A German court has found a former Islamic State member guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity for the 2015 killing of a 5-year-old girl, sentencing him to life in prison. The Frankfurt case is the first in the world to decide whether a former member of the Islamic State group played a role in the attempted genocide of the Yazidi religious group.

Cars, SUVs and trucks can be an efficient means of mass killing, and one that can be virtually impossible to prepare against. Furthermore, it is becoming harder to prosecute the driver involved in such fatalities in some states.

“Infectious disease threats will continue to emerge, whether naturally, by accident, or deliberately. Stopping them from spreading and causing mass effects is possible even today, but we have much work to do bringing our assets to bear” said Andy Weber, Senior Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR).

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to renewed discussion of biological weapons, but Glenn Cross, a former deputy national intelligence officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction responsible for biological weapons analysis, argues that the development and possession of biological weapons is trending dramatically downward since the end of World War II. “Nations likely no longer see utility in developing or possessing biological weapons for use in large-scale, offensive military operations given the devastating capabilities of today’s advanced conventional weapons,” he writes.

There is a need to construct a versatile system designed to protect the vast array of so-called soft targets such as stadiums, schools, and places of worship. After an eight-month competition among the nation’s biggest universities, DHS awarded Northeastern University a $36 million, ten-year contract to develop such a system.

DHS Counterterrorism Coordinator said that fears the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan could reinvigorate terror groups like al-Qaida and Islamic State, and lead to a surge of attempted infiltrations along the southern U.S. border, have not been realized. “It is just factually inaccurate to frame the southern border as a place where we are seeing a significant number of al-Qaida or ISIS-related terrorists or foreign terrorists,” he said.

There is a “fundamental mismatch” between the threat posed by Islamist terrorism and the attention afforded to it by Prevent, the U.K. government’s counter-extremism program, according to a new report.The report finds that despite the finding of the government’s independent reviewer that the United Kingdom faces the greatest terroristic threat from Islamists, far more resources are being devoted to other forms of extremism.

Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, was an American domestic terrorist whose 17-year bombing campaign killed three people and injured 23 others. Seeking to protect wilderness and destroy technology, he targeted scientists and businessmen. Kiernan Christ writes “Kaczynski’s contemporary influence, however, is not strongest among environmental activists. Rather, his manifesto and ideology have found a home on far-right websites, where Kaczynski is cited as a key radicalizing influence and thought leader in spaces generally extremely hostile to modern environmentalism.”

My colleagues and I outlined a plan to combat extremism in the military. It focuses on prevention over law enforcement by leveraging existing support programs for those at risk of joining extremist groups.