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Metro Nashville Police said that they found possible human remains at the explosion site and that the motive behind the incident is still unclear. “We have tissue that we believe could be [human] remains and we’ll just have that examined,” Chief of Police John Drake told reporters during a press conference on Friday afternoon. He didn’t elaborate on where the possible human remains were found.

Triumph Forsaken The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar Cambridge, 542 pp., $32 In the late summer of 1963, President John Kennedy dispatched two observers to South Vietnam. Their mission was to provide the president an assessment of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. The first, Major General Victor Krulak, USMC, the special assistant for counterinsurgency for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited some ten locations in all four Corps areas of Vietnam. Based on extensive interviews with U.S. advisers to the South Vietnamese army, Krulak concluded that the war was going well....

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Militants in Iraq targeted Christians in three separate Christmas Day bombings in Baghdad, killing at least 37 people, officials said Wednesday. In one attack, a car bomb went off near a church in the capital's southern Dora neighborhood, killing at least 26 people and wounding 38, a police officer said. Earlier, two bombs ripped through a nearby outdoor market simultaneously in the Christian section of Athorien, killing 11 people and wounding 21, the officer said. The Iraq-based leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Louis Sako, said the parked car bomb exploded after Christmas Mass and that none...

Success of lone gunmen may shift al-Qaida strategy By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON – On Christmas Day, a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit tried to blow up the plane with plastic explosives in his underwear. He failed, yet the very attempt shook the U.S. government, set federal agencies against each other and triggered months of political second-guessing. In fact, short of mass casualties, the attack allegedly attempted by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had exactly the kind of reaction that al-Qaida is after. And, it appears, that lesson is resonating with the terror network's...

Belmont Club January 7th, 2010 5:54 pmThe needle in the haystack Today President Obama described the steps he was taking in order to improve the defense against terrorism. The video of his remarks is below. His thesis is simple. Intelligence analysis failed. The raw data existed to potentially support pattern recognition, but nobody recognized the pattern. President Obama announced general steps to improve the analysis. embedded by Embedded Video YouTube DirektThe second broad measure announced was an additional investment in newer and more stringent bomb detection technologies in aviation security. Taken together, both steps represent a lot of effort....