Midday Roundup: House votes to tighten visa rules to keep out terrorists

Additional screening. With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House voted yesterday to tighten a visa waiver program in an attempt to prevent terrorists from visiting the United States. Visitors from 38 countries, most of them European, can visit the U.S. without getting a visa first. But the new law, which President Barack Obama supports, would require visitors from those countries to get a visa if they have recently traveled in Iraq or another country with terrorist activity. The law would not have prevented San Bernardino, Calif., attacker Tashfeen Malik from entering the country because she obtained a fiancée visa. But it could stop people like some of the Paris attackers, most of whom were Europeans who went to Syria for terror training.

Previous plans. Enrique Marquez, a neighbor and relative of California attacker Syed Rizwan Farook, is providing authorities with all kinds of details about the terrorist couple, including the fact that Farook had planned an earlier attack in the United States but changed his mind. Marquez bought the rifles Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, used in the shooting that killed 14 of Farook’s co-workers in San Bernardino, Calif. He is cooperating with police and has not been charged with a crime. Statements by Marquez, who was in the process of converting to Islam, support the conclusion that Farook and Malik had been radicalized for a while before the attack, possibly before they met each other.

Ferocious Frenchman. The mother of the third terrorist at Paris’ Bataclan theater has identified her son to police. The woman received a text message telling her that her son had died as a martyr, and she then gave DNA evidence to police to assist in identifying him. The attacker, Foued Mohamed-Aggad, went to Syria in 2013 and joined Islamic State. He reportedly told his family he planned to become a suicide bomber in Iraq and had no plans to return to France. No warrant had been issued for his arrest. “What kind of human being could do what he did?” his father, Said Mohamed-Aggad, told The Parisien newspaper. “If I had known he would do something like this, I would have killed him.”

Aggravated arson. Six arsons in the past six weeks have residents of a small Jewish community in Queens, N.Y., fearing an anti-Semitic criminal is targeting them. Police don’t know why six buildings, including four homes under construction, have been burned. The arsonist could be targeting the homes for their opulence, the religion of their owners, or for another reason, police say. The area is home to many families of Bukharian Jews who immigrated from Central Asia to escape persecution in the 1980s. “I don’t know what to think,” said Rabbi Zalman Zvulonov, whose future home, still under construction, was torched early Monday morning. “There are only Jewish houses burning so that tells you something. But I couldn’t point a finger.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.