According to a report published in the New York Times, British, Indian, and American intelligence agencies failed to piece together major plot details of Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba before they carried out the gruesome, three-day onslaught in Mumbai in 2008 that left 166 dead, including six Americans.

An illegally-constructed, half-completed building in the Mumbai suburb of Thane collapsed on Thursday evening, killing at least 45 people, including several children. Over 50 people were injured, and more than 20 are still missing; rescue workers, wielding construction equipment and driving bulldozers, are still at the scene, attempting to dig out possible survivors. Police, meanwhile, were trying to track down Jamil Qureshi and Salim Shaikh, the two builders who had illegally constructed the seven-story building and used substandard materials to do so. Of the dead, seven were construction workers from West Bengal, staying in the building as they added an eighth story—making it fully twice as high as zoning regulations are said to have allowed. "The entire incident reeks of corruption at many levels and in many departments," Anant Rangaswami writes at First Post. "From the local civil authorities who allowed the building to come up, to the electricity department which made connections available, to the water department which provided connections, to the local police station which failed to see something wrong, to the local politicians who seem not even to have noticed the illegal building coming up, to buyers of space in the building, which, if unauthorized, would not have registered the purchases." Prithviraj Chavan, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, visited the site of the accident on Friday. [NDTV | Guardian | First Post]

After discovering himself during 10-hour sessions on the Rock of Ages dance floor, Tom Cruise has an announcement to make:

Yesterday, the world was gifted with a video of President and Mrs. Obama bustin' some moves with children in Mumbai, India. Now, not 24 hours later, we have this remix: same video, new soundtrack (50 Cent's "In Da Club").

The headline says it all here, honestly. Here's a video that Science Channel host Danny Forster took with his iPhone (and posted to his Twitter page) this morning of two goats, in Mumbai, tied to—and dancing around!—a box.

Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani is about to move into his new house, the world's largest: a 27-story skyscraper in Mumbai. It has three helipads, a parking garage and 600 staff members. It's worth £630 million, or about $9 bajillion.

[Two container ships collided near Mumbai on Monday, placing the Arabian sea in danger of an oil spill from the MSC Chitra, the ship seen tilting dangerously here. Pic via AP]

Ugh. The story of the Slumdog Millionaire kids just keeps getting sadder. Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played Dev Patel's character as a little boy, just had his shanty house bulldozed by the government.

Remember how we all got all mad at the Bush administration for fear-mongering after 9/11? They squandered international goodwill with a dumb war, and they tried to make us all afraid, all the time, so we'd keep voting for them, forever, to keep us safe? What bad, bad people, those Republicans. Anyways. On Good Morning America today, Dan Harris, reporting from Mumbai, announced to a sleepy Monday morning audience that the well-coordinated attack in India is basically guaranteed to be repeated here in America, like there is a 100% chance that terrorists will take over the next hotel you check into and kill your children, and al-Qaeda will do a thousand more 9/11s. Is it too late to vote for Rudy Giuliani? He'll protect us!!!

We had a fun couple weeks there, congratulating ourselves for Barack Obama's historic, Liberals Save America presidential win, accepting other countries' "we're so proud of you" head nods and whatnot. It seemed like the country was back on track for a second, ready to head out into the world beloved for our bold and inspirational choice. Except, um, as it turns out, it doesn't really matter what the World thinks of us. A small, active faction of folks still hate us intensely and it doesn't matter that European people like US tourists again. Things like the current Mumbai crisis still wretchedly play out on big stages the belie their small, insidious roots.

Can't stand CNN? Don't want to keep Googling for news? Pop open a browser window and leave a Twitter search for "mumbai" running. People are posting photo links and group-sulking, rather than the usual sort of "if only they had used Twitter more in Mumbai, none of this would have happened" chatter. You can always go to Poynter for that stuff.

Hey there, Angelina Jolie, when you're not adopting babies or fainting all over the place, how's it going with A Mighty Heart? In the biopic, Angelina plays Marianne Pearl, wife of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Pakistan in 2002; Dan Futterman plays Daniel. Above, Futterman and Jolie enjoy a stroll through a Mumbai train station, and it does appear that Jolie has cut down a bit on the brownface. Futterman bears a decent resemblance to Danny Pearl, though obviously a little hunked up. Apparently they weren't mobbed by local fans until they actually boarded the train, at which point bodyguards had to shoo away "young students yelling Jolie's name." Huge, huge journalism fans over there in Mumbai.