause grieving families.(Full AP story here.)

. . . but have you ever seen an RAF Sabre?
(More early Cold War RAF photos here. If you go to his home page, you can drill down to other old photos as well.)
On Friday, Jan. 28, accompanied by my family, I was among 160 citizens-in-waiting who filed into a 3rd-floor auditorium in lower Manhattan to be sworn in as Americans. On our seats were an American flag, a copy of the Constitution, a booklet featuring the stories of prominent naturalized Americans, and a welcome letter from President Obama.
Reading the letter, I began to cry. I had spent more than one-quarter of my life hoping to become American, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the honor and the significance of the moment. The place I have called home for 12 years was finally claiming me, as well.
I looked around the room and saw other fortunate souls with long journeys now behind them, quietly weeping with joy.
Full article here, in Slate. (Most of the article is about mistakes in the citizenship test.)Have you ever received an insurance bill and wondered why it was double last year's? So did this guy in Pennsylvania:
All Patrick . . . wanted was for someone from Wells Fargo to talk to him. A single, white, goth and industrial music event promoter who declines to give his age, he wanted someone to explain why they were doubling his premiums and requiring him to insure his century-old house for its full replacement value instead of the market value.
Instead of getting an explanation, he ended up putting the bank's local branch office on the auction block.
Full story here. (Complete with Goth pictures, if you're into that.)
I'm guessing we'll soon be hearing more about the op and the pirates who murdered the missionaries about the sailboat in the Gulf of Aden.
In the meantime, most sensible people are calling for direct action against them before they take ships. But rather than just attacking the villages they sail out of - which we ought to do - we should hit the people who are financing them.
It's not as if we don't know who they are or can't figure it out - the navy was talking to one of them when all hell broke lose.
Bankroll a pirate, hang from a yardarm: sounds fair to me.
Item:
Suspected Somali pirates captured a U.S.-bound tanker carrying around $200 million worth of crude oil in the Indian Ocean on Wednesday in one of the biggest hijackings in the area so far.
Full story, which ought to seem more than a little familiar, here.
Speaking of Red Dragon Rising, one of these days I'm going to write a post on how difficult it can be to come up with a good title for a book.
The books in the Red Dragon series have gotten into a certain pattern: "X of War" for you math mavens, with X being a variable based somehow on the relevant happenings. "Shadow" and "Edge" have done it for us so far.
That sounded like a good idea when we started, but now we realize that it cuts down on the possibilities. The next installment in the series - which will be out this fall - presented a serious challenge. The best "X" based on the contents would have been "casualties" - but that gives you the title of a fairly famous movie set during the Vietnam War. Not only that, but the movie's central storyline was something we didn't want to connect with this book.
(Full disclosure: I didn't know until I looked it up. Duh. I still haven't seen the movie.)
Fortunately, Larry hit on a much better alternative on the second try, and we ran with it.
Or at least we think we did. The publisher still hasn't OK'd it, which is why it's not appearing in this post.
I was talking with Rob the Accountant the other day, and he brought up an interesting point:
How do the solar-powered parking meters in New York City (or anywhere else) work when there is a foot and a half of snow on the solar panels? (As there are now.)
Battery backup? Or are there really squirrels inside?
Good, brief roundup on unmanned helicopters for the uninitiated in Popular Mechanics on unmanned choppers, online here.
URL:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/robots/the-rise-of-the-drone-helicopter?src=rss#fbIndex1
Of course, they don't have the Dreamland birds, but what the hey :-)....
Speaking of helicopters, I've always wondered why they became known as "helos" in Navy slang. I can see the British slang - "heli" - but helo? (pronounced heal-O)
A few programming notes:
The Bradley biography has been moved to the fall so the publisher can put together a marketing/selling campaign and coordinate with other World War II books.
Meanwhile, Helios has been moved to February 2012 - maybe we'll have the actual solar collecting satellite launch by then.
Do I file this AP story under the pot calling kettle black, or chutzpah unlimited?
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak betrayed his people and the uprising against his rule is the appropriate response, Iran's top leader said during Friday prayers in Tehran.
Full story here, among other places.

Item: Pettitte retires. Semi-official story here.
Bummer for the Yanks. But Pettitte has certainly earned it.
From Publisher's Lunch:
Attorneys James Daily and Ryan Davidson [are writing] SUPERHEROES AND SUPERVILLAINS: THE LEGAL GUIDE, based on their blog Law and the Multiverse. [The book takes] a look at legal issues in the comic book universe (such as: "Are Wolverine's claws covered by the Second Amendment?" and "Can a supervillain be extradited to another dimension?")
I say yes to the first, no to the second. But the real question is how does a superhero lawyer get paid?

















