September 11 2001 Terrorist Attack

Osama bin Laden praised one of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers in a video marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Al Qaeda usually issues a video on the anniversary. This year's video showed hijacker Waleed Alshehri threatening the U.S.

Though they happened thousands of miles away, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would be difficult to forget for anyone passing in or out of the Los Angeles Fire Department's training center. Inside the entrance to the historic building that is part of the Frank Hotchkin Memorial Training Center in Elysian Park is a towering slab with names of firefighters who died on 9/11. And outside stands a 20-foot-tall, 2,300-ton remnant of the World Trade Center.

The nation's political and military leaders on Tuesday commemorated the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with remembrances of the nearly 3,000 people who were killed after 19 hijackers commandeered four airliners. On the South Lawn of the White House, there was silence at 8:46 a.m. EDT, the moment six years ago when American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles, slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Sitting in a chair just after 7:30 a.m., beneath the amber glow of a hallway light, Carol Ashley leans over and ties the laces on an old pair of sneakers. She slips her good shoes into her purse. She knows it will be muddy in the pit. Outside, the sky is gray and rain slaps her windows. Six years ago on a Tuesday morning nothing like this one, Ashley's 25-year-old daughter, Janice, stood in this hallway wearing a taupe dress suit, a silver watch and her great-grandmother's pearl earrings.

The plaintiffs in more than a third of the remaining suits filed by relatives of Sept. 11 victims, seeking compensation from airlines and their security contractors, have agreed to settle a week before the first case was to go to trial. Fourteen of 35 remaining cases were settled, including a case filed by the wife of Patrick Driscoll, who died aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. That was to be the first case to go to trial and was to start Monday.

Managing a furniture store is not what Osama Awadallah had his sights on during college. But selling couches and dressers will do until an offer to develop computer information systems comes along. His job opportunities are limited, he said, because of the notoriety from his friendship with two 9/11 hijackers. He was one of the hundreds of Muslim men jailed as material witnesses in the 9/11 investigation.

THE big striped armchair in the Russian Hill coffeehouse made Susan Faludi look even smaller than she is. It was Oct. 2, publication day for her latest book, and she was getting ready to head down the Santa Cruz coast to talk about "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America." After that, she'd be on a plane east for the official book-tour kickoff. Faludi herself was fine, she said, with the prospect of a month or so on the road.

The death of New York police Det. James Zadroga, which was previously linked to his work in the rubble of the World Trade Center, was caused by injections of ground-up pills, the city medical examiner's office said Thursday. "What caused the disease was the injection of the drugs into his bloodstream, as opposed to something he breathed," said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch. The ruling outraged the family of Zadroga, 34, who became a symbol of post-Sept.

A second Sept. 11 victim has been identified from human remains found underneath a service road at the World Trade Center site, officials said Friday. More than 400 human bone pieces have been recovered from beneath the service road that carried cleanup and construction trucks in and out of the site after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The search at the spot began in October 2006 when utility workers found more than 80 bones in a manhole in the service road.

Rudolph W. Giuliani's image as 9/11 mayor took a double hit Monday as he lost a key endorsement from the Sept. 11 commission chair to a rival, and New York firefighters and families of victims of the terrorist attacks took their campaign against him to New Hampshire. Adding to the bad news for Giuliani was a new poll showing that his support in New Hampshire dropped from 24% of GOP voters in September to 16% this month as Mitt Romney widened his from 25% to 33%.