A senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan apologized Wednesday for propaganda leaflets that superimposed a key Islamic text on the image of a dog. The leaflets distributed by U.S. forces in Parwan province, north of Kabul, on Tuesday depicted a lion, representing the U.S.-led coalition, chasing a dog with a section of the Taliban’s banner, containing a passage from the Koran in Arabic, superimposed on its side.

After coming under pressure from lawmakers, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has taken steps toward spending tens of millions of dollars to counter propaganda by Islamist extremists and governments such as Russia. A State Department official confirmed on Thursday that Tillerson last week approved the use of about $60 million by the Global Engagement Center toward the anti-propaganda efforts.

The French leader said that migrants were destabilizing Libya and Europe by fueling people-smuggling, which in turn funded terrorism. "The idea is to create hotspots to avoid people taking crazy risks when they are not all eligible for asylum. We'll go to them," he said on Thursday at a naturalization ceremony in the central city of Orléans.

For a few hours on Sunday, Ariana Grande, a 23-year-old pop star from Boca Raton, Florida, was the leader of the free world. The position has been open for months. Contestants ranging from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to, improbably, Chinese President Xi Jinping have been auditioning for the job. [...] While President Trump gutter-tweeted argle-bargle and played another round of golf, Grande delivered what will likely stand as the official American response to the bombing in Manchester and to another terrorist attack, the night before the concert, in London.

Put simply, a lack of education is a driver of extremist ideologies; in a world where there are so many conflict zones, it’s more urgent than ever that foreign aid is allocated for education that gives young people the resilience and critical skills to reject hate and violence. Schools have become targets of war. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack has noted that there has been a series of attacks on schools in at least 21 countries experiencing armed conflict and insecurity since 2013. These are not accidents.

The World Food Programme last week said nearly two million people were living on the brink of famine in the remote region, which has been devastated by Boko Haram violence since 2009. Boko Haram's Islamist insurgency has killed at least 20,000 people in northeast Nigeria and forced millions of others from their homes. Lack of security, plus restrictions on travel and trade, have hit agriculture hard, led to food shortages and driven up prices. The UN says Nigeria needs $1.05 billion this year to fund vital humanitarian projects including food, clean water and sanitation. 

To fight terrorist propaganda on the Internet, social media companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have all instituted take down policies and teamed up with Microsoft to create a database of unique ‘fingerprints’ to automatically detect terrorist propaganda in the form of images and videos. [...] Despite these efforts, however, ISIS still continues to successfully disseminate its propaganda on the internet.