Britian's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown nearly had an insane first day in office. A car bomb was planted outside a club in London, but was luckily found before it could detonate. Here's the story:

Police thwarted an apparent terror attack Friday near the famed Piccadilly Circus in the heart of London, defusing a bomb made of a lethal mix of gasoline, propane gas, and nails after an ambulance crew spotted smoke coming from a silver Mercedes outside a nightclub.

Officers were called to The Haymarket, just south of Piccadilly Circus, after an ambulance crew — responding to a call just before 1:30 a.m. about an injury at a nearby nightclub — noticed smoke coming from a car parked in front of the club, Clarke said.

A bomb squad manually disabled the bomb.

Update: So I've been watching the news as they keep reporting new information about how the car may have gotten to this London location and how long this may have been planned for and I keep thinking to myself, why wasn't a plot like this stopped in an earlier stage? How can something like this slip through the cracks of national security intelligence? Why weren't the people who planned this being watched or monitered? And if they were, which is potentially likely, why weren't they stopped?