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Hamas has started taxing street vendors and imposed a number of other new taxes in an effort to shore up its sagging finances.

Jamal Nassar, a Hamas MP, says the government is facing a financial crisis (عربي) because of international sanctions and the blockade. Nassar blames the Egyptian government for the current crisis: He says the new underground wall along the Gaza-Egypt border has choked off commerce into the Gaza Strip. Al-Arabiya reports that the wall has shut down most of the tunnels used to smuggle goods into Gaza. Hamas taxes those tunnels, so less smuggling means lower revenues.

Decent article on Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the latest edition of the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor. It reinforces the point that AQAP has found fertile recruiting ground in southern Yemen because of the south's political unrest and poor economic and social conditions.

There are no linkages between the southern separatist movement and AQAP, and it's unclear whether the tribes of southern Yemen truly support AQAP's ideology or simply share its antipathy for the central government in Sana'a. But there's common cause, nonetheless.

I finally had a chance to listen to Osama bin Laden's new recording, which we've posted in full (عربي). If you prefer English, the NEFA Foundation has a transcript (pdf).

The takeaway is that bin Laden went "back to basics" and discussed, in broad terms, the issues that fuel Muslim anger towards the West: Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush administration's humiliation and torture of Muslims. As Marc Lynch writes, bin Laden didn't get too far into the weeds. He didn't offer any thoughts on whether Hamas is a legitimate Islamic movement; instead, he talked about the Gaza blockade.

This is bin Laden adjusting his strategic communications. He obviously knows that the strident salafi Al-Qaeda that emerged over the last few years didn't play well in the wider Muslim world. A variety of polls (and Al-Qaeda's reported recruiting problems) testify to that. But bin Laden also can't come out and say, My bad! We shouldn't have been killing Iraqi civilians, after all. Instead he's hoping to sweep that under the rug and get back to more popular jihadi themes.

It's fair to conclude, as Spencer Ackerman does, that this change reflects a weakened Al-Qaeda.

But I think it's wrong to conclude (as Ackerman does on Twitter) that this means the end of Al-Qaeda.

Scott Sanford over at Jihadica has a good roundup of salafi reactions to the Hamas/Jund Ansar Allah battle in Gaza (h/t Marc Lynch on Twitter).

The upshot: Salafi groups are trying to recast the battle as a fight between them and the less pious members of Hamas, the "hypocrites and liars." One salafi writer, Akram Hijazi, said Jund Ansar Allah has no beef with "good" Hamas members like Ahmad Yassin and Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi. Sanford sees this as a significant development:

These assertions are important because Hamas members consider Yassin and al-Rantisi good leaders, but now Hijazi is linking these leaders with the Salafi-jihadi movement, of which Yassin and al-Rantisi were not a part. In short, Hijazi is attempting to hijack the legacy of these leaders from Hamas to the Salafi-jihadi cause, giving latter more credibility.

Hijazi also accuses Hamas of practicing takfir (declaring them non-believers).