• Extremism

    The leader of the extremist Atomwaffen group was convicted in U.S. District Court in Seattle of five federal felonies for his conspiracy to send threatening posters to journalists and employees of the Anti-Defamation League.

  • Public Health Preparedness

    In the United States, 743,452 “excess” (potentially preventable) deaths occurred from COVID-19 between February 2020 and September 4th, 2021, according to the CDC National Center for Health Statistics. This figure exceeds the number of excess deaths that occurred during the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, which was caused by an even deadlier virus.

  • Terrorism

    Since 2010, Islamist terrorists have increased their attacks on vaccinators in the Middle East, south Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Pakistan has seen the most attacks on vaccinators.

  • Extremism

    U.S. national security and law enforcement agencies are battling what they describe as a “significant jump” in threats from domestic terrorists, many of whom are acting on their own and motivated by racial animosity or anti-government ideology.

  • Extremism

    Research based on interviews with Irish Republican activists has shown that trust plays a greater role than ideology in how members pick sides when terrorist groups splinter. If commitment is primarily social rather than ideological, then counter-narrative or ideological “deprogramming” strategies may not help lure someone away from a group of individuals with whom he or she feels a close personal bond of trust.

  • Terrorism

    As strange as it may sound, revolutionary Islamist groups suffer from recruitment problems as any other organization does. My research on Islamist terrorism has found that al-Qaida and its rival offshoot, the Islamic State group, have long had chronic difficulties replenishing their ranks.

  • Extremism

    In recent times, the phenomenon of lone wolf terrorism has been observed with the social assumption that a radicalized individual is only guided by personal, social, and ethnic reasons to commit an extremist act. But there is still much to understand about this phenomenon and improve the methods of investigation or psychiatric interventions.

  • Post-9/11 building codes

    One legacy of the 9/11 tragedy and the harrowing experience of those who successfully escaped the Twin Towers – the disaster was the most significant high-rise evacuation in modern times —  is that today’s skyscrapers can be emptied much more safely and easily in an emergency.

  • 9/11: 20 years on

    The 9/11 terrorist attacks unfolded in less than two hours, killing 2,996 people. The war in Afghanistan, launched a month after the 9/11 attacks lasted 19 years, 10 months, three weeks and two days, with DOD counting 2.325 American military deaths. On Saturday, 11 September, President Biden will try to draw a line under these events, saying that a new era in American foreign and defense policy has begun. “But we will also see, as we always do, that one era does not end when a new era begins,” notes one historian.

  • 9/11: 20 years on

    Beyond their painful human toll, the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed and continue to influence life in America in many ways. Harvard professors detail how the tragedy reshaped U.S. homeland security and foreign policy, study and treatment of PTSD, and crisis planning and management.

  • 9/11: 20 years on

    President Biden says he will open up the government’s secret files about the plot, but will they answer the questions that remain?

  • 9/11: 20 years on

    Steven Simon, a counterterrorism expert: “[R]esilience is futile if counter-terrorism policy devolves to yet another partisan tool. Of all challenges, terrorism is mostly likely to spur a dangerously excessive reaction while degrading the state of American politics if the two parties have not cooperated on building and implementing effective defenses. If politics are too broken to permit such preparedness, then a successful strike against the U.S. will be more likely, the partisan blame game more poisonous, and an appropriate response far more difficult to engineer.”

  • 9/11: Twin Towers collapse

    The collapse of the World Trade Center has been subject to intense public scrutiny over the last twenty years, prompting several investigations and spawning a variety of conspiracy theories. FEMA’s report was published in 2002, and NIST’s 3-year investigation produced a report which was published in 2005. While there have been critics of both reports, their explanation for the buildings’ collapse is widely accepted. They conclude it was not caused by direct impact by the aircraft, or the use of explosives, but by fires that burned inside the buildings after impact.

  • Resilience

    Companies which experienced the financial impact of 9/11 were more resilient to the economic effects of COVID-19, according to new research.The research is the first of its kind to compare the events of the last eighteen months with 9/11.

  • Terrorism

    Twenty people involved in the November 2015 terrorist attacks in France – the largest terrorist event in France — in which 130 were killed and 490 wounded, went on trial in Paris Wednesday – six of them in absentia.

  • PERSPECTIVE: Aborted plot

    Recently declassified information from the first-ever interrogation of someone presumed to be a senior al-Qaeda operative captured after 9/11 provides new insights into Osama bin Laden’s plans for a follow-up attack to Sept. 11. Bruce Riedel writes that, specifically, bin Laden was plotting a major attack in Israel. The attack was thwarted at the last minute, but information about it has been classified until now.

  • Extremism

    Top law enforcement officials have described violent extremism — especially racially or ethnically motivated extremism— as the greatest domestic threat facing the United States. The Biden administration has requested tens of millions of dollars to fight it. Yet the research on what an effective strategy might look like has too often failed to engage the people who might know best: those who have lived that life and left it behind.

  • Afghanistan

    The Taliban has taken over the Panjshir Valley, saying that with the defeat of the last hold-out of the anti-Taliban forces, the valley is now open for travel and supplies. In a twitter message, resistance leader Ahmad Massoud said his forces are still present in Panjshir and will continue to fight the Taliban, but admitted that “hard decisions” had to be made, with ammunition running in the face of furious enemy attacks.”

  • First responders

    More than 91,000 responders were exposed to a range of hazards during recovery and clean-up operations, with 80,785 enrolling in the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP) set up after the attacks. 3,439 are now dead – far more than the 412 who died on the day of the attacks – and many of those alive have been suffering from a series of ailments related to the work at the Twin Towers site.

  • Extremism

    Twenty years ago, Islamist terror was still largely an unknown for German security authorities. Now, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has a newly established Islamist-Motivated Terrorism/Extremism Department. Around 500 criminal investigators, scientists, translators, and analysts work there to investigate Islamists, monitor dangerous individuals, and try to prevent attacks.