• EU explores ways to bolster European defenses against terrorism

    European interior and home-affairs ministers will meet in an emergency session in Brussels this Friday to explore measures to strengthen the RU zone’s defenses against terrorism. The main topics to be discussed on Friday will include a Europe-wide database of airline passengers, firearms security, and the bolstering of security of external borders, that is, the borders between the Schengen Agreement countries and those European countries not members of the treaty. France said that it would also insist on reintroducing national border checks within the Schengen zone – in effect, suspending the Schengen Agreement.

  • France demands effective suspension of the Schengen open borders agreement

    France will this week call for an effective suspension of the Schengen Agreement on open borders across Europe. The agreement was in 1985 in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg. It removes border checks within Europe, meaning that anyone. France will not call for a formal abrogation of the agreement, but would rather demand that all members of the Schengen Zone begin border identity checks, a move which amount to an effective suspension of the 30-year old agreement

  • France attacks ISIS targets in Raqqa, says more retaliatory actions will follow

    French warplanes have launched thirty airstrikes on more than a dozen Islamic State targets in Raqqa, the capital of the self-proclaimed caliphate. The raids were France’s first – but likely not the last — retaliation to Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris. The French Ministry of Defense said in a statement that the sites attacked by the French planes had previously been identified on reconnaissance flights. The bombing raids were launched simultaneously from bases in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan in coordination with U.S. forces.

  • U.K. put special British police unit on standby in the wake of Paris attacks

    In the early hours of Saturday, following the previous evening’s terrorist attacks in Paris, the British government put a special British police unit on standby for an emergency national mobilization of officers. The move was a precautionary measure taken as the government weighed placing the United Kingdom on its highest state of terrorist alert. There are forty-three local police forces in England and Wales, and raising the terrorist threat level to critical — the highest would have triggered the dispatching of officers from some of these local forces patrol sites and neighborhood in the country’s big cities.

  • How Islamic law can take on ISIS

    The vast majority of Muslims almost certainly feel moral revulsion and outrage about the violence perpetrated by ISIS in Paris last Friday. However, the truth of the matter is that ISIS leaders and supporters can and do draw on a wealth of scriptural and historical sources to justify their actions. Traditional interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law, approved aggressive jihad to propagate Islam. They permitted the killing of captive enemy men. They allowed jihadis to enslave enemy women and children, as ISIS did with the Yazidi women in Syria. ISIS’ claim of Islamic legitimacy can be countered only by a viable alternative interpretation of Islamic law. But for an alternative view of Sharia to emerge and take root through modern consensus, Muslims must first acknowledge and confront the problem of having acquiesced to a traditional interpretation of Sharia and ignored alternatives that would condemn ISIS as un-Islamic. Whenever ISIS collapses or is defeated, and for whatever cause, the world can only expect a new ISIS to emerge every time one disappears until we Muslims are able to discuss openly the deadlock in reforming Sharia.

  • U.K. plans to boost counterterrorism, aviation security significantly

    The U.K. government will substantially increase efforts to counter the threat from ISIS. In the five-year defense and security review, to be unveiled next week, the government details plans to increase the staff of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ by 1,900 officers; at least a double the funding for aviation security around the world; and deploy additional aviation security officers to assess security at overseas airports.

  • Updated toll : 129 dead, 352 injured – 99 in critical condition

    President Francois Hollande declared three days of national mourning, beginning Monday. France will observe a moment of silence on Monday at noon. Hollande said the Friday’s terrorist attack constitute “acts of war” against France. At least one of the attackers was a French citizen: He was born on 21 November 1985 in the suburb of Courcouronnes, about twenty miles south of Paris. He had been known to police since 2004 and was flagged as an extremist in 2010. One gunman was found with a Syrian passport in his pocket, born in 1980. He had not previously been known to French police. This terrorist arrived in Greece with a group of sixty-nine Syrian refugees, and was allowed into France on 3 October. It is not known whether the terrorist is Syria, since Syrian identity documents are being bought and sold on the black market.

  • Terrorist attacks in Paris kill scores, hostages taken

    Terrorists likely affiliated with ISIS have simultaneously attacked three targets across Paris three hours ago. French authorities say that so far there are sixty confirmed dead. One of the targets, the Bataclan concert hall, was attacked while the American rock group Eagle was performing on stage. The police say that there are about 100 people being held hostage inside the concert hall. The French government has announced a state of emergency across France, and closed the country’s borders.

  • “High degree of certainty” Jihadi John was killed by U.S. airstrike Thursday

    The Pentagon confirmed earlier today (Friday) that a U.S. airstrike in Syria targeted Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS terrorist known as “Jihadi John,” who appeared in several grisly ISIS propaganda videos showing the beheadings of eight hostages. U.S. military sources said there was a “99 percent certainty” that Emwazi had been killed in the drone strike. Analysts say that Mohammed Emwazi had no meaningful role in ISIS’ leadership structure, but that symbolically, his death would show that Islamic State is an organization that is suffering and that it would undercut recruitment.

  • U.S. new strategy: Take out ISIS-controlled oil fields in Syria

    In an effort to disrupt ISIS’ main source of income, U.S. and allied forces have significantly intensified their airstrikes against the oil fields that the militant group controls in eastern Syria. ISIS’ oil production earns the about $40 million a month, or nearly $500 million a year, according to Treasury Department estimates. Military officials said that the goal of the operation over the next several weeks is to cripple eight major oil fields, about two-thirds of the refineries, and other oil-production sites controlled by ISIS, aiming to paralyze the group’s oil-production capability not for days, but for six months to a year.

  • Berkeley modifies Suspicious Activity Reports guidelines

    The Berkeley City Council members said in a meeting last week that Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), an initiative of the DHS which, through regional and national agencies, disseminates to local law enforcement information on possible terrorist threats, has the potential of criminalizing innocent people. Members of the council agreed that in order to prevent hurting innocent people, the council should adopt a Police Review Commission recommendation to modify Berkeley Police Department orders on Suspicious Activity Reporting. The modification aims to make sure that SARs can be filed “only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct.”

  • DoD awards $7.6 million to Pitt to develop therapies against biowarfare

    The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded a $7.6 million grant to a collaborative group of scientists in the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) for work which could lead to countermeasures against bioterrorism attacks. The contract is the latest in a successful run of federal funding for this group of investigators within Pitt’s CVR, which the DOD acknowledges has performed well.

  • Assad government profits from a policy of enforced disappearances – 65,000 disappeared so far

    A new report by Amnesty International reveals the vast scale and chillingly orchestrated nature of tens of thousands of enforced disappearances by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad over the past four years. The report reveals that the state is profiting from widespread and systematic enforced disappearances amounting to crimes against humanity, through an insidious black market in which family members desperate to find out the fates of their disappeared relatives are ruthlessly exploited for cash. The scale of the disappearances is harrowing. The report documents at least 65,000 disappearances since 2011 — 58,000 of them civilians. Those taken are usually held in overcrowded detention cells in appalling conditions and cut off from the outside world. Many die as a result of rampant disease, torture, and extrajudicial execution.

  • Finnish security services: Increase in number of asylum seekers raised terrorism threat

    The Finnish Security Intelligence Service (FSIS) on Tuesday said that the rise in the number of asylum seekers had increased the threat of terrorism in Finland. Finland uses a national terrorism warning system, and the FSIS yesterday raised the warning level from “very low” to “low.” Finland expects 30,000-35,000 asylum seekers to arrive this year, compared with 3,600 in 2014.

  • FBI delays release of interactive tool to identify violent extremists

    Facing criticism, the FBI has decided to delay the release of “Don’t Be a Puppet,” an interactive program aiming to help teachers and students identify young people who show signs of flirting with radicalism and violent extremism. The program was scheduled for release Monday (yesterday). Civil rights advocates and American Muslim leaders, invited by the agency to preview the program, harshly criticized it for focusing almost exclusively on Islamic extremism. They noted that practically all the mass school shootings – and most of the violence perpetrated by extremists — in the United States had nothing to do with Islamic militants.