• Total body count was 13—with another 30 injured—at Ft. Hood yesterday. The gunman survived after being shot four times. [New York Times]
• Speaking of the gunman, Army psychiatrist,  Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, here is a lengthy biographical portrait. [Washington Post]
• An important Afghan governor and his militia and their rocket launchers are challenging the legitimacy of new president Hamid Karzai.  [WSJ]
• British PM Gordon Brown—and his soldiers and their implied rocket launchers—also threatened Afghanistan to just, you know, it’s enough already with the corruption. [AP]
• The Pakistani Army invaded a Taliban alcove in lawless, mountainy South Waziristan, presumably also a stop on Sarah Palin’s book tour. [Reuters]
• So apparently a giant wall (of symbolism?) was blocking everyone’s view at the Jay-Z/Beyonce/U2 performance at the Brandenburg Gate at last night’s fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall-themed concert. [Daily Mail]

• After very possibly receiving fewer votes than his opponent, Hamid Karzai has won the presidential election of Afghanistan! [New York Times]
• Ford earned $1 billion in the third quarter and people are now thinking the company could be profitable by 2011. [Washington Post]
• Yesterday some American guy—originally from Eritrea, but still totally counts—won the New York City Marathon, which is the first time that’s happened since 1982. [CNN]
• A suicide bomber killed 30-ish people outside a bank in Pakistan, most of whom used to have something or other to do with the military. [AP]
• The New York Yankees baseball team has won another go-round in the baseball tournament, and look at this biased coverage from the New York Post. [New York Post]
• Everyone who’s anyone in the Arab world just despises Hillary Clinton. [Reuters]

• Hamid Karzai’s brother, a prominent opium dealer (!), has been receiving CIA paychecks for eight years. He will now be fired and replaced by a teenager and an iPhone app. Recession!  [New York Times]
• A car bomb killed 86 people in Peshawar a couple hours after Hillary Clinton left Peshawar. [AP]
• At least six UN-related people died in a bombing in Kabul. Predictably, the Taliban has claimed responsibility, for such is their schtick. [Washington Post]
• Those pilots who appeared to have totally forgotten to land the plane for an entire hour after they were supposed to have done so have lost their licenses. [CNN]
• “Consumer confidence”—evidently an actual metric and not something people just say—is up for the first time since 2007. [Reuters]
• It’s looking like Iran might outsource its uranium enrichment needs, which is exactly what Obama wanted. [Reuters]

• After being prodded by basically everyone on Earth, soon-to-be-former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai is ready to admit that he did not actually win the re-election. [New York Times]
• A new poll says that most people think the public option would be a good thing, actually. [Washington Post]
• Swine flu has spread to this one actual swine in Minnesota. It’s hard to feel bad given how appropriate this seems! [WSJ]
• A US scientist was arrested for trying to sell important secrets to someone he thought was an Israeli intelligence guy, but was actually just an American intelligence guy about to arrest him. [CNN]
• Iran is two seconds away from doing something it might possibly regret to Pakistan—possibly bombing it, or possibly explicitly threatening it with bombs. [AP]
• Apple, Inc. shares are the highest they’ve ever been. There are still no available Genius Bar appointments. [Reuters]

• Big Oil and Big Natural Gas are fighting, like they always do! It’s about energy policy, like it always is! [New York Times]
• David Axelrod and all his friends are preemptively very offended—on behalf of America—by Wall St.’s big bonuses. [Washington Post]
• Pakistan soldiers cornered a bunch of Taliban people in South Waziristan, which is a place they really wanted to be for whatever reason. [WSJ]
• A suicide bomber interrupted a meeting between Shiite and Sunni tribesman in Iraq by blowing it up and killing six military commanders. [Los Angeles Times]
• The sheriff who has jurisdiction in Evil Balloon County, Colorado, confirmed the hoax and will now be doing everyone on Earth a favor by pressing charges against the hellish Balloon Parents. [CNN]
• Three people died of non-Detroit-related reasons while running the Detroit Marathon. [Detroit Free Press]

• Obama, to prove he does not hate New Orleans and has zero plans to willfully destroy it—as per the tradition of his predecessor—will visit this afternoon. [Los Angeles Times]
• Over 30 people were killed in a series of coordinated terrorist goings-on in Islamabad. [New York Times]
• The Arctic’s ice will be completely gone in 20 years. Add “carbon emissions” to “rock salt” on the national What Melts Snow list. [Times Online]
• Obama wants to give $250 to every senior and disabled person this winter, since there will not be the traditional increase on Social Security benefit checks. [Washington Post]
• Probationary Kennedy Maria Shriver has apologized for talking on her cell phone while driving, for such is illegal in California. This is like literally the third time this has happened. [CNN]
• Uhh… the Germans are constructing a new Berlin Wall, out of Styrofoam… because they want to knock it down again. Ha ha.  It seems this is how most things start, in Germany. [WSJ]

• One of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics is some American gal, Elinor Ostrom, who is the first lady economist ever to win. Something about communities and resources, anyway it was uncontroversial! [CNN]
• So our government is still working out the kinks in its system of telling when foreign people who visit here actually leave. [New York Times]
• Bombings, bombings, bombings all weekend in Pakistan, all thanks to the Taliban. [WSJ]
• There is a new song on the Internet from the dead, apparently self-referential pop star Michael Jackson called “This Is It.” [LA Times]
• A gang of British Greenpeace people had a sleepover party on the roof of the Palace of Westminster to let everyone know how much they despise climate change, and also politics. [Guardian]
• China is so excited to be able to sell Hummers soonish! There are some minor “regulatory emissions things” to figure out, but other than that, just pure excitement. [Reuters]

• WELL, WELL: Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize! For nuclear things! Anyway this is better than at least 3/5 of the summer Olympic events. [New York Times]
• The moon, well, most of it, managed to prolong its existence overnight despite NASA’s best efforts. [New York Times]
• 160-ish people were killed in mudslides in the Philippines. The last time things were this flood-y there was 40 years ago. [AP]
• A car bomb in Pakistan killed 42 people and injured 60 more. No one officially took credit but people are generally thinking “Taliban.” [Times Online]
• Olympia Snowe arguably still matters. This seems tenuous! Anyway, the LA Times has interviewed every known resident of Maine to prove it. [LA Times]
• Gen. McChrystal and the military people would like 40,000 troops sent to Afghanistan. [WSJ]

• Herta Muller, the famed rather depressing Teutonic authoress, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. [New York Times]
• Hooray, the Senate Finance Committee has approved the most recent health care bill, which means it could be sent to the Senate floor by the end of the month! [New York Times]
• Pakistan would rather the U.S. not interfere in its new civilian government actually, even if this would mean the U.S. would send along literally $8 billion in aid. [Washington Post]
• End-timesily, there have been four earthquakes in the past 11 hours in the South Pacific today. [CNN]
• Fall shopping was not such a hit this year it turns out, and it’s looking like most stores will be reporting declines. [AP]
• “Royal Mail” employees in England are THISCLOSE to striking after losing a contract with Amazon. Amazon loses things all the time though! [Guardian]

Any questions?
[New York Times]

• New stimulus money is maybe on the way! This time they are calling it “an extension of the first stimulus package” and it does not care for nicknames. [New York Times]
• The U.S. gave Pakistan $1.5 billion/year, for the next five years, simply to stop doing a thing: namely, supporting terrorism. [New York Times]
• Obama’s headed to the counter-terrorism part of downtown McLean to hand out new offensive and defensive plays. [Washington Post]
• David Letter apologized to his wife, on television! How could she not trust something produced by the staff of the David Letterman Show? [CNN]
• How did our gal Sotomayor do yesterday, on Supreme Court opening day? She WON with 36 questions asked, and Scalia only batting 30. [LA Times]
• The International Energy Agency asked for a suggested donation of $10 trillion dollars over the next ten years. This is adorable. [WSJ]