Worth a read: Arianna Huffington's post about the upside of social media in the Middle East. While al-Qaeda, she notes, was "an early adopter" of the Web as a tool for recruitment, incitement, organization, and disinformation, the judicious and imaginative use of social media outlets in the right hands may, over time, help foster peaceful initiatives in the conflict-plagued region.

Just one more thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving Week.

(Now, if we could only figure out how to deal with North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan....and the fallout from the latest WikiLeaks leaks.)

Work on the 9/11 Memorial progresses. Recently, the Port Authority announced that workers had successfully tested the reflecting pool fountains for the first time.

At long last.

Finally, the anti-climax. Al-Qaeda in Yemen, after a long silence, has taken responsibility for coordinating the thwarted parcel-bomb plot, according to Agence France Press, citing a jihadist Website's claim.

The only mystery: What took them so long to fess up?