Residue from an explosive compound found at the scene of an explosion in a New York City neighborhood is unregulated and routinely used for target practice with exploding targets.

The compound, known by the brand name Tannerite, is sold in sporting goods stores. It is not regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives because it is sold as a mix of two chemicals that when kept separate are inert.

ATF has previously issued advisories about Tannerite and what it describes as "binary exploding targets." The compound is typically used to mark a shot from a high-velocity rifle round with a small cloud of smoke.

The explosive compounds are generally made up of an oxidizer such as ammonium nitrate and aluminum or another metal-based powder and only become an explosive when combined. The ATF said someone would only need an explosives license to handle the material if it is combined and they are using it commercially.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/09/18/us/politics/ap-us-manhattan-explosion-tannerite.html

A German man who trained in Pakistan with an offshoot of Al Qaeda and confessed in 2009 to plotting to bomb American targets in Germany was released from prison this week.

The decision to grant early release to the leader of the plot, Fritz Gelowicz, comes as the country grapples with the aftershocks of two recent attacks in Bavaria by people claiming loyalty to the Islamic State.

Mr. Gelowicz, 36, was sentenced in 2010 to 12 years in prison. Counting time served before his sentencing, he had been in prison for nearly nine years and was eligible for early release based on good behavior and because he was no longer deemed to be a danger, according to Andreas Vitek, a spokesman for the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court. Mr. Gelowicz will have to report regularly to a probation officer.

The court in Düsseldorf released Mr. Gelowicz on Monday, but the decision did not receive widespread attention until Wednesday, when his defense lawyer, Dirk Uden, wrote about it on his website.

“I’m sure he will not use any violence against anybody,” Mr. Uden said in a phone interview on Wednesday, adding that his client had cooperated with the authorities and expressed remorse. “That’s based on my conversations with him, his conversations with psychologists in prison and his contacts with the police.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/europe/germany-fritz-gelowicz-bomb-plot.html

JERUSALEM — For many Israelis, the horrifying images of a truck plowing through crowds for more than a mile in the French resort town of Nice struck a macabrely familiar chord.

“We had tractors!” said Ami Zini, 49, who runs a boutique on the shopping street of the leafy German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem. “One of them flipped over a bus with its bucket.”

He was referring to a 2014 attack, by a Palestinian resident of the city, that killed an Israeli pedestrian. Nice was an even more direct, if far deadlier, echo of a 2011 rampage in which an Arab-Israeli man’s truck barreled down a Tel Aviv street for a mile, killing one and wounding 17.

These followed a spate of attacks with heavy construction vehicles and cars as weapons in 2008. And since October, according to Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, at least 32 Palestinians have rammed vehicles into people at bus stops, intersections and military checkpoints.

The French prime minister said after the Nice attack, the nation’s third mass killing in 18 months, that France “must live with terrorism.” That is what Israelis have been doing for decades, through the plane hijackings of the 1970s; the suicide bombers of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which began in 2000; and the lone-wolf stabbings and shootings of the past 10 months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/world/middleeast/to-france-from-israel-lessons-on-living-with-terror.html

BEIJING — Torrential rains and floods across the southern half of China have besieged cities and towns for days. Nearly 200 people had died by Friday in drownings, landslides and as buildings collapsed, including 35 buried by a landslide in the far west. Nearly two million people have been moved to safer ground while swollen rivers and lakes strain dikes and dams.

For China’s leaders, the floods are a test of their ability to deliver on their promises of safety for citizens.

The country’s flood defenses have faltered in the past, weakened by neglect and corruption, and Prime Minister Li Keqiang and other leaders have said that this year the government is better prepared than ever.

Yet experts and residents in areas hit by the rains have claimed that local governments have neglected drainage and filled in lakes, leaving cities exposed to greater flooding.

“This year, we’ve seen more flooding persist in urban areas,” said Ke Zhiqiang, a leader of Green City of Rivers, an environmental advocacy group in Wuhan, a city in central China that has been hit hard by the floods along the Yangtze River.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/world/asia/china-floods.html

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents bombed a convoy of buses carrying police cadets on the outskirts of Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Thursday, killing at least 33 people, including four civilians, according to government officials and the United Nations.

During a year of surging violence across Afghanistan, the government and its foreign allies have failed to coax the Taliban into participating in peace talks, or even into agreeing on a cease-fire that would have lasted during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which will end next week.

The bombings were the second large-scale assault by the Taliban in Kabul in less than two weeks. On June 20, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives next to a minibus shuttling Nepalese and Indian security guards to work at the Canadian Embassy, in one of the deadliest attacks on foreign contractors in the capital.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/asia/taliban-afghanistan-police-convoy-bombings.html

BEIJING — Young women who have sex before marriage are degenerates. A girl who gives her body for love will make the boy who “conquers” her love her less. Premarital sex has a “tremendous negative psychological and physical impact on girls.”

These are some of the assertions in a sex education textbook approved by a provincial education department in China that has led to an outcry on social media.

Outraged by the text, “Senior Middle School Student Scientific Sex Education,” a teacher posted photos from the book on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, on Friday, unleashing a firestorm of comments.

“I was so angry when I read the textbook,” Zhong Guangquan, the teacher from Guangdong Province in southern China whose post started the online debate, told a Chinese website, Sixth Tone. “The concepts are backward and all the negative comments are directed toward girls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/world/asia/chinese-textbook-calls-women-who-have-premarital-sex-degenerates.html

NAIROBI, Kenya — Islamist militants stormed a hotel in central Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, on Saturday afternoon, killing at least six people in what has become a well-established tactic to sow terror.

According to witnesses and government officials, the attack started around 4 p.m. with a car bomb at the gates of the Naso Hablod Hotel, before fighters ran in and shot at guests.

The Shabab militant group, which has been terrorizing Somalia for nearly a decade and claimed responsibility for the attack, has struck at least four other hotels in Mogadishu in the past year. A deafening car bomb at the hotel gates is typically how such attacks begin.

American-trained commandos from Somalia’s security services killed all four attackers after a shootout that lasted several hours, said Abdikamil Moalim Shukri, a spokesman for Somalia’s Internal Security Ministry. Witnesses said the attackers appeared to be tactically proficient, fighting their way into the hotel and then firing on government security forces from the rooftop.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/world/africa/islamist-militants-storm-hotel-in-somalia-killing-at-least-6.html

BEIJING — An unusually fierce tornado ravaged an eastern Chinese city on Thursday, killing at least 98 people and injuring 800 others, catapulting cars, ginkgo trees and cellphone towers through the air, and reducing homes to piles of debris, the authorities said.

The storm in Yancheng, a city of 7.1 million overlooking the Yellow Sea, featured wind gusts exceeding 80 miles an hour by some accounts.

“The skies turned dark and we thought the summer torrential rain was about to begin,” said a resident of Yancheng, according to a live-blog published by Sina, a web portal. “We ran to our house. Suddenly, the roof was blown apart, bricks were falling and the house collapsed.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/world/asia/tornado-yancheng-china.html

Inside an opulent palace in Riyadh late one evening in February 2004, two American investigators interrogated a man they believed might hold answers to one of the lingering mysteries of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: What role, if any, did officials in Saudi Arabia’s government play in the plot?

The man under questioning, Fahad al-Thumairy, had been a Saudi consular official based in Los Angeles and the imam of a mosque visited by two of the hijackers. The investigators, staff members of the national 9/11 commission who had waited all day at the United States Embassy before being summoned to the late-night interview, believed that tying him to the plot could be a step toward proving Saudi government complicity in the attacks.

They were unsuccessful. In two interviews lasting four hours, Mr. Thumairy, a father of two then in his early 30s, denied any ties to the hijackers or their known associates. Presented with phone records that seemed to contradict his answers, he gave no ground, saying the records were wrong or people were trying to smear him. The investigators wrote a report to their bosses saying they believed Mr. Thumairy was probably lying, though no government investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has ever found conclusive evidence that Mr. Thumairy — or any other Saudi official — assisted in the plot.

But nearly 15 years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the question of a Saudi connection has arisen again amid new calls for the release of a long-classified section of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that discusses a possible Saudi role in the terrorist plot — the so-called 28 pages, whose secrecy has made them almost mythical.

American officials who have read the 28 pages say that, of all the investigative leads in that section of the report, the unanswered questions about Mr. Thumairy and the two hijackers remain the most intriguing. If there was any Saudi government role whatsoever, some still believe, it most likely would have gone through Mr. Thumairy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-sept11-classified-28-pages.html

After Orlando and San Bernardino and Paris, there is new urgency to understand the signs that can precede acts of terrorism. And with the Islamic State’s prolific use of social media, terrorism experts and government agencies continually search for clues in posts and Twitter messages that appear to promote the militants’ cause.

A physicist may not seem like an obvious person to study such activity. But for months, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami, led a team that created a mathematical model to sift order from the chaotic pro-terrorism online universe.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Johnson and Miami colleagues searched for pro-Islamic State posts each day from mid-2014 until August 2015, mining mentions of beheadings and blood baths in multiple languages on Vkontakte, a Russia-based social media service that is the largest European equivalent to Facebook. Ultimately, they devised an equation that tries to explain the activity of Islamic State sympathizers online and might, they say, eventually help predict attacks that are about to happen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/science/fighting-isis-with-an-algorithm-physicists-try-to-predict-attacks.html

LONDON — On June 23, tens of thousands of young Britons will be gathered at the Glastonbury music festival, whose headliners include Coldplay, Muse and Adele. Others will be avidly following the European Soccer Championship in France or biting their nails in anticipation of the next episode of hit teenage soap “Hollyoaks.”

Oh, and there is the referendum that day asking them whether Britain should leave the European Union.

“Wait, are we even registered to vote?” Priya Patel, 25, asked her friend recently, as they waited outside a theater in east London to see their favorite stars arrive at the British Soap Awards.

Would she want Britain to stay in the European Union?

“Oh, definitely,” Ms. Patel, a medical practitioner, answered impatiently, switching her attention to her smartphone, visibly more interested in televised dramas than in the long-running tensions between her country and Brussels.

“Wait, what just happened?” she exclaimed as a “Hollyoaks” star rolled by in a car.

Holding the attention of young voters — and getting them to turn out on June 23 — is one of the biggest challenges for both sides in the campaign over Britain’s place in Europe, especially for the advocates of remaining in the European Union.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/world/europe/while-young-britons-favor-staying-in-eu-they-arent-big-on-voting.html

The drug that killed Prince has become a favorite of Mexican cartels because it is extremely potent, popular in the United States — and immensely profitable, American officials say.

Law enforcement and border authorities in the United States warn that Mexican cartels are using their own labs to produce the drug, fentanyl, as well as receiving shipments from China. Then the cartels distribute the substance through their vast smuggling networks to meet rising American demand for opiates and pharmaceuticals.

“It is really the next migration of the cartels in terms of making profit,” said Jack Riley, acting deputy administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “This goes to the heart of the marketing genius of the cartels. They saw this coming.”

It is still unclear how Prince, who the authorities say died of an overdose of fentanyl in April, obtained the drug. Doctors can prescribe fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, for cancer patients and for palliative care, including end of life treatment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/world/americas/drug-that-killed-prince-is-making-mexican-cartels-richer-us-says.html

An exhausted and ill-equipped Iraqi Army faces daunting obstacles on the battlefield that will most likely delay for months a long-planned major offensive on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, American and allied officials say.

The delay is expected despite American efforts to keep Iraq’s creaky war machine on track. Although President Obama vowed to end the United States’ role in the war in Iraq, in the last two years the American military has increasingly provided logistics to prop up the Iraqi military, which has struggled to move basics like food, water and ammunition to its troops.

Without the help, Americans commanders said, the offensive against Mosul would most likely fail.

Americans are ferrying equipment and spare parts directly to the battlefield by cargo plane, helping arrange purchases of ammunition for Soviet-era equipment and pressing the Iraqis to adopt measures to improve a supply chain that would run over 200 miles from Defense Ministry depots in the Baghdad area to Mosul.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/world/middleeast/iraqi-army-seen-as-ill-equipped-to-retake-mosul-from-isis-despite-us-aid.html

Trailing badly in the polls, and with elections just around the corner, Roxana Luna reached for transcendental salvation.

In a ceremony outside the government headquarters of Mexico’s Puebla State, Ms. Luna, a candidate for governor, unleashed a troupe of Aztec dancers across the colonial building’s cobblestone forecourt. They hopped around wearing leather skirts and spectacular feather headdresses. One drew designs in the air with smoke from burning tree resin. Another blew a conch shell.

Ms. Luna explained to bemused onlookers that the event last week was a purification ritual intended to flush out “the curse” of bad government, along with fear, coercion, vote buying, apathy and violence.

“People who feel desperate turn to ritualistic cleansings,” she said. “We’ve been cursed.”

It is election time in Mexico again, with voters going to the polls on Sunday for municipal and regional elections, including the governorships in 12 of Mexico’s 32 states.

While some might quibble with Ms. Luna’s technique, few would argue against her appeal to clean up Mexico’s electoral politics. Mexican political campaigns have never been for the faint of heart, and this year has been no different, with rough-and-tumble contests that have made a certain presidential contest north of the border look almost quaint in comparison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/world/americas/firebombs-and-accusations-fly-in-ruthless-election-campaigns-in-mexico.html

If modern Germany has a mantra, it is that people should learn from their history. Yet Berlin’s latest attempt at reconciliation with the past focuses on the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago.

And that gesture toward atonement has riled tempers on all sides of the already strained European relations with Turkey.

The argument is set to peak on Thursday in a debate in the German Parliament, which is expected to overwhelmingly approve a resolution that officially declares the century-old Armenian massacres to be genocide — and condemns what was then known as the German Empire, allied with the Ottoman Empire, for failing to act on information it had at the time about the killings.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said late Tuesday that he had warned Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in a telephone call that there could be consequences if the resolution passes.

For Turkey, there is scarcely a more sensitive topic than what German and international historians say was the murder of more than a million Armenians and other Christian minorities from 1915 to 1916. The Turkish government has long rejected the term genocide, saying that thousands of people, many of them Turks, died in the civil war that destroyed the Ottoman Empire.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/world/europe/armenian-genocide-germany-turkey.html

HIROSHIMA, Japan — President Obama laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Friday, telling an audience that included survivors of America’s atomic bombing in 1945 that technology as devastating as nuclear arms demands a “moral revolution.”

Thousands of Japanese lined the route of the presidential motorcade to the memorial in the hopes of glimpsing Mr. Obama, the first sitting American president to visit the most potent symbol of the dawning of the nuclear age. Many watched the ceremony on their cellphones.

“Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” Mr. Obama said in opening his speech at the memorial.

“Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us,” Mr. Obama said, adding that such technology “requires a moral revolution as well.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world/asia/obama-hiroshima-japan.html

Nearly two years into the American-led air war against the Islamic State, military officials say they have corrected the poor intelligence collection and clumsy process for identifying targets that initially plagued the campaign, and are now hitting targets like oil rigs and secret cash coffers that finance the terrorist group’s war machine.

The destruction in recent months of these targets, deep behind enemy lines — which commanders previously avoided for fear of causing civilian casualties — has seriously damaged the Islamic State’s ability to pay its fighters, govern and attract new recruits, military officials say.

“We’re hitting them where it hurts a lot more than we were in the past,” Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the air war commander, said in one of two recent telephone interviews from his headquarters in Qatar. “Every bomb now has a greater impact.”

To speed up the approval of targets, the Pentagon shifted the authority for most strikes that posed a risk to civilians to commanders in the field from the military’s Central Command in Tampa, Fla., which oversees operations in the Middle East.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/us-strikes-isis-targets.html

 It's all but official: this summer's Greek crisis has been called off.

After an 11-hour meeting lasting into the early hours Wednesday, European officials agreed to unfreeze more rescue loans and to consider ways to lighten Greece's debt load. That means Greece stands to get 10.3 billion euros ($11.5 billion) from its bailout loan package from European governments and the International Monetary Fund.

The money means Greece can make debt payments coming due in July. There won't be fears of a disastrous default and forced exit from the euro currency, as there were before Greece sealed a similar deal in July, 2015.

The country, however, is still far from safe financially or economically, meaning its crisis could yet flare up and once again cause jitters for the global economy.

Here's a look at what's next for the country.

___

Q: Is Greece out of danger of defaulting and leaving the euro?

A: For the next few months, yes. There are a few more checks to be made on Greece's reforms before the money can be transferred. But the deal seems mostly done.

For the longer term, no.

The IMF and the eurozone governments, led by Germany, remain at odds over how much austerity Greece needs to do. In particular, Germany and the European states want Greece to run a budget surplus — when not counting debt interest payments — of 3.5 percent of annual GDP. That's a huge figure. And it could stifle economic growth because it would give the government little space to spend on the economy.

The European creditors want such a surplus to make sure Greece pays off its debts. But the IMF says the figure is unrealistic and wants a lower target, more like 1.5 percent of GDP.

___

Q: Was that all they disagree on?

A: No, they also disagree on how to lighten Greece's debt load.

The IMF says Greece's debt, which is currently 180 percent of GDP, is "unsustainable." It wants European creditors to agree to lower interest rates on past rescue loans they gave Greece, and to push out their repayment dates.

The Europeans agree debt relief is possible. But Wednesday's deal puts off discussion of concrete terms for debt relief until 2018.

Germany, the most influential of the governments that loaned Greece money, is reluctant to go to its parliament for approval of more breaks for Greece ahead of national elections in October 2017.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/05/25/world/europe/ap-eu-greece-bailout-whats-next-.html

The Israeli military authorities on Monday allowed building supplies to start flowing into Gaza again, lifting a suspension that had blocked work for more than a month on thousands of houses destroyed in the 2014 summer war.

Israel had suspended deliveries on April 4 after accusing Emad al-Baz, an official in Gaza’s economic ministry, of diverting the supplies away from the work they were earmarked for: rebuilding private citizens’ homes. Other projects, like those overseen by the United Nations, were not affected by the suspension.

About 90 truckloads of cement were expected to cross into Gaza on Monday, according to the office of the special coordinator for the peace process. That is around the average amount that had entered daily before the suspension, according to figures provided by the office.

The suspension halted work on 5,095 houses and apartments, out of about 17,800 that were made uninhabitable during the war, which killed more than 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis.

About 4,065 damaged or destroyed homes have been rebuilt, according to United Nations figures.

The plodding pace of reconstruction for the most severely damaged houses has become a pressing matter for Palestinians. Many of the poorest displaced families languish in trailers and shacks, waiting to rebuild, and thousands of others are crammed into rental apartments.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/world/middleeast/israel-allows-building-supplies-to-enter-gaza-again.html

Every Friday, just yards from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an improvised mosque in a former furniture store.

The mosque is one of scores built here with Saudi government money and blamed for spreading Wahhabism — the conservative ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia — in the 17 years since an American-led intervention wrested tiny Kosovo from Serbian oppression.

Since then — much of that time under the watch of American officials — Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists.

Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam. Over the last two years, the police have identified 314 Kosovars — including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children — who have gone abroad to join the Islamic State, the highest number per capita in Europe.

They were radicalized and recruited, Kosovo investigators say, by a corps of extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab gulf states using an obscure, labyrinthine network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries.

“They promoted political Islam,” said Fatos Makolli, the director of Kosovo’s counterterrorism police. “They spent a lot of money to promote it through different programs mainly with young, vulnerable people, and they brought in a lot of Wahhabi and Salafi literature. They brought these people closer to radical political Islam, which resulted in their radicalization.”

After two years of investigations, the police have charged 67 people, arrested 14 imams and shut down 19 Muslim organizations for acting against the Constitution, inciting hatred and recruiting for terrorism. The most recent sentences, which included a 10-year prison term, were handed down on Friday.

It is a stunning turnabout for a land of 1.8 million people that not long ago was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world. Americans were welcomed as liberators after leading months of NATO bombing in 1999 that spawned an independent Kosovo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/world/europe/how-the-saudis-turned-kosovo-into-fertile-ground-for-isis.html