Ever since the attempted bombing there have been a lot of mainstream articles on Yemen. Here's one about how AQAP is trying to recruit Westerners for home-grown attacks. The article lists Americans who have joined or helped al-Qaeda. Since one of them used language study as an excuse to enter Yemen, a side effect has been that many language schools there are almost out of business now.
The UAE is trying to track the serial numbers of some of the bomb components from the attempted bombing.
The latest hypothesis is that the bombs were never meant to reach Chicago, but were supposed to blow up the airplanes in mid-air. One of the bombs was set to go off, but the other needed a cell phone to set it off. According to the Germans, it would have really damaged the planes. The Germans are now involved because one of the packages went through a UPS hub in Cologne/Koln.
The Yemeni college student finally has her name cleared; the man who processed the package at the shipping agency said it wasn't her. For those of you unfamiliar with segregation of the sexes in many Middle Eastern countries, you may be amused to know that when the police stormed her house, it was police women who did it.
It really sounds like no one knows what is going on. First the packages were letter bombs, now they were targeting the planes. First an al-Qa'eda man who turned himself in to Saudi authorities told them about the bombs, then it was an anonymous tip just before the attempted bombings. I'm not sure if there is a dearth of information, if everyone is incompetent, or if governments are obfuscating the issue so that AQAP can't figure out what is known.
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