NewsTracker Answers for week of Oct. 03, 2011

Q: The CIA launched a drone airplane strike last week that killed U.S.-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki and his companions in a car in Yemen. Where is Yemen?

Circle the area on this map

Q: The name of Awlaki's al-Qaeda group includes which geographic term?

A. Horn of Africa

B. Arabian Peninsula

C. Middle East

D. Southern Hemisphere

B. Awlaki was a propagandist, recruiter and plotter with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is active in the peninsula countries of Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Q: Besides Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Awlaki's group also has operated in Somalia. What separates Yemen and Somalia?

A. Persian Gulf

B. Dead Sea

C. Gulf of Aden

D. Mississippi River

C. The Gulf of Aden is located in the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the south coast of the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in the Horn of Africa.

Q: Yemen and Somalia are both . . .

A. Very poor

B. Monarchies

C. Heavily urbanized

D. All of the above

A. Despite oil production, Yemenis rank in the bottom third of world income while Somalis are near the bottom. Most people in both countries live in rural areas. Somalia has no functioning government. Yemen is officially a republic, but it has a president who has held power since 1978 and recently survived an assassination attempt.

Q: An Islamic cleric, Awlaki was accused of recruiting and preparing a Nigerian man who tried but failed to set off a bomb in his underpants on a 2009 Christmas Day flight to which American city?

A. New York

B. Washington

C. Chicago

D. Detroit

D. Jurors were scheduled to be selected this week in Detroit for the trial of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to kill nearly 300 people aboard the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Officials said the Saudi bomb maker who made Abdulmutallab's explosives also may have been killed in last week's drone airstrike.