TUESDAY’S MINI-REPORT…. Today’s edition of quick hits:
* Not surprisingly, some of the initial accounts from Sunday’s firefight at the bin Laden compound weren’t accurate: “White House officials on Tuesday sought to correct the official account of the raid in Pakistan that ended in the killing of Osama bin Laden, saying that the Qaeda leader was not armed and that his wife was not killed.”
* Obama in New York tomorrow: “President Obama will travel to New York City on Thursday to mark the death of Osama bin Laden by visiting the site of the World Trade Center and meeting with families of victims from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The president is scheduled to deliver a speech, tour the site and meet privately with family members, an administration official said.”
* Iraq: “A car bomb tore through a cafe packed with young men watching a football match Tuesday in Baghdad, killing at least 16 people, officials said.”
* House Republicans put together a new contract for attorney Paul Clement, and will once again pay him and his legal team $500,000 in taxpayer money to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court.
* I really wish more people still cared about this: “Arctic ice is melting faster than expected and could raise the average global sea level by as much as five feet this century, an authoritative new report suggests.”
* Two UCLA geographers and a class of undergraduates authored a 2009 paper predicting Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. How’d they do? “According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 88.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in a city less than 300 km from his last known location in Tora Bora: a region that included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night.”
* The Oklahoma state House of Representatives censured state Rep. Sally Kern (R) for her racism yesterday. Some of her Republican colleagues defended her, but they were in the minority.
* Congrats to Nico Pitney on his promotion, as he becomes the executive editor at the Huffington Post.
* The American Enterprise Institute tries to weigh in on for-profit colleges. The results aren’t good.
* And easily the strangest thing I’ve seen all day is a collection of tweets from people who have no idea who Osama bin Laden is. The terrorist, it turns out, wasn’t living in a cave, but maybe these folks have been.
Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.
