THE US: The US administration has stepped up warnings of potential terrorist attacks on the US. The move comes as it prepares to ask Congress for the biggest defence budget increase since Mr Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
In his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President George Bush warned: "Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning."
And other US officials, from the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, to FBI chief Mr Robert Mueller, have joined in the chorus of caution.
The warnings come as Congress is to announce its decision on Mr Bush's request for a $48 billion increase in the defence budget for 2003.
If approved, the increase would boost the defence budget by 15 percent from its 2002 level of $318 billion.
The Pentagon said on Thursday that the war in Afghanistan had exposed shortages of unmanned aircraft, manned reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft, command and control aircraft, air defence capabilities and chemical and biological defence units, as well as certain types of special-forces units.
But the nature of the potential threat against the US remains vague. In an apparent effort to lend credence to the warnings, the Bush administration has revealed that documents apparently found by US soldiers in Afghanistan have pointed to specific terrorist threats against one or more of the 103 nuclear power plants in the US. But the report has yet to be confirmed.
On January 4th, the US extended the December-3rd terrorism alert to March 11th, citing the "continuing high level of generalised threat information".
"There may well be those in the US who, having been trained by al-Qaeda, can come together with others for a particular terrorist attack," Mr Mueller warned, without offering further details. "We're doing everything we can to identify" them, he added.
In this climate of uncertainty, Americans are gearing up for two major events that have security officials on heightened alert: American Football's championship Superbowl game next Sunday in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Olympic Winter Games, February 8th-24th, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Mr Mueller told reporters on Thursday that thousands of police officers had been deployed to boost security for the two immensely popular events.
Also on Thursday, Mr Rumsfeld, speaking in vague terms about potential threats, warned that as adversaries of the US "gain access to weapons of increasing power - and let there be no doubt they are - these attacks could grow vastly more deadly than those we suffered September 11th."
"I'm a bit puzzled by the warnings," Mr Thomas Mann of Washington's Brookings Institute said. "It's not clear that the warnings are based on genuinely new information."
The war against terrorism will go on for many years," he said. "Whether the administration will succeed in maintaining a broad public support, whether the public will stay in a state of high alert and strong support remain to be seen.
"This is a challenge for the President and his administration," Mr Mann added.