Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's Global Public Square, says the U.S. has more interests in Pakistan than in Afghanistan "by far" and must maintain close relations with Pakistan. FULL POST

CNN Terrorism Analyst Paul Cruickshank and former CIA Officer Phil Mudd say al Qaeda's #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is no Osama bin Laden.  FULL POST

Stephen Carter, Professor of Law at Yale University, and Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, discuss whether the killing of Osama bin Laden was a legitimate act of war or murder. FULL POST

Officials round-up dozens of people with suspected connections to the bin Laden compound, CNN's Nic Robertson reports.  FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today's six OFF-SET questions is Matt Pottinger, Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

Pottinger was a former Wall Street Journal reporter in China who then served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Japan. He is co-author, along with U.S. Army Major Gen. Michael T. Flynn and Paul Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency, of the 2010 report "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan."

Does the killing of Osama bin Laden, from your point of view, indicate a turning point in our efforts to fight al Qaeda and terrorism around the world?

You bet.  The CIA and the Navy SEALs have extinguished the world’s foremost terrorist and champion of militant Islam.  Bin Laden’s ideology was already on the ropes in the Middle East.  Now that he’s dead, his would-be followers have to ask:  What did Bin Laden achieve? 

Other than killing many, many thousands of people—most of them Muslims, by the way—what strategic goals did he achieve through terrorism?  He failed to overturn a single government or realize his vision for a fundamentalist caliphate.  Pro-democracy demonstrators accomplished more in two months than Bin Laden accomplished in two decades. 

This doesn’t mean his disciples won’t keep trying.  They will.  And we will have our nose bloodied from time to time.  The trick will be to avoid overreacting the next time we do get attacked at home. FULL POST

Military expert John Gresham talks about the new model stealth aircraft used by Special Ops in the bin Laden raid.  FULL POST

Answering today’s five OFF-SET questions is Jeff Joerres, CEO of ManpowerGroup since 1999 and Chairman since 2001, and one of only three CEOs the company has had since its founding in 1948

ManpowerGroup, according to its website, is “the world leader in innovative workforce solutions…These solutions cover an entire range of talent-driven needs from recruitment and assessment, training and development, and career management, to outsourcing and workforce consulting. ManpowerGroup maintains the world’s largest and industry-leading network of nearly 3,900 offices in over 80 countries and territories... to meet the needs of its 400,000 clients per year.” 

On Friday, the Labor Department released its monthly employment report: the economy added 244,000 jobs in April, much better than expected. The unemployment rate ticked higher to 9% from 8.8%  How much hope does today’s report give you that the economy is improving?

The economy is definitely improving, it is just not happening at pace that anyone would like. The increase of new jobs created to 244,000 is a perfect example.

The challenge is that the country is waiting for a big breakthrough and this recovery is not going to pan out that way – it’s going to be a step by step improvement because employers are still feeling a degree of uncertainty and are waiting for robust demand before they ramp up their workforces.

Each quarter, we conduct a forward looking survey that looks at employers’ hiring intentions. Our latest survey shows six consecutive quarters of employment growth and positive hiring intentions in all 50 states, so it is definitely headed in the right direction. FULL POST

Answering today’s five OFF-SET questions is Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute and managing editor of ECRI’s forecasting publications. http://www.businesscycle.com/ He is the co-author of "Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy."

On Friday, the Labor Department released its monthly employment report: the economy added 244,000 jobs in April, much better than expected. The unemployment rate ticked higher to 9% from 8.8%  How much hope does today’s report give you that the economy is improving?

Job growth has improved since the beginning of the year, and this is consistent with the revival in economic growth that ECRI predicted last fall. But, just because we’ve seen a few months of decent jobs growth, doesn’t mean we should extrapolate that trend too far into the future. Even at this pace, we’d need several years to dig ourselves out of the hole and regain the jobs we lost during the recession.

According to some reports, there many be as many as 13.5 million unemployed people in the U.S. At the same time, politicians say they are focused on jobs, jobs, jobs. What is the best hope that millions of people will find work in the near future?

I’m sorry to say that, even with the best of intentions and policy measures, there’s no way that’ll happen. FULL POST

U.S. ADDED JOBS – The U.S. economy added 244,000 jobs in April, much higher than expected. Unemployment rate rose to 9%. Friday marks the one-year anniversary of Wall Street's 'flash crash' that sent the Dow industrials plunging nearly 1,000 points in less than 20 minutes.

BIN LADEN PLOTTED AGAINST U.S. RAILWAYS – President Obama is scheduled to meet on Friday with members of the Navy SEAL Team Six atFort Campbell, Kentucky. The private meeting with the SEALs involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden comes a day after a nationwide alert was issued regarding rail security, the first terror threat notification linked to materials found during the raid on the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan. FULL POST