Atlantic Council

The head of  al Qaeda in Pakistan was killed last week, Joby Warrick reports on page 1 of today's WaPo.

A New Year's Day CIA strike in northern Pakistan killed two top al-Qaeda members long sought by the United States, including the man believed to be behind September's deadly suicide bombing at a Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital

A deal is reported to have been reached that will see the flow of Russian gas into Europe resume shortly.  Although the pricing dispute between Moscow and Kyiv seems as intractable as ever, Russia has agreed to turn on its gas if international monitors observe the pipelines at their entry and exit points through Ukraine.

The Economist ran an interesting graph yesterday — car ownership per 1,000 people in select countries on both sides of the Atlantic.  And the U.S. didn't top the list...

A new international antipiracy task force led by the U.S. is set to be operational in the Gulf of Aden by mid-January.  The Fifth Fleet of the U.S. Navy, based in Bahrain, said it will be called Combined Task Force 151 (CTF-151) and will include a U.S. command ship, two more American warships, and air support.

While the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs from high wage countries to lower wage countries is a longstanding phenomenon, we mostly think of it as one between the developed and developing worlds, not something that takes place within the EU.

Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko is hoping that standing firm against Russia in the dispute over gas prices will bring him closer to Europe, Bloomberg's James M. Gomez and Agnes Lovasz argue. He may be sadly mistaken.

Just when you thought Israel's PR couldn't get any worse:

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children -- emaciated but alive -- in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.

In my post on the transatlantic divide over Israel's Gaza operation, I referred to "America's virtually automatic support of Israel, even for actions that are not only outside the norms of international law but decidedly unhelpful to our own interests."

As (somewhat) anticipated, Russia reduced the flow of gas to Ukraine on New Year's Day because of ongoing disputes over prices for 2009 and unpaid bills.  However, unlike the briefer affair in 2006, this spat has evolved into a full-scale crisis with news today that Russia has cut off gas to Europe entirely (see my colleague James Joyner's piece).  I've gathered some multimedia about the current gridlock.

The semi-annual gas war between Russia and Ukraine has ratcheted up another notch, with the announcement that all gas headed from to the rest of Europe through Ukraine — which is to say, virtually all Russian gas headed to Europe — has now been halted.