A video appears to show American journalist Steven Sotloff becoming the latest victim of the Islamic State’s terror campaign. Sotloff did freelance work for Time and Foreign Policy before he disappeared in Syria in 2013.

+ A new report from Amnesty confirms that the Islamic State has “carried out ethnic cleansing on a historic scale” and has literally changed “the demographic map of northern Iraq in a few weeks.”

+ The man behind the Nairobi mall attack may have been killed by an airstrike

+ The New Yorker’s Steve Coll explains why Obama’s options in Iraq are terrible and in Syria, they’re even worse.