Free Republic

Female DNA has been found on at least one of the bombs used in the Boston Marathon attacks, according to a new report. But it isn’t clear if that means a woman helped suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev carry out the attacks. U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal there could be several explanations for the DNA, including that it could have come from a store clerk who handled the materials the two brothers allegedly used in the bombings. A stray hair that landed on one of the explosives could also explain the DNA finding.

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said Sunday he thinks the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were trained in carrying out the attack. Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul told “Fox News Sunday” he thinks suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had help, considering the device’s level of sophistication and the type of device -- a shrapnel-packed, pressure-cooker bomb. “That leads me to believe there was a trainer,” the Texas Republican said. Homemade bombs built from pressure cookers have been a frequent weapon of militants in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen once published an online manual on how...

Since 2010, al-Qaeda has apparently been publishing an English-speaking magazine called Inspire meant to attract Muslims into extremism and teach them how to wreak massive amounts of violence onto innocent people. “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom” reads one of the headlines. At first, Americans laughed at Inspire and didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. But then we realized just how powerful this propaganda could be considering the relationship the average Muslim has with the American people these days. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman described the purpose of Inspire as “getting frustrated Muslim youth to buy into al-Qaeda’s...

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...