The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) and Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command, in a rare public statement, said that terrorists had tried to get their hands on a large quantity of weapons in order to launch wide-scale gun attacks in Britain. The details have emerged as a result of investigations in the wake of five jihadist terror plots which have been foiled in the last two years. The investigation into the origins and background of the five foiled plots has also discovered that 800 legally owned guns had gone missing.

Most military analysts believe it’s only a matter of time before Mosul falls. The next target on the coalition’s agenda is Raqqa, Syria, the capital of IS. It may only be a matter of time before IS’s territorial “caliphate” is no more. What then will be the fate of IS? Can the group survive without controlling any territory? Will it rebound? Or will it disappear? Whatever the case, history provides lessons on how effectively to deal with movements and individuals who wage war against the international order. For example, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchists struck out at rulers and symbols of capitalism throughout the world. Then, suddenly, the wave of anarchist violence ceased. Historians point to a number of reasons the anarchist moment passed. Anarchism competed for hearts and minds with other dissident groups. Nations undertook political and social reforms that addressed the grievances of potential anarchists. They adopted new methods of policing and surveillance. Police agencies cooperated across borders. But perhaps most important was the fact that high-risk movements that attempt to realize the unrealizable have a short shelf life. Such might be the case for IS.

A new survey of CEGEP students found that the risk of violent radicalization among Quebec youth remains “very weak,” while incidents of racism and hate speech remain common. CEGEP is a network of publicly funded pre‑university colleges in the province of Quebec’s education system – similar to U.S. community colleges.

The government of the state of Bavaria wants the German federal government to monitor the far-right Reichsbürger movement more closely. The movement resembles the American sovereign citizen movement: It does not recognize the authority of the government in Berlin, and challenge the legality of the German political structure. The Reichsbürger claims that the last legitimate German government was the one elected in November 1932 – and which made Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933 – and that all German governments since the surrender of Germany on 7 May 1945 have been illegitimate.

In the run up to the U.S.-led coalition campaign to liberate Mosul, U.S. officials warned that ISIS would likely use chemical weapons to slow down the progress of coalition forces and terrorize the residents. Last Thursday ISIS took the first step in its chemical strategy by setting ablaze the Mishraq Chemical plant and sulphur mine, located thirty km south of Mosul. The toxic cloud includes lethal sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. When combined with residue from burning oil wells, it is deadly for people caught in the open or without gas masks. Military experts say health effects from the toxic fumes from oil and sulphur will likely subside in about eighteen months, but the toxic clouds could harm much of the plant and animal life in the area and make it difficult for local farmers to return to their fields until then.

Argentina has requested the extradition of Iran’s former foreign minister due to his alleged role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aries. Argentinian authorities suspect five senior Iranian officials, including Ali Akbar Velayati and former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, of being involved in the bombing, which killed eighty-five people and is the deadliest-ever terror attack on Argentinian soil.

Game theory has long been used to apply mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers. Many of today’s major problems do not stem from great power conflicts or monolithic blocks of self-interest, but from a vast array of single entities making highly individual choices: from lone wolf terrorists to corrupt officials, tax evaders, isolated hackers, or even armies of botnets and packages of malware. Game theory thus needs to catch up with the chaos of the modern world.

What sort of military does the United Kingdom need to deal with a rapidly changing set of potential threats? As Western countries increasingly move away from the conventional foe — one that is easily identified, armed in a similar way and which, most critically, thinks in a similar way, and therefore in a conventional and predictable manner – it’s time to reappraise the sort of armed forces required for the future. It is no longer the size of your arsenal of firepower but how well it is employed that matters. Organizations such as Islamic State understand that well: their actions are carefully targeted to achieve maximum effect with limited resources. With technology on the Western side, the best counter to this present – and likely future – threat, will be to adopt in turn Voltaire’s maxim and concentrate increasingly on special, and specialized, forces.

The Obama administration’s domestic CVE policy has strained relations with an entire religious community, in large part because its policy perceives American Muslims through a security lens. The CVE efforts primarily consist of outreach to Muslim leaders to keep the community onside and encourage information sharing about vulnerable youth — but the community rarely knows about youth who are radicalized in their midst, and the vast majority of Muslims do not embrace violent extremism. Of the world’s jihadi foreign fighter population, there have been approximately 250 people mobilized out of 3.3 million Muslims in America (a mere .000075 percent). The U.S. government should jettison a community-oriented approach, and instead focus on individuals who have demonstrated a clear and sustained interest in jihadist propaganda, not an entire faith-based community.