The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is continuing its campaign over CIA drone use with a lawsuit filed on Monday to force the CIA to turn over details about the U.S. clandestine drone war program. The ACLU lawsuit, coming a week after some of details of the program were leaked, asks for summary data from the CIA on drone strikes, including the locations and dates of strikes, the number of people killed and their identities or status.

The Justice Department said this week that it has created a new office which would on homegrown extremists. Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin announced the move on Wednesday. He said the new office, the Domestic Terrorism Counsel, will be the main point of contact for federal prosecutors working on domestic terrorism cases. Carlin said the new office was created “in recognition of a growing number of potential domestic terrorism matters around the United States.” Following the 9/11 attacks, U.S. law enforcement had shifted its attention, and the allocation of law enforcement and intelligence resources, from domestic to foreign terrorism. The result, security experts say, was that federal authorities had lost sight of domestic extremists. “Looking back over the past few years, it is clear that domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists remain a real and present danger to the United States. We recognize that, over the past few years, more people have died in this country in attacks by domestic extremists than in attacks associated with international terrorist groups,” Carlin said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is coming to the United States next week on an official visit, and ahead of the visit the Obama administration is holding talks with Pakistani officials about Pakistan’s plan to deploy a small tactical nuclear weapon which would be more difficult to monitor and secure than Pakistan’s arsenal of larger weapons. U.S. officials fear that the smaller weapons are easier to steal, or would be easier to use should they fall into the hands of a rogue commander. “All it takes is one commander with secret radical sympathies, and you have a big problem,” said one former official.

A U.S. Defense Department team is spending three days this week in Colorado to determine whether two prisons in the state would be suitable for holding dozens of Guantánamo detainees indefinitely. The latest effort by President Barack Obama to close Guantánamo Bay involves inspecting a federal Supermax in Florence and a state penitentiary at Canon City to determine the feasibility of using them to continue the detention of men, currently at Guantánamo, who would not be charged or released by the United States. Colorado lawmakers oppose the move, and critics of the administration say the problem with Guantánamo is not its location, but the practice of indefinite detention without charge far from any active battlefield and the use of military tribunals – and these will not change in a U.S. domestic facility.

Christianity looks set to disappear from key parts of the Middle East, according to a report issued Tuesday, 13 October, which highlights a worsening cycle of persecution. Persecuted and Forgotten? A Report on Christians oppressed for their Faith 2013-15, compiled by Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, concludes that if the exodus of Christians from Iraq continues at existing levels, the Christians could all but disappear within five years, and that a faster rate of attrition is noted in Syria whose Christians have reportedly plummeted from 1.25 million in 2011 to as few as 500,000 today.

In the last few days, Israelis in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and other cities have been facing a spontaneous, from-the-bottom-up campaign of violence by (mostly) Palestinian youth wielding, in most cases, no more than kitchen knives. This wave of attacks may soon recede, but another eruption of violence will surely come soon unless the underlying conditions are dealt with. The lone-wolf attacks are an immediate security problem with which Israel’s security services must deal. This security problem, however, is only the symptom of a deeper, more pernicious condition. As is the case with a medical condition, dealing with the symptoms would just not be sufficient.

Moscow will soon begin to pay a steep price – in the form of reprisal attacks and casualties — for its escalating military intervention on behalf of the Assad regime in Syria, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has warned. Earlier this week, fifty-five leading Muslim clerics, including prominent Islamists, urged “true Muslims” to “give all moral, material, political and military” support to the fight against Assad’s army as well as Iranian and Russian forces. “Russia has created a Frankenstein in the region which it will not be able to control,” warned a senior Qatari diplomat. “With the call to jihad things will change. Everyone will go to fight. Even Muslims who sit in bars. There are 1.5 billion Muslims. Imagine what will happen if 1 percent of them join.”

Water is the foundation for life. People use water every single day to meet their domestic, industrial, agricultural, medical, and recreational needs. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, water system security became a higher priority in the United States. The Water Security Test Bed (WSTB) at Idaho national Laboratory can be used for research related to detecting and decontaminating chemical, biological, or radiological agents following an intentional or natural disaster. The WSTB will focus on improving America’s ability to safeguard the nation’s water systems, and respond to contamination incidents and to natural disasters.

Tony Blair has warned that the ideology which drives Islamic extremists has significant support from Muslims around the world. Blair said that unless religious prejudice in Muslim communities is rooted out, the threat from the extremists will not be defeated. Blair, speaking at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, said that while the number of people engaging in violence by joining groups like Islamic State is relatively small, many of their views are widely shared.