Morning News Roundup (20 Feb)

• Bin Laden's back, and there's gonna be trouble.... The AP reports that a new audio tape was posted to an Al Qaeda-related Web site on Monday, with bin Laden offering the United States a long-term truce and noting that al Qaeda would soon launch a fresh attack on American soil.
  
  [UPDATE - 9:45am PST] I passed over the fact that this isn't a new bin Laden tape--this was a reposting of last month's tape, but I believe it's also a bit longer.
  
  
• More bombings in Iraq, with 23 people killed from a suicide bomb on a bus in Baghdad and a bomb at a restaurant in Mosul (BBC).
  
  
• Bird flu is a-spreading. India "began slaughtering hundreds of thousands of chickens in western India" after "the death of a 27-year-old poultry farm owner who had bird-flu-like symptoms, though tests had yet to determine what killed him" (WaPo). Meanwhile Reuters reports that Indian officials were going door to door looking for people with fever and quarantining six. The Independent reports that in France a wild duck found dead tested positive for the less virulent H5 strain, while the German Baltic island of Ruegen is littered with the corpses of at least 100 swans just 24 hours after the authorities discovered three dead birds with H5N1 virus on its shores.
  
  
• From the NYTimes: The Israeli cabinet decided Sunday to immediately freeze the transfer of about $50 million a month in tax and customs receipts due to the Palestinian Authority, arguing that the swearing in of a Hamas-dominated legislature on Saturday meant that the Palestinians were now led by the militant group.
  
  
• The furor continues over the approval of a company from United Arab Emirates taking over operations at six major American ports (WaPo):
  

  Lawmakers from both parties are questioning the sale as a possible risk to national security.
  
  "It's unbelievably tone deaf politically at this point in our history," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said on "Fox News Sunday."
  
  Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), on CBS's "Face the Nation," said, "It is ridiculous to say you're taking secret steps to make sure that it's okay for a nation that had ties to 9/11, [to] take over part of our port operations in many of our largest ports. This has to stop."

• Oh joy! The Republicans have Seattle on the shortlist for their national convention in 2008 (via The Stranger's Slog blog). I agree with Dan Savage's assessment of it being a "shitstorm of unbelievable scale"--and quite fun to boot.
  

Finally, a note (with somewhat of a spoiler) about Munich, which Mrs. F and I saw last night (with Facade Friends A&J). I really enjoyed the first hour, but it became obvious that the speed in which this film was made (it was done within about nine months, after Spielberg finished War of the Worlds) was a tad bloated and occasionally repetetive--both from a writing and editing standpoint. Essentially, this 2.75-hour movie could have lost at least a half hour. But I was going along with it, largely because of the brief flourishes of Spielbergian film craft (found equally in the action scenes as well as a few offhand exchanges between characters) as well as a few unexpected story detours. But the penultimate scene between the movie's central character Avner (played by Eric Bana) and his wife having sex, with scenes of flashbacks to the deaths of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics was amazingly over-the-top and bewilderingly tasteless. And it really put the rest of the movie in the dumper for me. Disappointing.

[PS.1] Check out Kat's comment.

[PS.2] Billboard reports that a US music licensing company is paying a confidential amount to the the family of Zulu migrant worker Solomon Linda, the composer of the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," to settle the copyright.

Linda's family lives in poverty in the Johannesburg township of Soweto and were originally claiming 10 million rand ($1.6 million) in damages against the company.
[...]
The song has earned an estimated $15 million since it was written in 1939 after being recorded by at least 150 artists around the world. It also features in the Walt Disney "Lion King" film, as well as on stage.

That's great and all, except for one thing... it's the most annoying song in the history of songs. And I'm guessing we'll be hearing it a few times this week as news agencies pick up this news. Arrrgh.