• Bashar al-Assad likely still to be in power when Obama leaves office

    The U.S. government has privately concluded that President Bashar Assad of Syria is likely still to be in power when Barack Obama leaves the White House in January 2017. The Telegraph reports that a timeline which was prepared for American officials and obtained by the AP says that the earliest possible date for the departure from power of Assad and Alawite inner circled would be March 2017.

  • Florida prof. claiming mass shootings were staged by the Obama administration is fired

    James F. Tracy, a Florida Atlantic University professor conducting a public campaign on social media, in radio interviews, and op-ed articles claiming that that the 2012 massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary and other mass shootings were not more than hoaxes perpetrated by federal officials on instructions of the Obama administration in order to rally support for gun control, was fired Tuesday. Tracy has made a name for himself in the more rabid conspiracy circles for repeatedly calling into question the very truth behind recent mass shootings like the ones in Newtown, Connecticut, Charleston, South Carolina, Aurora, Colorado, and San Bernardino, California. Tracy, in his blog posts and radio interviews, claim that these shooting never took place – or, if they did, that they were mere “drills” carried out by “crisis actors” employed by the Obama administration.

  • ISIS can now use decommissioned shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles

    Weapon experts say that ISIS engineers have developed advanced new weapon systems capable of shooting down passenger jets. Different terror groups have had access to these missiles since the 1970s, but experts note that storing such systems for long periods of time requires the development of thermal batteries to power the missiles when they are taken out of storage and into the field. Developing such batteries and maintaining them requires advanced knowledge.

  • Leader of anti-government Oregon group says God told him to act

    Ammon Bundy, the leader of a group of anti-government militia which seized a government building in a remote wildlife refuge in Oregon to protest federal land policies, said he took his action after God told him to do so. Bundy comes from a Nevada Mormon family which has been challenging federal land policies for decades, most recently in 2014. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) claims the Bundy family owes the government $1.1 million in fees for using public and, and in penalties for non-payment.

  • Oregon siege: the U.S. militia movement is resurgent – and evolving

    For several days now, a small group of armed men have occupied an office of the National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon, 300 miles from Portland. There is of course a long history of distrust towards the federal government in America, one of which the militias of recent decades are acutely aware. Drawing on anti-Communist organizations of the 1950s and the paranoia of the Cold War, militia culture grew towards a fever pitch in the 1980s and 1990s. The popularity of this newly radicalized “paranoid style,” however, came to a sudden halt on the second anniversary of the burning of the Waco compound (April 1993), when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in what was then the most significant terrorist incident in American history, killing 168 people. The new coalition of anti-government activists, as represented by the people who seized the buildings in Oregon, is broad and ideologically diverse, and its principal spokesmen explicitly repudiate racism. Some of its leaders promote the goal of a theocratic society: The invasion of the wildlife sanctuary may also demonstrate the power of social media to do for American militia culture what Facebook and Twitter contributed to the Arab Spring.

  • Israeli Jewish passengers demand removal of Arab Israeli passengers from flight

    Israeli Jewish passengers on an Aegean Airlines flight from Athens to Israel had asked Greek security officials to remove two Arab Israeli passengers from the airplane because these two passengers looked “suspicious.” The police was called to examine the two Arab Israelis’ papers and luggage, and check their names against European terrorist watch-list. The police found nothing unusual, but the Jewish Israeli passengers insisted on the removal of the two Arab Israelis, and the two accepted the captain’s offer to stay one more night in Athens at Aegean Airline’s expense.

  • Sunni states cut Iran ties; Syrian regime uses sarin gas; ISIS’s Libyan oil terminal; European borders closing

    Bahrain, Kuwait, and Sudan cut their ties with Iran, while the UAE downgraded its relations; a UN fact-finding mission has found evidence for the use sarin gas in Syria; ISIS launched a coordinated gun and suicide car bomb attack on the Sidra oil port on Libya’s Mediterranean coast.; Denmark and Sweden reintroduced border controls in an effort to stem the wave of refugees trying to enter the two countries.

  • Terror threats, attacks are the new normal for Europe: Experts

    Following the 13 November attacks in Paris, terrorism analysts in the United Kingdom and Europe say the continent’s intelligence and security services have accepted the reality that ISIS appears not only to have the intention to continue to attack targets in Europe, but also the capability professionally to plan and execute such attacks.

  • Jewish extremists indicted in Israel for killing Palestinian family in arson attack

    Israel has indicted two Jewish extremists for killing three members of a Palestinian family and seriously injuring a fourth in an arson attack on a home in the Palestinian village of Duma in the West Bank. The attack also prompted the Israeli security services to begin to pay more attention to, and take action against, a small but growing group of violent Jewish religious fanatics, many of them living in illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories. These fanatics call not only for the expulsion of all Muslims and Christians from Israel, but also for the dismantling of Israeli democracy and the installation of a king of would rule over a Jewish kingdom run according to Old Testament laws.

  • Refugees in Germany; Swedish border checks; ISIS’s British medics; U.K. flood defenses

    German economist says Germany should expect a tough competition between refugees and poorer Germans; Sweden, as of midnight Sunday, began to impose strict identity checks of all travelers from Denmark; a British delegation, including an imam from London, has traveled to Sudan to try to dissuade young British doctors from joining ISIS; as parts of the United Kingdom braced themselves for more misery, the government’s storm-related actions are criticized.

  • 2 killed, 8 injured in terrorist attack in Tel Aviv

    Three hours ago a gunman shot and killed two people and injured eight – four of them seriously – at the center of Tel Aviv. Hundreds of police officers, using drones and sniffing dogs, have been searching for the gunman. Half an hour or so after the shooting, an abandoned taxi was found on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, with blood on the front seat and dashboard. It is not yet known whether there is a connection between the shooting and the abandoned taxi. The immediate suspicion among Israeli security experts is that the shooting is related to the recent surge in attacks by Palestinians on Israeli citizens. Most of these attacks were perpetrated by knife-wielding youths, so the use of an automatic weapon at the center of Tel Aviv should be regarded as an escalation of the campaign.

  • Israel concerned about ISIS-affiliated groups in Syria attacking Israel

    Israel security officials worry about the possibility that Shuhada al-Yarmuc, a small , ISIS-affiliated Jihadi organization operating in the southern area of the Syrian Golan Heights, would, in line with the emerging ISIS strategy of staging spectacular attacks in Western countries, try something similar in Israel.

  • Rail safety delays; Chicago’s trigger-happy police; killing Bangladeshi bloggers

    In October the Congress agreed to extend the deadline for installing the systems to 2018, but earlier this month Congress extended the deadline for deploying speed-control systems yet again, this time until the end of 2020; By June 2016, all Chicago police officers will be equipped with non-lethal Tasers. The move is part of a plan by city authorities to curb the sharp rise in the number of people – all of them African Americans — killed by police shooting; in 2015 alone, at least four pro-democracy bloggers and a publisher were murdered while others went into hiding, or fled abroad, prompting widespread calls for protection of free speech in Bangladesh from the threat of radical Islamists.

  • Examining how ISIS’s martyrdom appeals affect the brains of potential recruits

    Understanding the reasons why young people are susceptible to recruitment by violent extremist organizations like the ISIS is a formidable undertaking requiring a multidisciplinary approach. An ambitious U Chicago research — the Social and Neurological Construction of Martyrdom Project – will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural pathways through which martyrdom appeals evoke sympathy in the viewer. They aim to uncover exactly what is happening in the brain when an individual is persuaded to change their beliefs. Until now, there has not been a method to study whether it is a message’s intellectual content or emotional impact that resonates with a viewer. By using fMRI, researchers can see what areas of the brain “light up” when specific messages are heard. The project has been awarded $3.4 million by the Defense Department’s Minerva Research Initiative.

  • Majority of Americans believe it is sometimes necessary for govt. to sacrifice freedoms

    Survey conducted after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks finds a majority of respondents from both parties think it is acceptable for the government to analyze the Internet activities and communications of American citizens without a warrant.