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Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history. Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe...

SNIPPET: "Today the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced the arrest of two Canadian-born citizens, John Stuart Nuttall and Amanda Marie Korody, in a terror plot targeting a public gathering at the British Columbia Legislature in Victoria on Canada Day, July 1. According to online court records, Nuttall and Korody appeared at the Surrey Provincial Court this morning. The two suspects face charges that include "conspiring to place an explosive in or against a place of public use, a government or public facility, with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, for the benefit of, at the direction...

Federal agents arrested a Saudi Arabian traveler who arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport with a pressure cooker, a key component used in the Boston Marathon bombings last month. Hussain Al Kwawahir will be arraigned at 1 p.m. in federal court for allegedly using an altered passport and lying to a Customs and Border Protection Agent about the pressure cooker.

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out. BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible. CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.” >Snip< “All of that...

Republican Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield posted a photo of a pressure cooker with the words “Assault Pressure Cooker” listed below it on his blog, titled “Here comes Feinstein Again, “in the wake of the Boston bombing to make a point about the double standard of gun grabbers in this country. The hue and cry and lynch mob began to berate him, but he’s not backing down. According to the photo Campfield used of a pressure cooker, he labeled the “dangerous” features of the inanimate object, including a “muzzle break thingy that goes ‘up’” and a “tactical pistol grip.” Additionally,...

To borrow a line from Dennis Green, they are who we thought they were. From his hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has acknowledged his role in planting the explosives near the marathon finish line on April 15, the officials said. The first successful large-scale bombing in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, the Boston attack killed three people and wounded more than 250 others.The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, do not appear to have been...

(CNSNews.com) – Although no group has claimed responsibility for Monday’s deadly bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, a leading al-Qaeda ideologue last year recommended that jihadists in America include sporting events in their list of prospective terror targets.

FBI Special Agent Richard Deslauriers told reporters Tuesday, April 16, that the probe had no leads 18 hours after two explosions blew up at the annual Boston Marathon’s finishing line, killing three people and injuring 176 – 17 critically. debkafile’s counterterrorism sources can disclose however that the investigation has in fact homed in on a suspected terror cell of three Saudi nationals, very possibly tied to Al Qaeda. The flat they share in the Revere, Massachusetts, near Boston, was searched after the questioning of one of the suspects, a Saudi student, who was hospitalized with badly burned hands. One of...

The bombs that ripped through the crowd at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than 170, were fashioned out of pressure cookers and packed with metal shards, nails and ball bearings to inflict maximum carnage, a person briefed on the investigation said Tuesday.

Ever notice that even terrorist seem get involved with "fads?" It seems that the latest is a new type of improvised explosive device that is all too common in the area of the Indian subcontinent. The pressure cooker bomb is becoming the terrorist's weapon of preference. Here's something from the New Dehli Newspaper, the Hindu: Terrorists trained in making pressure cooker bombs NEW DELHI: Terrorists in camps purportedly operating along the Baluchistan border between Pakistan and Afghanistan are being trained in making and exploding pressure cooker bombs, which were used in the Delhi blasts last year and at least in...

Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, after raising suspicions at a Killeen, Texas, gun shop where he purchased six pounds of gunpowder and several boxes of shotgun shells, was in police custody in Killeen on Thursday, accused of plotting to kill fellow soldiers in a frightening reprise of the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood. Abdo, 21, who grew up in Garland outside of Dallas, was close to pulling off a "terror plot" in which the intended target was troops based at Fort Hood, said Killeen Police Chief Dennis Baldwin. "We would probably be here today giving you a different briefing had...

I'm a single guy that does almost all my own cooking. Mostly beans, soups, and chicken. These pressure cookers, (at sea level) speed up the cooking times dramatically!. Also, for reheating leftovers, its great!Last night, I found a store bought rotisserie chicken that was half eaten and 6 days old in the frig, most would throw it out. Not me! Pop it in the pressure cooker, add a little water, can of Mushroom soup, bring up to pressure (15psi) for 5 mins, damn it was good!

A German court has convicted four Algerian men of plotting to bomb a busy Christmas market in the French city of Strasbourg, and sentenced them to prison terms of 10-12 years. The plot was foiled by German police just before it was to have taken place in late December 2000. In handing down the Frankfurt court's sentence, presiding Judge Karlheinz Zeiher said the four men had intended to kill defenseless people with the aim of spreading terror in France and throughout Europe. He said they wanted to punish France because of its support for the Algerian government. Judge Zeiher said...

France's top chefs railed against the pressures of their job and the power of the critics after one of this food-obsessed country's culinary giants committed suicide, apparently because of a bad review. Bernard Loiseau, 52, whose restaurant and inn La Cote d'Or in Burgundy is one of the undisputed temples of Gallic haute cuisine, was found dead in his bedroom on Monday, his hunting rifle by his side. "He tried to do too much," said his wife, Dominique. "He was worn out; he'd just had enough." Others were harsher. Mr Loiseau, they pointed out, had managed to retain his priceless...