DOHA: China's Li Na has pulled out of next week's $2.3 million Qatar Open after failing to recover from the ankle injury she suffered in her Australian Open final defeat to Victoria Azarenka.
"Li Na has withdrawn from QatarTennis due to her ankle injury from the Australian Open final. #WTA #tennis," the WTA said on its Twitter account.
The Qatar Open starts on Monday.
- AFP/de
By Lateef Mungin, CNN
updated 1:38 PM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
(CNN) -- Iran says it has decoded and released footage from a U.S. drone that it downed more than a year ago.
The black and white aerial footage, which Iran claims was from a RQ-170 spy plane, was aired by Iranian news agencies and placed on YouTube.
A man, identified in Iranian media as Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, narrates parts of the footage.
Key U.S. official defends use of drones
"This aircraft has carried out many operations in the countries around Iran," the narrator says. "In the operations taken place in Pakistan, this aircraft guided many of the clashes ..."
The narrator also says that some of the footage shows the drone near Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.
CNN can not independently verify the authenticity of the video. Also CNN could not immediately reach Pentagon officials for comment.
Iran had said it downed the drone on December 4, 2011, near Kashmar in the country's northeast, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) from the border with Afghanistan.
A dangerous new world of drones
At the time, U.S. officials acknowledged that the drone was missing and President Barack Obama asked Iran to return it.
"We've asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," Obama said later that month.
At the time, Iranian military officials vowed not to return the plane.
This claim from Tehran comes at the same time that the U.S. drone program is being heavily debated in Washington.
John Brennan, Obama's pick to head the CIA, has been one of the architects of the drone campaign against al Qaeda and its allies for the past four years.
Senators will get to grill on him Thursday at his confirmation hearing.
Also Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee will receive a classified drone policy document that seeks to justify the administration's policy of targeting Americans overseas via drone attacks, a topic that has stirred controversies recently.
CNN's Samson Desta, John Raedler, Yousuf Basil and Neda Farshbaf contributed to this report.
Part of complete coverage on
It seems they are everywhere, searching the terrain and seas below like glinting birds of prey. Drones have become the emblem of war and intelligence-gathering in the 21st century.
updated 1:49 PM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
Here are some key facts about the U.S. drone program, including how and when they are used, and where.
updated 9:55 AM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
The Senate Intelligence Committee will receive a classified document that seeks to justify the administration's policy of targeting Americans overseas via drone attacks.
updated 8:55 PM EST, Tue February 5, 2013
CNN's Chris Lawrence reports on the technique used by the FBI to save a 5-year-old boy from his kidnapper in a bunker.
updated 1:36 PM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
The president's pick for CIA director -- John Brennan -- is one of a handful of U.S. officials who understands America's covert drone campaign inside and out.
updated 1:38 PM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
Iran says it has decoded and released footage from a U.S. drone that it downed more than a year ago.
updated 8:39 AM EST, Wed January 9, 2013
President Barack Obama has nominated his top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, to be the next director of the CIA.
updated 1:35 PM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
John Brennan, the president's top counterterrorism adviser, urged the president to authorize the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.
updated 1:35 PM EST, Sat December 22, 2012
They are now a familiar presence in war zones, but if manufacturers have their way, skies over civilians heads will soon be busy with unmanned vehicles.
updated 5:02 AM EST, Wed February 6, 2013
A leaked document is adding to the controversy over U.S. drone strikes in foreign countries. CNN's Barbara Starr reports.
updated 12:11 PM EST, Mon January 14, 2013
Four years ago, John Brennan withdrew from consideration for C.I.A. director because of his leadership role there while serious human rights violations were occurring.
updated 3:17 PM EST, Thu November 29, 2012
CNN's Suzanne Malveaux talks with VICE Media about a new documentary called "Drone On".
updated 5:14 PM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
As President Barack Obama's pick for CIA director heads to Capitol Hill for his confirmation hearing, some in the president's own party are threatening to hold up the nomination.
updated 9:51 AM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
As many as 54 countries participated in the overseas detention and rendition programs overseen by the CIA in the years following the September 11 attacks, according to a new report from a human rights watchdog group.
updated 10:23 AM EST, Thu February 7, 2013
The United States has signed a deal with the central Africa nation of Niger that allows deployment of surveillance drones to keep tabs on Islamic militants in the region.
updated 2:36 PM EST, Wed February 6, 2013
The attack in January on a gas facility in Algeria by an al Qaeda-linked group that resulted in at least 37 dead hostages has sparked an outpouring of dire warnings from leading Western politicians.
Updated 4:30 p.m. Eastern
BOSTON Halfway through a merciful winter across the Northeast, a blizzard threatened to strike with a vengeance starting Friday, with up to 2 feet of snow forecast for much of New England. The National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning for New York City, southern Westchester County and coastal portions of northeast New Jersey.
From New Jersey to Maine, people stocked up on food and other storm supplies, and road crews readied salt and sand ahead of what forecasters warned could be a weather history-maker. Boston and Providence, R.I., called off school on Friday, and airlines canceled more than 500 flights and counting, with the disruptions certain to ripple across the U.S.
In Taunton, Mass., National Weather Service meteorologist Alan Dunham said southern New England has seen less than half its normal snowfall this season, but "we're going to catch up in a heck of a hurry," with 1 1/2 to 2 feet forecast.
"Everybody's going to get plastered with snow," he said.
The snow is expected to start Friday morning, with the heaviest amounts falling at night and into Saturday. Wind gusts could top 60 mph. Widespread power failures were feared, along with flooding in coastal areas still recovering from Superstorm Sandy in October.
New York City was expecting around 5 to 10 inches of snow. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said plows and 250,000 tons of salt were being put on standby.
"We hope forecasts are exaggerating the amount of snow, but you never can tell," he said.
Two powerful storm systems heading toward the New York City area are expected to collide and dump snow, rain and slush over the region Friday.
"We're waiting for a converging system," said CBS 2 meteorologist John Elliott. "You've got a storm to the south and one coming in from the north."
A blizzard watch was posted for parts of New York's Long Island and portions of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, including Hartford, Conn., Providence and Boston.
In New England, it could prove to be among the top 10 snowstorms in history, and perhaps even break Boston's record of 27.6 inches, set in 2003, forecasters said. The storm is arriving just after the 35th anniversary of the blizzard of 1978, which paralyzed New England with more than 2 feet of snow and hurricane-force winds from Feb. 5-7.
The last major snowfall in southern New England was well over a year ago — the Halloween storm of 2011.
Diane Lopes was among the shoppers who packed a supermarket Thursday in the coastal fishing city of Gloucester, Mass. She said she went to different grocery earlier in the day and it was too crowded to venture inside. Lopes said she has strep throat and normally wouldn't leave the house but had to stock up on basic foods — "and lots of wine."
She chuckled at the excitement the storm was creating in a place where snow is routine.
"Why are us New Englanders so crazy, right?" she said.
In New Hampshire, Dartmouth College student Evan Diamond and other members of the ski team were getting ready for races at the Ivy League school's winter carnival.
"We're pretty excited about it because this has been an unusual winter for us," he said. "We've been going back and forth between having really solid cold snaps and then the rain washing everything away."
But he said the snow might be too much of a good thing this weekend: "For skiing, we like to have a nice hard surface, so it will be kind of tough to get the hill ready."
Terrance Rodriguez, a doorman at a luxury apartment complex in Boston, took the forecast in stride.
"It's just another day in Boston. It's to be expected. We're in a town where it's going to snow," he said. "It's like doomsday prep. It doesn't need to be. People just take it to the extreme."
Police officers across Southern California are on the defensive and scaling back their public exposure today, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outside police stations as former-cop-turned-alleged-gunman Christopher Dorner, armed and apparently on the hunt for cops, remains at large.
Dorner is suspected of killing one cop and two civilians during a rampage that began Sunday, injuring two other officers along the way.
Police departments have stationed officers in tactical gear outside police departments, stopped answering low-level calls and pulled motorcycle patrols off the road in order to protect officers who might be a target of Dorner's alleged rampage.
"The person we suspect of doing this is mobile, and with California's interstate highway system, every hour that goes by that's another 60 or 70 or 80 miles or greater circumference, it is a very wide net," Chief of Police Sergio Diaz of the Riverside police department said.
"We've made certain modifications of our deployments, our deviations today and I want to leave it at that, and also to our responses. We are concentrating on calls for service that are of a high priority, threats to public safety, we're not going to go on barking dog calls today," Diaz said.
Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the Los Angeles police department said Dorner is "believed to be armed and extremely dangerous."
Police have also put Dorner's license plate number and car description on highway signs, although they warn Dorner might have changed his license plate.
A former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, Dorner released an online manifesto before the shooting saying that he was targeting law enforcement and would be hard to capture because of his knowledge of police tactics.
The Los Angeles police department has sent dozens of patrols to guard specific targets named in Dorner's manifesto, which cops say he posted online.
Dorner wrote a long letter posted to his Facebook page in which he explained that he had been wrongly fired from the Los Angeles police department and would take revenge on those that wronged him.
The fired California cop went to a yacht club near San Diego overnight where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.
He aborted the attempted theft when the boat's propeller became entangled in a rope, law enforcement officials said. It was at that point he is believed to have headed to Riverside, where he allegedly shot two police officers.
"He pointed a handgun at the victim [at the yacht club] and demanded the boat," Lt. David Rohowits of the San Diego Police Department said.
Police say the rifle marksman shot at four officers in two incidents overnight, hitting three of them: one in Corona, Calif., and the two in Riverside, Calif.
Lopez said two LAPD officers were in Corona on special detail to check on one of the individuals named in Dorner's manifesto and encountered Dorner. Dorner allegedly grazed one of them but missed the other.
"[This is an] extremely tense situation," Lopez said. "We call this a manhunt. We approach it cautiously because of the propensity of what has already happened."
After Dorner allegedly shot at LAPD officers in Corona, he fled and encountered two Riverside police officers stopped at a red light in their police car. Dorner used a rifle to shoot through their windshield, killing one officer and injuring the other.
The deceased officer was a 34-year-old, 11-year veteran of the police department. The injured officer, age 27, is expected to make a full recovery.
Diaz said that the names of the officers are being withheld to protect their families, who might be targeted by Dorner if the names are released.
"They were on routine patrol stopped at a stop light when they were ambushed," Lt. Guy Toussant of the Riverside police department said.
In the manifesto Dorner published online, he threatened at least 12 people by name, along with their families.
"Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family," Dorner wrote in his manifesto.
A badge and identification belonging to Dorner have been found in San Diego, according to San Diego police Sgt. Ray Battrick. Dorner's LAPD badge and ID were found by someone near the city's airport, and turned in to police overnight, The Associated Press reported.
Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck said today that 40 protective details have been deployed to protect officers and their families.
"We are taking all measures possible to ensure safety of our officers and their families," he said.
Dorner is also believed to be responsible for the weekend slayings of an assistant women's college basketball coach and her fiancé in what cops believe are acts of revenge against the LAPD, as suggested in his online manifesto.
Lawrence was found slumped behind the wheel of his white Kia in the parking lot of their upscale apartment complex in Irvine Sunday and Quan was in the passenger seat.
"A particular interest at this point in the investigation is a multi-page manifesto in which the suspect has implicated himself in the slayings," Maggard said.
Police said Dorner's manifesto included threats against members of the LAPD. Police say they are taking extra measures to ensure the safety of officers and their families.
The document, allegedly posted on an Internet message board this week, apparently blames Quan's father, retired LAPD Capt. Randy Quan, for his firing from the department.
One passage from the manifesto reads, "I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty."
"I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own," it reads. "I'm terminating yours."
Dorner was with the department from 2005 until 2008, when he was fired for making false statements.
Randy Quan, who became a lawyer in retirement, represented Dorner in front of the Board of Rights, a tribunal that ruled against Dorner at the time of his dismissal, LAPD Capt. William Hayes told The Associated Press Wednesday night.
According to documents from a court of appeals hearing in October 2011, Dorner was fired from the LAPD after he made a complaint against his field-training officer, saying in the course of an arrest she had kicked a suspect who was a schizophrenic with severe dementia.
After an investigation, Dorner was fired for making false statements.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad", and a director at the New America Foundation.
Washington (CNN) -- The attack in January on a gas facility in Algeria by an al Qaeda-linked group that resulted in at least 37 dead hostages has sparked an outpouring of dire warnings from leading Western politicians.
British Prime Minister David Cameron described a "large and existential threat" emanating from North Africa. Tony Blair, his predecessor as prime minister, agreed saying, "David Cameron is right to warn that this is a battle for our values and way of life which will take years, even decades."
Hang on chaps! Before we all get our knickers in a tremendous twist: How exactly does an attack on an undefended gas facility in the remotest depths of the Algerian desert become an "existential threat" to our "way of life"?
Across the Atlantic, American politicians also got into sky-is-falling mode. Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, fulminated, "This is going to get worse. You cannot allow this to become a national security issue for the United States. And I argue it's already crossed that threshold."
Peter Bergen
Previous real U.S. national security threats and their manifestations include 9/11, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (from the potential use of nuclear weapons) with the Soviets, Pearl Harbor and Hitler's armies taking over much of Europe.
A ragtag group of jihadists roaming the North African deserts is orders of magnitude less significant than those genuine threats to the West and is more comparable to the threats posed by the bands of pirates who continue to harass shipping off the coast of Somalia. They are surely a problem, but a localized and containable one.
Western politicians and commentators who claim that the al Qaeda linked groups in North Africa are a serious threat to the West unnecessarily alarm their publics and also feed the self-image of these terrorists who aspire to attack the West, but don't have the capacity to do so. Terrorism doesn't work if folks aren't terrorized.
North African group hasn't attacked in the West
Western politicians and commentators who claim that the al Qaeda linked groups in North Africa are a serious threat to the West unnecessarily alarm their publics...
Peter Bergen
Much has been written, for instance, in recent weeks about al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), al Qaeda's North African affiliate, a splinter group of which carried out the attack on the Algerian gas facility. But according to Camille Tawil, who has authoritatively covered Islamist militant groups over the past two decades for the leading Arabic daily Al-Hayat and has written three books about al Qaeda, AQIM doesn't threaten the West: "To my knowledge no known attacks or aborted attacks in the West have been linked directly to AQIM."
AQIM was formed seven years ago so the group has had more than enough time to plot and carry out an attack in the West. By way of comparison, it took two years of serious plotting for al Qaeda to plan the 9/11 attacks.
So, what is the real level of threat now posed by al Qaeda and allied groups?
Let's start with "core al Qaeda" which attacked the United States on 9/11 and that is headquartered in Pakistan. This group hasn't, of course, been able to pull off an attack in the United States in twelve years. Nor has it been able to mount an attack anywhere in the West since the attacks on London's transportation system eight years ago.
Core al Qaeda on way to extinction
Osama bin Laden, the group's founder and charismatic leader, was buried at sea a year and half ago and despite concerns that his "martyrdom" would provoke a rash of attacks in the West or against Western interests in the Muslim world there has instead been.... nothing.
Meanwhile, CIA drone strikes in Pakistan during President Obama's tenure alone have killed 38 of al Qaeda's leaders in Pakistan, according to a count by the New America Foundation.
Those drone strikes were so effective that shortly before bin Laden died he was contemplating ordering what remained of al Qaeda to move to Kunar Province in the remote, heavily forested mountains of eastern Afghanistan, according to documents that were discovered following the SEAL assault on the compound where bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Core al Qaeda is going the way of the dodo.
Affiliates are no better off
And a number of the affiliates of core al Qaeda are in just as bad shape as the mother ship.
Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the virulent Southeast Asian al Qaeda affiliate that killed hundreds in the years after 9/11 is largely out of business. Why so? JI killed mostly Westerners in its first attacks on the tourist island of Bali in 2002, but the subsequent Bali attack three years later killed mostly Indonesians. So too did JI's attacks on the Marriott hotel in the capital Jakarta in 2003 and the Australian embassy in 2004. As a result, JI lost any shred of popular support it had once enjoyed.
At the same time the Indonesian government, which at one point had denied that JI even existed, mounted a sophisticated campaign to dismantle the group, capturing many of its leaders and putting them on trial.
In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf Group, a number of whose leaders had trained in Afghanistan in al Qaeda's camps, and which specialized in kidnapping Westerners in the years after 9/11, was effectively dismantled by the Philippine army working in tandem with a small contingent of U.S. Special Operations Forces.
In Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban in 2009 took over the once-tranquil mountainous vacation destination of Swat, and destroyed some 180 schools and beheaded 70 policemen there. Suddenly, they were only 70 miles from the capital Islamabad and some warned that the Pakistani state was in danger. Today, the Pakistani Taliban have been rolled back to their bases along the Afghan border and 16 of their leaders have been killed by CIA drones since President Obama took office.
Al Qaeda militants based in Saudi Arabia mounted a terrorist campaign beginning in 2003 that killed dozens of Saudis, and they also attacked a number of the oil workers and oil facilities that lie at the heart of the Saudi economy. This prompted the Saudi government to mount such an effective crackdown that the few remaining al Qaeda leaders who were not killed or captured have in recent years fled south to Yemen where the remnants of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are now based.
From its new headquarters in Yemen AQAP has made serious efforts to attack the United States, sending the "underwear bomber" to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 and also smuggling bombs on to U.S.-bound cargo shipments in October 2010.
None of these attempts were successful.
Yemen militants decimated
As a result of the threat posed by AQAP, the United States has mounted a devastating campaign against the group over the past three years. There was one American drone strike in Yemen in 2009. In 2012 there were 46. That drone campaign has killed 28 prominent members of the group, according to a count by the New America Foundation. Among them was the No. 2 in AQAP, Said al-Shihri, who was confirmed to be dead last week.
In the chaos of the multiple civil wars that gripped Yemen in 2011, AQAP seized a number of towns in southern Yemen. But AQAP has now been pushed out of those towns because of effective joint operations between U.S. Special Operations Forces, the CIA and the Yemeni government.
The Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, even went to the United Nations General Assembly in September where he publicly endorsed the use of CIA drones in his country, something of a first.
A couple of years ago, al Qaeda's Somali affiliate, Al- Shabaab ("the youth" in Arabic) controlled much of southern Somalia including key cities such as the capital Mogadishu.
Once in a position of power, Shaabab inflicted Taliban-like rule on a reluctant Somali population, which eroded its popular legitimacy. Shabaab was also the target of effective military operations by the military of neighboring Kenya, troops of the African Union and U.S. Special Operation Forces.
As a result, today the group controls only some rural areas and for the first time in two decades the United States has formally recognized a Somali government.
Mali conflict shows weakness of jihadist militant groups
Similarly, groups with an al Qaeda-like agenda captured most of northern Mali last year, a vast desert region the size of France. Once in power they imposed Taliban-like strictures on the population, banning smoking and music and enforcing their interpretation of Sharia law with the amputation of hands. The militants also destroyed tombs in the ancient city of Timbuktu, a UNESCO World Heritage site, on the grounds that the tombs promoted "idol worship."
None of these measures endeared the jihadist militants to the population of Mali. In the past weeks, as a relatively small force of some 2,000 French soldiers has rolled through Mali putting the militants on the run, the French have been cheered on by dancing and singing Malians.
When French soldiers are greeted as an army of liberation in an area of the world that in the past century was part of a vast French empire, you can get a sense of how much the jihadist militants had alienated the locals.
Last week the French military took the city of Timbuktu. The defeat of the al Qaeda-linked groups as effective insurgent forces in Mali is now almost complete.
What has just happened in Mali gets to the central problem that jihadist militant groups invariably have. Wherever they begin to control territory and population they create self-styled Islamic "emirates" where they then rule like the Taliban.
Over time this doesn't go down too well with the locals, who usually practice a far less austere version of Islam, and they eventually rise up against the militants, or, if they are too weak to do so themselves, they will cheer on an outside intervention to turf out the militants.
The classical example of this happened in Iraq where al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) controlled Anbar Province, about a third of the country in 2006. AQI cadres ruled with an iron fist and imposed their ultrafundamentalist rule on their fellow Sunnis, who they killed if they felt they were deviating from their supposedly purist Islamic precepts.
This provoked the "Sunni Awakening" of Iraqi tribes that rose up against AQI. These tribes then allied with the U.S. military and by the end of 2007 AQI went from an insurgent group that controlled vast territories to a terrorist group that controlled little but was still able to pull off occasional spectacular terrorist attacks in Baghdad.
Jihadist violence still a threat
The collapse of core al Qaeda and a number of its key affiliates does not, of course, mean that jihadist violence is over. Such religiously motivated mayhem has been a feature of the Muslim world for many centuries. Recall the Assassins, a Shia sect that from its base in what is now Iran dispatched cutthroats armed with daggers to kill its enemies around the Middle East during the 12th and 13th centuries. In so doing the sect gave the world the useful noun "assassin."
And so while core al Qaeda and several of its affiliates and like-minded groups are in terrible shape, there are certainly groups with links to al Qaeda or animated by its ideology that are today enjoying something of a resurgence.
Most of these groups do not call themselves al Qaeda, which is a smart tactic, as even bin Laden himself was advising his Somali affiliate, Al Shabaab, not to use the al Qaeda name as it would turn off fundraisers because the shine had long gone off the al Qaeda brand, according to documents recovered at bin Laden's Abbottabad compound.
One such militant group is the Nigerian Boko Haram, which bombed the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria in 2011 and has also attacked a wide range of Christian targets in the country. However, the group has shown "no capability to attack the West and also has no known members outside of West Africa," according to Virginia Comolli of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies who tracks the group.
Ansar al-Sharia, "Supporters of Sharia," is the name taken by the militant group in Libya that carried out the attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in September in which four Americans were killed. Similarly, in Yemen militants that are aligned with al Qaeda have labeled themselves Ansar al-Sharia.
But this new branding hasn't done the militants much good in either country. In Libya, shortly after the attack on the U.S. consulate, an enraged mob stormed and took over Ansar al Sharia's headquarters in Benghazi. And, as we have seen, in Yemen the jihadists have now been forced out of the towns in the south that they had once held.
One strong foothold in Syria
The one country where jihadist militants have a serious foothold and are likely to play an important role for some period in the future is in Syria. That is because of a perfect storm there that favors them. The Sunni militants in Syria are fighting the regime of Bashir al Assad, a secular dictator who is also an Alawite, which many Muslims believe to be a heretical branch of Shiism.
For the jihadists, Assad's secularism makes him an apostate and his Alawi roots also make him a heretic, while his brutal tactics make him an international pariah. This trifecta makes funding the Sunni insurgency highly attractive for donors in the Gulf.
And for the Arabs who form the heart of al Qaeda the fight against Assad is in the heart of the Arab world, a contest that happens to border also on the hated state of Israel. Also Syria was for much of the past decade the entry point for many hundreds of foreign fighters who poured into Iraq to join Al Qaeda in Iraq following the American invasion of the country. As a result, al Qaeda has long had an infrastructure both in Syria and, of course, in neighboring Iraq.
The Al Nusra Front is the name of arguably the most effective fighting force in Syria. In December the State Department publicly said that Al Nusra, which is estimated to number in the low thousands and about 10% of the fighters arrayed against Assad, was a front for Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Al Nusra certainly seems to have learned from AQI's mistakes. For starters, it doesn't call itself al Qaeda. Secondly, it hasn't launched a campaign to crack down on social issues such as smoking or listening to music and so has not alienated the local Sunni population as AQI did in Iraq.
Barak Barfi, a journalist and fellow at the New America Foundation who has spent several months on the ground in Aleppo in northwestern Syria reporting on the opposition to Assad, says Nusra fighters stand out for their bravery and discipline: "They are winning over the hearts and minds of Aleppo residents who see them as straight shooters. There is a regimented recruiting process that weeds out the chaff. Their bases are highly organized with each person given specific responsibilities."
Arab Spring countries seen as an opportunity
The chaotic conditions of several of the countries of the "Arab Spring" are certainly something al Qaeda views as an opportunity. Ayman al-Zawahiri the leader of the group, has issued 27 audio and video statements since the death of bin Laden, 10 of which have focused on the Arab countries that have experienced the revolutions of the past two years.
But if history is a guide, the jihadist militants, whether in Syria or elsewhere, are likely to repeat the mistakes and failures that their fellow militants have experienced during the past decade in countries as disparate as Somalia, the Philippines, Yemen, Iraq, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and now, Mali.
That's because encoded in the DNA of al Qaeda and like-minded groups are the seeds of their own destruction because in power they rule like the Taliban, and they also attack fellow Muslims who don't follow their dictates to the letter. This doesn't mesh very well with these organizations' claims that they are the defenders of Muslims.
These groups also have no real plans for the multiple political and economic problems that beset much of the Islamic world. And they won't engage in normal politics such as elections believing them to be "un-Islamic."
This is invariably a recipe for irrelevance or defeat. In not one nation in the Muslim world since 9/11 has a jihadist militant group seized control of a country. And al Qaeda and its allies' record of effective attacks in the West has been non-existent since 2005.
With threats like these we can all sleep soundly at night.
Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.
Join us on Facebook/CNNOpinion.
NEW YORK: The euro slipped against the US dollar on Wednesday ahead of the European Central Bank's policy meeting, expected to keep monetary policy on hold.
Meanwhile, the Japanese currency pulled higher after hitting three-year lows on Tuesday.
The euro fell to $1.3519 at 2200 GMT, from $1.3582 late Tuesday, nearly two cents below its 14-month high of $1.3710 hit on Friday.
The slip came a day before ECB policymakers were to meet, with most analysts saying they will not undertake any more easing of monetary conditions despite worries about slow growth and the strengthening euro.
On Tuesday French President Francois Hollande urged a more managed euro, saying it should not be allowed to "fluctuate depending on the markets' mood."
"A single currency zone must have a foreign exchange policy, otherwise it will see an exchange rate imposed on it (by the markets) which is out of line with its real competitive position," he told the European parliament.
Also weighing on the euro was concerns about political instability in Spain, where the government is under attack over corruption allegations, and Italy, where former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, much distrusted by markets and Europe's technocrats, was gaining in election polls.
"There is enough uncertainty around Spanish and Italian politics to ensure that the next leg higher for the euro is delayed," said Kit Juckes of Societe Generale.
Hollande's plea came amid increased worries from around the world over a global currency war.
A key target of those worries, the Japanese yen, pulled higher on Wednesday a day after hitting three-year lows.
The yen sagged further on Tuesday following the announcement by Bank of Japan chief Masaaki Shirakawa that he would step down three weeks before his term ends, after butting heads with the new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over monetary policy.
Abe wants the central bank to undertake more easing to reinflate the slumping economy.
But the yen edged higher Wednesday, with a dollar buying 93.57 yen, compared with 93.61 yen a day earlier.
The euro slipped to 126.46 yen from 127.13 yen.
The British pound was virtually unchanged at $1.5658; the dollar rose to 0.9101 Swiss francs from 0.9077 francs.
- AFP/de
Floyd Lee Corkins was arrested at the shooting scene.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Washington (CNN) -- After years of thinking it over, Floyd Corkins finally had a plan.
He'd bought a gun and learned how to use it. He'd loaded three magazines. And he had stopped by Chick-fil-A to pick up 15 sandwiches, which he planned to smear in the dying faces of staffers he expected to kill at the Family Research Council in Washington.
It would be a statement, he said, "against the people who work in that building," according to documents filed in U.S. District Court, where Corkins pleaded guilty on Wednesday to three charges related to the August shooting at the conservative policy group.
Corkins told Judge Richard Roberts that he hoped to intimidate gay rights opponents.
The shooting came amid intense debate over remarks against gay marriage by an executive with the Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A restaurant chain and the company's support for groups considered hostile to gay rights.
The research council, a Christian group that focuses on family, anti-abortion and religious liberty issues and views homosexuality as harmful, backed Chick-fil-A in the ensuing controversy.
"They endorse Chick-fil-A and also Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage, so I was going to use that as a statement," prosecutors quoted Corkins as telling investigators.
Corkins, 28, pleaded guilty to committing an act of terrorism while armed, interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition, and assault with intent to kill while armed.
Prosecutors dropped seven other charges.
The charges carry sentences of up to 70 years in prison. However, the sentence could be shorter because Corkins has no prior criminal record.
Corkins will be sentenced April 29, prosecutors said.
The act of terrorism charge alleges that Corkins wanted to kill building manager Leo Johnson and other Family Research Council employees "with the intent to intimidate and coerce a significant portion of the civilian population of the District of Columbia and the United States."
It is a District of Columbia law passed in 2002 but never before used.
According to prosecutors' account of the attack filed on Wednesday, Corkins got into the Family Research Council's building by telling Johnson that he was there to interview for an internship.
After Johnson asked for identification, prosecutors say, Corkins reached into his backpack, retrieved a handgun and leveled it at Johnson's head.
Johnson ducked and lunged at Corkins before he could fire a shot, according to prosecutors.
As the two struggled, Corkins fired three times, hitting Johnson once in the arm, before the building manager was able to wrestle him to the ground, disarm him and hold him at gunpoint until police arrived.
As he lay on the ground, Corkins said something to the effect, "'It's not about you.' It's about the FRC and its policies," according to the prosecution account.
Corkins -- who had chosen the research council as his target after finding it listed as an anti-gay group on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center -- had planned to stride into the building an open fire on the people inside in an effort to kill as many as possible, he told investigators, according to the court documents.
If he'd been successful and escaped, his plan was to go to another conservative group to continue the attack, prosecutors said. A handwritten list naming three other groups he planned to attack was found among his belongings, prosecutors said.
According to the documents, Corkins had thought about such an attack for years but "just never went through with it."
He purchased the gun used in the attack a week before at a Virginia gun store, where a French television crew taped him while doing a story about the widespread availability of guns in America, according to prosecutors.
He also went to the store the day before the attack for two hours of training.
U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen said Corkins' guilty plea "makes clear that using violence to terrorize political opponents will not be tolerated."
At the time of the shooting, Corkins lived with his parents in Herndon, Virginia, and volunteering at a Washington center for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
In August, FBI investigators said in an affidavit that investigators had interviewed Corkins' parents after the shooting, and they said their son "has strong opinions with respect to those he believes do not treat homosexuals in a fair manner."
Carol Cratty reported from Washington; Michael Pearson wrote from Atlanta; CNN's Paul Courson also contributed to this report.
MONTROSE, Ga. More than two dozen cars, pickup trucks and tractor-trailers collided Wednesday morning in a fiery pileup on a foggy Georgia interstate, killing at least four people and sending nine others to a hospital, officials said.
Work crews on Interstate 16 were still clearing charred and twisted wreckage from the crash scene, which covered nearly a quarter-mile of the roadway, nearly six hours after the chain of crashes occurred at about 8:10 a.m.
State troopers said there were four separate crashes involving 27 vehicles, CBS Savannah affiliate WTOC-TV reports.
The Georgia State Patrol was still trying to piece together what started the series of wrecks. Capt. Kirk McGlamery said even drivers who dodged to the side of cars crashing in front of them weren't safe from getting rear-ended off the highway's shoulder.
"It was just a chain-reaction," McGlamery said. "I talked to two individuals involved who had come to a stop and had pulled off, one was on the shoulder and the other was trying to get out of the way, when they were struck by vehicles coming up behind them."
Officials said poor visibility likely played a big part. Weather forecasts called for dense fog Wednesday morning, and McGlamery said motorists reported smoke across the highway. He said a controlled burn had been permitted nearby the day before, and troopers were trying to find out if burning continued into Wednesday.
The crash shut down I-16 in both directions for several hours, though a single eastbound lane had opened Wednesday afternoon. The highway covers only 170 miles between nearby Macon in central Georgia and Savannah on the coast. But it's heavily traveled by commercial trucks hauling goods between Atlanta and Savannah's busy seaport, and is often used by travelers as a route to Interstate 95 along the Eastern Seaboard.
McGlamery said seven tractor-trailers were involved in the pileup, including an empty fuel tanker that exploded and caught fire.
Joseph White, a soldier in the Army National Guard, told the The Courier Herald of Dublin he was heading to work when he drove into heavy traffic clouded by black smoke. He was rear-ended before he saw a fuel tanker hit an 18-wheeler.
"I'm looking back and the tanker exploded," said White, who ran from the scene after his car came to a halt. "Pieces of the tanker flew toward me on the freeway, barely missing me. A piece of the tanker landed like 10 feet behind me as I was running. It almost fell on my head."
Martha Strickland, who passed through the smoky scene shortly after the crashes, said she could see the tanker burning but not engulfed in flames.
"We had to creep by because, you know, it was just so much smoke and to keep us from getting in a wreck, and we were on eastbound and that was in westbound," Strickland said.
Laurens County EMS director Terry Cobb, who was among the first emergency officials at the scene, said at least six vehicles were still on fire when crews arrived. Emergency officials encountered fog on the way to the crash site, though it seemed to lift one they arrived, Cobb said.
Cobb and the State Patrol confirmed nine people were taken to a hospital in nearby Dublin, though none of the injuries appeared life-threatening. Jeff Bruton, a hospital administrator, said all were treated and released except for one patient who was transferred to a hospital in Macon.
The names of the four people who died in the crash were not immediately released.
The area was under a dense fog advisory at the time of the pileup, said Laura Belanger, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Peachtree City. In some areas, visibility was only a quarter-mile or less, Belanger said.
You may look out on a starry night and get a lonely feeling, but astronomers now say our Milky Way galaxy may be thick with planets much like Earth -- perhaps 4.5 billion of them, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Astronomers looked at data from NASA's Kepler space telescope in orbit, and conclude that 6 percent of the red dwarf stars in the Milky Way probably have Earth-like, habitable planets. That's a lot by space standards, and since red dwarfs are very common -- they make up three out of four stars in our part of the galaxy -- we may have a lot more neighbors than we thought.
The nearest of them, astronomers said today, could be 13 light-years away -- not exactly commuting distance, since a light-year is six trillion miles, but a lot closer than most yellow stars like Earth's sun.
Video: Are We Alone? Kepler's Mission
David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
"We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted," said Courtney Dressing, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, in announcing the findings today. The results will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
David Charbonneau, a co-author, said, "We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy. That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought."
Red dwarfs are older, smaller and dimmer than our sun, but a planet orbiting close to one could be sufficiently warmed to have liquid water. Dressing and her colleagues cited three possible planets that were spotted by Kepler, which was launched in 2009. One is 90 percent as large as Earth, and orbits its red sun in just 20 of our days.
There is no saying what such a world would actually be like; the Kepler probe can only show whether distant stars have objects periodically passing in front of them. But based on that, scientists can do some math and estimate the mass and orbit of these possible planets. So far, Kepler has spotted more than 2,700 of them in the small patch of sky it has been watching.
There are estimated to be 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way -- which is probably a pretty average galaxy. So the new estimate implies a universe with tremendous numbers of Earth-like planets, far beyond our ability to count.
Pictures: Final Frontier: Images From the Distant Universe
Could they be friendly to life? There's no way to know yet, but space scientists say that if you have the right ingredients -- a planet the right size, temperatures that allow for liquid water, organic molecules and so forth -- and the chances may be good, even on a planet that is very different from ours.
"You don't need an Earth clone to have life," said Dressing.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Editor's note: Dan Jones is a historian and newspaper columnist based in London. His new book, "The Plantagenets" (Viking), is published in the U.S. this spring. Follow him on Twitter.
(CNN) -- Richard III is the king we British just can't seem to make our minds up about.
The monarch who reigned from 1483 to 1485 became, a century later, the blackest villain of Shakespeare's history plays. The three most commonly known facts of his life are that he stole the crown, murdered his nephews and died wailing for a horse at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. His death ushered in the Tudor dynasty, so Richard often suffers the dual ignominy of being named the last "medieval" king of England -- in which medieval is not held to be a good thing.
Like any black legend, much of it is slander.
Richard did indeed usurp the crown and lose at Bosworth. He probably had his nephews killed, too; it is unknowable but overwhelmingly likely. Yet as his many supporters have been busy telling us since it was announced Monday that Richard's lost skeleton was found in a car park in Leicester, he wasn't all bad. In fact, he was for most of his life loyal and conscientious.
Dan Jones
To fill you in, a news conference held at the University of Leicester on Monday confirmed what archaeologists working there have suspected for months: that a skeleton removed from under a parking lot in the city center last fall was indeed the long-lost remains of Richard III.
News: Richard III: Is this the face that launched 1,000 myths?
His official burial place -- under the floor of a church belonging to the monastic order of the Greyfriars -- had been lost during the dissolution of the monasteries that was carried out in the 1530s under Henry VIII. A legend grew up that the bones had been thrown in a river. Today, we know they were not.
What do the bones tell us?
Well, they show that Richard -- identified by mitochondrial DNA tests against a Canadian descendant of his sister, Anne of York -- was about 5-foot-8, suffered curvature of the spine and had delicate limbs. He had been buried roughly and unceremoniously in a shallow grave too small for him, beneath the choir of the church.
He had died from a slicing blow to the back of the head sustained during battle and had suffered many other "humiliation injuries" after his death, including having a knife or dagger plunged into his hind parts. His hands may have been tied at his burial.
Opinion: What will the finding of Richard III mean?
In other words, we have quite a lot of either new or confirmed biographical information about Richard.
He was not a hunchback, but he was spindly and warped. He died unhorsed. He was buried where it was said he was buried. He very likely was, as one source had said, carried roughly across a horse's back from the battlefield where he died to Leicester, stripped naked and abused all the way.
All this is known today thanks to a superb piece of historical teamwork.
The interdisciplinary team at Leicester that worked toward Monday's revelations deserves huge plaudits. From the desk-based research that pinpointed the spot to dig, to the digging itself, to the bone analysis, the DNA work and the genealogy that identified Richard's descendants, all of it is worthy of the highest praise. Hat-tips, too, to the Richard III Society, as well as Leicester's City Council, which pulled together to make the project happen and also to publicize the society and city so effectively.
However, should anyone today tell you that Richard's skeleton somehow vindicates his historical reputation, you may tell them they are talking horsefeathers.
News: Back from the grave, King Richard III gets rehab
Richard III got a rep for a reason. He usurped the crown from a 12-year old boy, who later died.
This was his great crime, and there is no point denying it. It is true that before this crime, Richard was a conspicuously loyal lieutenant to the boy's father, his own brother, King Edward IV. It is also true that once he was king, Richard made a great effort to promote justice to the poor and needy, stabilize royal finances and contain public disorder.
But this does not mitigate that he stole the crown, justifying it after the fact with the claim that his nephews were illegitimate. Likewise, it remains indisputably true that his usurpation threw English politics, painstakingly restored to some order in the 12 years before his crime, into a turmoil from which it did not fully recover for another two decades.
So the discovery of Richard's bones is exciting. But it does not tell us anything to justify changing the current historical view of Richard: that the Tudor historians and propagandists, culminating with Shakespeare, may have exaggerated his physical deformities and the horrors of Richard's character, but he remains a criminal king whose actions wrought havoc on his realm.
Unfortunately, we don't all want to hear that. Richard remains the only king with a society devoted to rehabilitating his name, and it is a trait of some "Ricardians" to refuse to acknowledge any criticism of their hero whatever. So despite today's discovery, we Brits are likely to remain split on Richard down the old lines: murdering, crook-backed, dissembling Shakespearean monster versus misunderstood, loyal, enlightened, slandered hero. Which is the truth?
Somewhere in between. That's a classic historian's answer, isn't it? But it's also the truth.
Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.
Join us on Facebook/CNNOpinion.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dan Jones.
Copyright © News flamboyer. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
