A young Muslim woman is suing Chicago police who decided she was a "lone wolf" terrorist because she wore a hijab, or headscarf, and was walking briskly out of a city subway station on the Fourth of July last year while wearing a backpack. Read the rest
Congress today publicly released 28 previously secret pages of its 9/11 inquiry that detail possible connections between officials in the Saudi government, and the hijackers who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Read the rest
@LASchools closed today regarding unspecified threat. #LASD #LAPD and #LASPD Investigating.
— LA County Sheriff's (@LASDHQ) December 15, 2015
UPDATE, 1034am PT: NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton says NYC got the same threats as LAUSD did, and determined it to be a hoax. Bratton says LA authorities are massively overreacting. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck disagrees.
Wouldn't be a Tuesday in America without an incident of mass violence or a threat of one.
“Officials closed all Los Angeles Unified School District campuses Tuesday morning after receiving a 'credible threat' of violence involving backpacks and packages left at campuses,” the Los Angeles Times was among the first to report today. LAUSD is America's second-largest school district, with more than 700,000 students. Read the rest
A mother in northeast France received a text from a phone traced to Syria: “Your son died as a martyr Nov. 13.” Read the rest
ISIS, or as they hate to be called, Daesh, released a video online Wednesday threatening an imminent attack on New York City. Read the rest
An overnight blast blamed on the Islamic extremist terror organization Boko Haram killed 32 people and wounded 80 Tuesday at a truck stop in northeastern Nigeria. Read the rest
Swedish police swarmed on this gentlemanly beard club who were taking a group photo, because the cops received a call from a worried onlooker who believed the group was a a terrorist meet-up. It was not ISIS, ISIL, Al Qaeda, or anything like that. Just a meeting of a beard enthusiast club. Wonder if the ending would have been as mellow if they hadn't all been white guys. Read the rest
Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, known for kidnapping hundreds of school girls, are fleeing their forest hideouts to escape "mystical bees" and "mysterious snakes" that are physical manifestations of the people they have killed. Read the rest
Two days after a group of Somali islamist militants vowed to execute Kenyan hostages, and tweeted a video of a captive pleading for the Kenyan government to help free them, the Al-Shabaab Twitter account @HSMPress was suspended. A Google cache is visible here. Warning: includes gruesome photos. The group took a French intelligence officer hostage, then apparently murdered him after an unsuccessful attempted raid by the French military which the US assisted). An @HSMPress press release about that killing is available on Twitlonger.
The Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Twitter account has been around since 2011, promoting the group's vision of strict sharia law in Somalia, 140 characters at a time. The US State Department was reportedly looking in to shutting it down ages ago. Wonder what took them so long?
For its part, Al Shabaab blames its "Christian enemies" for suspending its Twitter account. And they do sound rather miffed about being blocked on the popular social networking platform. Read the rest
Via the BB Submitterator, reader Keith Irwin writes,
Carlos Miller reports that there's a new TSA poster which seems to suggest that people who photograph airplanes are suspicious. The TSA blog has responded saying that 1) the poster isn't new and 2) the pictures on the poster just show general things which happen around airports and are not meant to cast photographers as terrorists. That their current group of posters includes pictures of a stewardess and a maintenance person probably backs up their story. Just in case, though, I fixed it to help us be alert of the real threat which photographers pose.
TSA publishes new posters depicting photographers as terrorists Read the rest
