The United States is reportedly considering adding Venezuela to the list of terrorism-sponsoring states. The move would impose further financial punishment on the already-collapsing Venezuelan economy, which is staggering under the combined weight of hyperinflation, food and medicine shortages, and a mass exodus of citizens.

Governments and police forces around the world need to beware of the harm caused by mass and social media following terror events. In a new report, leading counter-terrorism experts from around the world offer guidance to authorities to better manage the impacts of terror attacks by harnessing media communication. “People only know what they see or read, so the immediate panic social media – and then on the news – perpetuates rumors and creates fear. This is exactly what terrorists want,” says one expert.

Russia’s lower house of parliament has approved the first reading of a bill softening the punishment in some cases for inciting hatred, amid concerns over prison terms handed down to people for “liking” or reposting memes on the Internet. The draft bill discussed on 15 November would remove the possibility of a prison sentence for first-time offenders found to have incited ethnic, religious, and other forms of hatred and discord in public, including in the media or on the Internet.

Newly released FBI data showed hate crimes in the U.S. jumped 17 percent in 2017 with a 37 percent spike in crimes targeting Jews and Jewish institutions. The FBI, in its annual Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA) report, said there were 7,175 hate crimes in 2017. The 17 percent jump was three times more than the 5 percent increase the agency reported in 2016.

The 2018 midterms were not kind to most of the country’s extremist and bigoted candidates, but a number of them did garner disturbingly high vote counts. More than 1.8 million Americans voted for known extremists and bigots who were running for national offices. In races for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, extremists pulled in, on average, 29 percent of the vote. The extremists’ sole winner of the night was U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), whose reelection prospects appeared briefly dimmed by his embrace of overtly white nationalist rhetoric. King beat back a strong Democratic challenger to keep his seat in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District. He won his 9th term with 50.4 percent of the vote.

What turns people into radical jihadist clerics? A new book by MIT political scientist Richard Nielsen offers a new answer: thwarted career ambitions. More specifically, the book finds, a certain portion of Muslim clerics who end up advocating for jihad — war against Islam’s foes — started out as mainstream clerics looking for state-sponsored jobs where they could use their intellectual training, only to become unemployed, disenchanted, and radicalized.

If research can only be as good as the data on which it is based, then the study of terrorism has been in serious trouble for decades. From the 1980s to the present-day, many of the field’s most influential scholars have lamented that a majority of articles rely on literature-review based methodologies and do not present any new, first-hand insights. As a result, much of what we know about terrorists and terrorism has been derived from media sources – sometimes brilliant accounts that provide fascinating insights, but often short newspaper pieces of questionable accuracy and limited level of detail.

Hate preacher Louis Farrakhan, on a solidarity trip to Iran ahead of the re-imposition of United States sanctions on the clerical regime, led chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” The Nation of Islam leader spoke at the University of Tehran law school, where he praised women’s rights in Iran and the Islamic laws mandating that they cover themselves. Leaders of the Women’s March, including Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory, support Farrakhan and have appeared at Nation of Islam events, which promote hatred of Jews.

I am a trauma surgeon who cared for many of the critically wounded victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. As we raced to find the source of blood loss in one of the most severely injured patients, one of my trauma surgeon partners, a U.S. Army veteran of multiple tours, joined me in the operating room to assist. His first comment upon seeing the injuries that we were managing struck me. He said he last saw such destruction from military weaponry when he was serving in Afghanistan.