Congressional and administration officials tell CNN Osama bin Laden is dead. He was reportedly killed in Afghanistan.

John King reports he has been killed by a U.S. asset based on “actionable U.S. intelligence.”  CNN reports he was in a mansion outside of Islamabad, Pakistan.

AP says it was a CIA operation and the United States has his body.

Thoughts?

UPDATE:  This is, unsurprisingly, the lead story in Politico’s Morning Energy, which offers these implications for energy:

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On Thursday, The Washington Post editorializes that Donald Trump has been campaigning on “bogus” issues and that he should “cease and desist.” An article in the news pages the same day reports that the great orange charlatan’s “simply wild speculation” has “almost no basis in fact.”

Then, on Saturday night, Post reporters and editors, in black-tie finest, go to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner to host their invited guests, including .”‰.”‰. Donald Trump.

Awkward though the Trump invitation is, it is just one of the many problems with the annual dinner and its satellite events….

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank has written his second column blasting the DC media in as many months (see Milbank slams fawning, stenographic media in Issa scandal: “Rotten to the press corps”).

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Buildings in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, lie in ruins on April 28, a day after a tornado demolished the city (via Reuters)

We reported in March that NOAA said GOP’s proposed satellite funding cuts could halve the accuracy of precipitation forecasts.  Michael Conathan, CAPAF’s Director of Ocean Programs, updates the story.

On Thursday, as the search for survivors continued in devastated communities across Alabama and other southern states pummeled this week by massive, terrifying tornadoes,  President Obama said “we can’t control when or where a terrible storm may strike, but we can control how we respond to it.” Unfortunately, thanks to the spending bill orchestrated by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, he couldn’t say we are doing everything in our power to protect Americans from future extreme weather events. Events that are becoming ever more frequent, as CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and Valeri Vasquez pointed out in a report and interactive map released Friday.

The Associated Press characterized the number of fatalities from these storms –more than 340 as of Saturday — as something that “seems out of a bygone era, before Doppler radar and pinpoint satellite forecasts were around to warn communities of severe weather. Residents were told the tornadoes were coming up to 24 minutes ahead of time, but they were just too wide, too powerful and too locked onto populated areas to avoid a horrifying body count.”

It is precisely those “pinpoint satellite forecasts” that Congress, including every GOP member of Alabama’s delegation, decided were luxuries America cannot afford when it passed the continuing resolution to keep the government operating for the remainder of the fiscal year.

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This week, the Big Five oil companies announced their first quarter profits, which, with oil well over $100 per barrel, came to more than $30 billion. Exxon alone registered nearly $11 billion in profits, a 69 percent increase over their first quarter profit a year ago.

If history is any example, these profits “” gained at the expense of American consumers, from prices thatare helping to slow the American economy “” are going to go straight towards enriching oil executives.  WonkRoom has the story.

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This week the Obama Administration committed to preserving one of this nation’s most valuable assets, and our public health, with an announcement that it would enact stronger pollution controls on millions of acres of wetlands and tens of thousands of miles of streams.  CAP’s Jorge Madrid has the story.

Obama’s national Clean Water Framework “outlines a series of actions underway and planned across Federal agencies to ensure the integrity of the waters Americans rely on every day for drinking, swimming, and fishing, and that support farming, recreation, tourism and economic growth,” according to a press release by the administration.  These actions could prevent the dumping of mining waste and the discharge of industrial pollutants to waters that feed swimming holes and drinking water supplies.

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In March, the entire House Republican Caucus voted to protect oil subsidies, which total $40 billion over 10 years. Now, it appears that numerous Republicansare questioning the wisdom of those subsidies, especially with high gas prices and soaring profits for oil companies.  ThinkProgress has the story.

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