(AP) European Union interior ministers pledged Friday to beef up border security, boost the powers of the bloc’s police agency and crack down on hate speech and online propaganda in response to a wave of extremist attacks, most recently in Austria and France.
Four people were shot to death and several were wounded in the Austrian capital Vienna on Nov. 2, when a man who officials said had tried to join the Islamic State group rampaged through the city center, before police fatally shot him. The attack strengthened calls in Austria for a crackdown on Islamic extremism.
In France last month, an extremist killed three people in a church in the French city of Nice, and a Chechen teenager beheaded a teacher near Paris because he had shown his students cartoons of Islam’s prophet for a discussion about freedom of expression.
