Direct Hit: The leader of al Shabab, the terrorist group based out of Somalia, was killed in a drone strike Monday, the US says. Ahmed Abdi Godane was the leader of the group responsible for the massacre of 60 people at the Westgate shopping mall in Naibrobi last year. The US says a special operations strike, including manned and unmanned aircraft, obliterated the Shabab encampment outside Mogadishu, killing everyone there. Godane was one of the most wanted terrorist leaders in the world.
Targeted: President Obama has gathered nine allies to fight the extremist Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. He’s trying to make a comeback after bluntly admitting he had “no strategy” for dealing with ISIS. The effort is expected to be made with air strikes and without sending in ground troops. Obama said, “You narrow their scope of action, you slowly shrink the space, the territory that they may control, you take out their leadership.”
Obama will have to make the difficult decision whether to hit ISIS inside Syria, which unintentionally help the vicious Assad regime fighting a civil war.
The coalition includes the US, Britain, France, Australia, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark.
Wilding: The five young men wrongly sent to prison for the infamous 1989 Central Park jogger rape have been awarded a collective $41 million settlement, about $1 million for each year they spent behind bars. The settlement language avoids placing any blame on the city, the investigators, or the prosecutors who got the thing so horribly wrong. The five men age 14 to 16 at the time were accused by the media of “wilding” in the park and raping a young investment banker. In 2002 a previously convicted rapist admitted he committed the crime alone.
Mystery: A private plane piloted by a Rochester, NY developer crashed off Jamaica after signaling distress and then going unresponsive. Larry Glazer and his wife Jane, both 68, were killed. Flying to Naples, Fla., Glazer asked an air traffic controller for permission to get lower. A few minutes later he was not answering radio calls. Two F-16 fighters were scrambled and the pilots reported seeing Glazer slumped over his controls and his windows fogged. The plane passed through Cuban airspace before it crashed.
The Obit Page: Bruce Morton, one of the intelligent and classy correspondents from the heyday of network news, has died at age 83 in Washington. He was elegant in the simplicity of his reports. In political coverage, Morton was one of the “Boys on the Bus,” covering candidates in the days when reporters surfed the aisles of campaign jets on serving trays as the plane took off. Morton spent 29 years covering Washington for CBS News and another 13 years for CNN before retiring in 2006.
First Tourist: On the way home from the NATO summit in Wales yesterday President Obama stopped to visit Stonehenge in England. Obama was given a personal tour and later said he had “knocked this off my bucket list.”

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