On Monday, following days of anti-government demonstrations, which culminated Sunday with millions of Egyptians filling the streets of Egypt’s major cities, the Egyptian military issued an ultimatum to President Mohammed Morsi: the military gave the president forty-eight hours to respond to the demands of the protesters – chief among them that he resigned from the position of president. If Morsi failed to meet the demands of the protesters, the military said it would offer its own “roadmap for the future” of Egypt. Ten government ministers announced their resignation from the cabinet in sympathy with the protesters. The interior Ministry announced its “complete solidarity” with the military. Morsi’s aides indicated he would not give in to the threat of a military coup.

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, will today announce the government’s spending plans for FY 2015-16. The U.K. agencies responsible for fighting terrorism — MI6, MI5, and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — will see a significant increase in their combined £1.9 billion budget, an indication of the David Cameron government’s concern about the growing terrorism threat the United Kingdom.

Clark County, Nevada, Sheriff Doug Gillespie says DHS needs to make a bigger effort to help local law enforcement work on preventing terrorist attacks, instead of responding to them after the fact. Gillespie used the Boston Marathon bombings as an example of the importance of prevention efforts, noting that the response to the attacks was handled well, but that people were already killed and injured.

Two men from upstate New York were charged Wednesday with a scheme to build an X-ray weapon to kill Muslim enemies of the United States and Israel. They planned the weapon to kill the designated targets with lethal radiation, and some of the targets were to be killed in their sleep. The indictment says the two wanted to build a powerful X-ray device that could be placed in a truck and driven near a target. The driver would park, leave the area, and activate the device, “killing human targets silently and from a distance with lethal doses of radiation.”

The National Security Agency (NSA) and Justice Department on Tuesday offered a trenchant defense of the NSA’s surveillance programs. Gen. Keith Alexander, NSA director and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, told lawmakers that the programs have helped prevent “potential terrorist events” more than fifty times since 9/11. Officials also offered a point-by-point rebuttal of the criticism of the program by civil libertarians, emphasizing that authorities, when they gather phone records, cannot immediately find out the identity or location of the callers.

The Obama administration has informed Congress a few minutes ago that the U.S. intelligence community has determined that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on several occasions against both rebel forces and Syrian civilians. The U.S. intelligence community says these attacks, each using small quantities of sarin gas, have killed about 150 Syrians. The president’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told reporters that the president had decided to provide “direct military support” to the opposition. Rhodes said the U.S. military assistance to the rebels would be different in “both scope and scale” from what had been authorized before, which included non-lethal equipment such as night-vision goggles and body armor.

A Xerox copy of a 26-page manual with instructions on how to use man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS – also called SA-7 — was found in a building in Timbuktu in North Mali which was used by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operatives during the 8-month control – April 2012 to February 2013 — of the area by Islamist militants. The Libyan military under Col. Qaddafi had about 15,000 SA-7s, but after the Qaddafi regime fell in November 2011, NATO forces and Libyan militias loyal to the government gained possession of only 5,000 of them. The rest have disappeared into the arsenals of different militias, and have probably found their way to different terrorist organizations in North Africa and the Middle East.

Life-threatening bacterial infections cause tens of thousands of deaths every year in North America, but current methods of culturing bacteria in the lab can take days to report the specific source of the infection, and even longer to pinpoint the right antibiotic that will clear the infection. Researchers have created an electronic chip that can analyze blood and other clinical samples for infectious bacteria with record-breaking speed.

For Iran and Hezbollah, the preservation of Bashar Assad regime is of supreme strategic importance, but both realize the regime may not survive. Iran and Hezbollah, therefore, employ two parallel strategic tracks. The first, immediate track aims to prop up the Assad regime’s ability to survive and continue governing by providing it with military, economic, political, and propaganda support. The second track, planned as an intermediate- and long-term strategy, aims to make it possible for Syria’s Shi’ites and Alawites to defend themselves by creating a “popular army.” To help the first track, Hezbollah has sent thousands of its best fighters to fight on the side of the Assad regime and help the regime keep its hold over areas in northwest Syria. To advance the second track, Hezbollah, with Iranian funding, is helping the Assad regime build and train a popular army of about 150,000 Alawite and Shi’a soldiers. This army will protect the interests of the Alawite and Shi’a communities – and the interests of Iran and Hezbollah — in Syria if the Assad regime falls.