• 3,000 ISIS fighters surrender as end of caliphate nears

    ISIS once controlled large parts of Syria and Iraq, but now thousands of ISIS fighters have handed themselves in. Kurdish-led units reported some IS fighters were continuing to resist.

  • Fraudulent news, disinformation become “new normal” political tactics

    New report warns of the risk of fraudulent news and online disinformation becoming a normalized part of U.S. political discourse. The report sounds an alarm that fraudulent news and online disinformation, which distort public discourse, erode faith in journalism, and skew voting decisions, are becoming part of the toolbox of hotly contested modern campaigns. 

  • Information literacy must be improved to stop spread of “fake news”

    It is not difficult to verify whether a new piece of information is accurate; however, most people do not take that step before sharing it on social media, regardless of age, social class or gender, a new study has found.

  • Deterrence in the cyber age: U.K. Foreign Secretary's speech

    U.K. foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt last Thursday spoke at Glasgow University on cybersecurity and the U.K. government’s approach to deterring cybercrime. “In the cyber age, an authoritarian regime armed with nothing more ambitious than a laptop computer could try to manipulate our democracy, Hunt said. “For every example of publicly attributed interference [by Russia], there have been others that never saw the light of day.” He added: “The material fact is that the Russian state has tried to subvert democracy,” concluding: “We can no longer afford to wait until an authoritarian regime demonstrably succeeds in changing the outcome of an election and weakening trust in the integrity of democracy itself. The risk is that after just a few cases, a pall of suspicion would descend over a democratic process – and once that happens, the damage would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to repair.”

  • Legal experts: Emergency declaration may not be quickest way to build wall

    Even if President Donald Trump gets his way, eminent domain lawyers say a variety of legal issues would arise surrounding private land seizures that could delay wall construction for years — and even derail it entirely.

  • China's Huawei sues U.S. government over ban

    Chinese tech giant Huawei has sued the U.S. government, arguing that legislation Congress passed last year that restricts its business in the United States is “unconstitutional.” The case, which analysts see more as a public relations move, is but the latest in an intensifying effort by the telecommunications company to fight U.S. security concerns, which Huawei argues are unfair and unfounded.

  • Canada must not be naive when dealing with China’s authoritarian regime

    A new book on Canada-China relations offers lessons for the United States. The book “is in many ways a primer on the central challenge of our era – the question of how democracies address the scope and depth of an authoritarian wave now picking up momentum,” writes Hugh Segal, a Canadian foreign policy expert. “Our engagement with China must set aside the temptations of presuming fair minded universal intent on the part of Chinese state-controlled instruments, economic, diplomatic or military. We must be more focused on the protection of our own security and freedoms from Chinese subversion. Countries that wish access to our resources, technology and investment on normative terms do not get to launch cyberattacks against us, from military and intelligence units controlled by the state.”

  • U.K.’s Equality Commission to investigate Labour Party over failure to counter anti-Semitism

    In an explosive development, Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced Thursday that it had begun proceedings against the Labour Party over its failure to stamp out anti-Semitism in its ranks. The equality watchdog said it has reason to believe that Labour has “unlawfully discriminated against people because of their ethnicity and religious beliefs” over the party’s handling of anti-Semitism complaints.

  • The guises under which current anti-Semitism travels

    Today’s anti-Semitism travels under many guises. In reviewing Deborah Lipstadt’s just-published Antisemitism: Here and Now, Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, writes that the most important insight of Lipstadt’s analysis is “that the resurgence of anti-Semitism owes as much to its political enablers who aren’t openly bigoted as it does to its ideological practitioners who are — is the most valuable contribution the book makes to our discussion of modern-day Jew hatred.”

  • ISIS child suspects arbitrarily arrested, tortured by Iraqi, Kurdish govs.

    Human Rights Watch estimates that Iraqi and Kurdish authorities are holding in detention approximately 1,500 children younger than 17 years of age for alleged ISIS affiliation. Many of these children, some as young as 11 years old, have been tortured. At least 185 foreign children have been convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to prison terms, according to Iraqi government authorities.

  • U.K. unveils new counter-terrorism information sharing platform

    A new multi-million pound project to share information with the private sector has been unveiled by the security minister. this joint initiative will see a ground breaking interactive online platform developed to provide secure expert advice and training to businesses and public sector organizations to help them develop their own counter-terrorism approaches.

  • White supremacist propaganda and events soared in 2018

    White supremacists dramatically stepped up their propaganda efforts targeting neighborhoods and campuses in 2018, far exceeding any previous annual distribution count for the United States and showing how these extremist groups are finding ways to share hateful messages while hiding the identity of individual members.

  • European ethno-nationalist and white supremacist movements thrive

    More than seventy years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, ethno-nationalist and white supremacist movements in Europe continue to thrive. They include far-right political parties, neo-Nazi movements, and apolitical protest groups. Some groups openly espouse violent white supremacy, while others have propagated their radical stances under the guise of populism. Though not all of these groups directly link their ideologies to Nazism, their propaganda portrays immigrants and ethnic minorities in a similar manner to how Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews, blaming them for national economic troubles and depicting them as a serious threat to the broader national identity.

  • Emission regulatory rollback: 200M metric tons of additional green house gasses annually

    Following the release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, the Trump administration is proposing to give four top climate-polluting industries a pass. A new report says that six specific regulatory rollbacks will cause an annual increase of more than 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, resulting in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in forgone benefits, and lead to tens of thousands of premature deaths.

  • U.S. should reject partial North Korean “concessions”: Experts

    The failure to reach an agreement at last week’s Hanoi meeting between President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi is but the latest indication that the differences between the United States and North Korea over the latter’s nuclear weapons capability are deep and complex.