• Terrorist attacks in Paris kill scores, hostages taken

    Terrorists likely affiliated with ISIS have simultaneously attacked three targets across Paris three hours ago. French authorities say that so far there are sixty confirmed dead. One of the targets, the Bataclan concert hall, was attacked while the American rock group Eagle was performing on stage. The police say that there are about 100 people being held hostage inside the concert hall. The French government has announced a state of emergency across France, and closed the country’s borders.

  • “High degree of certainty” Jihadi John was killed by U.S. airstrike Thursday

    The Pentagon confirmed earlier today (Friday) that a U.S. airstrike in Syria targeted Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS terrorist known as “Jihadi John,” who appeared in several grisly ISIS propaganda videos showing the beheadings of eight hostages. U.S. military sources said there was a “99 percent certainty” that Emwazi had been killed in the drone strike. Analysts say that Mohammed Emwazi had no meaningful role in ISIS’ leadership structure, but that symbolically, his death would show that Islamic State is an organization that is suffering and that it would undercut recruitment.

  • U.S. new strategy: Take out ISIS-controlled oil fields in Syria

    In an effort to disrupt ISIS’ main source of income, U.S. and allied forces have significantly intensified their airstrikes against the oil fields that the militant group controls in eastern Syria. ISIS’ oil production earns the about $40 million a month, or nearly $500 million a year, according to Treasury Department estimates. Military officials said that the goal of the operation over the next several weeks is to cripple eight major oil fields, about two-thirds of the refineries, and other oil-production sites controlled by ISIS, aiming to paralyze the group’s oil-production capability not for days, but for six months to a year.

  • Berkeley modifies Suspicious Activity Reports guidelines

    The Berkeley City Council members said in a meeting last week that Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), an initiative of the DHS which, through regional and national agencies, disseminates to local law enforcement information on possible terrorist threats, has the potential of criminalizing innocent people. Members of the council agreed that in order to prevent hurting innocent people, the council should adopt a Police Review Commission recommendation to modify Berkeley Police Department orders on Suspicious Activity Reporting. The modification aims to make sure that SARs can be filed “only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct.”

  • DoD awards $7.6 million to Pitt to develop therapies against biowarfare

    The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded a $7.6 million grant to a collaborative group of scientists in the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) for work which could lead to countermeasures against bioterrorism attacks. The contract is the latest in a successful run of federal funding for this group of investigators within Pitt’s CVR, which the DOD acknowledges has performed well.

  • Assad government profits from a policy of enforced disappearances – 65,000 disappeared so far

    A new report by Amnesty International reveals the vast scale and chillingly orchestrated nature of tens of thousands of enforced disappearances by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad over the past four years. The report reveals that the state is profiting from widespread and systematic enforced disappearances amounting to crimes against humanity, through an insidious black market in which family members desperate to find out the fates of their disappeared relatives are ruthlessly exploited for cash. The scale of the disappearances is harrowing. The report documents at least 65,000 disappearances since 2011 — 58,000 of them civilians. Those taken are usually held in overcrowded detention cells in appalling conditions and cut off from the outside world. Many die as a result of rampant disease, torture, and extrajudicial execution.

  • Finnish security services: Increase in number of asylum seekers raised terrorism threat

    The Finnish Security Intelligence Service (FSIS) on Tuesday said that the rise in the number of asylum seekers had increased the threat of terrorism in Finland. Finland uses a national terrorism warning system, and the FSIS yesterday raised the warning level from “very low” to “low.” Finland expects 30,000-35,000 asylum seekers to arrive this year, compared with 3,600 in 2014.

  • FBI delays release of interactive tool to identify violent extremists

    Facing criticism, the FBI has decided to delay the release of “Don’t Be a Puppet,” an interactive program aiming to help teachers and students identify young people who show signs of flirting with radicalism and violent extremism. The program was scheduled for release Monday (yesterday). Civil rights advocates and American Muslim leaders, invited by the agency to preview the program, harshly criticized it for focusing almost exclusively on Islamic extremism. They noted that practically all the mass school shootings – and most of the violence perpetrated by extremists — in the United States had nothing to do with Islamic militants.

  • Climate change heightening the risk of conflict and war

    Thirty of Australia’s leading minds from defense, academia, policy think tanks, and other government agencies have joined together for discussions over two days last week for Australia’s first climate security summit. The summit participants agreed that increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, changing rainfall patterns, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events are heightening the risk of conflict and increasing the displacement of people. The summit organizers quote Brigadier-General Wendell Christopher King (Ret.), the Chief Academic Officer at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, who said: “[Climate change] is like getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years — there is no exit-strategy.”

  • Legislation would give U.K. police powers to access U.K. computer users’ browsing history

    The U.K. police and intelligence service, ahead of the publication this coming Wednesday of legislation on regulating surveillance powers, have urged the government to give them the power to view the Internet browsing history of British computer users. Senior officers were pressuring the government to revive measures which would require telecommunications companies to retain for twelve months data which would reveal Web sites visited by customers. The police and intelligence agencies argue that such measures are necessary because the scale of online activity has made traditional methods of surveillance and investigation less useful.

  • Centralized leadership, major reform needed to bolster U.S. biodefense

    A comprehensive report on U.S. biodefense efforts calls for major reforms to strengthen America’s ability to confront intentionally introduced, accidentally released, and naturally occurring biological threats. The report details U.S. vulnerability to bioterrorism and deadly outbreaks and emphasizes the need to transform the way the U.S. government is organized to confront these threats. Recommendations include centralizing leadership in the Office of the Vice President; establishing a White House Biodefense Coordination Council; strengthening state, local, territorial, and tribal capabilities; and promoting innovation through sustained biodefense prioritization and funding.

  • Online tool maps terrorist networks, behavior over time

    To allow a better understanding of how terrorist organizations network and function over time, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has launched the Big Allied and Dangerous (BAAD) online platform. The tool features updated, vetted, and sourced narratives and relationship information and social network data on fifty of the most notorious terrorist organizations in the world since 1998, with additional network information on more than 100 organizations. The research team plans to expand the database and online platform to include more than 600 terrorist organizations.

  • Carter details shift in U.S. ISIS strategy

    Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said that the U.S. military will intensify airstrikes and may carry out unilateral ground raids as it steps up its campaign against Islamic State. The shift in U.S. policy comes after the administration had concluded that the previous approach, which was based on equipping and training carefully vetted moderate Syrian rebels, has failed. Carter said similar missions were likely as U.S. forces adapted to the fight in Syria and Iraq.

  • Syria’s civil war, Europe’s refugee crisis the result of spikes in food prices: Experts

    The disintegration of Syria and Europe’s refugee crisis are only the latest tragic consequences of two spikes in food prices in 2007-08 and 2010-11 that triggered waves of global unrest, including the Arab Spring. Researchers have traced these spikes and spiraling crises to their root causes: deregulated commodity markets, financial speculation, and a misguided U.S. corn-to-ethanol fuel policy which removes nearly five billion bushels of corn from markets each year.

  • Obama considering deploying U.S. troops inside Syria, closer to front lines with ISIS

    Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and other top national security officials have presented President Barack Obama with their recommendation to move U.S. ground troops into areas in Syria and Iraq, and have them assume battlefield-related roles, which would likely bring them into direct contact with Islamic State militants. The proposals reflect a growing recognition that the strategy the United States has pursued against ISIS so far has failed to deliver satisfactory results.