Sometimes when I sit in front of the fire in my smoking jacket, idly sipping Scotch and browsing through the latest issue of Sexy Sex Sexology on Sexual Sexiness, it occurs to me that we, as a society, are totally overthinking boning.
Showing posts with label Prove. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prove. Show all posts
5 Terrifying Sex Toys That Prove We're Overthinking Sex
UConn Upperclassmen Prove Too Tough For Kentucky Freshmen To Handle
ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Connecticut's upperclassmen were too much for the kids of Kentucky.
Poised and experienced, UConn won its second national championship in four years, outlasting Kentucky and its stable of freshmen Monday night.
UConn (32-8) dominated early, withstood a big charge late in the first half and made all the clutch plays down the stretch of a 60-54 victory that made Kevin Ollie the first coach since Michigan's Steve Fisher in 1989 to win a national title in his first NCAA tournament as coach.
Shabazz Napier, the dynamic senior point guard, led the way as he almost always does, finishing with 22 points, six rebounds and three assists to bookend his career with national titles.
Gritty junior Ryan Boatright fought through a turned ankle in the second half to scored 14 points. Niels Giffey, another member of the '11 team, found his shooting touch just in time, scoring 10 points on 3-of-7 shooting from 3-point range.
It was sweet redemption for a team that had been repeatedly dismissed since winning the 2011 national title.
The Huskies weren't given a chance when Jim Calhoun retired and sanctions kept them out of the 2013 NCAA tournament.
They were discounted after being blown out by Louisville in the regular-season finale and losing to the Cardinals again in the American Athletic Conference tournament.
But the Huskies are a resilient bunch and used what they believed to be slights as chip-on-their-shoulder motivation.
They certainly were in the national championship game against Kentucky (29-11), relying on their tried-and-true elder statesmen against all those blue-blood freshmen coming off the other bench.
Napier and Boatright were a dynamic duo early, slashing and dashing through Kentucky's defense for layups and 3-pointers while UConn built a 15-point lead.
Kentucky's young Cats whittled the lead down to four by halftime behind their athleticism and a zone that seemed to flummox the Huskies.
UConn dug down when the game got tight and physical, answering every time Kentucky tried to mount a run.
Boatright was injured midway through the second half, rolling his left ankle after taking a pass. He got worked on by the trainers during a timeout and returned, still limping and grimacing.
After a couple of pats on the head by Ollie, he kept charging at the Wildcats, driving to the basket, bellying up on Kentucky's guards and hitting a big step-back jumper in the closing minutes.
Giffey, a freshman on the 2011 title team, had not been able to find his stroke during the NCAA tournament. A 49 percent shooter from 3-point range, he was 3 of 15 from the arc through the first four games, including 0 for 2 in the national semifinals against Florida.
The senior came up big when the Huskies needed him, hitting a pair of 3s in the second half.
And, of course, there was Napier.
Kemba Walker's understudy during the '11 title run, he proved he could be the leader who gets the ring, hitting 8 of 16 shots, 4 of 9 from 3-point range and playing the kind of all-around game that would make his mentor proud.
Bergen: Bin Laden bombshell? Prove it
Vice President Joe Biden, left, President Barack Obama, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, second from right, watch the mission to capture Osama bin Laden from the Situation Room in the White House on May 1, 2011. Click through to see reactions from around the world following the death of the al Qaeda leader. 
President Obama edits his remarks in the Oval Office prior to making a televised statement announcing bin Laden's death. 
Servicemen cheer from a lamp post as thousands of people gather at Ground Zero in New York City. 
Crowds celebrate with NYPD officers in New York's Times Square early on May 2, 2011, after the death of Osama bin Laden. 
Revelers gather at the fence on the north side of the White House. 
Afghans watch television coverage in Kabul announcing the killing of bin Laden. 
U.S. Marines watch the announcement of bin Laden's death at Camp Dwyer in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. 
Times Square is filled shortly after the announcement of bin Laden's death. 
Students gather to celebrate at the fence on the north side of the White House. 
A passer-by looks at newspaper headlines in front of the Newseum in Washington. 
Danielle LeMack, left, Carie LeMack and Christie Coombs, who lost relatives on 9/11, pause during a ceremony to honor the victims on May 2, 2011, at the Garden of Remembrance in Boston. 
A visitor photographs the fence overlooking the crash site of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on May 2, 2011. 
Pakistani media and residents gather outside the bin Laden hideout on May 3, 2011. HIDE CAPTION
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Peter Bergen: NYT article says Pakistan knew bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad
- He says reporter Carlotta Gall is a respected authority, but there's no evidence
- Bergen: Why would many high-level U.S. intelligence officials deny Pakistan's knowledge?
- Bergen: If Obama administration has information showing Pakistan knew, it must release it
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad."
(CNN) -- The New York Times magazine is running a bombshell story alleging that the Pakistanis knew all along that Osama bin Laden was living for years in his longtime hiding place in the northern Pakistan city of Abbottabad, where he was killed by a U.S. Navy SEAL team on May 2, 2011.
The Times story, titled "What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden," will carry weight: It was written by Carlotta Gall, the dean of the correspondents who have covered Afghanistan and Pakistan since that fateful day in 2001, when al Qaeda's four hijacked planes crashed through America's comfortable sense that vast oceans insulated it from its enemies.
Peter Bergen during coverage of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 on location in Afghanistan
At great personal risk Gall has authoritatively covered the war in Afghanistan for the past 12 years. Indeed, I first met her during the civil war in Afghanistan during the mid-1990s when she was an aid worker, and I have met her many times since. I encouraged her (along with, I'm sure, many others) to write a book about her reporting in Afghanistan, as no Western reporter has more to say about what has transpired there since the fall of the Taliban.
The bin Laden story in the New York Times magazine is an extract from Gall's forthcoming book, "The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014."
Gall makes two astonishing claims in her Times magazine piece.
The first claim: An unnamed Pakistani official told her, based on what he had in turn heard from an unnamed senior U.S. official that "the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad." ISI is Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency.
The second claim: "The ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: bin Laden...the top military bosses knew about it, I was told."
It is, of course, hard to prove negatives, but having spent around a year reporting intensively on the hunt for al Qaeda's leader for my 2012 book "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad," I am convinced that there is no evidence that anyone in the Pakistani government, military or intelligence agencies knowingly sheltered bin Laden.
Gates on OBL Death: There were no cheers
Admiral: Destroy Osama bin Laden photosAdmiral: Destroy Osama bin Laden photosHow did I arrive at this conclusion?
On three reporting trips to Pakistan I spoke to senior officials in Pakistan's military and intelligence service. They all denied that they had secretly harbored bin Laden. OK, you are thinking: "But they would say that, wouldn't they?"
Well, what about the dozens of officials I spoke to in the U.S. intelligence community, Pentagon, State Department and the White House who also told me versions of "the Pakistanis had no idea that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad"?
During the course of reporting for my book I spoke on the record to, among others, John Brennan, now the CIA director and then President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser; then CIA Director Leon Panetta and his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash; then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen; then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. James Cartwright; then director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter; then senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, Nick Rasmussen; then head of policy at the Pentagon, Michele Flournoy; Michael Vickers, who was then the civilian overseer of Special Operations at the Pentagon; Tony Blinken, who is now the deputy national security adviser; and Denis McDonough, who held that position before Blinken.
These officials have collectively spent many decades working to destroy al Qaeda, and many are deeply suspicious of Pakistan for its continuing support for elements of the Taliban. But all of them told me in one form or another that Pakistani officials had no clue that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.
Indeed, an early debate between senior national security officials at the White House, once CIA intelligence established that bin Laden could be hiding in Abbottabad, was whether to mount a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid on bin Laden's suspected hideout.
This plan was rejected because the officials were concerned that such a joint operation carried the risk that word would leak out about the bin Laden intelligence. This debate would have been moot if the Pakistanis already knew bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.
And, by the way, if the U.S. government had any evidence that the Pakistanis were knowingly sheltering bin Laden, as Gall claims, why cover this up?
In 2011, the relationship between the United States and Pakistan was at its lowest point ever. Early that year a CIA contractor killed two Pakistanis in broad daylight in the city of Lahore, and both countries were trading accusations about each other's perfidy. The tension was compounded by the fact that the CIA drone program in Pakistan was then at its height, which was deeply unpopular among Pakistanis. What did U.S. officials have to lose by saying that bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis if it were true?
The fact is that the senior Pakistani officials Gall alleges were harboring bin Laden were utterly surprised that al Qaeda's leader was living in Abbottabad. Based on the bewildered reactions of top Pakistani officials to the events on the night that bin Laden was killed, it was obvious to U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter and to U.S. officials monitoring communications in Pakistan that the Pakistanis had not had a clue about bin Laden's presence there.
Finally, in the course of reporting my book I discovered that bin Laden was even hiding from some of the people living in his own compound; forget about letting officials in the Pakistani government in on the secret. One of the wives of the bodyguards protecting bin Laden didn't know that the tall stranger hiding on the compound was al Qaeda's leader.
In fairness to Gall, I have heard from four current and former U.S. intelligence and military officials that some of the thousands of documents that U.S. Navy SEALs picked up at bin Laden's Abbottabad compound that haven't been publicly released could point to some kind of official Pakistani collusion.
If that is the case, the Obama White House should release any documents that are relevant so that the American public can be the judge if one of our allies was knowingly harboring bin Laden all along. So far there is no evidence that that is the case.
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