bin Laden, Osama

(born 1957, Riyadh, Saud.Ar.) Leader of a broad-based Islamic extremist movement implicated in numerous acts of terrorism against the U.S. and other Western countries. The son of a wealthy Saudi family, he joined the Muslim resistance in Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion of that country. Following his homecoming, he became enraged at the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) and, through a network of like-minded Islamic militants known as al-Qaeda, launched a series of terrorist attacks. These acts included the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the U.S. warship Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000. A self-styled Islamic scholar, bin Laden issued several legal opinions calling on Muslims to take up jihad (holy war) against the U.S., and in 2001 a group of militants under his direction launched the September 11 attacks, which led to the deaths of some 3,000 people. The U.S. thereafter demanded bin Laden's extradition from Afghanistan, where he was sheltered by that country's Taliban militia, and launched attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda forces when that ultimatum was not met. With the collapse of the Taliban, bin Laden and his associates went into hiding.

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(born Dec. 20, 1925, Alor Setar, Kedah, Malay states) Malaysian politician, prime minister (1981–2003). The son of a schoolmaster, Mahathir studied medicine and worked as a government medical officer before entering parliament in 1964, where he became a forceful advocate of policies to ensure economic success for ethnic Malays. Once prime minister, he was reelected repeatedly; under his leadership Malaysia achieved one of the most prosperous economies in Southeast Asia, rising literacy rates, and increased life expectancies. An economic downturn in the late 1990s precipitated a split between Mahathir and his deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, whom Mahathir dismissed in 1998; opposition to this action and other policies was suppressed. Following the September 11 attacks of 2001 in the U.S., he offered his support in the global war against terrorism, but he opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and was noted for his frequent criticisms of the West.

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• Technical or specialised terms:
• /bin, a common Unix directory
• .bin, a CD disk image file format
• In mathematics, the histogram of a discrete variable that can acquire m different values is called an "m-bin histogram"
• In Computational Geometry, a Bin is a space partitioning data structure to enable fast region queries and nearest neighbor search.
• In video editing, a bin is a location, real or virtual, for storing media to be used in a production
• Sin Bin or Sin-bin, an informal name for a penalty box
• Names:
• Hu Bin (born 1973), a Chinese swimmer
• Won Bin, a Korean actor
• The stage name of Jeon Hye Bin, a K-pop singer
• en:bin#Arabic (en:بن) an alternative spelling of en:ibn#Arabic (en:بن) meaning "son of" in Arabic names

BIN may refer to:

• Bank Identification Number
• BIN, a file extension for binary files
• BIN, a file extension for disk image format files
• Biology, information technology, and nanotechnology
• Bini language (ISO 639 alpha-3: bin), a Benue-Congo language spoken in Edo State, Nigeria
• Belgisch Instituut voor Normalisering/Institut Belge de Normalisation/Belgian Institute for Normalisation
• British India (FIFA country code: BIN), the portions of present-day India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Myanmar that were under British colonial rule
• "Buy It Now," a purchasing method on eBay
• BIN (supermarkets), a Russian supermarket
• Bank International Ningbo
• Badan Intelijen Negara, Indonesia's State Intelligence Agency

See also

• Binary (disambiguation)