Earlier this morning Israeli planes destroyed the Yarmouk arms factory in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital – 1,300 miles from Israel; in 1998 the plant was suspected of holding Iraqi chemical weapons which Saddam Hussein wanted to conceal from the UN inspectors; Sudan has become a major corridor of arms for Hamas, and Israel has conducted several military operations inside Sudan aiming to disrupt shipments of arms to Hamas; in April 2011 Israeli special forces, ferried by helicopters into Sudan, ambushed and killed two high-level Hamas officials who were on their way to Libya to finalize a deal, financed by Iran, to buy about 800 chemical munitions from anti-Qaddafi rebels who had taken over a couple of chemical weapons depots from the pro-Qaddafi forces

Israel’s air defenses worked just fine in handling the drone launched by Hezbollah last week: the drone was picked up by Israeli surveillance as it was launched from southern Lebanon, then tracked as it flew south over the Mediterranean; it was allowed to enter Israeli air space so that after it was shot down, its remains could be collected and analyzed; still, the incident made many Israelis sit up and take notice; Israel, a country which has pioneered the use of UAVs as an integral part of military operations and which has held a monopoly on operating drones in the region, was forced to realize that is adversaries, too, now had access to the technology

A 21-year-old Bangladeshi national, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, was arrested by FBI agents after he attempted to detonate what he believed was a 1,000-pound bomb in front of the Federal Reserve Bank building on Liberty Street, Manhattan; the device, however, was a fake provided to him by undercover FBI agents who had been tracking his activity, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force said Wednesday afternoon

Bomb-sniffing dogs are the best and most popular way for airport security quickly to detect anyone planning to bring explosives to an airport; scientists are trying to change that; Dr. Denis Spitzer and his colleagues, for example, are working on a sensor that will detect vapors of TNT and other explosives in very faint amounts; the device they are trying to create would replace dogs as the top bomb detecting method in the field

In the wake of police raids in several cities in France, French prosecutors said that an Islamist terror cell was planning the biggest bomb attack on France since the mid-1990s; French police arrested twelve people in raids over the weekend; in one of the raids, a gun-wielding suspect was shot and killed; a French prosecutor said the explosive ingredients found garage in the Paris suburb of Torcy on Tuesday night could have made “exactly the same kind of device as was used in 1995 by the GIA” (the Algerian Islamist group exploded a bomb in the Paris Metro which killed eight people and injured 100); Francois Hollande has said that there will be “total mobilization of the state to fight all terrorist threats”

Tensions between Turkey and Syria continue to escalate, and yesterday Turkish planes forced a Syrian Airbus A320 passenger plane en route from Moscow to Damascus to land in Ankara after Turkish intelligence found that the plane was carrying armament and military equipment Russia was sending the besieged Assad regime; Turkey appears set to create a security zone inside Syria, which will be covered by a no-fly umbrella enforced by the Turkish air force; the no-fly measure would then be extended to the entire Syrian air space, preventing the Assad regime from using its air force to target the opposition, and preventing Iran from air-lifting military supplies to aid the regime

A $5.8 million federally funded program allowing New Jersey Transit commuters to “text against terror” has received 307 tips to the agency since the program started in June 2011; of those 307 messages, seventy-one have “referred to something regarding homeland security,” said Christopher Trucillo, chief of N.J. Transit Police

Ahead of hearings today before a congressional panel investigating potential security lapses at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the U.S. Department of State has said that it had no actionable intelligence about plans by a terrorist organizations for the deadly attack on the consulate; State Department officials also said the department had never concluded that the sacking of the mission was motivated by the U.S.-made video ridiculing Muslims

Amidst the Jewish High Holidays, the Secure Community Network (SCN), the national homeland security initiative of the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents, distributed what SCN described as “a first ever” homeland security briefing primer for American law enforcement and homeland security agencies and national security partners across the United States