Spurred on by the arrest of a Dutch teenager identified as “Sarah” in Rotterdam on Monday, who tweeted “hello my name’s Ibrahim and I’m from Afghanistan. I’m part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I’m gonna do something really big bye," dozens of teens are now tweeting bomb-threat jokes to American Airlines.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin Wednesday warning airlines of possible attempts to attack passenger jets using explosives packed in shoes, Fox News reports. The threat is described as being unrelated to the Sochi Olympics.
Terrorism has emerged in the last decade as one of the most critical issues with which governments must contend, topping most Western nations’ agendas in terms of resource allocation. For example, some reports indicate the United States has spent more than one trillion dollars waging the “War on Terror” – money and resources that may have been allocated very differently in the absence of such threats.
Male terrorists tend to get most of the press, but terrorist cells are recruiting more women, often due to security forces considering them less suspicious.
The May 2013 edition of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist Listincluded its first woman – Joanne Chesimard, wanted for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey State Trooper.
The Obama administration acknowledged that it is collecting a massive amount of telephone records from at least one telephone carrier, saying it's necessary to protect Americans against attack.
In 2004, the United State’s Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration established the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) to, as quickly as possible, identify, secure, remove and/or facilitate the disposition of high-risk vulnerable nuclear and radiological materials around the world that pose a threat to the United States and the international community.