The Telegraph by Anne Gulland, Global health security correspondent The naming of the Russian agents believed to be responsible for the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury has brought the spectre of chemical weapons to the forefront of the public consciousness once again.But while such weapons can undoubtedly wreak enormous havoc, a Telegraph film investigating the threat of biological terrorism has shown that a far simpler way to spread fear and disrupt daily life would be to harness diseases in plants, animals and even humans. Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/biological-terrorism-vulnerable-uk/...

PBS News Hours by Simona Foltyn In October 2017, Iraqi forces captured the town of Hawija from the Islamic State, taking back one of the militant group’s last remaining strongholds. But now, ISIS has regrouped in the area and continues to terrorize residents. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Simona Foltyn recently traveled near Hawija to find out how much control the militants continue to assert over the civilian population for this report in cooperation with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Read the Full TranscriptSIMONA FOLTYN:ISIS is making a comeback in Iraq and so far the government has failed to stop it. In my last report, I accompanied Iraqi Security Forces as they tried to clear remote, mountainous areas where ISIS militants have regrouped. These clean up operations were largely ineffective. The government troops known as the emergency response division were used to fighting a conventional war against ISIS. They...

The Islamic State and Drones: Supply, Scale, and Future Threats Combating Terrorism Center at West Point by Don Rassler The Islamic State is a group known for doing things a bit differently, for its capacity for innovation, and for its many ‘firsts.’ Two of those ‘firsts’ happened within months of each other. The first occurred in October 2016 when the group used a bomb-laden drone to kill, after the explosive hidden within the drone killed two Kurdish peshmerga soldiers who were investigating the device. Another ‘first’ happened in January 2017 when the Islamic State released a propaganda video that showed nearly a dozen examples of the group releasing munitions on its enemies from the air with a fair degree of accuracy via quadcopter drones it had modified. And it wasn’t long before the group’s bomb-drop capable drones would go on to kill, too. After reaching a high point in the...

Orlando Sentinel by Hal Boedeker - Contact Reporter For the 17th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, “CBS This Morning” will offer a sobering and detailed interview with FBI Director Christopher Wray.“People think of the 9/11 threat, they think New York, they think D.C. Today's terrorism threat is everywhere, coast to coast, north, south, east, west,” Wray tells Norah O’Donnell. “It's a different kind of threat.” The chat will air in two parts, on Tuesday and Thursday, on the show, which starts at 7 a.m.O’Donnell talked to Wray at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan, and she will talk with him Wednesday in Washington. Wray says the United States is “safer” and "dramatically better prepared" to tackle terror threats.Yet he cautions that cyber threats are “at an all-time high” and that “terrorism today moves at the speed of social media.”In the in-depth interview, Wray provides details about...

  KOB 4by Joshua PanasALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A federal grand jury has indicted the five suspects who were arrested after a raid on a compound in northern New Mexico.Jany Leveille, 35, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 40, Hujrah Wahhaj, 37, Subhanah Wahhaj, 35, and Lucas Morton, 40, face federal firearms and conspiracy charges.The conspiracy charge alleges that, between December 2017 and August 2018, the defendants established a training camp and firing range in Taos County, where they stored firearms and ammunition and engaged in firearms and tactical training as part of their plan to prepare for violent attacks on government, military, educational, and financial institutions.The defendants are scheduled to appear in federal court in Albuquerque at 1:00 p.m. Wednesday to be arraigned on the indictment and for detention hearings.The defendants could face between 5-10 years in prison if convicted. Read more: https://www.kob.com/albuquerque-news/federal-grand-jury-indicts-nm-compound-suspects-on-firearms-conspiracy-charges/5066804/...

Express TONY Blair has called for a shift in the approach to international counter-terrorism, from “security only” towards more emphasis on soft power and prevention initiatives, in a new report from the Tony Blair Institute. By Abbie Llewelyn The former Prime Minister will give a speech in Washington DC today to advocate for a re-balancing of counter-extremism efforts.The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is launching the “global extremism monitor” which they describe as a “yearly tracker of global Islamist activity”.The study found that only one percent of the UK’s anti-terrorism budget is spent on “countering the ideology driving Islamist violence”.In a forward to the report, Mr Blair said: “Islamist extremism is global and growing.“It didn’t begin with Al-Qaeda, nor will it end with the defeat of ISIS.“It is a global movement, driven by a guiding transnational religious-political ideology.“There are now more than 120 groups operating in the world, all...

CSIS Strategy, Mass Effect, and States by James Andrew Lewis, Senior Vice President Despite all the attention, cyberspace is far from secure. Why this is so reflects conceptual weaknesses as much as imperfect technologies. Two questions highlight shortcomings in the discussion of cybersecurity. The first is why, after more than two decades, we have not seen anything like a cyber Pearl Harbor, cyber 9/11, or cyber catastrophe, despite constant warnings. The second is why, despite the increasing quantity of recommendations, there has been so little improvement, even when these recommendations are implemented.These questions share an answer: the concepts underlying cybersecurity are an aggregation of ideas conceived in a different time, based on millennial expectations about governance and international security. Similarly, the internet of the 1990s has become “cyber,” a portmanteau term that encompassed the broad range of global economic, political, and military activities transformed by the revolution created by digital...

Department of Justice U.S. Attorney’s Office Southern District of Texas Illegal Alien Sent to Federal Prison for Trying to Drown Federal AgentA 31-year-old Illegal alien residing in Ciudad Hidalgo, Michoacan, Mexico, has been ordered to prison following his conviction of assaulting a Border Patrol (BP) agent during his attempt to illegally enter the country, announced U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick. Edgar Garrido-Miranda pleaded guilty Dec. 5, 2017.Today, U.S. District Judge Marina Garcia Marmolejo ordered him to prison for 60 months and ordered restitution in the amount of $4,788.79. At the hearing, the court heard that this was not an accidental act on Garrido-Miranda's part. She sternly him warned him that things could have gone very wrong, including being shot. Not a U.S. citizen, he is expected to face deportation proceedings fooling his sentence.On Aug. 16, 2017, BP agents encountered a group of undocumented aliens near the Zacate Creek area in...

The Jerusalem Post REUTERS - A federal judge in Washington, D.C. on Monday ordered Iran to pay $104.7 million to victims of a June 1996 truck bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia that killed 19 US military personnel, though it is unclear when and how the plaintiffs might collect.Chief Judge Beryl Howell entered a default judgment against Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which did not defend against claims over their alleged roles in the attack, which sheared off the front of the Khobar Towers complex.Iran's permanent mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Howell said 15 service members who were at the complex when it was bombed could recover for assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.The judge also said 24 relatives could recover for emotional distress from seeing how the bombing affected their loved ones.Howell rejected punitive damages, saying US law...

Washington says it will hold Tehran accountable for attacks by Iran-backed militias after unknown assailants launch rockets at Baghdad green zone, Basra airport amid unrest The Times of Israel By AFP    WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday warned it would hold Iran accountable for any violence attributed to Tehran-allied militias in Iraq that results in damage to US facilities or injures American personnel.“Over the past few days, we have seen life-threatening attacks in Iraq, including on the United States consulate in Basra and against the American embassy compound in Baghdad,” the White House said in a statement. “Iran did not act to stop these attacks by its proxies in Iraq, which it has supported with funding, training, and weapons.”Three mortar shells hit late Friday the ultra-secure green zone in Baghdad, which houses Iraqi authorities and the US Embassy.The rare attack — whose perpetrators remain unidentified — did not cause...

'Terrorism Today Moves at the Speed of Social Media,' FBI Director Says on 9/11 Anniversary Fortune By Renae Reints “Today’s terrorism threat is everywhere, coast to coast, north, south, east, west,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told CBS This Morning in an interview aired Tuesday, the seventeenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.While noting that “we’re safer” than we were in 2001, Wray said that terrorism has “evolved.”“I think the threat, today’s terrorism threat, still includes sleeper cells, Al Qaeda, all the kind of major terrorist organizations that you would think of,” Wray told CBS, “but we’re also very focused now on homegrown violent extremists, which are people who are largely here already, in the United States.”According to Wray, of the FBI’s nearly 5,000 terrorism investigations within the past year, 1,000 have been homegrown violent extremists.The Bureau has thwarted a number of terrorist attacks recently, including one aimed at the San...

Palm Beach Post By Eliot Kleinberg Editor’s note: This story was originally published Sept. 9, 2016. DELRAY BEACH — On a July night 15 years ago, in Delray Beach, a police officer stopped a motorist for speeding. He let the man go with a warning.“Take a minute and consider how your careless driving affects the people you share these streets with and try to help make our streets a safer place to be,” the written warning read.Nine weeks later, Mohamed Atta flew an airplane into a building.In the summer leading up to the deadly terrorist attacks, 12 of the 19 hijackers who commandeered and crashed four jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people, lived in or had connections to Palm Beach County. Nearly the entire crew of the two jets that brought down the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center were here.They shopped at Target...

The Post and Courier by Robert Behre No one in the Lowcountry has lived 9/11 quite like Joe Daniels has.Daniels was named the new CEO of the National Medal of Honor Museum planned at Patriots Point earlier this year, not long after finishing up almost 12 years as president and CEO of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. He was drawn to that New York project because, on the morning just after the first passenger plane slammed into the World Trade Center, he was exiting a nearby subway.He vividly recalls all sorts of details from that tragic day, and his career would be steered into a position where he would hear firsthand so many 9/11 stories from so many others.Seventeen years later, Daniels said 9/11 should remind everyone that the United States, so long protected by two vast oceans, remains vulnerable. And that one of...

Jihad WatchExposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts By Robert Spencer “‘Nothing at this stage shows signs of a terrorist nature in these assaults,’ the sources said, adding that the attacker had targeted ‘strangers in the street.'” In a sane society, a Muslim migrant stabbing strangers in the street would be taken as a sign “of a terrorist nature in these assaults.” Why? Because the Islamic State issued this call in September 2014: So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or...

Washington Post Associated Press CAIRO — Egypt’s military says its special forces have held drills with special forces from the United States to exchange expertise on combating terrorism.The announcement was made in a Thursday statement by Egypt’s armed forces.The anti-terrorism drills come ahead of the “Bright Star” exercise on Sept. 8-20, which will involve additional countries including Greece, Jordan, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and France.The first “Bright Star” exercise took place in 1980, but the Obama administration postponed them in 2011 following the uprising that toppled longtime President Hosni Mubarak, and scrapped them in 2013 after Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of protesters while breaking up a mass sit-in.Last September, Egypt held the war games with U.S. troops for the first time in eight years. Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/egypt-us-special-forces-hold-drills-on-combating-terrorism/2018/09/06/c15c31ae-b1e8-11e8-8b53-50116768e499_story.html?utm_term=.20ad94acd4b8...

AFP Iraq executed by hanging seven of its citizens convicted of "terrorism", the head of the health ministry in the southern province of Dhi Qar said on Monday. Doctor Abdel Hassan al-Jabri said the bodies of the seven men were handed over on Monday to the morgue of the state hospital of Nassiriya, the provincial capital. They had been tried and convicted on charges of "terrorism", he said. In December last year Iraq declared "victory" over the Islamic State group after a three-year war against the jihadists who once controlled nearly one third of the country. In June, Iraq executed 13 jihadists after IS claimed responsibility for the murder of eight civilians. Iraq has repeatedly faced criticism from international human rights groups over the high number of death sentences handed down by its anti-terrorist courts. In 2017, at least 111 convicts were hanged in Iraq and this year 44 people...

by Tobias Petersson  •  Gatestone Institute On his Facebook page, Said Hadrous praises the Samer Issawi, a member of the DFLP terrorist group who was convicted in Israel of possession of explosives and attempted murder. In a post on Facebook on August 29, Lars Adaktusson, a Swedish member of the European Parliament for the Christian Democrats, said that the EU should designate the DFLP as a terrorist organization. Another Left Party candidate in the upcoming elections, Dr. Ali Hadrous, is running for the Landskrona City Council. He often shares Facebook posts showing sympathy with jailed Palestinian terrorists. Osama Tamim was a member of the DFLP in Syria and is now running for the Åmål City Council on the Left Party list. In 2015, Tamim's organization, Amal Palestina, distributed to children in Åmål a booklet in Arabic in which youngsters are portrayed favorably as instigators of violent activities. Anyone who believes...

NY Post By Paul Sperry After 9/11, the FBI warned the public about a number of potential terrorists they believed were being groomed for an encore attack. The feds described them as “the next Mohamed Atta” and put them on their Most Wanted Terrorists list. Today, these dangerous suspects remain on that same list and are still at large. Yet oddly, the FBI no longer talks about them.The only thing that’s changed, besides the descriptions of their appearances, is that the FBI is now offering bigger rewards for them, along with several key al Qaeda leaders also still on the loose.Families of 9/11 victims want to know why, after two wars costing trillions of dollars, do we appear no closer to capturing these top terrorists? Did the FBI stop hunting for them? Has it given up hope of finding them? Terrorism experts are equally troubled by the delay in bringing...

Voice of Europe Syrian refugee excuses stabbing a German woman because he acted according to his religion By Stan M Six months ago Abdullah A, a 17-year-old Syrian refugee, stabbed a woman with a jackknife in Burgwedel. The 24-year-old woman required emergency surgery and had to be put into an artificial coma. She remained in a life threatening condition for several days.The attacker came to Germany as a refugee along with his family in 2013. The prosecution is charging him with aggravated assault. This could mean between 6 months and 10 years in prison for him.German tabloid Bild reports his lawyer’s written statement: “His client doesn’t know any differently and according to his culture conflicts are solved with knives. An insult warrants stabbing somebody and if the offence is perceived as a serious one killing is permissible.” Read more: https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/09/syrian-refugee-excuses-stabbing-a-german-woman-because-he-acted-according-to-his-religion/...

Orlando Sentinel by David Harris - Contact Reporter Orange County deputies arrested a man after he told two employees at a Disney resort that he was sent by al-Qaida to “blow the place up,” according to an arrest affidavit.Deputies responded to Saratoga Springs Resort on July 21 after two employees greeting guests reported the comments. They identified the suspect as Gregory Lazarchick, 56, who was visiting from New Jersey, the affidavit said.The greeters told deputies they were asking guests about their days when he said he was having a bad day.He then said al-Qaida “sent me to blow the place up,” according to the affidavit. Lazarchick did not appear to be joking, the employees told deputies. Lazarchick admitted to saying something about al-Qaida but didn’t remember what exactly he said. He was remorseful and apologetic, deputies said. Deputies searched his room and didn’t find any bomb-making materials. Read more: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-al-qaeda-threat-disney-20180905-story.html...