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Does Osama bin Laden matter anymore? You could be forgiven for thinking he doesn't. In recent months, an impressive cast of terrorism experts and counterterrorism officials around the world has coalesced around the notion that al-Qaeda's leader is no longer an active threat to the West. They point out that he has not been able to strike on U.S. soil since 9/11 or in Europe since the London bombings three summers ago. In Iraq, his most successful franchise operation is on the ropes. Across the Muslim world, opinion polls suggest his popularity has faded, and many...
...even though the overall population of contemporary Russia continues to shrink by more than half a million people a year, fools appear to multiply as profusely as ever. Perhaps that's why whenever national elections are held, the polling station nearest my dacha (country house) is the local loony bin. As for the roads, each 40-mile drive here from Moscow confirms my suspicion that roads were in much better shape in Gogol's time. Today, they look as if World War II just ended, but not before a couple of Messerschmitts managed to sneak in a final strafing...
...Paul Pillar, former top analyst and deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, who now teaches at Georgetown University. Says Frances Fragos Townsend, who stepped down last November as chief of President George W. Bush's Homeland Security Council, "I've read all the same conflicting reports [on bin Laden's health] that people have talked to you about. I never found one set of reporting more persuasive than another...
...bin Laden really is dying, the news would doubtless be greeted with some ambivalence. On the one hand, his demise is what the U.S. government has been fervently trying to hasten - since before 9/11. But death by kidney disease is not exactly what it had in mind. "Wouldn't that be a tragic situation if, with all this effort, bin Laden died without it happening at the hands of coalition forces?" says one current senior counterterrorism official. Given the reliability of past long-distance diagnoses, however, and the continuing threat al-Qaeda poses around the world, that...
...this sounds familiar to those following Malaysian politics, consider what happened a decade ago. Then the country's Deputy Prime Minister and a star in the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), Malaysia's largest political party, Anwar launched a challenge against the long rule of former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. Anwar was quickly sacked and charged with sodomy and abuse of power. Although the sex charge was overturned in 2004, the man once presumed to become Malaysia's next Prime Minister languished in prison for six years...