Almost everything we learn about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden these days is coming from anonymous U.S. officials.

Today, for instance, U.S. officials told us via The Washington Post that Al Qaeda was on the verge of being totally wiped out. The comments echoed earlier ones from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the former C.I.A. director, who earlier said that only a couple dozen more Al Qaeda militants needed to be killed before the war was over.

More from GlobalPost: How many drones it take to kill a terrorist?

Last week the officials were talking to the Wall Street Journal. They told the paper that Al Qaeda would likely be shifting the focus of its attacks to Western targets outside of the United States. They said this was because it had become too difficult for them to strike inside the United States.

The Wall Street Journal said the U.S. officials had come to this conclusion based on evidence gleaned from flash drives found in the compound where bin Laden was killed. Much of the information we are learning about bin Laden and Al Qaeda, in fact, is said (by U.S. officials) to be coming from those flash disks, as well as a computer.

It was from the computer, for instance, that U.S. officials learned that bin Laden liked porn. Everyone ran with that story. It was great story. Not only was it sure to drive traffic, combining two of the most searched items on the internet these days (porn and bin Laden), but it also tweaks the legacy of a man who claimed that a strict adherence to Islam is what guided him in his global campaign of terror.

With little other recourse available, Pakistanis who have lost family members to the drone attacks in North and South Waziristan are attempting to sue the U.S. government.

They have held mass protests, but to no avail. They have appealed to their own government to stop the attacks, which as in ally of the United States it could presumably do, but that hasn't worked either. The Pakistani government, which has repeatedly denounced the drone strikes publicly, has continued to give them the green light privately. It's enough, they say, to make them throw up their hands and join the militants. But that, of course, wouldn't help either.

So with no one to turn to who might have their best interests in mind, it's to the courts they go.

(GlobalPost in North Waziristan: Obama's Hidden War)

Soldiers ready a Shadow drone for takeoff at Forward Operating Base Pasab. The unarmed drones are equipped with high-tech surveillance equipment.

The humanitarian crisis in southern Yemen is worsening as more than 45,000 people have been displaced by fighting between the Yemeni army and Al Qaeda militants, a U.N. official said today, speaking to reporters in Geneva.

Al Qaeda gunmen first siezed the coastal city of Zinjibar, the capital of southern Abyan province, at the end of May and have been capitalizing on a power vacuum that has gripped the country since June 4, when an attack on President Ali Abdullah Saleh forced him to leave the country to seek medical treatment. A military official told AFP that more than 100 soldiers have so far been killed in the fighting.

Some analysts say that Al Qaeda has sought to take advantage of the unrest between Saleh's government and its opponents in order to seize territory. Others, however, have argued that Saleh purposely handed Zinjibar over to the militants in order to reinforce his claim that an end to his three-decade rule would embolden Al Qaeda, a claim that has drawn the attention of the United States.

The Saleh administration has been an important ally of the United States in the war on terror and has so far escaped some of the condemnations that President Barack Obama has leveled at other regional leaders who have responded violently to peaceful protest movements.

Either way, GlobalPost correspondent Jeb Boone reported, Zinjibar has become a war zone.