The American Mind.

The American legal system was a thing of beauty. Refined across centuries and emerging from the precedence of millions of common law cases, by the end of the last millennium it had become the envy of the world. Serving both a dispute resolution and truth-seeking function, it channeled the violent passions of human nature into a controlled medium. It then subjected those passions to standardized procedures (the rules of evidence and civil or criminal procedure) to yield judgments that commanded the respect of the parties and the public.

The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests.

But today, sophisticated regime mandarins in Big Law, government, and non-profit activist organizations seek to pervert our legal system by hacking it. They warp its dispute resolution and truth-seeking function to one that advances and sustains their grip on power, delegitimizing that grip in the process. This is known as lawfare. Its variants include access denial, weaponized defamation law, weaponized criminal law, misuse of federal and state agencies, subversive professional licensing requirements, and “adversarial inversion.”

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I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that ‘Palestinians’ are planning terrorist attacks.

Will the Islamophobia ever cease?

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Can’t say that I blame them.

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Systemic racism, but not the way they want you to believe.

Imagine how much the crime rate in the U.S. would plummet if all of the Africans left.

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Vision Pro is being used for a wide range of applications in the field of health and medicine, with Apple highlighting an app which helps surgeons plan and visualize operations which are carried out with the help of a surgical robot.

The company says that the device is also helping to familiarize nurses with new medical equipment, in a way that reduces anxiety when they start using the kit in real-life applications …

UPDATE: Apple Vision Pro gives developers a chance to positively impact the future of healthcare

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I guess they didn’t love Big Brother enough.

ZMan peeks behind the curtain.

One of the things the paleos missed when they began to flesh out managerialism in the last century is how it assumes the qualities of democracy. This is something Robert Dahl picked up in his analysis of American government against the standard of democracy he developed. While the institutions of America were not democratic and could never be democratic, the people in these institutions were motivated by a democratic sense in that they wanted to act according to public will.

This explains, in part, how our institutions have grown increasingly authoritarian over the last three decades, while the people running them have become obsessed with defending what they call “our democracy.” They do not view democracy as a process, but rather as a goal. The truly democratic society is open, and the people freely exchange the right ideas. Defending democracy in this sense means dragging the people to this place, by force if necessary.

This democratic sensibility within democracy is important in understanding the reckless behavior of the people running the institutions. If one were to pick a single word to describe the cause of the current crisis it would be “reckless”. Whether it is reckless foreign policy adventures or poorly conceived domestic fads, the ruling class seems to take pleasure in reckless projects. They operate like gamblers with unlimited credit that they assume will be repaid by others.

The Hill.

DEI — the identity-obsessed dogma that goes by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — has now trained Google’s new AI to refuse to draw white people. What’s even more alarming is that it’s also infected the supply chain that makes the chips powering everything from AI to missiles, endangering national security.

The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.

This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.

Reality is what’s left when ideology crashes and burns.

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Since January 2023, President Joe Biden’s National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent millions of dollars on grants funded by the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus package. The grants have nothing to do with COVID, but they do fund studies on climate change.

The American Rescue Plan, which Biden said would bring “direct relief to families bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 crisis,” sent $600 million to the NSF. The agency pledged to use the funding to “support groups of individuals and institutions most strongly affected by the pandemic.” Three years after Biden signed the legislation, that money is still going out the door—through research grants that aren’t COVID-related.

One July 2023 grant, for example, funded a $246,000 Amherst College study meant to “deepen our understanding of how floodplains have responded to … climatic changes.” A more than $7 million grant awarded one month earlier to the University of Texas at Austin will help develop “a learning environment that is welcoming to marginalized and minoritized researchers.” The NSF sent another $181,000 to California Polytechnic State University in December to investigate “the structural organization, and changes therein, of a school of fish.”

Power Line.

I think the answer to that question is Yes. In reality, the whole point of DEI is bigotry, so the fact that its exponents keep getting outed as haters is not at all coincidental. The latest case comes from Johns Hopkins, where the Chief Diversity Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine has resigned following a hateful outburst.

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Anybody who has ever observed and studied the homeless situation in California will readily see how the nonprofit homeless service providers that have been enabled by our political leaders have not only helped create the crisis, but have institutionalized homelessness as a way of life.

Now, a new conduit for corruption in the state of California is rearing its ugly head, and a word to the wise is to recognize this demon for what it really is. In brief, it is the role that nonprofits are playing in the California State Housing Mandate that the governor’s office and our legislature are promoting.

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Three small business owners filed suit and won in court against the Biden administration for attempting to choose winners and losers solely based on race when deciding who would receive government financial support.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) sued the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), a federal agency that was expanded under the Biden administration and charged with supporting minority-owned businesses, in March 2023 on behalf of Jeffrey Nuziard, Matthew Piper and Christian Brucker.

The MBDA sought to serve “minority business enterprises (MBEs) owned and operated by African Americans, Asian Americans, Hasidic Jews, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders.” The agency was created as part of a presidential executive order in the 1960s, and permanently authorized through the Infrastructure Act in 2021.

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Protesting New York Attorney General Letitia James and supporting former President Donald Trump might be putting some of New York’s bravest under fire with the New York City Fire Department leadership.

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Tonight is Hollywood’s biggest night, the 96th Academy Awards, when the liberal bubble of the movie industry puts on a TV show expecting the rest of the nation to pay rapt attention. So it’s a good time to dig out the absolute worst quotes we’ve collected over the years from the “stars,” as they championed their favorite liberal politicians and badmouthed conservatives.

Democrats, the Hollywood elite tells us, are virtual deities walking amongst us. Back in 2012, actor Jamie Foxx saluted “our lord and savior, Barack Obama,” during the Soul Train Awards on BET. “It would be wonderful to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass,” actress Gwyneth Paltrow not-so-constitutionally enthused at a Democratic fundraiser for Obama in 2014.

But Republicans are foul creatures who need to be exterminated. “If we were in other countries,” actor Alec Baldwin screamed after Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, “we would stone [GOP Congressman] Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and children!” Nearly two decades later, actor George Takei sneered that Justice Clarence Thomas was “a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court….He is a disgrace to America.”

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The Southern Poverty Law Center has repeatedly opposed Georgia bills that would require local law enforcement to report illegal aliens to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they are charged with or convicted of other crimes. This activism has drawn renewed scrutiny in the wake of Laken Riley’s killing, allegedly at the hands of an illegal alien who appears to have slipped through the justice system, and amid a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC.

D.A. King, a Georgia immigration activist who founded a pro-immigration enforcement organization called the Dustin Inman Society, noted that the SPLC opposed two laws that would have improved communication between local law enforcement and ICE.

King is currently suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for defamation after the group branded his organization an “anti-immigrant hate group” in 2018, around the same time the SPLC registered a lobbyist to oppose an immigration enforcement bill King supported.

Power Line.

Referring to an illegal alien as “illegal” in unscripted remarks during his State of the Union Address this past Thursday, President Biden inadvertently offended a core Democratic constituency (i.e., illegal aliens). That could not stand and it didn’t. As John notes nearby, Biden recanted and apologized within 48 hours.

Illegal or undocumented — which is the correct term. As a matter of fact, “Illegal alien” is the correct term.

 

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Name me a country where “Christian Nationalists” are kidnapping children.

It’s often more trouble than it’s worth.

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The University of Virginia (UVA) has at least 235 employees under its “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” banner — including 82 students — whose total cost of employment is estimated at $20 million. That’s $15 million in cash compensation plus an additional 30-percent for the annual cost of their benefits.

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The following report from French TV describes an incident that occurred recently on a train, in which an annoyed passenger attempted to behead a fellow passenger for failing to quiet a crying baby.

I must point out that this was an enricher-vs.-enricher attack: the alleged perpetrator is said to be Tunisian or Palestinian, and the victim is an Algerian.

Palestinians appear to be … ill-natured.

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Even after weeks of opportunistic strikes against time-sensitive Houthi targets — usually in the form of missiles and drones being prepared for launch — the group fired 28 drones at targets around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that separates the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden. U.S. Central Command subsequently released a statement saying that none of the drones hit their mark and were shot down by allied ships and aircraft. Regardless of the success of this onslaught, it is a very clear sign that the Houthis have no intention of curtailing their attacks on shipping and that the growing coalition of warships and combat aircraft are stepping up to meet that challenge head-on.

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The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

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A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration from unlawfully redirecting taxpayer funds away from the construction of a wall along the southern border.

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An interactive slide show posted to the New York Times site on Wednesday, the day before President Biden’s State of the Union address (“How the State of the Union Became a Picture of Disunion”) relayed a slanted history of partisan scrapping at recent State of the Union addresses that suggested Republicans were almost wholly responsible for the turn to incivility.

The slideshow featured historical text by Peter Baker, White House correspondent.

Here’s the entry for George W. Bush suggesting nothing untoward had happened at a SOTU before at least 2007: “Even at the height of the Iraq war, decorum still reigned. In 2007, George W. Bush called it a “high privilege” to address the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, even though she was a vocal critic of his war policy.”

But Baker completely skipped over the start of the present-day SOTU partisanship: The booing of George W. Bush by Democrats during his State of the Union addresses in both 2004 and 2005.

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The Irish electorate looks like having solidly rejected two constitutional amendments that would have erased the word “woman” from the Irish constitution and altered the legal definition of family in what is shaping up to be a 70-30 shock victory for tradition over the nation’s well-financed NGO lobby.

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Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame. Their actions show vividly that those sentiments are alien to them – unable to penetrate the entrenched barriers of dogma, arrogance and deep-seated insecurities. The last are personal as well as political. Therein lies a puzzle. For, as a consequence, the West has set itself on a path of collective suicide. Moral suicide in Gaza; diplomatic suicide – the foundations laid in Europe, the Middle East and across Eurasia; economic suicide – the dollar-based global financial system jeopardized, Europe deindustrializing. It is not a pretty picture. Astoundingly, this self-destruction is occurring in the absence of any major trauma – external or internal. Therein lies another, related puzzle.

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Sir Roger Scruton suggested that “conservatism is more of an instinct than an idea.” Apparently, what he meant was that conservatism was not primarily a construct of intellectuals, but something that comes from our natural human dispositions.

Scruton’s insight seems to be corroborated by research on the connection between human personality and political ideology. Psychologists have identified correlations between certain personality traits and ideological and political preferences. These findings suggest that there is a lot in the conservatism-progressivism divide that results from differences in personality traits.

A leading approach to the study of human personality today, called The Big Five, identifies five dimensions of the human personality: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or, conversely, neuroticism). Researchers interested in assessing the extent to which differences in personality affect ideological inclinations and political choices seek to identify possible associations of these five personality traits with specific political ideologies.

StrategyPage.

The U.S. Navy has finally started repair work on an SSN (nuclear attack submarine) that returned damaged from its last time at sea nine years ago. The Newport News Shipbuilding firm is to carry out a $1.24 billion overhaul of Los Angeles-class submarine USS Boise at a shipyard in Virginia. The work will be completed by 2029.

The work includes maintenance and restoration of hull structure, tanks, propulsion systems, electric plant, auxiliary systems, armament, and furnishings in addition to many useful alterations.

The delays in doing the work on the USS Boise were caused by submarine maintenance backlogs resulting from not enough shipyards. The Boise was originally supposed to have this work done in 2016, but for eight years there were not enough shipyards available to do the work.

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The Senate passed six government funding bills on March 8 to avoid an impending shutdown deadline that was poised to activate at midnight later that night.

Senators approved the funding package 75–22 early in the evening on March 8 after hours of debate. Democrats pushed for a faster vote, while Republicans proposed several amendments to the funding package that all inevitably failed.

After the House of Representatives passed its measure on March 6, only the Senate was left to pass its funding bills before they were all sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. In addition to the March 8 deadline, there is another looming shutdown deadline on March 22.

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New York Attorney General Letitia James has been sued by a Nassau County executive who has accused her of unconstitutional discrimination for trying to override the county’s decision to block biologically mmale transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.

The lawsuit was filed by Nassau County official Bruce Blakeman, who said on X that he filed the lawsuit “to protect women’s sports and ensure a safe environment for women.”

“Bullying of women and girls will not be tolerated!” he added, in response to James’ cease and desist letter and threat to use legal action to force the county to allow trans athletes to compete.

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Of course they do.

Daily Beast.

Gee, I wonder why?

Real estate billionaire Jeff Greene sat in his oceanside mansion in Palm Beach on Thursday as President Biden unveiled a proposal to raise taxes on the ultra-rich—a central element of his State of the Union address. The plan would impose a 25 percent minimum income on anyone worth at least $100 million. Greene, with an estimated $7.5 billion net worth, would easily make the cut.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the real estate tycoon doesn’t support Biden’s proposal. “I don’t agree with the idea of just singling out people because of how much they have or don’t have,” he fumed to The Daily Beast.
“The progressive income tax, I understand,” he continued, though he argued that tax rates in some parts of the country have already grown out of control. “You have to leave incentives for people who are the ones who are going to create the jobs for all those people trying to climb the ladder.”Greene also contended that wealth can be difficult to measure. Some billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, have net worths composed mostly of publicly traded stock, which is easy to value. In his world—real estate—that kind of analysis is often subjective.

(Hint: If you’re the whipping boy, don’t give your money to the guys with the whips. Just sayin’.)

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Germany’s gross domestic product has been falling since the third quarter of 2022, causing fears of the first two-year-long recession since the early 2000s. German farmers are openly protesting new climate regulations that would raise the price of diesel fuel, vital for tractors and farm machinery. This discontent is mirrored by the general public, which is opposed to higher energy costs that drag down the economy. Recent polls show a significant shift in public opinion that’s increasingly opposed to the coalition government.

Unlike the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate, where invariably one party secures a ruling majority, multiple German parties must form a coalition to reach the required 50%+1 majority threshold. Currently, the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party comprise this coalition. The latest polls show all these parties polling far below their 2021 election results while the more right-leaning parties, such as the Christian Democratic Union and the Alternative for Germany, are surging in popularity.

The recent economic slowdown has resulted in widespread political discontent, and the core of the slowdown has been disastrous energy policy.

The Foundry.

Throughout all of history, education has been understood as being about learning the truths of reality and conforming oneself to those truths in order to flourish in civil society.

The Biden administration wants to turn that idea on its head. The administration thinks one should try to twist reality to conform it to oneself and one’s emotions.

That brainwashing starts at the highest levels of the federal government and percolates down into the classrooms. And that’s exactly what’s happening with the Department of Education.

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disturbing services without parental knowledge or consent, an investigation by a leading parental rights group has found.

Progressive education activists claim that so-called school-based health centers and other “wrap-around services” improve academic performance and behavior by giving students daily access to mental and health services on campus.

This sounds good in theory—especially with a proposed staff of nurses, doctors, and psychologists ready to aid students in need—a lack of guardrails and associations with politically motivated organizations severely compromise the sales pitch for school-based health centers, or SBHCs.

The Foundry

According to a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, ICE asked police in Montgomery County, Maryland, 119 times this year to detain and hand over criminal aliens they had arrested. The criminals’ records included “convictions for assault, robbery, illegal firearms, sex abuse of a minor, rape, and MS-13 gang membership,” former official John Feere said. Montgomery County didn’t honor a single request.

ICE “detainers” are a request from federal law enforcement to their state and local colleagues to let them know when a foreign national (“alien” in immigration law) is going to be released from custody after having been arrested or after having served time for a criminal conviction. This is so ICE can take them into federal custody pending removal, or during any legal process needed to deport them.

Illegal aliens are deportable under immigration law simply for being here illegally, but they can apply for relief such as asylum. Some have legitimate asylum cases, fearing for their lives if they are returned to their home countries, but the majority clog the system with bogus claims so they can stay in the United States for years—oftentimes, indefinitely. But being convicted of a crime makes illegal aliens doubly deportable under other sections of the law.

When detainers are honored, ICE can lock potentially violent alien suspects or convicts safely away from the public. Unfortunately, many local and even state governments in the U.S. have “sanctuary” policies, one of which is to refuse to inform ICE when they arrest or release an alien.

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The Royal Navy has successfully conducted the inaugural trial of a quantum navigation system capable of determining a vessel’s precise location worldwide, without reliance on GPS.

The technology was developed by physicists from Imperial College in London.

Quantum navigation represents a technological leap over satellite-based systems, because satellites can be jammed and often malfunction.

The Foundry.

I remember learning about democracy back in grammar school. We learned about it in the context of the American Revolution: Britain’s King George III may have ruled as a capricious monarch, but the intrepid Colonists fought for the then-novel concept of democratic self-government.

A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines “democracy” as “government by the people” or, more elaborately, as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation’s liberal elites and the foot-soldier activists of today’s Democratic Party.

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The essence of progressivism is to obsess about trivialities and ignore the main issue.

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“It concerns a group of individuals within the violent Islamist extremist environment. We see connections to serious organized crime, as well as international links to the terrorist organization Islamic State,” said Fredrik Hultgren-Friberg, press spokesman for Swedish security services SÄPO. “What I can say is that we have been aware of these individuals for a longer period and have taken action against their plans to avert a threat,” he said, adding that further arrests are not out of the question.

Security services and police raided several different properties connected to the suspects, including a property owned by an Islamic association, according to daily Aftonbladet. After raiding the home of one of the four, police retrieved a significant number of automatic weapons, Expressen writes.

Muslims seem to have pretty much a monopoly on terrorism these days.

Power Line.

• Esquire used to pose a rhetorical question as a caption on a photograph of Richard Nixon that it published in its annual Dubious Achievement Awards edition: Why is this man laughing? The question to be posed for this speech is Why is this man shouting? He is an angry old man.

• This was a terrible speech terribly delivered. It’s a good thing no drug test was required before the address. Biden sounded hopped up. He spoke too fast. He slurred his words. He was frequently difficult to understand. He shouted a variety of clichés and shibboleths as though we might otherwise miss their depth and meaning. The disparity between the shibboleths and the shouting was almost funny.

• Biden sounded like a 45 rpm record playing at 78. It was an old record — it had scratches at several places that caused it to skip the groove.

I have some bad news….

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Anyway, that is the show this week. It is about how the decline in intelligence will impact our live and society. The people who think AI will solve it or that robots will pick up the slack have not thought about the problem hard enough. All of those things will make the decline worse for the people with anything on the ball. Imagine Idiocracy by terminators are in charge instead of morons.

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The president made numerous claims, many of them contentious and sharply partisan. The Daily Signal fact-checked many of those claims to assess whether they were truthful and accurate.

Newsbusters.

Hey, somebody needs to.

mmediately following President Biden’s State of the Union Address Thursday night, CNN’s band of liberal anchors (Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Abby Phillip) praised his attacks on former President Trump, his “fight,” and tried to do damage control for his plethora of senior moments.

Tapper made sure to tout how Biden alluded to Trump 13 times (ABC counted 16) during the address. Once he quickly exhausted all the nice things he had to say, Tapper awkwardly pivoted to trying to downplay Biden’s bumbling, stumbling, and disgraceful mispronunciation of Laken Riley’s name (the young college student Biden’s open border policies killed) by calling her “Lincoln”.

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Many years ago Recep Tayyip Erdogan famously quoted a poem by the 20th-century Turkish nationalist writer Ziya Gökalp:

The mosques are our barracks,
the domes our helmets,
the minarets our bayonets,
and the believers our soldiers.

One of those barracks was raided today by security police in the Swedish town of Tyresö, and four people were arrested for planning a terrorist attack.