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Two UK-based specialists on terrorism in Pakistan use empirical evidence to document and analyze the Pakistani Taliban's (Tehrik-e-Taliban) practice of targeting spaces of public interaction for terrorism intended to suppress expressions of public unity and restrict venues for open discussion. In tracing the rise of the Taliban in Pakistan, the authors review the country's history of state and civil society formations, its relations with Afghanistan, and U.S. and Western policy in the region. The authors present timely information and insights that enhance understanding of the recent surge in terrorist attacks on civilians in Pakistan and its ties to the eastward spread of conflict from neighboring Afghanistan. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F520, F540, O 180, Z000.3 figures, 1 table, 83 references. Key words: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tehrik-e-Taliban, terrorism, suicide bombers, public spaces, al-Qaeda, Khyber-Pakhtunkwa province, Swat valley, Wahhabis. DOI: 10.2747/1539-7216.51.4.496

U.S. chemical plants currently have potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities as terrorist targets. The possible consequences of these vulnerabilities echo from the tragedies of the Bhopal incident in 1984 to the terrorist [...]

It is argued here that the politics of suicide bombings can be seen to operate through the aesthetic responses they produce, insofar as these responses are provoked and in that they necessarily mobilise further responses. The article considers the scene of devastation created by a Chechen suicide bomber in Moscow in 2003. Drawing upon a reading of the political theory of Hannah Arendt that ties her to the tradition of thinking the sublime, it suggests that the 'aesthetic' impact of the scene dislocates the witness as well as simultaneously locating her/him in this world, a world in which such things happen. This location is a prompting to consider the world-in-common, the movements of the world, in a parallel sense to that in which the notion of the sublime has been employed to describe how the particular can have the ability to usher forth a feeling that there may be a super-sensible purposiveness to nature. At this prompting, the subject is humiliated and limited, since s/he becomes aware of the impossibility of adequately answering such questions, while 'ethically' her/his task is to nevertheless attempt some articulation of the connections so prompted. The article considers various ways in which that articulation might take place in relation to the Moscow bombing, and argues that these contested articulations constitute the 'political' level prompted in response to a scene of horror whose impact operates on the level of sensibility. Keywords: suicide bombers; Chechnya; the sublime; Hannah Arendt; terror; politics.

Terrorist activities have evolved to encompass areas outside their traditional spheres, like hijacking, hostage taking and murders, to the point where the line between an act of terrorism and a conventional crime has blurred. The distinction between piracy, which is driven by financial gain, and maritime terrorism, which is politically motivated, are described.

A former reporter recalls what it was like to work in Argentina, a country where political killings were regular. The military dictatorship turned Argentina into terrorists methods even more indiscriminately than the so-called 'subversive elements'.

Byline: Tae-Ho Woo, Un-Chul Lee, Yun-Il Kim For the minimisation of the damage in possible terror attacks on the nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities, a dynamic assessment is performed in the aspects of nuclear safeguard. The incidents against nuclear facilities are modelled by the time-step scenario. Several cases are explained for the illicit trafficking of radioactive material. The dynamic simulation is examined by the system dynamics method. In the modelling, there are three major models that include the nuclear insider terror, the reaction control and the nuclear forensic steps. The risk increases slowly and decreases rapidly in the result. This is the similar pattern of the September 2001 terror where many lives were lost.

Terrorism has been called 'war in the 21st century' (Barnett). Metrics are needed to quantify changes in threat state as well as system design trade-offs that weight the time required for accurate identification against the threat detection sensitivity. We present an adaptable agent-detection-platform capable of sensing multiple threat agents (chemical, biological and nuclear) simultaneously in diverse media and a performance model of this detection platform. A performance metric 'Time-To-Identify' (TTI); the time required to identify the presence of a given target analyte is presented. Experimental results that illustrate the new technologies required by this platform are presented. The model and metric predict the detection platform's sensitivity and speed for several CONcepts of OPeration (CONOP): (1) agent detection (chemical, viral or bacterial) in a 1 ml clinical sample, (2) botulinum toxin detection in milk and (3) pathogen detection in airplane cabin air.

Byline: Sanjeev. Thomas On 26 November 2008, the people of India experienced again the gory of terrorism. This time it was a series of brutal attacks on civilian locations in [...]

Conditions that are potentially hospitable to transnational criminal activity and terrorist activity in selected regions of the world from 1999 to 2002 are assessed. The treatment of the countries varies with the extent and seriousness of conditions being studied.

The report that the department of justice had dramatically overstated its records of convicting terrorists presented by the Philadelphia Inquirer resulted in quick investigation. It was found that justice data listed 463 cases of terrorism, but focusing only on federal convictions brought down this number.

Vulnerable U.S. populations may be more likely to fear terrorism and avoid certain activities as a result, according to a study in the January 2009 issue of AJPH. The study, [...]

What's wrong with this picture? The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a frequent campus speaker, tells students at Harvard Law School that the United States should 'build bridges and relationships, not simply [...]