At least forty-nine people were killed and more than twenty seriously wounded Friday in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Three men and one woman are in custody. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said none of them were on security watch lists. The terrorist group’s leader, a 28-year old Australian, has been charged with murder.

Public opinion surveys of attitudes tend to show that a majority of New Zealanders are in favor of diversity and see immigration as providing various benefits for the country. But extremist politics, including the extreme nationalist and white supremacist politics that appear to be at the core of this attack on Muslims, have been part of our community for a long time.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

The United states and other countries around the world are dealing with the same question: Should their citizens who join foreign terrorist organizations and fight for them be allowed to return to their home country? Determining which approach makes Western countries safest requires examining the facts about foreign fighters.

Exposures to infectious diseases in Bioafety level-3 (BSL-3) and BSL-4 environments can be scary, but they do happen. Concern has always extended beyond the safety of the laboratory worker, but also that a pathogen of pandemic potential could be released. Other aspects of lab safety have raised concern as well, as more attention has been directed toward gain-of-function (GoF) research.

BioWatch, the program launched more than fifteen years ago to detect bioterrorism attacks in major American cities, has been routinely criticized for not living up to its early promise. Many have suggested doing away with the system all together. Trouble is, experts say that BioDetection 21 – DHS’s proposed replacement for BioWatch – is even less effective.