Open Thread for Friday Night Owls & Early Birds

As has been noted across wwwLand, Benazir Bhutto said in a November 2 interview with David Frost that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh killed Osama bin Laden. The see-we-told-you-so response of many bloggers ignored the fact that Sheikh Omar has been held in custody since February 2002 for the killing of Daniel Pearl, a crime for which he was convicted in July 2002 and sentenced to death. (Whether he actually did or not is much debated, but there is no question he is incarcerated.) Nor has there been much mention of what Bhutto told BBC America a month before the Frost interview, on October 1:

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said on Monday that she might allow a U.S. military strike inside Pakistan to eliminate al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden if she were the country's leader.

"I would hope that I would be able to take Osama bin Laden myself without depending on the Americans. But if I couldn't do it, of course we are fighting this war together and (I) would seek their cooperation in eliminating him," Bhutto said in an interview on BBC World News America.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Bhutto misspoke when she said Sheikh Omar had murdered Osama?

Whether he is dead or alive, the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute is reporting that we'll be getting a New Year's tape purportedly from the man himself:

Forthcoming Speech from the Head of Al-Qaeda, Usama bin Laden: "The Way to Contain the Conspiracies"

SITE Intelligence Group has learned that a new message is forthcoming from Usama bin Laden, the head of Al-Qaeda, addressing Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq. The message is produced by As-Sahab, the multimedia arm of Al-Qaeda, and is titled, "The Way to Contain the Conspiracies". The announcement of this impending released was posted to jihadist forums today, Thursday, December 27, 2007, and gave the duration of the tape as 56 minutes and 10 seconds. It also stated: "May Allah demean the Front of Shame and Dinar, and may the Merciful One reveal the confusion of Al-Jazeera, the station of the infidels."

Just about forgotten in the news these days is a place called Darfur. Not forgotten because the situation is no longer dire:

New UN survey reveals alarming malnutrition rates among Darfur’s children

Child malnutrition rates have reached their highest level in three years in the strife-torn Darfur region of Sudan, according to a joint survey carried out by the Government and the United Nations, which is leading what is the currently the largest relief effort in the world aimed at assisting some 4.2 million people.

The overall malnutrition rate among children under five in Darfur reached 16.1 per cent this year, compared to 12.9 per cent last year, surpassing for the first time since 2004 the emergency threshold of 15 per cent. ...

Over 200,000 people have been killed and another 2.2 million forced to flee their homes, living either as internally displaced persons (IDPs) or as refugees in neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR), since fighting began between Government forces and rebel groups in 2003.

Starting on Monday, the hybrid United Nations African Union Mission (UNAMID) will take over from the current AU operation with some 20,000 troops and more than 6,000 police and civilian staff. Still missing from the effort to quell the violence in Darfur is adequate equipment, particularly helicopters.