Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you the man who always knew how to catch bin Laden, the World Trade Center on Sunday night, the Supreme Court's declining of a rape case, TFT's book review of Asunder, and our president, Chuck Norris. Enjoy!

In December 2004, I worked with Peter Bergen and Karen Greenberg in organizing a major conference in the US Senate titled “Al Qaeda 2.0″. Bergen, probably the world’s most famous al Qaeda and bin Laden tracker, had arranged one of the first major interviews by a Western journalist of bin Laden in 1997. Greenberg was then and is Executive Director of the NYU Center on Law & Security.

After learning Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan last night I walked the two miles downtown to the World Trade Center site to meet my friend B. I had expected the streets to be irrationally busy for being 2AM on a Sunday night but the things remained empty as I moved southward. Two blocks from the World Trade Center site I saw the first sign of something slightly unusual, an empty police trailer used for transporting police horses. At Church and Vesey, on the Northeastern corner of the still empty pit surrounded by giant metal cranes and the all-night lights of the still traumatized skyscrapers on the perimeter, a crowd of 300-400 people were squeezed into the center of the intersection.

The Texas cheerleader who was raped by a star high school athlete and subsequently kicked off her squad after refusing to cheer for her rapist, has lost her Supreme Court appeal, Jezebel is reporting. A lower court ruled “that the cheerleader was speaking for the school, not herself, and had no right to remain silent when called on to cheer the athlete by name.” The Court declined to hear her case and had no further comment.

"Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity." – Madame Bovary, Gerard Hopkins Translation

We learned a lot about Barack Obama over the weekend. And for some people it must have been a real crash course since they only became aware that our president is a U.S. citizen a few days before.