Gavin Long, the 29-year old former Marine who on Saturday killed three Baton Rouge police officers, was a member of a black antigovernment sovereign citizen group whose members believe they are indigenous to the United States and beyond the reach of the federal government. Members of the Washitaw Nation believe that they are descendants of black people who occupied the North American continent tens of thousands of years before white Europeans arrived, and, therefore, they fall outside federal authority.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has released an update to its Global Terrorism Database (GTD), an open-source database including information on terrorist attacks that took place around the world between 1970 and 2015. Among the findings: The total number of terrorist attacks and total deaths due to terrorist attacks worldwide decreased by 12 percent in 2015, compared to 2014. This was largely due to fewer attacks and deaths in Iraq, Pakistan, and Nigeria. This represents the first decline in total terrorist attacks and deaths worldwide since 2009.

A Brazilian Jihadist group called Ansar al-Khilafah, has pledged allegiance to ISIS less than a month before the opening of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. It is the first pledge of allegiance to ISIS to come from South America. Portuguese and Spanish versions of ISIS’s Nashir have also been launched on the encrypted Telegram messaging app.

The Bastille Day terror attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice has been claimed by the Islamic State Group – sort of. With no clear connection to Jihadi groups (and merely a record as a petty criminal), French officials are trying to ascertain whether Bouhlel was a lone actor terrorist or a mentally ill person with whom IS is opportunistically associating. The idea that a mass casualty perpetrator is likely to be suffering from mental illness is consistent with the research on lone actors. My research on suicide terrorism has demonstrated that affiliation with a group is quite different from the research of Criminal Justice professor Adam Lankford of the University of Alabama who insists that many terrorists are suicidal and not sacrificing themselves for a greater cause or for some underlying altruistic motivation of self-sacrifice. The implications for policy and the potential for backlash from terrorists and counter terrorists vary greatly depending on which scenario ends up being accurate for Bouhlel, whether he was in fact radicalized or possible mentally ill matters.

At least eighty-four people were killed Thursday when a 31-year old Tunisian plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. He accelerated, and continued to drive for about 1.5 miles, running over people who crowded the boulevard. More than 200 were injured, some of them are in critical condition. Police shot and killed the driver, Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who had a residency permit to live and work in France.

France has a long history of violence carried out by different groups with different ideologies and goals. Until the rise of Islamist terrorism in the last twenty years, most of the violent and terrorist acts in the post-World War Two era belonged to three categories: Separatist movements; terrorism related to the Algerian War; and terrorism by various groups in the Middle East and North Africa.

A big truck deliberately plowed into a crowd of people celebrating France’s 14 July Bastille Day, killing “several dozen” and injuring more than 100. The area where the attack occurred — Promenade des Anglais – is a broad boulevard which was closed to vehicular traffic in order to allow revelers celebrate into the night. The driver was shot and killed by police officers.

On the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the Second Lebanon War, Israeli officials continued to warn that any future conflict with Hezbollah will result in unprecedented damage to the group. A senior IDF official said that the difference between the next war and 2006 “will be the difference between an operation and a war. 2006 was an operation, and we didn’t use all of our power. Next time it won’t just be planes flying around. … We will use all of our power to destroy Hezbollah militarily.”

ISIS has boasted that its Islamist fighters have killed 5,200 people in “military operations” during the holy month of Ramadan. An infographic in the group’s Arabic-language weekly magazine al-Naba, ISIS lists fourteen terrorist attacks group followers carried out in Europe, the United States, Asia, Africa, Syria, and Iraq. ISIS claims the victims include nearly 2,000 Shiites, 1,000 Kurds, 600 Syrian Alawites, and 300 Christians.