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April 28, 2012 | | KNOW YOUR DONORS The Republican candidate has accepted donations from controversial hedge-fund billionaire John Paulson, but Romney made their association more explicit Thursday night when Paulson hosted a fundraiser. The Daily Beast’s Ben Jacobs reports on the big-money event at a townhouse owned by the man who made a fortune shorting the housing market and subprime mortgages. NEUTRALIZED Al Qaeda is up against the ropes a year after a surgical Navy SEAL strike took out top terrorist Osama bin Laden, counterterrorist officials told reporters Friday. While some pockets of the radical Islamist group remain active in Pakistan, drone strikes and other American tactics have greatly lessened the group’s capacity for attack. The mission that took out bin Laden has become a main stumping point for President Obama as he vamps up his reelection efforts, a way of showing that the cool-tempered commander in chief can give the go when it counts. BY THE BOOK Some things shouldn’t need to be spelled out. But in light of a prostitution scandal in Colombia, the men and women who protect the president are getting a new rulebook. Many of the new regulations are aimed at overseas travel, and include no drinking within 10 hours of time on duty, and no bringing foreigners back to the hotel. And if the cautionary tale of the past weeks has not made the danger of the Service’s “wheels up, rings off” culture clear enough, the agency will also be sitting employees down for ethics sessions. The Secret Service has said the new guidelines are “common-sense enhancements” of what’s already on the books. 99 PERCENT? Blue-collar credentials are this election season’s must-have—which means Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Elizabeth Warren, engaged in a heated Massachusetts Senate race, have some explaining to do. Brown’s tax return showed that his family netted close to $840,000 after his 2010 election. Warren’s family did even better, taking in just under $1 million two years out of the last four. In 2010, both Warren and Brown ranked among the nation’s top 1 percent of earners. “Gail and I are very blessed,” Brown and his wife told reporters Friday. “We’ve worked very hard over the last 25 years.” BLOODSHED Syrian activists said Saturday that at least six civilians and four rebels were killed in a village near Damascus when soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad pursued Army defectors in the area. A British Syrian-rights groups also reported 10 dead, but said that all of those killed were defectors. Violence in Syria continues two weeks after a U.N.-backed ceasefire did little to bring peace to the country rocked by 13 months of internal conflict. The killings Saturday took place in the village of Bakha north of Damascus. | | 
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