OUR PICKSVehicles as Weapons for Mass Attacks | Is the NSC Dead? | How America Lost Control of the Seas, and more

The Surprising History of Using Vehicles as Weapons for Mass Attacks  (Charles Lane, Washington Post)
The latest incident, in Liverpool, underlined that assumptions about perpetrators can be misguided.

Trump’s Visa Crackdown Plunges 275,000 Chinese Students into Uncertainty  (Kim Bellware and Angie Orellana Hernandez, Washington Post)
Chinese students make up nearly up nearly a quarter of all international students in the United States. Here’s who they are and what they’re studying.

Is the NSC Dead?  (Rishi Iyengar and John Haltiwanger,Foreign Policy)
Trump guts the Biden administration’s most powerful foreign-policy advisory body.

How America Lost Control of the Seas  (Arnav Rao, The Atlantic)
Thanks to decades of misguided policy choices, the U.S. has an astonishing lack of maritime capacity.

A Swedish MMA Tournament Spotlights the Trump Administration’s Handling of Far-Right Terrorism  (Ali Winston, Wired)
A member of a California-based fight club seems to have attended an event hosted by groups with ties to an organization the US government labeled a terrorist group. Will the Trump administration care?
While the Trump administration carries out a mass deportation campaign against undocumented immigrants allegedly involved with “terrorist” organizations and targets foreign students with granular social media surveillance, at least one American member of a neo-Nazi fight club has connected with a group linked to a far-right Scandinavian organization listed by the United States Treasury Department as a terrorist group.
In September 2024, at least one American affiliated with the “Active Club” movement—a transnational alliance of far-right fight clubs that closely overlap with skinhead gangs and neo-fascist political movements—appears to have traveled to Borås, Sweden, to participate in a mixed-martial-arts tournament with members of other affiliated fight clubs from across Europe. Social media posts from Tvåsaxe and GYM XIV, the Swedish skinhead organizations that hosted Holmgang 2024, claim that at least one member from the Southern California Active Club was in attendance. Photographs of the tournament were also published online by Media 2 Rise, the American ACs’ media wing.

FEMA Has Canceled Its 4-Year Strategic Plan Ahead of Hurricane Season  (Molly Taft and Vittoria Elliott, Wired)
Multiple FEMA employees tell WIRED that they did not know of another time when a strategic plan was rescinded without another in place.

White House Health Report Included Fake Citations  (Dani Blum and Maggie Astor, New York Times)
A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.