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Now that the initial shock of the Nice Bastille Day terror attack which claimed at least 84 lives has passed, and the investigation into the causes and motives behind the latest tragic mass killing has begun. Earlier this morning it was revealed that the driver of the truck used to attack Bastille Day celebrations in Nice has been named in local reports as 31-year-old delivery driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian criminal, who is reported to be a French passport holder, and well-known to the police. According to newspaper Nice-Matin, quoted by the Telegraph, the identity of the driver of...

A 31-year-old Niçois of Tunisian origin was driving the truck that claimed over 70 people on the Prom in Nice on Thursday night. The Frenchman was 31 years old.

Green cards, or Lawful Permanent Residency, puts immigrants on the path to citizenship and allows for lifetime residency, federal benefits, and work authorization. Included in the totals are refugees, who are required to apply for a green card after one year of residency in the U.S. Unlike other types of immigrants, refugees are immediately eligible for welfare benefits including Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Medicaid Green Card Totals, FY09-FY14: Pakistan (102K), Iraq (102K), Bangladesh (90K), Iran (85K), Egypt (56K), Somalia (37K), Uzbekistan (30K), Turkey (26K), Morocco (25K), Jordan (25K), Albania (24K), Afghanistan (21K), Lebanon (20K), Yemen...

A French waitress was allegedly assaulted by two Muslim men for serving alcohol during Ramadan. The woman, a practising Muslim of Tunisian origin, was working on the terrace of the Vitis Café in Nice when she was reportedly insulted by two passers-by on Wednesday. The men are said to have started to abuse her when they saw she was serving alcohol to customers, The Times reported. She said one of the men screamed she was a “whore” and slapped her across the face, leaving her with a black eye after she was knocked to the ground. The incident has been...

A group of Tunisian migrants set fire to the main pavilion in a Lampedusa refugee welcome center Tuesday night, causing severe damage, after learning they would be repatriated to their home country, according to reports. The fire enveloped the first aid and reception center of Imbriacola in Lampedusa, which presently houses some 530 asylum-seekers, though no injuries have been reported. This is not the first time that migrants have set the pavilion ablaze. Similar acts of arson occurred in 2009 and then in 2011. After hours battling the fire, which was set around 10:30pm, teams of firefighters stationed on the...

A U.N. panel against torture on Friday expressed concerns about allegations of “excessive use of force,” including deadly force, by Israeli security forces in Palestinian areas, and warned about authorities barring access to detained suspects, including minors. The Committee Against Torture, which works under the office of the U.N. human rights chief, released its “concluding observations” about Israel and five other countries — France, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Philippines — as part of regular reviews by the panel. […] In a 12-page segment on Israel, the committee pointed to “allegations of excessive use of force, including lethal force,...

A security crisis in North Africa is on the verge of exploding while defense bureaucrats in Northern Virginia postpone sending long-promised support to an embattled ally. The crisis centers on Tunisia, which finds itself in the gunsights of an increasingly aggressive ISIS while the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency repeatedly defers deadlines for awarding a desperately needed security contract. The United States pledged support to Tunisia last summer after terrorist gunmen massacred 38 people at the popular Sousse beach resort. At the time, the U.S. offered a “Jordan lite” style program to fortify the porous border between Tunisia and neighboring...

Hosni Kaliya pulls a cigarette out his pack with his mouth. When he poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire, most of his right hand was consumed by the flames and all that remains is a stump without fingers. He still has four fingers on his left hand, but they jut out like claws, burned, stiff and contorted. His fingernails are curled. He wears black wool gloves with the fingertips cut off, so that they won't dangle emptily. A knit cap protects Kaliya's head, where his hair was burned off, and his unusually small ears. But the...

President Barack Obama resolved earlier this month, much to the surprise of Washington insiders, to open a third anti-terror front in Libya to eradicate the Islamic Front’s tightening grip on the country. This top-secret decision was first revealed by DEBKA Weekly 692 on Jan. 1. --snip-- At the peak of the assault, large-scale US, British and French marines will land on shore for an operation first billed as the largest allied war landing since the 1952 Korean War. The attachment of Russian forces was negotiated later. According to this scenario, one group will be dropped ashore from the Gulf of...

Tunisia's Prime Minister Habib Essid held an emergency cabinet meeting Saturday, after authorities declared a nighttime curfew nationwide following the worst outbreak of social unrest since the 2011 revolution. Five years after the ouster of longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, street demonstrations against unemployment and poverty have again shaken the North African nation. Anger erupted over the death on January 16 of Ridha Yahyaoui, a 28-year-old unemployed man who was electrocuted when he climbed a power pole while protesting in the central town of Kasserine. The unrest spread around the country, including to Tunis where shops were burnt...

In an interview with the Tunisian Al-Wataniya TV channel, Professor Amel Grami said that in the days of early Islam, "society was more aware of its diversity and more pluralistic, while today we are more rigid and unaccepting of the other." According to Grami, a professor of Arabic studies at the University of Manouba, Tunisia, and an authority on gender studies, "many judges talked openly about their passion for boys, and said that they have their own boy, whom they meet intimately, and so on. Many jurisprudents had such relations." The interview aired on December 20, 2015. Video at link

Relax. The "Frenchman of Tunisian descent" (as Reuters described him) who drove his car at French troops -- who were, ironically enough, guarding a mosque -- was no terrorist. He just had a "fit of anger" according to Prosecutor Alex Perrin of Valence, the city in which the attack occurred. Perrin says it was a spontaneous thing: He explained that when he parked his car in front of the mosque and saw the soldiers, he got the urge to ram into them because French troops are killing civilians in Syria. Ah, sure. No problem, then. Any "Frenchman" would react that...

Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the...

It is hardly surprising that when Faida Hamdy wonders whether she is responsible for everything that happened after her moment of fame she is overwhelmed.

When it comes to selling copy, it’s a good bet that sex trumps multilateral finance. That’s an axiom of human nature. It would be asking too much to expect that the media, or its customers, would be as fascinated by the in-house diplomacy of the International Monetary Fund as all concerned have been by the scandal surrounding the recently handcuffed and dethroned IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Most eyes are now on the prosecutor’s cratering case, the curious past of the maid who alleged the sexual assault, and the media now analyzing its own coverage of these sordid events. But...

A Tunisian pro-democracy group accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today and called for the fight against terrorism and helping Palestinians to achieve self-determination as global priorities. The National Dialogue Quartet, which won the Peace Prize for helping build democracy in the birthplace of the Arab Spring, accepted the award at a ceremony in Oslo held under tight security following the armed attacks in Paris. ...

An explosion has hit a bus carrying presidential guards in Tunisia's capital, Tunis, officials say. At least 12 people have been killed in the blast, the interior ministry said. The explosion, during rush hour in the city's main avenue, was an attack, a presidential source said. Tunisia has been targeted by the Islamic State group, including an attack by a gunman on the beach resort of Sousse in June, killing 38 people, mostly foreign tourists.

At least 12 people were killed on Tuesday when an explosion tore through a bus full of Tunisian presidential guards in an attack that one source said was probably the work of a suicide bomber. Ambulances rushed wounded from the scene and security forces closed off streets around Mohamed V Avenue, one of the main streets in the capital Tunis, where the charred wreckage of the bus lay, not far from the Interior Ministry.

"The Muslim Brotherhood youth in Egypt reject any form of violence." So said Rachid Ghannouchi, who - you'll no doubt be stunned to hear - heads up the Muslim Brotherhood's Tunisian branch, Ennahda. Naturally, Ghannouchi gave his Egyptian confederates a clean bill of health while speaking as an invited guest of the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. He is a master of the Brotherhood game, consulted by the State Department and a bipartisan Beltway clerisy ever on the hunt for that elusive "moderate Islamist." He is an Islamic supremacist who knows he can worm his way into Washington's heart...

Bomb a factory; attract 24/7 media attention. Build a factory brick by brick? That rates a yawn, not a headline. Fortunately, careful "brick by brick" does receive occasional recognition. An exception occurred two weeks ago when the Nobel committee awarded its 2015 Peace Prize to a Tunisian civic and political coalition, the National Dialogue Quartet. The Quartet consists of four civic organizations -- a business organization, two labor unions and a lawyers association. Tunisia kicked off the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions. Violence flared. Throngs filled the streets, protesting dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's two decades of misrule. Ben Ali...