For the first time in a week I’m not starting out talking about the government shutdown. I’ll circle back around to it in just a second.

Some surprising anti-terrorism victories
We captured one of the Al Qaeda leaders who led the 1998 bombings against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. We captured this guy alive. His name is Nazih Abd al Hamid al-Ruqhay, but he is also known as Abu Anas el-Liby. He was captured near Tripoli and is in US custody now.

So, remember a couple weeks ago when there was that shooting at the mall in Kenya? A terrorist group from Somalia took credit for the attack. The terrorist group was called Shabab. Well, a Navy Seal team attacked the militant camp in Somalia and reportedly killed the leader that they were looking for. From NYT – “The unidentified Shabab leader is believed to have been killed in the firefight, but the SEAL team was forced to withdraw before that could be confirmed, a senior American security official said. Such operations by American forces are rare because they carry a high risk, and indicate that the target was considered a high priority. Baraawe, a small port town south of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, is known as a gathering place for the Shabab’s foreign fighters.”

the Fukushima sign reads – ‘Nuclear power – the energy for a better future’

There’s been a lot of news out of Fukushima, Japan over the last week or so. I’ve kind of buried my head in the sand. I’ve always had a problem with nuclear power. I have a problem with any process that leaves us with nuclear active waste which is highly radioactive; not for years or decades, but for eons. We’ve never come up with a good solution about what to do with this stuff. We don’t know how to make something less radioactive, at least not at the present time. So we have this area of Japan which continues to be radioactive and is leaking water into the ocean. It’s not just leaking water, but highly radioactive water into the ocean. The cleanup is costing Japan billions and billions of dollars. There seems to be no end in sight. To me, and this is just me, it seems that the price of nuclear power is just too high.

Well, it’s been approximately five days since the government shutdown. There’s been lots of posturing on both sides. I think the date that everyone needs to keep in mind is October 17. Past October 17, the United States government will be unable to pay its bills. Then we’re really in deep kimchi. Let me just say that I’ve seen lots of politicos discussing how the Democrats and Republicans can get out of this sticky mess that they are in. Personally, I don’t think that any of these scenarios are going to work. As a matter fact, I think most of these scenarios are delusional. Let’s remember that the House has not passed a significant piece of legislation since the Republicans took office in early 2011. Let’s also remember that Barack Obama reached out to Republicans and tried to make a grand bargain in order to avoid debt ceiling fights and budget fights for the rest of his term in office. The grand bargain failed. This failure did not happen because Barack Obama did not try to compromise. The grand bargain failed because John Boehner was completely unable to deliver on any of the deals that he’d agreed upon. I really don’t look for any significant movement until we get closer to October 17. If the United States is allowed to default on its debts, I think that this will be a huge blow to conservative Republicans. I think there will be a giant backlash from Wall Street and from the American public.

Oh, please don’t tell the anti-Obama Republicans, but the US just surpassed Russia as the world’s top oil and natural gas producer.

What stories are you following?