• U.K. bail procedure to be changed to prevent jihadists from leaving country while on bail

    Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to oversee a shakeup of police bail procedures after a counterterrorism chief said the procedures were “weak and “toothless” and allowed jihadists to act with impunity. The weaknesses in the current bail system were highlighted by the revelations that Siddhartha Dhar, the Londoner suspected of being Isil’s new ‘Jihadi John’, was able to leave the United Kingdom without any problem while on bail despite being told to surrender his passport. Under current law, the police are powerless to escort a released suspect home to seize their passport because of bail regulations and human rights laws.

  • Suicide bomber kills 15 outside polio clinic in Quetta, Pakistan

    The Taliban’s violent campaign against bringing Western medicine to children in Pakistan, a campaign which focused primarily on disrupting the efforts of the Pakistani government and international NGOs to fight polio, continues. Earlier today (Wednesday), a suicide bomber has killed at least fifteen people, most of them police, outside a polio eradication center in the city of Quetta in western Pakistan.

  • Istanbul terrorist was a Syrian asylum seeker

    Turkish media report that the terrorist who killed ten tourists in Istanbul entered the country as an asylum seeker from Syria. Most of the dead and wounded in the attack were German nationals. The Turkis police was able to identify the attacker quickly because his fingerprints were already stored in Turkey’s the refugee biometric database.

  • Seismologists "hear" the nuclear explosions in North Korea

    International experts are far from convinced that North Korea actually conducted its first H-bomb test, which was reported by the country last week.Seismology alone cannot tell whether it was a hydrogen bomb or not, but seismologists say that what emerges from the existing data is that last week’s seismic events in North Korea were slightly smaller than a similar event in 2013.

  • Travel association to DHS: Tell Congress about visa overstays before tourism is restricted

    The U.S. Travel Association is urging DHS to address people who stay overstay the length of their approved visas before placing new restrictions on visa waiver programs that are designed to boost U.S. tourism. “We should not even begin to discuss further improvements to visa security without much-needed data from the Department of Homeland Security on visa overstays,” the association says.

  • Israel’ security agencies take gloves off in dealing with Jewish terrorists

    The killing last summer of a Palestinian family by Jewish fanatics forced the Israeli security agencies to rethink their approach to the growing threat of violence posed by Jewish religious radicals. These religious extremists, raised in Israeli settlements built in the occupied Palestinian territories, are small in number, but they enjoy the tacit support of many settlers, and, as importantly, the blessings of a few extremist but influential rabbis. The Israeli security services have decided to take the gloves off, and subject Jewish extremists to enhanced interrogation techniques which, until now, have been used only on Palestinian terrorism suspects. The more robust interrogations have yielded important results.

  • World leaders urged to oppose encryption back doors

    In an open letter made public on Monday, nearly 200 Internet and digital rights leaders and experts, companies, and organizations are calling on the Obama administration and other world leaders to reject efforts to create “back doors” to encryption. “Encryption tools, technologies, and services are essential to protect against harm and to shield our digital infrastructure and personal communications from unauthorized access,” the letter states.

  • ISIS instructs Western followers on how to avoid detection by police

    ISIS is a sophisticated terrorist organization, as its savvy use of social media shows. Its sophistication shows in other ways as well: It has issued instructions to its followers in the West, who are plotting terrorist attacks against Western targets, advising them how to avoid detection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

  • ISIS follower shoots Philadelphia police officer

    A man who shot a Philadelphia policeman while he was sitting in his squad car and wounded him, was inspired by ISIS. Edward Archer used a stolen gun to fire eleven shots at Jesse Hartnett in – but Hartman, despite being wounded, was able to get out of the car and return fire, hitting the gunman three times.

  • Religious beliefs may promote interfaith cooperation, rather than violence

    From the Christian Crusades to the Paris attacks, countless conflicts and acts of violence have been claimed to be the result of differing religious beliefs. These faith-based opinions are thought to motivate aggressive behavior because of how they encourage group loyalty or spin ideologies that devalue the lives of non-believers. However, just published research reveals the opposite: religious beliefs might instead promote interfaith cooperation.

  • Administration tries to harness Silicon Valley’s talent for fight against ISIS

    Senior administration intelligence officials are meeting today (Friday) with Silicon Valley’s major technology firms — companies including Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, YouTube , LinkedIn, Dropbox, and others — in an effort to recruit them and their technological know-how in the fight against radicalization and terrorism.

  • New York City settles Muslim surveillance lawsuits

    The NYPD has been agreed not to conduct surveillance based on religion, race, and ethnicity after charges that it had illegally monitoring Muslims in New York City. The city has agreed to settle two civil rights lawsuits for illegally monitoring its Muslim community following the September 11 attacks. As part of the settlement, in which the city does not admit to any wrongdoings, the city will appoint a civilian to monitor the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit.

  • Ryan examining congressional authorization of war against ISIS

    House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) has instructed the House majority leader and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to begin discussions with House members about whether a measure which would authorize war against ISIS would be likely to be supported by a majority of House members. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), and many other Republicans in Congress, question the need for such a measure.

  • Adelson offered to pay for Iron Dome’s development

    In 2013, shortly after Congress had passed a funding bill for the joint Pentagon-Israel Iron Dome missile defense system, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), then the Senate’s majority leader, received a call from one of his constituents, the gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Adelson asked Reid to convey to the White House a most unusual offer: He, Adelson, was willing personally to contribute $1 billion of his own money toward the development costs of Iron Dome.

  • It’s too late for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine

    Many obstacles stand in the way of a two-state solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine. The current wave of violence has cemented additional layers of distrust of Palestinians to the ones Jewish Israelis already harbor. The hatred is calcifying. Reaching a two-state solution is essential: Within a few years there will be more Palestinians than Jews “between the River and the Sea,” and without a Palestinian state, Israel will either have to give the right to vote to Palestinians or become an apartheid state like South Africa once was. Demographic changes taking place within Israel’s Jewish population, however, may make the implementation of a two-state solution, if it is miraculously agreed to by the two sides, impossible to implement. The most important structural change is that Israel is steadily becoming more religious, which is leading to a decline in the overall level of education and economic productivity of the Israeli population. Allied to the increasing propensity to religiosity among Israeli Jews are trends in the composition of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a change that raises questions about the reliability of the army. The IDF is increasingly a religious army, recruited from the settler community in the West Bank. Best estimates are that if a two-state agreement is somehow reached, about 100,000 settlers would have to be evacuated from the West Bank under any such agreement. Could the IDF be relied upon to evacuate Jerusalem and West Bank settlements — as they did in Gaza in 2005 — with battalion commanders who are increasingly religious, and with religious soldiers who, in any event, are more likely to obey their rabbis’ instructions than their commanders’ orders? With every passing year, using the IDF to evacuate settlers from the West Bank will become more problematic, and evacuation less likely — which means that reaching, and implementing, a two-state solution is becoming less likely as well.