ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Tell a Big Lie and Keep Repeating It By Norman Rogers

Posted By on November 11th, 2017

If you want to tell a big lie, a good vehicle is “science.” Like a wolf hiding in a sheep’s skin, lies hide in lab coats worn by liars with Ph.Ds. We are gullible because science and scientists have a positive image. The positive image belongs to the science of the past, before the entrepreneurial idea of inventing fake catastrophes to attract vast sums of government money.

When a lie is backed by millions of government dollars, it is difficult for the truth to compete. The truth comes from scientists not corrupted by money, and from small organizations dependent on private donations. The truth is outgunned by government financed propaganda mills. The promoters of fake catastrophe depict themselves as disinterested idealists. The promoters of the truth are depicted as servants of evil industries, or as mentally disturbed crackpots.

Pravda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Union. Pravda means “official truth” in Russian. Pretty much everyone in Russia knew that there was very little truth in the pages of Pravda. But to publicly dispute the “official truth” was a very dangerous step. Often dissenters were sent to insane asylums. In the United States, as a climate skeptic, you may lose your job. Almost certainly you will be vilified as incompetent. But so far, you won’t go to prison or to an asylum, although there are calls to criminally prosecute “climate deniers.” There are also those who think that non-believers in the catastrophe are mentally ill. The obvious solution is to send the skeptics to prison or to an insane asylum. Why should we think that true believers in global warming, if they gain enough power, would be less totalitarian than communists?

Fake science prospers for a number of reasons. Investigative reporters are mostly ignorant concerning science. The average educated person is equally ignorant. Often those who do understand that something is fake don’t dare speak up because they work for bureaucracies that are promoting the fake science.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

From India to Israel, Making Beautiful Music Zubin Mehta discusses Wagner, Mahler and the evolution of the Jewish state in the half-century since he adopted it. By Tunku Varadarajan

Posted By on November 11th, 2017

For the first few minutes of our meeting, Zubin Mehta is on his cellphone with an old friend (who, it turns out, is a grandson of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan). The friend, like Mr. Mehta, is an Indian Zoroastrian—or Parsi—and the two are making plans for dinner after the maestro and his Israel Philharmonic Orchestra finish their performance that night at Carnegie Hall. They speak in Gujarati, the adoptive language of the Parsis, who fled persecution in newly Islamized Persia in the ninth century and took shelter in western India.

After he’s sorted out dinner, Mr. Mehta turns to me, mildly irritated. “New York is surprising. The restaurants all close at 10:30 p.m.,” he says. The night before, he had wanted an 11 p.m. table at a favorite spot, “but they said, ‘We cannot serve you that late, we are unionized.’ ” Tonight he is going to an Indian restaurant of repute that is happy to accommodate a late-dining celebrity. “It’s good food,” he tells me, adding in a very Indian touch: “Give them our name if you go. Then they’ll pay more attention.”

Mr. Mehta is the musical director of the Israel Philharmonic, an orchestra he has worked with and loved for more than 50 years, and with which he is touring the U.S., possibly for the last time. At 81, he’s still a maestro with more raw oomph than anyone else waving a baton. He’s also exactly as old as his orchestra, which was founded in 1936 by Bronislaw Huberman, a Polish violinist who made it his mission to find dignified work in Palestine for Jewish musicians forced from their jobs by the Nazis.

For a foreign, non-Jewish man, Mr. Mehta’s association with Israel is remarkable for its longevity and passion. Yet its beginnings were refreshingly humdrum. “It started by chance,” Mr. Mehta says. “A great conductor, Eugene Ormandy, fell ill and couldn’t do a series of concerts with the Israel Philharmonic in 1961. I was a jobless conductor in Vienna, with my two children, and they called me to cover as substitute. They sent me two tickets, for my wife and myself.”

He recalls the contract as grueling—about 15 concerts in a short span—but there was “an immediate good feeling between me and the orchestra. We hit it off, musically and spiritually. And I felt very at home in Israel, because it’s somewhat like our place, somewhat like India.” I press him to elaborate. “Their temperament is very much like India,” he says. “They all talk at the same time. They’re very opinionated, very argumentative, very hospitable.”

Mr. Mehta doesn’t say so, but when he signed on full-time in 1969, he quickly became a sort of popular hero, an outsider who had embraced Israel in a time of national hardship and international ostracism. He became friendly with Israeli founder and former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Another friend was Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek: “He was Viennese, and I’m half-Viennese because of my musical culture—I speak the Viennese dialect—so we became very close,” Mr. Mehta says. As for Ben-Gurion, he “didn’t love music so much, but he was a scholar of oriental religions. He told me things about Zoroastrianism that I didn’t even know. You know, we modern Parsis, we don’t know too much. We even pray in a language we don’t understand”—a reference to Avestan, the ancient Iranian language now used only in Zoroastrian scriptures.

Besides being impressed with Ben-Gurion’s erudition, Mr. Mehta was struck by “how very depressed he was” that India’s government had condemned Israel for the Six Day War in 1967. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had visited Cairo in solidarity with Israel’s enemies just four months after hostilities ceased. Mr. Mehta says Ben-Gurion “said to me, ‘We Israelis—and I particularly—worship Mahatma Gandhi. He managed to get rid of the British without spilling blood and we, in our small little country, had to kill and shoot them.’ ” Ben-Gurion couldn’t understand how the Mahatma’s country had become hostile to Israel. “And to this day, I don’t know either,” Mr. Mehta says. “What did India have to do with the Six Day War? Israel didn’t start it!”

Mr. Mehta still has Indian citizenship and is delighted that India and Israel now enjoy close relations, having established full diplomatic ties in 1992. I ask how it felt to be in the vanguard of this rapprochement. “Well,” he says, “I was in a way a substitute ambassador. In 1994, I took the Israel Philharmonic to Bombay and Delhi, and they played free of charge. Itzhak Perlman, the great violinist, didn’t take a fee. So I couldn’t be happier.”

Has Israel changed over the many years Mr. Mehta has known it? The maestro grows somber, and—in a faithful reflection of the way so many Israelis are themselves—quite critical. “Oh yes, I’m afraid,” he says, “and not for the better. This obsession with building settlements in land that really doesn’t belong to them—that’s where the argument is.” It’s a “great tragedy,” he adds, “that Sharon isn’t there anymore.” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke in 2006 and died eight years later. “He used to be very militant, and then completely changed. He would not have subsidized these settlements to the extent that is currently happening.” CONTINUE AT SITE

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

An Environmentalist Sues over an Academic Disagreement Meet Stanford’s $10 million man. By Robert Bryce

Posted By on November 11th, 2017

Leonardo di Caprio’s favorite renewable-energy promoter, Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson, has set a new record in thin-skinned-ness. Jacobson has filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and Chris Clack, the lead author of a paper NAS published in June that roundly debunked a previous paper of Jacobson’s. The earlier paper had claimed it would be possible for the U.S. to run entirely on renewable energy by 2050.

Even when Jacobson implied in an email to Clack that he was going to sue, a development I noted here in July, I didn’t believe he would actually do it. Nevertheless, on September 29, he did. Jacobson’s 42-page lawsuit, filed in federal court, hinges on the fact that Clack — and the 20 co-authors of the paper, who are not named as defendants — refused to accept the Stanford professor’s numbers on the amount of hydropower available in the U.S.

Clack’s paper found that Jacobson had overstated hydropower’s potential by a factor of ten or so. The land-use requirements for wind power were equally cartoonish. Clack determined that Jacobson’s all-renewable scheme would require covering more than 190,000 square miles with turbines — an area larger than the state of California. Given the burgeoning coast-to-coast backlash against Big Wind, such a notion is absurd on its face.

Rather than admit any errors, Jacobson claims that Clack — a Ph.D. mathematician who has worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and taught at the University of Colorado, and now has a consulting firm — and the National Academy damaged his reputation and made him and his co-authors “look like poor, sloppy, incompetent, and clueless researchers.”

In an email, Clack told me that it’s “unfortunate” that Jacobson has “chosen to reargue his points in a court of law, rather than in the academic literature, where they belong.”

Despite the many flaws in his plan, Jacobson made himself the patron saint of America’s richest and most powerful green groups by claiming a fully renewable energy sector was possible. His papers, many of them peer-reviewed, lent a patina of credibility to the all-renewable-no-fossil-fuel-no-nuclear dogma that Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other groups have been feeding their math-challenged disciples for decades. In 2013, Jacobson even appeared on David Letterman’s show.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Visit the Marine Corps Museum The Quantico institution showcases 242 years of bravery and valor. By Hans A. von Spakovsky

Posted By on November 11th, 2017

To help celebrate the 242nd birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, my wife and I recently visited one of the best museums in the Washington, D.C., area — the National Museum of the Marine Corps, located just outside Quantico Marine Base about a half-hour drive south of Washington in Virginia.

Most visitors to Washington spend their time visiting the Smithsonian museums, not realizing that another terrific museum is just a short drive away. From the splendid architecture of the building itself — it’s designed to look like the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima — to the interior displays and exhibits, it provides an informed, educational, interesting, and frankly emotional tour through the storied and dramatic history of the Marines.

In fact, the second flag raised on Mt. Suribachi — the one captured by Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Joe Rosenthal in one of the most famous photographs in history — is actually on display in the museum.

You can’t help but get a taste of the toughness, professionalism, and go-for-broke style of the Marines as soon as you walk in the door. There, carved on the wall of the high atrium that is the center of the museum, are the words of a legend in the Marine Corps — Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph “Dan” Daily: “Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”

Daily yelled those famous words at his men as they were charging the Germans during the Battle of Belleau Wood during World War I, a battle in which the Marines defeated much larger German forces while losing more men than had been killed and wounded in all of the prior battles of the Marines combined since their founding.

There is a special exhibit at the museum dedicated to the Battle of Belleau Wood. Daily received the Navy Cross for heroism during that battle and is one of only 19 men in the entire history of the U.S. to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor twice — once for his defense of the U.S. and foreign diplomatic delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a second time in Haiti in 1915.

There are special exhibit halls dedicated to everything from the Continental Marine’s first sea battles as part of the fledgling U.S. Navy during the Revolution to the “shores of Tripoli,” the “Halls of Montezuma” during the Mexican-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Besides the major conflicts the Marines participated in, the museum also highlights the “savage wars of peace,” to quote Rudyard Kipling — the numerous battles fought by the Marines all over the world during official times of peace. Soon to come in 2018: exhibits showing the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Second Fusion GPS Dossier Implicated Clinton Foundation Donors The Kremlin hoped to undermine the United States government regardless of which party won. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 11th, 2017

Fusion GPS, the research firm commissioned by the Clinton campaign to compile the so-called Trump dossier, is also responsible for a second dossier — the information that Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to top Trump-campaign officials in June 2016. The second dossier reportedly alleged financial misconduct by major contributors to the Clinton Global Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation.

Fusion dug up this information in connection with its work in behalf of Prevezon, a Russian company controlled by Putin cronies. At the time, Prevezon was the defendant in a multi-million-dollar asset-forfeiture suit brought by the Justice Department. The suit stemmed from the Putin regime’s fleecing of an investment fund called Hermitage.

Years earlier, to investigate the Russian government’s role in the fraud, Hermitage hired Sergei Magnitsky, a private lawyer in Moscow. His exposure of the Putin regime’s complicity led to his imprisonment, torture, and murder. That atrocity led Congress to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which allows the federal government to seize and forfeit fraud proceeds. This, in turn, has led to a furious Kremlin campaign to smear Hermitage’s chief executive officer, Bill Browder, and to get the Magnitsky Act repealed. In the United States, that campaign has been spearheaded by Veselnitskaya.

It was the Magnitsky Act that the Justice Department used to sue Prevezon. Veselnitskaya is Prevezon’s lawyer in Moscow, and she helped the company retain American counsel to defend them in the suit — a lawyer ironically named John Moscow and his firm, Baker Hostetler. These lawyers hired Fusion GPS to do research on Browder and Hermitage for litigation purposes. It was in that role that Fusion prepared the dossier, which, as far as we currently know, did not actually implicate Mrs. Clinton directly in any misconduct.

My conjecture is that there are three explanations for what happened here, none of which excludes the others: (a) The Russians do not understand American political campaigns well enough to appreciate that alleged misconduct by a donor does not hurt a candidate if the candidate is not complicit in the misconduct; (b) the Putin regime attempted (unsuccessfully) to lure the Trump campaign into its anti–Magnitsky Act effort by convincing Don Trump Jr. and other campaign officials that there was a useful anti-Clinton angle to be exploited; and (c) the Putin regime calculated that, simply by taking a meeting with a Kremlin emissary on the promise of damaging information about Clinton, the Trump campaign would foolishly expose itself to blackmail by Putin.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: VETERANS DAY

Posted By on November 10th, 2017

Some words stir the soul when I think of those who served and serve in defense of our nation.

President Ronald Reagan on Veterans Day November 11, 1985 at Arlington Cemetery

“It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country, in defense of us, in wars far away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray haired. But most of them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives — the one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”

President Franklin Roosevelt in a letter to the families of fallen soldiers:

” He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die that freedom might live and grow and increase its blessings. Freedom lives and through it he lives in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.”

Hannah Senesh, World War 2 hero and martyr and poet who was imprisoned and tortured but did not reveal the secrets of her mission to save Hungarian Jews. She was tried and executed. From her poem “Blessed is the Match”:

“Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.”

God Bless our Veterans….rsk

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Remembering Stalingrad 75 Years Later It is now fashionable to demonize Russia, but most Americans have forgotten key aspects of 20th-century history, including the Russians’ fight to stop the march of Nazi Germany. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 10th, 2017

Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded — and would soon destroy — a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany’s best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942–43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.

Before Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler regularly boasted on German radio as his victorious forces pressed their offensives worldwide. After Stalingrad, Hitler went quiet, brooding in his various bunkers for the rest of the war.

During the horrific Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted more than five months, Russian, American, and British forces also went on the offensive against the Axis powers in the Caucasus, in Morocco and Algeria, and on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

Yet just weeks before the Battle of Stalingrad began, the Allies had been near defeat. They had lost most of European Russia. Much of Western Europe was under Nazi control. Axis armies occupied large swaths of North Africa. The Japanese controlled most of the Pacific and Asia, from Manchuria to Wake Island.

Stalingrad was part of a renewed German effort in 1942 to drive southward toward the Caucasus Mountains, to capture the huge Soviet oil fields. The Germans might have pulled it off had Hitler not divided his forces and sent his best army northward to Stalingrad to cut the Volga River traffic and take Stalin’s eponymous frontier city.

By the time two Red Army pincers trapped the Germans at Stalingrad in November, Russia had already suffered some 6 million combat casualties during the first 16 months of Germany’s invasion. By German calculations, Russia should have already submitted, just like all of the Third Reich’s prior European enemies except Britain.

Instead, the Red Army drew the Germans deeper into the traditional quagmire of Russia until the 6th Army was low on supplies, freezing in the winter cold, and trapped more than 1,500 miles from Berlin. How did the Red Army not only survive but go on the offensive against the deadly invaders?

In part, it had no choice. Germany was intent on not just absorbing Russia, but wiping it out or enslaving millions of its citizens. In part, Britain and the United States under the Lend-Lease policy began sending huge amounts of material aid, providing everything from boots to locomotives. In part, Red Army soldiers were terrified of their own communist strongman, Josef Stalin.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Diversity Visa Lottery: A Game Of “Russian Roulette” American sovereignty and security dismantled under the guise of “diversity.” Michael Cutler

Posted By on November 10th, 2017

On Tuesday, October 31, 2017 New York City suffered a deadly terror attack on a well-known and heavily used bike path in lower Manhattan, just blocks from what, in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11, had come to be known as “Ground Zero.”

The perpetrator of this heinous savage attack is a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who reportedly legally immigrated to the United States in 2010 subsequent to winning the Diversity Visa Lottery.

Consequently, attention immediately turned to the Diversity Visa Program that annually enables approximately 50,000 aliens annually to enter the United States as lawful immigrants.

Aliens who participate in this visa lottery are citizens of countries that send the United States the smallest number of lawful immigrants. These aliens do not need to possess any special skills or abilities and do not need to have any family ties to the United States.

There is no application fee for this category of immigrant visa. Under this program apparently being “diverse” is all that matters. This does absolutely nothing to benefit America or Americans and therefore must be terminated.

The State Department provides a table for Fiscal Years 2007-2016 for “Immigrant Number Use for Visa Issuances and Adjustments of Status in the Diversity Immigrant Category.”

Clearly, more than 16 years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the “All Clear” has not sounded and the “War on Terror” continues on as more innocent victims are slaughtered. Nevertheless, there are members of Congress who have recently questioned the legal authority known as AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists) being used by President Trump to deploy members of the U.S. Armed Forces to wage war against ISIS, Al Qaeda and related deadly terrorist organizations. AUMF was passed by Congress just days after the attacks of 9/11.

Ironically, the latest deadly terror attack in New York City was carried out even as some members of Congress were publicly questioning AUMF, incredibly complaining that it gives President Trump too much discretion to deploy our armed forces to fight terrorist organizations that seek to kill as many Americans as possible, especially within our own borders.

Those politicians must not have gotten the memo that wars and armed conflicts do not end because leaders unilaterally wish that the wars or conflicts would end. Wars only end when both sides agree to a cease-fire or a more permanent solution is reached. Peace can only be achieved when the aggressors are forced to cease hostile actions. Invariably, this requires the demonstration of unwavering resolve. This requires the use, or threat of use, of overwhelming force.

The United States has no alternative.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

News Nanny: The Race to Censor Internet News If we don’t fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 10th, 2017

How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model.

Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by “qualified, accountable human beings” from teams of “40 to 60 journalists.” Once upon a time, journalism meant original writing. Now it means deciding which original writing to censor.

“Can trust be monetized?” The Street’s article on News Guard asks. But it isn’t really trust that’s being monetized. It’s censorship. It’s doing the dirty work that Google and Facebook don’t want to do.

The Dems and their media allies have been pressuring Google and Facebook to do something about the “fake news” that they blame for Trump’s win. The big sites outsourced the censorship to media fact checkers. The message was, “Don’t blame us, now you’re in charge.”

Facebook made a deal with ABC News and the AP, along with Politifact, FactCheck and Snopes, to outsource the censoring for $100K. When two of these left-wing groups declare that an article is fake, Facebook marks it up and viewership drops by 80%.

Facebook is reportedly considering adding the Weekly Standard to its panel of fact checkers. Even if that were to happen, it would be the difference between putting the New York Times without David Brooks or the Times with David Brooks in charge of deciding what you can read on Facebook. Adding a token conservative who is acceptable to the left doesn’t change the inherent bias of the system.

Not only does the roster of fact checkers lean to the left, but so do its notions of what’s true and false. For example, Snopes and Politifact both insist that General Pershing’s forces never buried the bodies of Muslim terrorists with pigs. But General Pershing specifically stated in his autobiography, “These Juramentado attacks were materially reduced in number by a practice that the Mohamedans held in abhorrence. The bodies were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in France: October 2017 “We are still in a state of war.” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on November 10th, 2017

Article 57 of the French Civil Code states that the name chosen by parents must be in “the best interests of the child.” If the public prosecutor thinks the name “Jihad” is contrary to the law, he can ask a judge to order the name to be changed. If the parents are unable or unwilling to choose a new name, the judge has the right to choose a name.

Of the 1,900 French jihadists fighting with the Islamic State, as many as one-fifth have received as much as €500,000 ($580,000) in social welfare payments from the French state, according to Le Figaro.

Henda Ayari, in an interview with Le Parisien, gave detailed public testimony accusing Tariq Ramadan of sexually assaulting her in Paris. She said that Ramadan believes that “either you wear a veil or you get raped.”

October 1. A 29-year-old illegal immigrant from Tunisia stabbed two women to death at the central train station in Marseille. Witnesses heard the assailant shout “Allahu Akbar” as he lunged at the women with a 20-centimetre (eight-inch) knife before threatening soldiers, who shot him dead. The man, identified as Ahmed Hanachi, was using seven different identities and had a long criminal history. He had been arrested in Lyon for shoplifting just days before the attack, but those charges were dropped due to a lack evidence. He was released, despite not having the documents needed to live in France. Why he was never deported remains unclear.

October 2. Five people were arrested in Paris after police found four makeshift bombs at a building in the 16th arrondissement, one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Police said there was no one living in the apartment block who might be considered a target for jihadists. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb surmised that the bomb was simply meant to create fear: “Blowing up a building in a posh neighborhood shows that no one is safe…that it could happen anywhere in France.” He added: “This shows that the level of the threat in France is extremely high…yes, even if the Islamic State has suffered military setbacks, we are still in a state of war.”

October 2. The trial began of Abdelkader Merah, the 35-year-old brother of Mohamed Merah. In March 2012, Mohamed in March 2012 had gone on a nine-day shooting spree in southern France, killing three soldiers and gunning down a teacher and three children at a Jewish school before being shot dead by police. Abdelkader stands accused of “knowingly” helping to facilitate the “preparation” of the attack, in particular by stealing the scooter used for the three separate shootings. He appeared alongside 34-year-old Fettah Malki, accused of giving Mohamed Merah a bulletproof jacket, an Uzi submachine gun and the ammunition he unloaded on his victims. Abdelkader Merah faces a possible life sentence while Malki could get 20 years in prison.

October 5. Six gas canisters attached to a “crude detonator device” were found under several trucks at a cement company in Paris. The trucks, parked in the French capital’s northeastern 19th arrondissement, belonged to Franco-Swiss cement company Lafarge-Holcim. Lafarge is being investigated over claims that it paid taxes to the Islamic State and other armed groups in Syria to keep a plant running in a war zone. The company admitted that it resorted to “unacceptable measures” to continue operations at a now-closed cement factory in northern Syria in 2013 and 2014, after most French groups had quit the war-torn country.

October 6. A French woman who travelled three times to Syria in support of her jihadist son was sentenced to 10 years in prison for being part of a terrorist conspiracy. Christine Rivière, 51, was sentenced for her “unfailing commitment” to jihad and for helping a number of young women travel to Syria to marry jihadists, including her son, Tyler Vilus. Rivière, a Muslim convert who was nicknamed “Mama Jihad,” said of her son: “I didn’t want to push him to die a martyr, but that could happen. Then he would be in heaven, near Allah.”

October 6. French prosecutors charged three men in connection with a makeshift explosive device made of gas canisters, placed inside an apartment block in western Paris. Amine A, his cousin Sami B, and Aymen B., were charged with “attempted murder in an organized group in connection with a terrorist enterprise” and placed in pre-trial detention. All three were arrested on October 2, two days after the device was found in the exclusive 16th arrondissement. Amine A., 30, and Aymen B., 29, are both on the terror watch list.

October 9. French police and intelligence services are surveilling around 15,000 jihadists living on French soil, according to Le Journal du Dimanche. Of these, some 4,000 are at “the top of the spectrum” and most likely to carry out an attack.

October 10. President Emmanuelle Macron announced a plan to open immigration offices in Niger and Chad to identify persons eligible for asylum on lists provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and bring them directly to France. The stated aim is to “better prevent an influx of economic migrants” who are not eligible for asylum. In all, France will take in 10,000 people, not only from Niger and Chad, but also from Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, by October 2019.

October 11. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb announced the dismissal of the central government’s top representative in the southern Rhône region, after a report criticized “errors of judgement” and “serious faults” in handling foreigners whose papers are not in order. The report was commissioned after 29-year-old Tunisian Ahmed Hanachi stabbed two women to death at the central train station in Marseille on October 1.

October 11. A 20-year-old woman was arrested in Rouen on suspicion that she may have played a role in a jihadist attack on a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. On July 26, 2016, two jihadists had broken into the church and murdered Father Jacques Hamel while he was celebrating mass. While leaving the church, they were shot dead by the police. A few hours later, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Police say that shortly before the attack, the woman had been in contact with one of the jihadists.

October 12. A French intelligence agent accidentally sent a text message to the mobile phone of a jihadist, inadvertently warning him that he was under surveillance and being monitored, according to M6 television. The target, a “proselytizing Islamist” living in Paris, responded by directly calling the agent and informing him of his mistake.

October 12. The interior ministry announced that France will maintain border checks with its European neighbors until April 30, 2018, because of “persistent” terror threats. The 1985 Schengen Agreement ended passport checks and other protective measures on borders, but after the jihadist attacks in Paris in November 2015, France resumed them.