World: Two Americans and United Nations staffers were among 21 people killed when a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up outside a popular Lebanese restaurant in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul. Gunmen sprayed the restaurant after the explosion. The Taliban said the attack was retaliation for an air strike earlier in the week.

New Rules: President Obama announced that intelligence agencies will need a court order before using the trove of telephone data stored by the NSA, and that the agency should no longer store such data in the future.

 Obama’s one-hour speech walked a tightrope between maintaining America’s intelligence capability and assuring the world we are not Big Brother. He said, “People around the world – regardless of their nationality – should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”

 Obama either ignored or passed to Congress some of the most far-reaching reforms suggested by his own review panel.

  In a nod to German President Angela Merkel, whose cellphone was hacked, Obama said the US would no longer spy on the heads of state who are close friends and allies.

Easy Credit: The software used to hack the customer base of Target and other retailers was created by a 17-year-old boy in St.Petersburg, Russia, according to the cyber security company IntelCrawler. The hacker known as “Ree4” sold the software to cyber criminals. The program captures data as it travels through the live memory of a computer during a brief moment when it is not encrypted.

Nation: Declaring a drought emergency, California Gov. Jerry Brown called for a voluntary 20 percent conservation of water throughout the state. Last year was the driest on record for California since 1898. Brown said,  “We are in a unprecedented, serious situation that people should pause and reflect on how we’re dependent on rain, Mother Nature and each other.” The snowpack in California’s mountains, which provides much of the state’s water, is at 20 percent of normal.

>A Federal monitor has been appointed to oversee Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff’s Dept. and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the blowhard who bills himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” The department has been accused of racially profiling Latino drivers.

>Michelle Obama turned 50 and joined the AARP, which is just depressing.

Voter ID: A Pennsylvania judge struck down that state’s law requiring voters to present government-issued identification. Republicans say the law blocks voter fraud, although there’s little evidence much of it ever occurs. Judge Bernard McGinley wrote, “The record is rife with testimony from numerous Pennsylvania voters whose right to vote will be – and indeed already has been – denied or substantially and unnecessarily burdend by the voter ID Law.”

The Obit Page: Mae Young, a lady wrestler fans used to love to hate, died at age 90 in South Carolina. A pioneer in women’s wrestling and a hall of famer, she fought her last match in 2010. Women wrestlers in her day were divided between baby faces, who fought clean, and heels, who fought dirty. Young was a heel. From an account of a 1941 match: “Miss Young choked Miss LaVerne to win the second fall in 6:03 and got so unmanageable in the third, she was disqualified by referee Laverne Stokes in 2:46.”

Gas, Gas Gas!!!: A new study reveals that there are 6,000 leaks in the aging natural gas system in Washington DC. This just begs for a joke about where in the city the most gas is leaking.

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