1. "Is the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq dead?": Questions, questions fill my head. From USA Today.

["There are unconfirmed reports that the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq has been killed, according to the Associated Press and other news organizations. "There is intelligence information. Some information, you know, needs confirmation, but this information is very strong," an Interior Ministry spokesman said, according to AFP."]

["This Saturday was my big thesis presentation day. Every year, the Livingston College Honors Program sponsors a day in which all the seniors must go up in front of a crowd of fellow honors students and faculty and present essentially a summary of the thesis they wrote this year. So, for 10 minutes, I had to basically speak about Jean-Luc Godard and Quentin Tarantino and summarize my thesis regarding them both, in which I basically tried to show, by delving not only into a comparative discussion of their respective films but also comparing personal backgrounds and the historical and social contexts in which their work was created and received. In other words: they're both interesting and important in their own ways. (That's certainly a rather different proposition from the one I initially started out with in undertaking this thesis project, one that I'd like to think has come from a lot of careful consideration.)"]

["Tommy Newsom, the good-humored backup bandleader on "The Tonight Show" who earned fame as Johnny Carson's comical punching bag—and respect among musicians as a composer, arranger and saxophone soloist—died on Saturday at his home in Portsmouth, Va. He was 78."]

["Julia Stiles will star in and produce an adaptation of Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar.""]

["Duke University's Fuqua School of Business disciplined 34 first-year master of business administration students who were caught in the school's largest cheating scandal."]