An 18-year-old Minnesota man was arrested after allegedly pledging allegiance to ISIS and discussing plans for a mass shooting at the Mall of America. Federal court documents say he was taken into custody after purchasing an AK-47-style rifle, magazines and ammunition from an undercover FBI employee.

According to an affidavit filed in federal court in Minnesota, Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud spent months discussing a potential attack. In September, he allegedly told an FBI confidential source, “I can’t wait until I kill kuffar man. October 24 is the day insha Allah.”

When the source later asked why he had selected Oct. 24, Mohamud allegedly referred to a “Hmong Arts Celebration” at the Mall of America, saying the event would draw “a lot of people,” the affidavit states.

“Mohamud met with someone he believed to be a loyal member of ISIS to attempt to purchase an AK-47 rifle, knowing it would be used in a felony or federal crime of terrorism,” Christopher Dotson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office, said at a news conference Wednesday. “Mohamud planned to use the gun he bought in a high-traffic public area just a few weeks’ time in support of a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

Mohamud is charged with knowingly receiving a firearm and ammunition while knowing or having reasonable cause to believe they would be used to commit a felony and a federal crime of terrorism.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement to News Media that the suspect “allegedly obtained a weapon he hoped to use in a mass casualty attack in support of ISIS, but this FBI arrested him and put a stop to his plans.”  

“Once again, this FBI is moving more effectively than we ever have before at stopping terrorists before they can attack Americans—with over 1,100 individuals prevented from conducting attacks, over 4,000 foreign terrorist organization-related disruptions and arrests, a 38% increase, and more,” Patel said. “We will continue to use every resource we have to detect and prevent acts of terrorism and wipe out their networks all over the country. Thank you to FBI Minneapolis, who did an outstanding job in the investigation and likely saved lives.”

EXPLORE MORE: Fat Tuesday to Return to Jacksonville After 30-Year Absence

The arrest followed an FBI investigation that began around December 2024. Investigators said the case eventually involved a confidential human source who communicated extensively with Mohamud through encrypted messaging and social media platforms. 

The conversations initially focused on Mohamud’s alleged desire to leave the United States and join al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based terrorist organization. In May, he allegedly told the source he was “so excited to make hijrah” and wanted to travel to Somalia, get married and “fight the enemies of Allah.” He said he planned to work for about six weeks to save $2,000 for a plane ticket, according to the affidavit.

Investigators say Mohamud’s plans had changed by July.

Mohamud allegedly told the source he could not afford to travel to Somalia and wrote, “so i will do attack here.” He later discussed purchasing two pistols online and going to the Mall of America or the Minnesota State Fair around Christmas, according to the affidavit.

He allegedly discussed using an assault rifle to attack the Mall of America, telling the source he could “drive straight to the crowded place and start shooting.” Investigators also say Mohamud sent the source a selfie-style video in September pledging allegiance to ISIS and its leader.

The FBI then organized an undercover weapons transaction. On Sept. 25, the source told Mohamud that a “brother” could sell him an AK-style rifle, magazines and ammunition. Mohamud allegedly indicated that he wanted the weapon to be fully automatic.

On Tuesday, Mohamud met with the purported ISIS-connected “brother,” who was actually an undercover FBI employee. He allegedly paid $800 for an AK-47-style rifle, four magazines and about 200 rounds of ammunition. Although the rifle had been rendered inoperable, the ammunition was live. During the meeting, Mohamud allegedly said he intended to carry out a shooting at a “kuffar festival” at the Mall of America.

According to the affidavit, Mohamud left the vehicle carrying the rifle, magazines and ammunition in a duffel bag before FBI agents arrested him at gunpoint.

This is a developing story; check back for updates.

The atmosphere at Gate 138 in Newark Liberty International Airport is uneasy on Saturday as passengers prepare to board United’s nonstop service to Tel Aviv.

The route had been grounded for five months after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks, when rockets were launched across Israel, including toward Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport. United restored the service in March 2024, but suspended it once more at the beginning of the US war with Iran in February.

Now, after another six-month pause, flights to Tel Aviv are operating again.

And then came FlyDubai.

Three days later, I am making my way through Newark airport for what will be my 22nd visit to Israel in two and a half years.

In the aftermath of October 7, I became deeply unsettled by what I saw as the mainstream media’s confused and disillusioning coverage of the attacks. After 30 years as a journalist, I no longer felt certain I could separate fact from fiction. So I traveled to Israel myself, without handlers, an official itinerary or a government-approved agenda—just a camera and an open mind.

That journey became the documentary The Prophet, which follows Colonel Erez Eshel, a 55-year-old Israeli army reservist and former paratrooper who returned to the battlefield alongside his sons.

Three years after the Hamas attacks, as I make my way back to Tel Aviv, it is impossible to miss how dramatically—and understandably—the country has been transformed.

Once the aircraft climbs above the clouds, the tension gives way to something close to optimism. It feels distinctly Israeli. The crew, however, remain guarded.

Ten hours into the flight, we begin our descent. A flight attendant announces that Israeli security procedures require everyone to stay in their seats for the final 30 minutes, beginning about 180 miles from the coastline. The cockpit door will remain locked.

At Ben-Gurion Airport, the queue for travelers with foreign passports stretches ahead. Clearly, I am not the only international visitor who considers this a reasonable time to come to Israel. My taxi driver outside the terminal is far less hopeful. His 32-year-old son, he says, has reached his limit and has left the country permanently.

The driver himself plans to vote for “big change” at the next election. That tension—resistance mixed with fatigue, self-assurance alongside deep mistrust—can be felt everywhere. Underneath it lies an even more troubling reality.

On Monday morning, I arrive in Jerusalem to speak with Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.

Pizzaballa was born in a small town outside Bergamo, Italy, and came to Jerusalem in October 1990 as a 25-year-old Franciscan priest during the First Intifada. At first, he spoke little beyond Italian, but he eventually mastered Hebrew well enough to teach the language and translate Catholic liturgy into it.

More than 30 years on, he is responsible for guiding the Latin Catholic Church through one of the world’s most politically charged and religiously complex regions. That experience makes him an unusually compelling person to question about Israelis, Palestinians and Christians. For more than 35 years, he has lived within all three communities.

The most significant observation he shares with me is also the most direct: everyone is suffering. Everyone.

He urges me to travel to Taybeh, east of Ramallah in the West Bank, so I can witness firsthand the growing hardship faced by Palestinian Christians.

If you haven’t spent time in the West Bank, you may not realize what a bizarre geographic jigsaw puzzle it is. The territory is carved into Areas A, B and C, sometimes in patches that make very little intuitive sense when you’re driving through them.

Area A is under Palestinian Authority civil and security control. Area B is under Palestinian civil administration with Israel retaining overriding security authority. Area C is under Israeli civil and security control. Israeli citizens are prohibited from entering Area A. I’m an American, so that prohibition doesn’t apply to me.

I drop a digital pin signaling my location to a trusted security contact.

On paper, the distinctions sound bureaucratic. On the ground, they can determine how safe you feel, who can travel where and what happens when somebody decides you don’t belong.

During a previous visit to Hebron, a Palestinian Authority officer in an SUV screeched to a halt in front of me, jumped out of his vehicle and grabbed me by the arms. I couldn’t immediately understand what the hell was happening. Then I realized what he was trying to establish. I reached for my American passport and assured him I wasn’t Israeli. And, yes, that I wasn’t Jewish.

Identity is not an abstraction here and the danger isn’t theoretical.

RELATED: Tennessee AG Won’t Say if Christa Pike Faces Execution Again

In March 2024, a 57-year-old Jewish Israeli entered Dhahiriya, an Area A Palestinian town near Hebron, reportedly to see a doctor. According to Israeli authorities and media reports, a Palestinian man attacked him after discovering he was Jewish, stabbing him in the abdomen. Thankfully, he survived.

I try to meet Father Bashar Fawadleh in Taybeh. We can’t manage that. The roads are closed. A giant orange gate blocks our path and Israeli soldiers tell us very roughly that we are under no circumstances going to Taybeh today.

This is normal, according to Father Bashar. Over the phone, he tells me that Israeli settlers have been entering private Palestinian-owned groves east of Taybeh, taking olives and damaging trees. Families around Taybeh depend on those trees for income, but also as a connection to land their families have lived on for generations. Again, that’s normal, except now people are leaving.

Unemployment in his community is above 30 percent. Tourism has collapsed. Movement is difficult. Ordinary life, difficult already, has become even harder. Palestinian Christians here, he says, feel abandoned and endangered. By everyone. 

It’s a feeling, I’ve come to see, that Israelis and Palestinian Christians share.

Zalli Jaffe, the deputy president of Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, pushes back hard on any suggestion that Israelis ignore or dismiss instances of settler violence against Palestinians. ‘I want nothing more than for the Cardinal to come to the Great Synagogue and meet my congregation and witness that we denounce assumed settler violence in the most forceful of terms,’ he tells me. ‘Anyone who harms innocent Palestinians should be dealt with in the harshest of terms. We fight barbarism, not innocent people.’

On Tuesday, I arrive at Ganei Yehoshu’a in Park HaYarkon in Tel Aviv, where roughly two thousand fresh-faced 19-year-olds wheel their suitcases onto the grass, stack them in piles and separate into circles – ready to embark on what may be the biggest adventure of their lives.

They are the newest class of the Ein Prat Leadership Academies, founded by my documentary subject, Erez Eshel. He is more famous for this than for fighting: he founded the pre-military academy movement, and for more than 25 years Ein Prat has shaped the next generation of leaders in Israel and around the world by developing character, moral integrity and a drive to bring good into the world. 

And there, greeting this newest class of recruits, is Erez.

‘Our name is freedom,’ he tells the recruits. ‘We are the ones who want to practice the idea of a free society. We say we are optimists. But it’s much more than optimism. We are people of Tikvah — of hope.

‘The difference between an optimist and someone who has Tikvah? An optimist says everything will be all right. Someone else will be there. There will be miracles.

‘The people of tikvah say: If we are together, we will build the abilities. We will build the strength. We will build the commitment. And we are not afraid of…’

He stops and considers it.

‘Nothing.’

If there is one thing Israelis and Jews around the world increasingly seem to agree on, it is that they are – once again – just three years after October 7, seen as international public enemy number one.

The Anti-Defamation League’s latest Global 100 survey, released in January 2025, found that 46 percent of adults worldwide – an estimated 2.2 billion people – held what the ADL classifies as deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes. That’s up from 26 percent when the survey began in 2014. The methodology is specific: respondents are considered to hold antisemitic attitudes if they say at least six of eleven negative stereotypes about Jews are ‘probably true’ or ‘definitely true.’

The survey measures hostility toward Jews; it doesn’t establish that Jews are literally the world’s ‘number one’ target. But spend enough time in Israel and the distinction can start to feel academic.

In a world where antisemitism is growing, there may ultimately be nowhere else for Jews to go.

Foreign Jews are buying in. Purchases of Israeli homes by overseas buyers rose 18 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to the Finance Ministry, with French buyers up by more than half and British buyers up 54 percent.

Now Israelis look at the United States, once an indispensable ally, and see something different: younger Americans whose attitudes toward Israel are markedly different from those of their parents; an increasingly partisan argument over Israel; protests in American streets and on college campuses; and political rhetoric that would have been difficult to imagine coming out of mainstream American politics a generation ago.

To Israelis already convinced that history has taught them not to depend on anyone else for their survival, that is proof of their suspicion.

The question I’m trying to answer now is what that means for Israel’s relationship with the United States and with the rest of the world.

Has the experience of October 7, the wars that followed and the explosion of antisemitism abroad convinced Israelis that international approval isn’t unattainable if they are to weather this storm? What happens when the country that has long regarded the US as its savior begins to wonder whether that relationship is permanent?

Two other cab drivers said to me, no joke: ‘We don’t need you. You need us.’ They feel like they don’t need anyone anymore.

I leave the country with an even more unsettling question: After all that Israelis and Jews have endured, would the world ever leave them to survive on their own?

A New York man allegedly threatened to kill Georgia Rep. Mike Collins after becoming angry over what he described as an “inaccurate” article published online, federal authorities said.

Anthony Lantrell Bennett was arrested in Buffalo after allegedly sending a terroristic threat targeting the Republican congressman and his son-in-law last week, according to the FBI and the Butts County Sheriff’s Office, which announced the arrest Monday.

“I understand politics. I understand disagreements. But there is a line that cannot be crossed,” Butts County Sheriff Gary Long said.

“Threatening to kill a public official or his family is not politics — it is a criminal act, and we will take it seriously and hold those responsible accountable just as we did in this case,” Long added.

Investigators have not disclosed the exact wording of the message, how it was delivered or which platform was used. The FBI said Bennett allegedly admitted during questioning that he sent the threat after reading an online article he believed was “inaccurate.”

Authorities have not identified the article or explained what specifically provoked Bennett. CNN reported in July, however, that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, had previously shared antisemitic and white nationalist rhetoric.

DON’T MISS: Michael Douglas Reveals His Stubble Gave Basic Instinct Co-Star Sharon Stone a Rash in Sensitive Areas

“No American should have to worry that their home could be the next Butler, Pennsylvania or Utah Valley University,” Collins said in a statement after Bennett’s arrest.

“I’m grateful to the FBI, the Butts County Sheriff’s Department, and all law enforcement partners for acting quickly to protect my family,” he added.

Collins, who is campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat, also criticized his Democratic opponent, Sen. Jon Ossoff, accusing him of portraying Collins as a “monster.”

“When you mix false accusations with inflammatory rhetoric, it fuels the lunatics who want to settle political disagreements with violence,” Collins said.

Ossoff responded by saying he “condemns all threats of violence.”

Ossoff currently leads Collins by nine percentage points, according to a polling average compiled by Decision Desk HQ.

A California couple is facing serious felony allegations after authorities accused them of abusing at least 14 children born through surrogacy at their multimillion-dollar mansion in Arcadia. Some of the children were reportedly only two months old.

Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, have each been charged with conspiracy to commit child abuse. Xuan additionally faces felony counts of child abuse, being an accessory after the fact and five counts of attempting to dissuade a witness. Zhang is also charged with being an accessory after the fact and four counts of dissuading a witness. Both defendants have entered not-guilty pleas.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman called the case unprecedented, saying the alleged abuse involved an extraordinary number of children. He described the reported corporal punishment as “appalling and revolting,” particularly because it was allegedly carried out by people entrusted with the children’s care.

The investigation began in May 2025 after Zhang took her two-month-old baby to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles with a traumatic head injury and significant bleeding in the brain, according to affiliate FOX 11 Los Angeles. Doctors concluded that the infant had allegedly been shaken violently and struck by a nanny identified as Chunmei Li.

Prosecutors say Xuan and Zhang waited roughly two days before seeking emergency care, doing so only after the baby began suffering seizures. The couple allegedly told medical personnel that the child had fallen from a bed, a claim investigators say was false.

Police reviewing surveillance video from the couple’s estimated $10 million residence allegedly uncovered evidence of ongoing abuse involving 14 surrogate-born children. The children ranged in age from two months to 13 years, although most were between one and three years old.

Authorities later found six other children connected to the couple living at separate residences, bringing the total number of children involved in the investigation to 21.

Investigators said the mansion contained three so-called “learning centers,” where toddlers were allegedly made to remain seated at desks for extended periods. Nannies were reportedly told to use forms of punishment intended to avoid leaving obvious injuries.

FOX 11 reported that prosecutors accuse Xuan and Zhang of supervising and directing nannies who allegedly beat the children every day with sticks kept around the property. The children were also allegedly instructed to say they had not been beaten.

In one alleged incident, Xuan reportedly told a nanny who was hitting a child to strike harder before taking part in the assault. Prosecutors say he slapped the child’s head, hit the child’s exposed buttocks and lifted the child by one arm while continuing to strike. In another case, a boy was allegedly ordered to perform repeated squats or remain in a “horse stance” for hours as punishment.

READ MORE: Exploring the Story of Tanka Jahari: From Wikipedia to the Chocolate Factory – NewsFinale

The couple also ran Future Spring Surrogacy from the Arcadia property, recruiting women to serve as surrogates and paying tens of thousands of dollars for pregnancies. One surrogate was paid $135,000, while prosecutors allege that others were recruited through deceptive or misleading representations.

At least eight surrogates told investigators they had encountered aggressive behavior and been given false information about the family’s living arrangements.

Authorities said the home also contained signs of significant wealth, including more than 200 bank accounts allegedly controlled by Xuan, large amounts of cash used to pay nannies and passports from several countries, including Mexico.

Investigators additionally reported finding liquor worth an estimated $8 million to $9 million inside the residence.

Officials are still working to identify the biological and social parents of all 21 children. The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has placed the children in its care while arranging ongoing medical treatment, psychological assessments and permanent legal placements.

Hochman said the residence did not provide the children with the care and affection they deserved. Instead, he alleged, the children were systematically beaten and punished whenever they failed to follow orders. He added that prosecutors would pursue accountability against the couple for what he called despicable conduct.

Nanny Chunmei Li is charged with child abuse causing great bodily injury or death; authorities said she has since fled to China.

Beyond the child abuse allegations, law enforcement is probing Xuan’s past, including his connection to a property previously linked to an illegal casino and a psilocybin mushroom growing operation.

News Media reached out to attorneys for Xuan and Zhang for comment. It remains unclear how long the alleged abuse had been occurring prior to May 2025.