The terrorism threat against the United States has evolved, with homegrown terrorists and a greater diversity in the scope and methods of attack making it more difficult to prevent them, top security officials told a Senate committee Wednesday; the number of terrorist attacks against the United States increased in the past fifteen months; Napolitano said the nature of terrorist attacks continues to evolve, with recent attacks coming faster and with “less extensive pre-operational planning than previous attempts and with fewer linkages to international terrorist organizations”

Irish politicians on both sides of the border say resurgent Republican terrorism is a growing problem; tensions grown as community leaders charge that the Northern Irish police have turned a blind eye to the killing of a Belfast man by the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF); intelligence sources say the UVF leadership authorized the killing because the man “had flouted their authority”

The security measures India has put in place for the Commonwealth Games surpass those instituted for Delhi’s Independence Day and Republic Day; in all, the Games will be secured by more than 80,000 Delhi police personnel, 17,500 paramilitary personnel, 3,000 commandos, 100 anti-sabotage teams, more than 200 dogs, and 15 bomb squads

U.K. police released the six men arrested Friday on suspicion that they plotted to kill the Pope during his U.K. visit; the police, after a thorough search of the homes of the suspects — all men of North African origin — and interviews with neighbors, the police said the men posed no credible threat; one newspaper reports that the men were arrested after been overheard sharing a joke in their canteen; the six all work for Veolia Environmental Services, a contractor which employs 650 on-street staff to keep the streets of Westminster clean

The head of MI5 says that Britain is facing a wave of terrorist attacks on two fronts from a new generation of al Qaeda extremists and Irish Republican militants who could strike on the mainland; a “significant number” of British residents are training in camps run by the al Qaeda-linked group al Shabaab. As many as 100 Britons of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and West African backgrounds had traveled to Somalia; in Northern Ireland, there were now thought to be about 600 hard-line Republicans involved in terrorist activity, around half the number during the peak of IRA activity in the 1980s

American Muslims say that nine years of denouncing terrorism, of praying side-by-side with Jews and Christians, of insisting “I’m American, too,” and many other gestures have not eased the attitude of suspicion with which Muslims in the United States are regarded; Muslim leaders say that fatigue is setting in add that they wonder how many more times will they have to condemn violent extremism before non-Muslim Americans believe them?

One lesson both Hezbollah and Hamas have drawn from their recent military encounters with Israel — Hezbollah in July-August 2006, Hamas in December 2008-January 2009 — is that both would benefit from increasing even more the use of the Shi’a population in southern Lebanon (Hezbollah) and the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip (Hamas) as human shields against the Israeli military; hiding weapons and explosives in residential buildings, however, increases the number of deadly accident, as the one which occurred in Lebanese village of Shehabiyeh last Friday

The Taliban continues its violent campaign to push Muslim women back into Medieval times; in Afghanistan, the Taliban is pursuing a campaign against girls’ education; the organization’s latest tactics: poisonous gas attacks on girls’ schools, aiming to scare students and teachers; Taliban operatives launched eight poisonous gas attacks on girls schools since April, and earlier today it launched the ninth attack, this time against a girls high school

In February 2007, Iran Air launched flight 744 — a bimonthly flight that originates in Tehran and flies directly to Caracas with periodic stops in Beirut and Damascus; passengers cannot book a seat on the flight because it has never been opened to the public; U.S. intelligence services have been worried for a while now that the flight is used for two purposes: first, for smuggling nuclear weapons-related materials into Iran, and, second — in cooperation with Venezuela — for setting up a network of Iranian operatives to retaliate against U.S. targets and Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere in the event of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities