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McVeigh’s Dastardly Act Changed Domestic Terrorism (Buffalo News)
Western New York had a sad role in the worst case of domestic terrorism by a U.S. citizen. Twenty-five years [this past Saturday], Pendleton native Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding 800 others.
McVeigh’s bomb made lasting changes to life in the United States. Before McVeigh, domestic terrorists, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Weathermen, targeted specific people but rarely killed indiscriminately.
After McVeigh, domestic terrorists aimed for body count, the more attention-getting the better. In recent years on the crackpot right, there has been an uptick in McVeigh adulation.
The bombing also changed law enforcement. McVeigh sent signals a quarter century ago that probably would attract law enforcement attention today. There is no way to know if that would have stopped the bombing. There have been plenty of unstopped domestic-terror slaughters since. But likewise, there surely have been attacks prevented since McVeigh because law enforcement was listening.

25 Years After Oklahoma City, Domestic Terrorism Is on the Rise (Garrett M. Graff, Wired)
In an exclusive interview with WIRED, FBI director Christopher Wray discusses a scourge that “moves at the speed of social media.”

Mass Surveillance Is Spreading along with COVID-19 (Michael Nemeth, FEE)
Government surveillance and data collection have long been a point of contention in the United States, and the current COVID-19 pandemic shows why.

Russian Hackers Tried to Steal San Francisco Airport Windows Accounts (Lawrence Abrams, Bleeping Computer)
San Francisco International Airport employee websites were hacked in March. New research from security firm ESET shows links between that attack and Russia’s “Energetic Bear” hacking group, one of that country’s most active teams. While they’ve typically targeted critical infrastructure, Energetic Bear has focused on aviation in the past, and generally casts a wide net. They appear to have been trying to obtain the Windows log-in credentials of visitors to SFOConnect.com and SFOConstruction.com. Airport officials forced a password reset, and encouraged any third-party visitors to those sites to do so as well.

Syrian “Torture Chief” Who Fled to Germany Charged with 58 Murders (Oliver Moody, The Times)
A former commander in the Syrian secret police who allegedly supervised the torture of 4,000 opponents of the Assad regime was arrested after he appealed to the German authorities for protection, it has been claimed. Anwar Raslan, 57, has been charged with crimes against humanity, rape, aggravated sexual assault and 58 murders relating to his time in Branch 251, a notorious intelligence unit with its own prison in Damascus.

Britain Has 139 Tons of Plutonium. That’s a Real Problem. (Christopher Fichtlscherer, Friederike Frieß, Moritz Kütt, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The United Kingdom’s last plutonium reprocessing plant, B205, located in Sellafield in northern England, will shut down by the end of 2020. It will bring an end to the era of plutonium separation in the country, which began 68 years ago. Because the United Kingdom never used any of the material it recouped from reprocessing except in nuclear weapons, today it has amassed a stockpile of almost 139 metric tons of separated plutonium. This creates lasting problems: Plutonium stored in Sellafield is highly toxic and poses a permanent risk of proliferation. It is enough material to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

Warmest Oceans on Record Could Set Off a Year of Extreme Weather (Brian K. Sullivan, Bloomberg)
The world’s seas are simmering, with record high temperatures spurring worry among forecasters that the global warming effect may generate a chaotic year of extreme weather ahead.

A Decade After Deepwater Horizon (New York Times)
Rolling back regulations ignores the central lessons from the country’s largest oil spill.

Can “Carbon-Smart” Farming Play a Key Role in Taking on Climate Change? (Gabriel Popkin, Grist)

Fossil Fuels Are in Long-Term Decline. Coronavirus Stimulus Money Will Be wasted on them.(David Roberts, VOX)
The industry is shedding value, taking on debt, and losing favor among financial institutions and investors.