Eleven months after the attack, U.S. federal officials have filed the first charges in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on 11 September 2012. Among those charged is Ahmed Abu Khattala, a prominent Libyan militia leader. Others named as defendants were not disclosed. The charges initially were sought in New York months ago, and are still under seal. Attorney General Eric Holder had promised congressional leaders earlier this year that the Justice Department would soon publicize the action the Justice Department would be taking.

Interpol, in a statement issued from the organization’s headquarters in Lyon, France, urged law enforcement agencies around the world to show “increased vigilance,” following prison breakouts over the past nine month in nine countries, including Iraq (22 July), Libya (27 July), and Pakistan (31 July). More than 2,500 terrorists have escaped in these nine prison breakouts.

The U.S. State Department issued a travel alert Friday warning al Qaeda may launch attacks in the Middle East, North Africa, and several other places. The department also closed twenty-one embassies and consulates this weekend. “Current information suggests that Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August,” the State Department said in a statement.

Al Qaeda engineers have been working on designing a sophisticated bomb powerful enough to bring down passenger planes but which is designed to avoid detection by explosives detection machines or trained dogs at airports. “All of our explosive detection equipment wasn’t calibrated to detect [this type of bomb]” TSA director John Pistole said. “And all of our 800 bomb-sniffing dogs had not been trained for that specific type.” A CIA informant inside a Yemeni cell of al Qaeda volunteered to place the bomb on a U.S.-bound plane, but instead delivered it to his CIA handlers in Saudi Arabia. A CIA effort to learn more about the bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, and take him out was aborted when someone leaked the story to AP. The news service refused pleas by the administration to postpone publication of the story until the end of the operation. The AP did agree to delay publication by a week to ten days to allow the CIA to extricate the agent and his family from Saudi Arabia to safety before publication. Asiri and his bomb-making assistants are still at large.

Shelton Thomas Bell, 19, of Jacksonville, Florida has been indicted on federal charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The indictment claims Bell planned to travel to Arabian Peninsula and join Ansar Al-Sharia (AAS), an alias for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to take part in “jihad.”

A western Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for leading an Internet forum which promoted terrorist attacks against American military and civilian targets. Emerson Begolly, 24, of Redbank Township was also convicted of having a concealed gun and biting an FBI agent when he was arrested in 2011.

The Department of Defense initially described Army Major Nidal Hassan’s Fort Hood shooting spree as “terrorism,” but quickly changed that definition to “workplace violence.” Testifying before a congressional panel, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani criticized DoD’s decision, and political correctness more generally, saying that “You can’t fight an enemy you don’t acknowledge.”

The U.S. top soldier said the United States is facing a “10-year issue” in Syria: “if we fail to think about [the Syrian issue] as a 10-year regional issue, we could make some mistakes,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said.

At least twenty-nine high school students and a teacher are dead after militants from the Islamic Boko Haram group attacked a boarding school in northeast Nigeria. The Islamists set the school dorm on fire while students, aged 10 to 15, were sleeping inside. Most of the dead were burned alive inside the dorm. The militant waited outside the dorm, and shot those who tried to escape the burning building.