A digital-age spy mystery caromed through the Twitterverse over the past week. And now that some of the story has come to light, one central question remains unresolved: Who, if anyone, was @PrimorisEra working for?

PrimorisEra was one of the Twitter handles of a variously identified woman who purported to be a player in U.S. national security matters. She -- or at least, her bikini-clad avatar -- was also a looker, and seemingly unusually apt to ply her attractiveness -- as well as an enthusiasm for missiles -- in defense-oriented corners of the Twitterverse.

However, the sometimes contradictory claims she posted to her many accounts and her habit of soliciting detailed information from her national security twitter-contacts soon earned her a less admiring sort of attention; and once a few other national-security tweeters cast suspicion on her possible credentials and motives, PrimorisEra suddenly disappeared. Her Facebook account went dark, as did her logins on various other discussion boards and social-media outlets where she posted content under numerous digital aliases.

And this being Washington, the whole mysterious disappearing act fueled further speculation. Was PrimorisEra a "honeypot"--in the vein of deported Russian spy Anna Chapman--seeking to use her social-media charms to solicit national security information from drooling defense geeks? Or was she a bored defense contractor in some drab northern Virginia office park who simply got carried away with her avatar's fantasy life as a covert agent -- a spook wanna-be? Or was she some combination of the above? Full Story »

We'll have to wait until Saturday to find out how many people watched the royal wedding on TV this morning. (The projection is 2 billion worldwide.) But for now we know that the event generated massive traffic online.

George Winslow reports: "Akamai, which handled the transmission of live streams from the Royal Wedding for Fox News, CBS and about two dozen outlets from around the world over its network, reported record traffic with a peak of about 2.9 million live streams over its network, breaking the previous record of about 1.6 million streams during the last World Cup."

You can read more over at Broadcasting & Cable.

(Matt Dunham/AP)

Anti-government protesters defied warnings by the Syrian army to stay home and took to the streets in cities across Syria today to protest the rule of authoritarian President Bashar Al-Assad. The action comes in the midst of a a bloody crackdown by the Assad regime, and some are suggesting the confrontation between Assad and Syrian dissenters my be reaching a tipping point.

Assad sent the Syrian army to all main cities today to stop people from demonstrating. But the army apparently disobeyed his reported orders not to kill protesters—and also didn't achieve Assad's main goal of preventing the protests from taking place at all.

"Today I'm sure that Assad lost control of the people and his people," one Syrian observer commented on condition of anonymity. He stressed that Assad failed either to assert effective authority over the army or over the Syrian people.

In response to the brutality of the crackdown, President Barack Obama signed an executive order today instituting sanctions against the Syrian intelligence agency and two of Assad's brothers, a White House official confirmed. Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council voted in Geneva today to condemn the Syrian crackdown.

"The [Executive Order] is a watershed," Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Envoy. "This is the first time an Assad has been designated by the [U.S. government], and the first time the USG has issued an EO on human rights in Syria. Until a few months ago Human Rights was a distant fifth on our list of issues with Syria. Now it's emerged as the center of our policy."

Full Story »

Yesterday, we reported on the growing number of accusations being lobbed at Donald Trump.

And now, it seems, another one can be added to the list. This week, Trump told local Fox hosts at "Good Day New York" that he didn't serve in Vietnam because he "got lucky" with his draft lottery number.

But The Smoking Gun uncovered documents that say otherwise.

Full Story »

Hostility between the Obama administration and the press seems to be escalating.

The latest example: Friday's front-page San Francisco Chronicle story about how the White House threatened to exclude the paper from the press pool designated to cover presidential functions in the Bay Area.

The trouble began at an April 21 Obama fundraiser in San Francisco. At that gathering, a group of six protesters who had paid a combined $76,000 to attend the event spontaneously broke into song to "air their concerns regarding the treatment of Private Bradley Manning," as Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci, the pool reporter on hand, wrote at the time.

When a pool reporter is invited to a private White House event, he or she is allowed to cover it on the condition that the report is then distributed among the members of the White House press corps who aren't present.

But Marinucci also used her smart phone to record the disruption (see video above). The White House regards such freelance reporting as a big transgression of the rules—and Obama officials retaliated by removing Marinucci from its list of approved pool reporters. At the same time, the White House sought to use its clout to pressure other correspondents to keep the rebuke under wraps, according to sources who spoke with Chronicle editor-at-large Phil Bronstein. White House flacks would not speak with the Chronicle on the record about the situation.

And here, according to the Chronicle's account, is where things got sticky:

Full Story »

"It's official!" my colleague Zachary Roth reports from London:

A smiling Prince William and Kate Middleton were moments ago declared man and wife at London's Westminster Abbey, in front of a congregation of around 1,900 and a worldwide television audience estimated at as many as 2 billion.

Wearing an ivory and white satin dress designed by Sarah Burton--a closely guarded secret until minutes before the service began--Kate accepted a wedding ring of Welsh gold, given to William by the Queen soon after the couple were engaged. The bride also wore a  halo diamond tiara loaned by the Queen, with her gently curled hair down at the back. Full Story »

Cross-posted at The New Royals blog:

It's official!

A smiling Prince William and Kate Middleton were moments ago declared man and wife at London's Westminster Abbey, in front of a congregation of around 1,900 and a worldwide television audience estimated at as many as 2 billion.

Full Story »

Donald Trump is used to being on the firing end of accusations.

But Trump, who's spent the last few months using flimsy questions about President Obama's birth and college credentials to gin up attention for a possible presidential run, now finds himself on the receiving end of a fresh round of public scrutiny. Critics are taking aim at the real-estate mogul's financial disclosures—as well as at how his line of Trump-branded merchandise jibes with his stated positions on U.S. trade policy.

Below we review the issues that Trump is now facing:

Full Story »

Spotted at the State Department today by a tipster: Sean Penn.

What was the actor/director/philanthropist doing at Foggy Bottom? It's not totally clear.

"Apparently he has meetings all over D.C. today--the White House, State, Pentagon," one State Department official said.

Penn is in town to attend Saturday's White House Correspondents Association dinner--the event known to the Washington press corps as "Nerd Prom"--as a guest of Mother Jones magazine.

One guess as to Penn's business with government officials: his recent humanitarian work in Haiti. He was recently awarded the Producers Guild of America 2011 Stanley Kramer Award for his efforts in the Caribbean nation, and co-founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization, which is trying to help Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, recover from its Jan. 2010 earthquake.

Full Story »

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan has given her first interview since the sexual assault she suffered on Feb. 11 while covering the revolution in Egypt.

"For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands," Logan told The New York Times' Brian Stelter as she described the trauma of the 40-minute attack. Logan estimates that she was assaulted by as many as 300 men, who were among the crowd  in Tahrir Square exulting over the ouster of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. As Stetler writes, she provided an account of how her assailants "tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body."

Logan was in Cairo covering the celebrations for "60 Minutes." During the chaos sparked by the announcement of Mubarak's resignation, the veteran foreign reporter—who, like many journalists there, had already been detained and roughed up by Egyptian police earlier in the uprising—was separated from her producer and crew. "There was a moment that everything went wrong," she said—describing the point at which a mob began to gather around her. Logan and CBS decided several days later to go public about the incident, a grim account that stood out in stark contrast to Egypt's otherwise jubilant celebration of the Arab Spring.

"The physical wounds heal," Logan said. "You don't carry around the evidence the way you would if you had lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan . . . . What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence." You can read more about her harrowing account over at The New York Times.

"60 Minutes" will air an interview with Logan on Sunday night.

(Photo of Logan moments before the attack, courtesy of CBS News)