A “mysterious shiny object” that turned up at a West Delhi scrap dealership — leaving five people injured from radiation exposure, one severely — contained cobalt-60, often used in radiation therapy, The Press Trust of India updates. “Could what happened in India four days ago happen here? The answer: It is amazing that it has not happened yet,” Homeland Security Newswire follows up. “Add in scary data about Pakistan’s nuclear security, and the specter of a terrorist dirty bomb exploding in New York, D.C., or elsewhere is no longer a remote possibility,” Thomas Lifson alleges in The American Thinker.
Know nukes: On the eve of the Nuclear Security Summit concluded yesterday, Pakistan’s P.M. assured President Obama “appropriate safeguards” are in place to safeguard atomic materials, Reuters’ Matt Spetalnick, relatedly, reports. “Overall, how much loose nuke material is out there? A lot. The nations of the world together have about 1.6 million kilograms of highly enriched uranium and about 500,000 kilograms of plutonium,” The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grier assesses. Some 130 lightly guarded civilian research reactors, moreover, hold sufficient HEU for hundreds of warheads, The New York Times’ William J. Broad spotlights — while The Associated Press’ Sharon Theimer highlights the United States’ own stockpile security shortcomings. A White House counterterrorist says al Qaeda has been “scammed” in its bid to obtain the material for building a nuclear device, Danger Room’s Nathan Hodge also notes.
Feds: World leaders arriving for the nuke summit “must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow,” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank muses of the highly militarized security on display the past two days. Senators have called for creation of a permanent cyberczar in response to two GAO assessments finding federal agencies out of compliance with info security initiatives, Nextgov’s Aliya Sternstein relates. “There’s a huge security issue here that just seems to be going right over everybody’s head,” a Knoxville wholesaler tells Nashville’s NewsChannel 5’s Phil Williams about the outsourcing of TSA uniform orders to Mexico — and recall the Kissell Amendment.
Follow the money: West Africa offers South American drug traffickers “what the impenetrable terrain of the Hindu Kush offers to al Qaeda and the Taliban — a place beyond the reach of law,” The N.Y. Times Magazine spotlights — as a Fletcher Forum of World Affairs piece urges Washington to “leverage its strategy of . . . diplomatic engagement to gain broader support against the growing terrorism-crime nexus.” Since Afghanistan banned logging and lumber sales, the industry is largely supervised by the Taliban, which skims the profits and uses timber smuggling networks to transport weapons and men, The Wall Street Journal relates. Washington stands ready to cooperate with a new E.U. system for tracking terrorism financing, a Treasury big tells the Times, but without saying whether it would go so far as to share U.S. bank account data. Swiss authorities sifted through record numbers of suspicious financial deals last year for possible money-laundering, most being forwarded to prosecutors, Reuters reports.
State and local: New Orleans is using a controversial recovery management contract to dole out no-bid deals to other firms using FEMA dollars, the Times-Picayune learns from a city I.G.’s draft report. Champaign, Ill., is in the midst of its spring 2010 round of Community Emergency Response Team training, comprising five classes instructing locals in assessing and tackling disastrous situations, The Daily Illini informs. Gun and ammo sales are up following the murder two weeks ago of a southern Arizona cattle rancher, The Arizona Daily Sun says. New Mexico Homeland Security chief John Wheeler, meanwhile, has been named to DHS’s Preparedness Task Force, Albuquerque’s KOAT 7 News notes. A free discussion on bioterrorism is scheduled tomorrow evening at the Louisville Science Center, the Courier-Journal alerts.
Bugs ‘n bombs: A white powder was found near an X-ray machine at the U.S. Attorneys office in Phoenix on Monday morning, but no evacuation was ordered, The Arizona Republic reports. “Since 9/11, far more Americans have been killed, injured or hurt because of our lack of a coordinated food safety system than by terrorist acts,” a Huffington Post contributor leads. Using current technology, it could take DHS as long as 36 hours to detect a biological attack on U.S. soil, but the department’s goal is to cut that time to four hours, Defense News spotlights. In each of dozens of instances in which BioWatch filters have captured dangerous germs since 2003, the reading has been traced to the background environment, not evil-doers, The Columbus Dispatch recounts.
Close air support: Three Continental Airlines flights out of Newark were delayed after a disgruntled passenger falsely complained that an airport employee had triggered a security checkpoint alarm, the Star-Ledger relates. “The new London [Ontario] International Airport security measures currently in place for travel to the United States are very disconcerting,” a London Free Press reader rumbles. Security at a major regional airport in New South Wales is under scrutiny after a secure entrance was found to have a secret PIN code posted clearly on a gate, The Australian says — while NDTV has a Jet Airways flight in India delayed for five-plus hours after a passenger threatened to blow up the plane.
Coming and going: Passengers subdued a man who threatened to blow up an eastbound Greyhound bus on Interstate 10, The Arizona Republic relates. YouTube has removed a video of a Chechen rebel claiming responsibility for last month’s Moscow metro bombings after it was flagged by the site’s users, the U.K.’s Metro Reporter relates. Federal authorities are certain nearly 300 Somalis allegedly smuggled into the United States by a Virginia man who admitted contacts with an Islamic terrorist group are still in the country, but they can’t find them, The Washington Examiner explains.
Terror tech: “While it’s clear from the cyberwar news that we are living in a war zone when we turn on our computers, we at Wired.com refuse to surrender — even at the risk of taking an e-bullet in the name of Freedom,” Threat Level proclaims, challenging news readers to play CyberWar Bingo. Ultra-pure samples of a radioactive gas could soon make it harder for nations to carry out nuclear tests in secret, New Scientist notes — while Budget Travel describes “a few technologies that could help spot potential terrorists before it’s too late, similar to the systems for detecting ‘pre-crimes’ used in the Tom Cruise movie ‘Minority Report.’” The Indian military’s Computer Emergency Response Team has issued a cyber-alert to government and corporate officials warning of possible large-scale cyber-attacks, Defense Tech tells.
Terror cells: The Mexican government is allowing cell phone firms a bit more time to process unregistered users before disconnecting 27.5 million such phones as a counter-cartel measure, Bloomberg relates — while Tucson’s KOLD 13 News sees that rancher murder prompting an Arizona lawmaker to urge cell companies to boost their border coverage. DHS’s Science and Technology division wants to help create 40 prototypes by year’s end of cell phones “that can detect toxic chemicals in the air just as easily as they can receive a call or send a text message,” PC Magazine mentions — while Sci Pry notes work proceeding apace on Optical Dynamic Detection devices capable of sensing potentially dangerous chemicals and explosives in suitcases and such left in public venues. Britain’s anti-terrorist hotline, meantime, has received a total of 62,871 tips between April 2002 and March 2009, an average of approximately 40 a day, The Guardian spotlights.
Courts and rights: Wisconsin’s Justice Department won’t release its copy of a threat assessment wrongly compiled by DHS regarding groups participating in a 2009 abortion protest, Wisconsin Public Radio briefs. The attorney for the Muslim convert charged with killing one soldier and wounding another outside a Little Rock military recruiting center says his goal is to avoid the death penalty, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports. A Canadian passenger from the underpants-bomber-threatened flight tells the Detroit Free Press she wants a trial for the Nigerian man accused in the case — as Detroit’s WDIV News hears fed prosecutors at a brief hearing yesterday saying they’ve shared reams of evidence with the defendant’s lawyers. The trial of the last three people accused in the Toronto 18 terror plot is under way in an Ontario courtroom, The Canadian Press reports.
Over there: Iran, meanwhile, is refusing to allow Canada to deport a member of an Iranian terrorist group who was arrested at Toronto’s airport while carrying a recruitment letter from the “Martyrdom Lovers’ Headquarters” in Tehran, The Canwest News Service notes. The Afghan war “is likely to end in negotiations that will involve wrenching choices for the country as well as for U.S. and European allies,” a Los Angeles Times columnists forecasts — and see Brit Foreign Minister David Miliband in The New York Review on “How to end the war in Afghanistan.” Army chiefs from seven African nations gathered Tuesday in Algiers to coordinate efforts against a regional al Qaeda offshoot, AP reports.
This just in, from The Onion: “WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder turned in his letter of resignation to President Obama on Tuesday after discovering that people willfully participate in the killing of other human beings on a routine basis. ‘I am stunned,’ a pale and shaking Holder said. ‘That’s just horrible. People really do that? My God, why?’ Sources close to Holder said that he is seeking a position in which he will be less likely to encounter man’s inhumanity toward man, perhaps in child protective services.” See, also, on Onion Network News: “Man Attempts To Assassinate Obama, ‘But Not Because He’s Black Or Anything’: Suspect Alex Croft, who has a ton of black friends, planned to kill Obama because of his socialist agenda — not because of his skin color . . . ”
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