By Holmes Lybrand, Evan Perez, CNN

(CNN) — The war with Iran has raised concerns about possible retaliatory terrorist attacks in major cities such as London, where the police commissioner says they have intensified focus on possible threats.

But unlike in the US, where government officials have raised alarm of possible so-called Iranian sleeper cells, UK counterparts describe a more diffuse threat that could come from lone-wolf attacks.

Sir Mark Rowley, London’s police commissioner, told CNN in a recent interview that police had disrupted 20 plots in the last two years. Most have involved Iranian operatives seeking to hire attackers, some through the dark web, to target Iranian diaspora members who oppose the Tehran government and against Jewish institutions, he said.

“It’s sometimes ordinary criminals responding to adverts on the dark web, which is extraordinary, because it’s a different sort of state craft, isn’t it?” Rowley said of the recruitment efforts by Iran for hired gunmen, who he said were akin to “useful idiots.”

Rowley noted that the concept of sleeper cells — a fear expressed by Republican lawmakers and Trump officials that agents for Iran could be lurking in the US, ready to be activated for an attack — sounded “a bit Jason Bourne to me.”

“The idea of longterm strategic placement by Iran is not the core of what we have seen,” Rowley said.

The threat of short-term actors hired on Iran’s behalf remains.

On Wednesday, the Metropolitan police in London announced charges against two Iranian men accused of surveilling “locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area” for Iran’s intelligence service last summer.

The two men, arrested earlier this month, appeared in court Wednesday and have yet to enter pleas in the case, according to local media reports.

The threat of terrorist attacks and related threats was central part of the police commissioner’s discussions with top officials and key partners in the US during his trip to the United States, including the FBI, New York Police Department and beyond, he said.

In discussing London’s approach to crime, a city that saw a historical low in the homicide rate last year — 97 deaths, less than a third of New York City, which is comparable in population and also saw historical lows in homicides in 2025 — Rowley pointed to a technology that many Americans would rage against but which he says over 80% of Londoners approve of: surveillance paired with facial recognition.

The MPD has recently begun to deploy identifiable police vans equipped with cameras and facial recognition software in high traffic, high crime areas in the city. The recognition software uses datasets of people wanted by the police or who may be in violation of constrictions imposed by the court.

“It is a very narrow set of criminals who we are targeting through their images — dangerous wanted offenders and registered sex offenders,” Rowley said while adding that once a person is captured on camera who is not wanted by the police, their image is deleted.

The failure rate for such technology — identifying the wrong person — is exceptionally low, according to Rowley. Only 10 people were misidentified as being wanted by the police out of 3 million people whose images were captured, an MPD report published last fall found.

To operate such a program in a democratic society, Rowley said, “You have to keep coming back to, how do you nurture the trust?”

“The whole Western world, we’re all seeing, all this misinformation out there,” Rowley said. “Polarized politics, bot farms in Russia, all of this is attacking trust in the state and in the state’s institutions.”

“Ours is going up,” Rowley said of trust in the poli

By Holmes Lybrand, Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

(CNN) — The Justice Department on Thursday seized several websites it says were used by Iran as part of “psychological operations” targeting perceived advisories and spreading terrorist propaganda.

Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security was using the four websites, in part, to post “sensitive data stolen during such hacks, and calling for the killing of journalists, regime dissidents, and Israeli persons,” the DOJ said in an announcement Friday.

Attorney General Pam Bondi warned that “terrorist propaganda online can incite real-world violence” in announcing the seizures while FBI Director Kash Patel said the “FBI will hunt down every actor behind these cowardly death threats and cyberattacks and will bring the full force of American law enforcement down on them.”

The website seizures come a week after men hundreds of miles away from one another attacked US institutions in American cities. Both attacks — one at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia and the other at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan — are being investigated as acts of terrorism.

The exact motives for each attack are still being investigated but the man who officials say drove a truck into the Michigan synagogue, before dying in a shootout with security, had previously been flagged in US government databases for connections with suspected members of the militant group Hezbollah, although he was not believed to be a member himself.

Separately, the man officials say killed one person and injured two others at Old Dominion University on Thursday was a veteran and convicted ISIS supporter. That man was killed by a group of students in the ROTC classroom where he opened fire.

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed in US-Israeli strikes late last month. The strikes have continued each day since.

According to the Justice Department, the websites it seized posted photos, names and sensitive information on 190 Israeli government associates along with threats and warnings. The Justice Department says the websites were involved in other threats and hacking operations, as well as calls for assassinations against Iranian targets.

“Threat actors” associated with one website, the Justice Department statement said, “directed online threats toward individuals who publicly criticized the Iranian government.”

The goal of these campaigns, the Justice Department said, is to “discourage independent reporting” while “creating fear among members of the Iranian diaspora critical of the regime.”

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By Leah Asmelash, CNN

(CNN) — The rapper Afroman did not defame seven sheriff’s deputies or invade their privacy when he put out a series of catchy, flamboyantly insulting music videos about them after they raided his home in 2022, an Adams County, Ohio jury ruled on Wednesday.

In a three-day trial that pitted two very different notions of personal outrage against each other, Afroman, whose legal name is Joseph Foreman, successfully argued that he had a First Amendment right to mock the deputies, as public figures, and that the over-the-top lyrics of his viral songs could not reasonably be taken as literal statements of fact.

Decked in an American flag-patterned suit and matching sunglasses, Afroman — best known, before the videos that brought him into court, for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High” — turned the proceedings into a display of virality, using the witness stand as one more platform to present the raid as a serious act of wrongdoing, and to insist on his power to make fun of it.

“After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door,” he said during the trial, “I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time.”

In August 2022, a squad of deputies from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office broke down his door with weapons in hand. He wasn’t home at the time, but a family member recorded videos of the search on their phone, and footage from the house’s security cameras shows the officers tearing through his kitchen.

The officers had a warrant to search for evidence for drug trafficking and kidnapping, according to CNN news affiliate WCPO, but they failed to find anything that would justify charges. By Afroman’s account, the officers left his house torn apart, cut his security video cords, took cash from his home — officials later announced that deputies had merely miscounted the money — and traumatized his kids.

So Afroman took his anger, and his case, to the internet, working to outmaneuver the deputies in the court of public opinion. After uploading the footage of the raid onto his Instagram page shortly after the incident, Afroman remixed it into multiple YouTube videos over the following months — even releasing an album titled “Lemon Pound Cake,” after the moment in the footage in which an officer apparently did a double take at the cake sitting on Afroman’s kitchen island.

“The Adams County Sheriff kicked down my door / Then I heard the glass break / They found no kidnapping victims / Just some lemon pound cake,” he croons in the title track. The music video, from 2022, has more than 3 million views on YouTube.

Beyond criticizing the raid, the barrage of videos also attributed various personal, professional and sexual transgressions to the deputies. The deputies claimed that these were intentional lies that harmed their reputations and made their lives and their jobs more difficult. Deputy Lisa Phillips wept on the stand during a courtroom playing of the song and video “Licc

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