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Anchored by Jake Tapper, The Lead airs at 4 p.m. ET on CNN.
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pop lead
Watch The Lead's Jake Tapper rap
Hip hop mogul Jay-Z released a track Thursday going after critics who bashed he and his wife Beyoncé's recent trip to Cuba, suggesting in one line that he got permission from the White House. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked about it, and quipped "I guess nothing rhymes with Treasury," citing the department responsible for travel licenses to Cuba.
That sounded like a Twitter challenge to us. The Lead's Jake Tapper helped out Jay-Z in our Thursday Twitter challenge (which is now closed, sorry tweeps!), finding a choice treasury rhyme in the video above.
world lead
Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf comes clean on drone strikes
By Nic Robertson
Deadly American drone strikes in Pakistan have soured U.S.-Pakistan relations for almost a decade.
"No Pakistani official has ever acknowledged sanctioning U.S. drone strikes, until now," Pervez Musharraf, former military leader of Pakistan, told CNN's Nic Robertson. "Only on a few occasions when a target was absolutely isolated, and no chance of collateral damage."
Musharraf was Pakistan's military ruler when drone strikes began in 2004, and was bitterly and publicly critical of them Now he admits there was a secret deal.
"One discussed at the military level, at the intelligence level to strike, and if at all there was no time for our own [Special Operation Task Force] and military to act then. Only rarely, maybe 2 or 3 times only," said Musharraf.
FULL POST
buried lead
Cicadas are coming
They're baaa-ack. Those giant, orange, bug-eyed, winged creatures that sing. In just a few weeks, states from Connecticut to North Carolina will be swarming with cicadas.
"There's a boat load. There could be a billion per square mile," said Michael Raupp, professor of entomology at the University of Maryland.
Different types of cicadas appear every summer but this spring a group known as brood 2 will be back after 17 years. Cicadas sing a mating call, mate, lay eggs, and die in trees, all in about 4 to 6 weeks.
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money lead
Six seconds of fame with video sharing app Vine
Imagine how tough it would be to live in a world where we only had six seconds to communicate a thought. But in social media, undersharing is the latest craze, thanks to the popular video app Vine, which lets users create and upload six-second long clips. Just four months after its debut, Vine has already earned the top spot among app store downloads.
The video-sharing app was launched in January by Twitter, the same company that made communicating 140 characters at a time the norm. It fuels creativity by limiting the length of video clips to just seconds. Those videos are then posted on an endless loop to your Twitter account. Since its debut, Vine has become a go-to service for not just avid tweeters, but advertisers, and celebrities.
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national lead
Sen. Manchin to Sandy Hook parents: 'I can do something'
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was noticeably moved by the Sandy Hook families he met Wednesday afternoon. He met with them just hours after unveiling a bipartisan bill alongside Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania that would extend background checks to guns bought online and at gun shows.
"I can do something," an emotional Manchin told the parents who lost children in the Sandy Hook attack.
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