“Officials now say the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down.” The NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi with a pretty remarkable look at how ISIS built the machinery of terror under Europe’s gaze.
LA Times: In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA.

+ “Even the most imaginative of dramatists would balk at a plot line of a star-crossed lover so desperate to get a message to his lost love that he would hijack an aircraft and toss a hopeful letter of reconciliation to his inamorata onto the tarmac.” The Daily Beast on one of the weirdest plane hijackings ever.