Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

The rise of ISIS and their brutal acts of terror have been a horrifying development in the past year. And yet within in the Middle Eastern artistic community, an unlikely group of voices has begun to stand up to try and combat’s the group’s message of fear and intolerance: comedians.

Moazzam Begg, a former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay prison, says he offered to help negotiate the release of British hostage Alan Henning. Instead, the British Foreign Office ignored him for months.

The US has long worried that its attempts to fight terrorism might actually spur more terrorism. We learn that a US detention camp in Iraq seems to have helped incubate ISIS. Meanwhile, it is Election Day in the US and an app lets Americans show their partisan choices as they shop. And an Egyptian bus driver found one heck of a way to fail a drug test. We have those stories and more in today’s Global Scan.

After resisting involvement for months — and even years — the US and five other countries finally launched airstrikes in Syria against ISIS, the Khorasan Group and other Islamist militants. But will the US be able to keep its long-standing vow not to send ground troops to defeat ISIS?

When ISIS accounts were kicked off of Facebook and Twitter, the terrorist group turned to Russian social network VKontakte to keep up its propaganda and fundraising. A new report from a Russian news site exposed the extent of the militants’ use of Russian sites and that seems to have started a crackdown by authorities.