TIME By Rahim Faiez (KABUL, Afghanistan) — A suicide bomber struck a voter registration center in the Afghan capital on Sunday, killing at least 57 people in an attack claimed by ISIS.Public Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Majro said another 119 people were wounded in Sunday’s attack, updating an earlier toll. Gen. Daud Amin, the Kabul police chief, said the suicide bomber targeted civilians who had gathered to receive national identification cards.The large explosion echoed across the city, shattering windows miles away from the attack site and damaging several nearby vehicles. Police blocked all roads to the blast site, with only ambulances allowed in. Local TV stations broadcast live footage of hundreds of distraught people gathered at nearby hospitals seeking word about loved ones. Majro said there were five small children and 21 women among the dead. More than a dozen children and nearly 50 women were wounded, he said, adding...

VOX The trial of the Pulse nightclub shooter’s wife dramatically changed the narrative about the deadly attack. By Jane Coaston It’s been nearly two years since the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people — widely believed to be an act of aggression against the club’s LGBTQ clientele and “undeniably a homophobic hate crime.” There’s now conclusive evidence that the shooter wasn’t intending to target LGBTQ people at all.In fact, he allegedly had no idea Pulse was a gay club, and simply Googled “Orlando nightclubs” after finding that security at his original target, a major shopping and entertainment complex, was too high, as reported by ClickOrlando.com.This evidence dramatically changes the mass shooting’s narrative; politicians and individuals across the political spectrum had positioned it as an anti-LGBTQ hate crime. Instead, the new evidence suggests, the Pulse nightclub shooting was intended as revenge for US anti-terror policies...

CBSMIAMI.COMFORT LAUDERDALE (CBSMiami) – Members of the Broward Sheriff’s Office rank-and-file have until Thursday to let their voices be heard in a no-confidence vote for Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel.Today, in person voting begins at the union office in Plantation.Deputies can check one of two boxes.  “They’ll come in, they’ll be given a ballot,” union president Jeff Bell explained, “A simple ballot right here, it’s a very simple question.  I have confidence in Sheriff Israel or I do not  have confidence in Sheriff Israel.” Bell said the historic move is due to the dysfunction of the office, which has been piling up for years but it was Israel’s handling of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that is a major component of the no-confidence campaign, saying he should not have put the full blame on Deputy Scot Peterson, the school’s resource officer.Video shows Peterson remained outside after investigators say...

Fox News By Katherine Lam, Matt Richardson Toronto cops nabbed the suspected driver who plowed into a group of people on a crowded city street Monday afternoon, leaving nine people dead. 16 people have been injured, Deputy Police Chief Peter Yuen said.Police confirmed to Fox News the arrest of the suspect, which came just minutes after news of the incident broke. "The van involved in multiple pedestrians stuck in the Yonge and Finch area of Toronto has been located and the driver arrested," Toronto police tweeted. The identity of the driver has not been released. Cops initially said eight to 10 people were hit near Yonge Street and Finch Avenue just before 1:30 p.m. A nearby hospital tweeted that it took in seven patients. After striking the pedestrians, the driver sped off, CBC reported. Photos from the site of the collision showed pedestrians attempting to help people on the ground...

InHomelandsecurity.com SEATTLE (AP) — A Seattle area man suspected of sending suspicious packages to multiple government agencies and military installations around the nation’s capital was charged Tuesday with shipping explosive materials.Thanh Cong Phan, 43, of Everett, was charged with one count of shipment of explosive materials in federal court in Seattle, where he made his initial appearance Tuesday.Get started on your Homeland Security Degree at American Military University.A complaint alleges that Phan shipped a vial containing black powder with a fuse on March 16 from a U.S. Postal Service kiosk in Mill Creek, north of Seattle. Ashwin Cattamanchi, a public defender representing Phan, declined to comment on the case when reached by phone.Eleven suspicious packages were received through the U.S. Postal Service at various government agencies and military installations in the Washington D.C. area, including the U.S. Secret Service White House Mail Screen Facility, the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren...

by Dan Peltier, Skift The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has processed travelers with facial recognition scans at many U.S. airports, part of pilot programs during the past year that the government now believes it’s ready to roll out nationwide.That’s the view of Isabel Hill, director of the National Travel & Tourism Office, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, who spoke at the World Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Wednesday about the future of secure and seamless travel.Various airlines and airports have trialed facial recognition in recent years, such as JetBlue and New York’s JFK Airport, the latter part of one of Homeland Security’s pilots. “We’re very advanced in facial biometric entry and exit,” said Hill. Homeland Security developed the backend technology for the pilot programs. “We’re developing a process where you’ll go from reservation to destination without every showing a boarding pass,”...

Washington Free BeaconBy Adam Kredo   The al Qaeda terror organization is using Google Maps to plan precision jihadist attacks across the Middle East, according to a new propaganda video released by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that features a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who has since returned to the terror group after being freed from the prison, according to a new report from a regional media monitoring organization.Al-Malahem, the media arm of Al-Qaeda In The Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, released on Friday a propaganda video featuring Sudanese national and former Gitmo detainee Ibrahim Al-Qusi, a onetime financial asset for al Qaeda who was arrested in December 2001 and spent more than 10 years as a convicted terrorist in Gitmo before being released to Sudan in 2012.Al-Qusi appears to be one of many former Gitmo inmates who returned to the battlefield after being freed from Gitmo.In the newly released video...

CATO Institute By David Bier President Donald Trump has promised to implement “extreme vetting” of immigrants and foreign travelers, asserting that widespread vetting failures had allowed many terrorists to enter the United States. This policy analysis provides the first estimate of the number of terrorism vetting failures, both before and after the vetting enhancements implemented in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. Vetting failures are rare and have become much rarer since 9/11. A terrorism vetting failure occurs when a foreigner is granted entry to the United States who had terrorist associations or sympathies and who later committed a terrorism offense including support for terrorist groups abroad. This analysis defines vetting failure broadly to include individuals who had privately held extremist views before entry. Moreover, unless evidence exists to the contrary, it assumes that anyone who entered the United States legally either as an adult or older teenager, and...

Department of Justice U.S. Attorney’s OfficeNorthern District of Ohio Press ReleaseThree men plead guilty to concealing sending money to Anwar Al-AwlakiThree men pleaded guilty to their roles in concealing the provision of thousands of dollars to Anwar Al-Awlaki in an effort to support violent jihad against U.S. military personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world.The guilty pleas were announced by Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, U.S. Attorney Justin E. Herdman of the Northern District of Ohio and Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony of the FBI’s Cleveland Division.Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, 38; Asif Ahmed Salim, 37; and Sultane Room Salim, 43, each pleaded guilty this week to one count of concealment of financing of terrorism. They are expected to be sentenced later this year.“These defendants provided thousands of dollars to finance terrorism, then used every effort to conceal their activity from law enforcement,” U.S. Attorney...

By Nick Paton Walsh and Salma Abdelaziz, CNN (CNN) For Samantha Sally, a vacation was all it took to flip her quiet middle-American world of muscle cars, cotton candy and an Indiana packing company, into the horror of the ritual beatings, serial rape, torture and propaganda videos of ISIS's so-called Caliphate.A holiday is what her husband, Moussa Elhassani, promised her when she went to Hong Kong in 2014, she says. The couple was planning to move to Morocco to start a new, cheaper life, she says, and needed to go through Hong Kong to transfer money.Days later, Sally says, she stood on the Turkish border with Syria, on the edge of ISIS territory, her husband holding her daughter, Sarah, while she held her son, Matthew, then 7, confronted with an impossible choice: Abandon her daughter to ISIS and save her son, or follow her husband into ISIS's so-called Caliphate. Following...

By The Clarion Project ISIS’ latest threat is against New York City, where the group has promised to attack the subway. A new poster appeared on a messaging platform used by the terror group showing a man standing inside Brooklyn Bridge Station at High Street,  the Daily Mail reported.Behind him sticks of dynamite are shown rigged to a timer. The poster states, “You will not expect where we will attack.”The poster was produced by the group’s propaganda wing, the Wafa Media Foundation, which also produced posters threatening the 2018 World Cup to be held in Russia. That poster states, “Putin: You disbeliever. You will pay the price for killing Muslims. Just Terror.”The group also threatened to attack Paris again. Last year, its propaganda was directed towards the Queen of England and the Vatican. Read more: https://clarionproject.org/latest-taunt-isis-threatens-attack-nyc-subway/...

DW Documentary ISIS, or so-called Islamic State, made millions by taking hostages - many of whom didn’t survive. An in-depth look at how kidnapping helped IS rise to power.   ...

Evening Standard by Martin Bentham Britain must prepare to face the threat of Islamic State terrorists using drones to attack buildings and other landmark targets, a security expert will warn in a book published next month. Nicholas Grossman said that IS had already used drones packed with explosives in Syria and that no terror group had done more to exploit the new technology. He said options for protecting against the danger included using electrical repulsion systems. But he warned that if the use of drones for commercial deliveries and other purposes becomes more common it will become increasingly difficult to stop terrorists using drones to destructive effect.  There are already concerns about the potential risk that such devices could pose to aircraft if they stray into flight paths, and the possibility that out-of-control drones could injure people. But in his book Drones and Terrorism, Mr Grossman, an academic from the...

Marine Corps Times By: Shawn Snow Thousands of Marines and U.S. troops kicked off a major training exercise Sunday hosted by Jordan that will include civilian evacuation operations, and chemical and biological drills, according to U.S. military officials.Known as Eager Lion, the nearly two-week exercise started Sunday, coincidentally following U.S., French and British strikes on three Syrian chemical weapons sites. The strikes were in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack April 7 on the Syrian city of Douma that killed scores of citizens.“Planned training evolutions include live-fire ranges, fire support coordination exercises, military working dog training, close quarters battle, military operations in urban terrain, chemical/biological/radiological/nuclear training, visit/board/search/seizure, and an Embassy Reinforcement/ Noncombatant Evacuation Operation, among others,” Capt. Natalie Poggemeyer, 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement to Marine Corps Times on Saturday.Military officials would not confirm whether the chemical and biological training in the region was in...

The New Arab by Zohra El-Mokhtari What is terrorism? French, Tunisian and international legislation has not provided a clear definition of the word, and the UN struggles to define a concept that has meant different things to different people. So how is it possible to fight something that is so vaguely defined?Countries including France, Tunisia, Israel and the United States have often used the concept of "war on terror" without giving it much explanation.On 9 January 2016, while paying homage to the victims of the 2015 attack in the French supermarket Hypercacher, Prime Minister Emmanuel Valls repeated the phrases he had used in November 2015: "Those enemies who attack their co-citizens deserve no explanation. Because explaining would be the beginning of forgiveness."More recently, after the attacks that took place in Aude (though no longer prime minister), he pleaded for "a ban on Salafism". Like other presidents and prime ministers across...

  Read more at The Clarion Project

9news.com.au by Nick Pearson When Frenchman Emile Henry detonated a bomb in the middle of one of Paris' most popular cafes in 1894, he set the spark for a new kind of violence.Bloodshed was nothing new in the 1800s, a century which included the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and countless colonial conquests.And specific acts of violence were hardly unusual either. Two US presidents had been successfully assassinated in the past 30 years.But what set Henry's attack apart was his target, according to Yale University historian John Merriman."His bomb in 1894 which he threw into the Café Terminus, what made it in my mind the first act of modern terror was that terrorists used to go after heads of state, like (President William) McKinley," Dr Merriman told nine.com.au."When Henry went out to kill, he was out to kill ordinary people, killing them because they were bourgeois."Henry was an anarchist,...

Fox News Hollie McKay RAQQA, Syria – The Syrian government and its Iran and Russian backers continue to rebuff staunchly any responsibility for chemical attacks in the war-ravaged country — of which there allegedly have been more than 50 since the war began — including last weekend in the city of Douma. Instead, they point the finger at opposition “terrorist” groups at having either “staged” the events or dispersed the chemicals themselves. And while the U.S. and allied French and U.K. officials collected irrefutable evidence linking the Assad regime to the recent attacks — prompting retaliatory action to take out their stockpiles early Saturday — the showdown has cast a renewed spotlight onto the chemical weapons use of non-state actors in the war-torn country. According to some experts, this latest development poses a perhaps even more direct threat on U.S. interests. “There has always been a sneaking suspicion that ISIS...

Minneapolis Star Tribune An atypical terror case comes to close with 20-year sentence By ERIC TUCKER and SADIE GURMAN Associated PressBALTIMORE — It was July 2015 when the FBI, scrambling to contain a surge in Islamic State group propaganda, first visited an Egyptian-American newspaper deliveryman in Maryland.Agents needed to ask Mohamed Elshinawy why his phone number had surfaced in an investigation involving ISIS extremists and how he came to receive a $1,000 Western Union transaction from Egypt.During hours of questioning, Elshinawy first suggested the money was from his mother. Next he said it was for an iPhone purchase for a friend. After being reminded it was a crime to lie to federal agents, he proceeded to tell a whole new story — that he had indeed received money from the Islamic State but that he was actually scamming the group instead of planning an attack.It was a pivotal moment in...

by Clarion ProjectA U.S.-led effort to get member states of the United Nations to take appropriate measures to combat terror travel was passed unanimously by the Security Council. Here are the solutions proposed by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2396 and the U.S.: Read more: https://clarionproject.org/us-leads-global-track-down-foreign-jihadis/...