How Safe Are Fans at Euro 2024? | Boko Haram Terrorists Now Use Elon Musk’s Starlink | Al Qaeda Calls on Fighters to Return to Afghanistan, and more

How Safe Are Fans at Euro 2024? A Security Expert Is Worried  (Oliver Moody, DW)
“Everyone is going to look at Germany during those couple of weeks when we have the championship here,” Hans-Jakob Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project told DW. “That means our adversaries are going to try to do whatever they can to disrupt this.” Fears of a terrorist attack on the Euros have increased since an attack on a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow claimed by an offshoot of the so-called “Islamic State” group left 145 people dead. A threat subsequently published in an IS propaganda magazine suggested the tournament was a target. Still, Schindler said the public nature of that threat makes it less likely that a coordinated attack is planned.

Boko Haram Terrorists Now Use Elon Musk’s Starlink for Internet Connection  (Leadership News)
Some members of the Boko Haram terrorist group have been caught using Starlink, the super-fast device owned by billionaire Elon Musk in Sambisa Forest. According to a counter Insurgency Expert and Security Analyst, Zagazola Makama, the Nigerian troops “Operation Hadin Kai” successfully killed a top commander of the sect, Tahir Baga, and recovered digital connectives like Starlink Wi-Fi system, mobile phones amongst other weapons. Starlink which is owned by the second richest man in the world, announced its presence in Nigeria in January 2023 with the aim of providing low-cost internet to remote location in the country and is sold for N450, 000 on pre-order. The terrorist group were said to have fled and abandoned the items when they could no longer withstand the firepower of the Nigerian troops.

Trump Is Not America’s Le Pen  (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic)
Anglo-American media always need a shorthand to sum up this messy, nuanced, continent-wide horse race, and on the morning after Sunday’s vote, they found one: The Rise of the Far Right. And the follow-up talking point? America might head this way too.
Now let me make it more complicated.
When applied to France, the scary headlines were fair enough: Marine Le Pen’s anti-establishment, far-right National Rally party (which has in fact been a part of the French establishment for decades, though never in charge) swept the board, which in that system means it won about a third of the votes.
Almost everywhere else, the banner headline was wrong.
For Americans, the message from these elections is alarming and unexpected, but not because of what is happening in Europe. Gaze across the continent, whether at Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister whose party originated in Mussolini’s fascist movement, or Le Pen, whose roots truly lie in Vichy, or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who once called his country’s Parliament “fake,” and you will see far-right leaders who have succeeded precisely by appearing to tack to the center, trying to sound less extreme, and dropping previous objections and embracing existing alliances, such as the European Union and NATO. They do talk a lot about immigration and inflation, but so do mainstream parties. Their goals may secretly be more radical—Le Pen may well be planning to undermine the French political system if she wins, and I don’t believe that she has cut her ties to Russia—but they are succeeding by hiding that radicalism from voters.
Donald Trump is not like these politicians. The former president is not tacking to the center, and he is not trying to appear less confrontational. Nor does he seek to embrace existing alliances. On the contrary, almost every day he sounds more extreme, more unhinged, and more dangerous. Meloni has not inspired her followers to block the results of an election. Le Pen does not rant about retribution and revenge. Wilders has agreed to be part of a coalition government, meaning that he can compromise with other political leaders, and has promised to put his notorious hostility to Muslims “on ice.” Even Orbán, who has gone the furthest in destroying his country’s institutions and who has rewritten Hungary’s constitution to benefit himself, doesn’t brag openly about wanting to be an autocrat. Trump does. People around him speak openly about wanting to destroy American democracy too. None of this seems to hurt him with voters, who appear to welcome this destructive, radical extremism, or at least not to mind it.
American media clichés about Europe are wrong. In fact, the European far right is rising in some places, but falling in others. And we aren’t “in danger” of following European voters in an extremist direction, because we are already well past them. If Trump wins in November, America could radicalize Europe, not the other way around.