Germany on Wednesday announced the creation of a new police unit which officials said will be specifically armed, outfitted, and trained to deal with terrorism; the UN Security Council on Thursday passed a resolution aiming to make it more difficult for IIS to raise funds by selling oil and antiquities, ransom payments, and other criminal activities. It remains to be seen whether the two big buyers of ISIS oil – the Assad regime and Turkey – will comply; a Facebook photo inadvertently reveals U.S. commando presence in Libya.

Israel and Turkey were once close allies, but the relationship between the two countries has cooled after the Islamist party of President Recep Tayeep Erdogan came to power in 2002, and he was elected president in 2003. The two countries have decided that the many challenges they face in common now justify the resumption of normal relationship, even if the two countries are deeply divided over the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel; Denmark is set to pass a law which would allow authorities to confiscate jewelry from refugees entering Denmark in order to pay for some of the refugee-related expenditures by the government; the new government in Argentina will reopen the investigation in to the mysterious death in January of a prosecutor who was about to charge former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner with covering up Iran’s involvement in the killing of eighty-five Argentinian Jews in 1994.

On Monday, Saudi Arabia announced the formation of a new alliance, consisting of thirty-four Sunni Arab and Muslim states, to fight terrorism. The alliance forces will join the moderate rebels in Syria – Prime Minister David Cameron said last week that these rebels were 70,000-strong – not only to fight ISIS, but also to turn their fire on the weakening Assad regime’s military; Italy will send troops to defend the strategically important Mosul Dam in northern Iraq; the EC ordered Italy to use force if necessary to compel migrants and refugees to have their fingerprints taken, this obliging these refugees to apply for asylum in Italy rather than use Italy as a corridor on their way to other EU countries.

Officials from DHS and the Department of State, as a general policy, do not check social media postings of applicants out of civil liberties concerns. With this policy in place, the department’s officials who handled Tashfeen Malik’s application could not have seen her pro-ISIS postings and note her growing radicalization. Officials from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pressed for a change in DHS policy in light of the fact that social media  is increasingly used by followers of jihadist groups to declare their allegiance, but the disclosures by Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance programs was behind the reluctance of DHS high officials to change the policy for fears such a change would further damage the administration’s standing with civil rights groups and European allies.

There have been many books on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are few about the recent military interventions of America’s allies in countries such as Mali and others on the African continent. Because the January 2013 French intervention in Mali against the local Al Qaeda affiliate was quick, effective, and relatively low cost, the story contains valuable lessons for future strategy.

The U.S. Senate summary report on the allegations of CIA torture during the “war on terror” failed to live up to its original purpose, a Stanford scholar said. The researchers says that the U.S. Senate’s 2014 summary report on alleged CIA torture and interrogation Four key errors have doomed the Senate report to “eternal controversy,” she said: “It was not bipartisan, took too long to write, made little effort to generate public support along the way, and produced a declassified version that constituted a tiny portion of the full study.”

FBI director James Comey told lawmakers this week that one of the suspects in the foiled terror attack in Garland, Texas, in May had exchanged 109 messages with sources in a “terrorist location” overseas ahead of the attack. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, however, have not been able to break into and read those messages because they were exchanged on devices equipped with end-to-end encryption software which, security services in the United States and Europe argue, make it impossible to monitor and track terrorists and criminals.

Sources say that the White House is about to announce a new executive order to expand background checks of individuals wishing to purchase guns. One proposal being considered would designate more sellers as high-volume dealers, closing a legal loophole which allows many sales conducted online or at gun shows to escape existing background check provisions. Two other developments on the gun front: On Thursday, Connecticut governor Dan Malloy said he would sign an executive order which would bar people on the government’s terrorism watch lists from buying guns in Connecticut; in the House, Democrats demand that a 17-year ban on government-funded research into violence involving firearms be ended.

Queen Mary University of London has suspended the Islamic society at the university after the students’ union has launched an investigation into possible violations of protocols and procedures by the society. the society has been accused in the past of hosting events in which radical Islamist speakers, including speakers associated with Islamist fundamentalist groups. The U.K. government said that at least seventy events featuring hate speakers were held on U.K. campuses last year.