"Alleged 'American Jihadist' Made Way to Yemen," by Haley Sweetland Edwards

(Photo and article courtesy: AOLNews)

SANA'A, YEMEN (March 12) -- Sharif Mobley, a 26-year-old New Jersey man suspected of being an al-Qaida member, reportedly shot his way out of a Yemeni hospital Sunday and into American headlines.

"It was like the movies," said Zaid al-Olfah, who was visiting a family member at the aging, Soviet-style building in the Yemeni capital on Sunday. "There was shooting and smoke coming out the windows and down the hallway." The window of Mobley's former hospital room is still blackened.

Mobley is the latest in a line of suspected "American jihadists" -- disgruntled American citizens, including Colleen LaRose aka Jihad Jane, who have allegedly been radicalized and recruited as foot soldiers by Islamic extremists. Their American citizenship, which allows them to both travel freely and hold sensitive positions of employment without raising suspicion, makes them potentially invaluable contributors to al-Qaida plots on American soil, U.S. intelligence reports have said.

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"Poverty Predicts Quake Damage Better Than Richter Scale," by Emily Schmall

(Article and photo courtesy: AOLnews)

Though an 8.8-magnitude earthquake that rocked Chile early Saturday was one of the strongest on record, the structural devastation and human toll is expected to be far smaller than the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January.

To project the scope of destruction and loss of human life, the quality of buildings and the poverty level are far more telling than the magnitude on the Richter scale, scientists and aid workers say.

"It's not as much the earthquake that kills, it's the poverty that kills," said Colin Stark, a geomorphologist and researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who is studying the aftermath of a 1999 earthquake in Taiwan to predict the probability of landslides in Haiti.

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"Billionaire Among Us: How Mexicans See Carlos Slim," by Emily Schmall

(Photo and article courtesy: AOLnews)

MEXICO CITY (March 13) -- How does a country battered by a lethal drug war and the worst recession since the 1930s react when one of its own, Carlos Slim Helu, is deemed by Forbes magazine to be the world's richest person?

In a word, mixed.

"There's no way for a country with so many poor to have the world's richest man without something being awry," said Pedro Dominguez, a mechanic from Puebla. "The problem is, most Mexican people have no way to attain this kind of wealth."

"He has my respect," countered Rafael Contreras Martinez, a housepainter from Izucar de Matamoros, on his way to a job. "I'm not going to speak ill of a man who has worked and struggled."

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