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Europe’s Energy Choice
Russia’s war in Ukraine and the disruption of Russian gas exports to Europe has triggered an energy crunch, with price spikes unlike anything seen since 1973. And the situation will get worse before it gets better. Responding to the immediate energy crisis in the right way will help to address the broader climate challenge. Authorities must both buffer the shock of the gas crunch in the short term, and accelerate the transition to clean energy in the long -term.
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China Tried to Infiltrate Federal Reserve: Senate Report
Fed Chair Jerome Powell and a senior member of Congress are at odds over a report issued Tuesday by Senate Republicans alleging that China is trying to infiltrate the Federal Reserve and that the central bank has done too little to stop it. China’s goal, according to the report, is to “supplant the U.S. as the global economic leader and end the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s primary reserve currency.”
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New Chief Information Officer (CIO) Program at NYU
Created in partnership with Emeritus, the new nine-month executive program helps senior technology leaders and CIOs advance their C-suite leadership skills, transform information systems, and navigate rapidly changing remote and workforce trends.
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FAU Receives State Grant for Cybersecurity, IT Training
Cybersecurity jobs are expected to grow by a faster-than-average 33 percent over the next 10 years. In addition, cybersecurity-related job postings have increased by 43 percent in the past year. Florida launches a $15.6 million initiative to prepare students and mid-career professionals for jobs in the fields of cybersecurity and information technology.
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Global Supply Chains Remain Resilient in the Wake of Natural Disasters
International trade links bind countries together in ways that are difficult to untangle following a crisis. While many U.S. policy makers are calling for reshoring and nearshoring to combat trade disruptions caused by COVID-19, new research suggests retrenchment of global supply chains is unlikely to happen in the post-pandemic context.
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U.S. Disrupts North Korea Ransomware Group, Recovers Nearly Half a Million
U.S. law enforcement authorities have disrupted a group of North Korean hackers, recovering nearly half a million dollars in ransom payments it received from a Kansas hospital, a Colorado health care provider and other victims. The North Korea state-sponsored cybercriminals encrypted the Kansas hospital’s servers in May 2021, demanding ransom in exchange for regaining access to its critical computer networks.
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New Computing Security Architecture Protects Sensitive Private Data
Protecting sensitive information on the internet has become an essential feature for computing architectures. Applications that process such data must trust the system software they rely on, such as operating systems and hypervisors, but such system software is complex and often has vulnerabilities that can risk data confidentiality and integrity.
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U.S. Dominated by Remarkable Heat, Dryness
June kicked off a very warm and dry start to meteorological summer for the U.S. The U.S. struck with 9 separate billion-dollar disasters so far this year. The average June temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 70.7 degrees F — 2.2 degrees above average.
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Pegasus Spyware Maker NSO Is Conducting a Lobbying Campaign to Get Off U.S. Blacklist
The cybersecurity firm has invested heavily in top lobbyists and law firms in an effort to lift restrictions on doing business in America. NSO is hoping the Israeli prime minister will raise the issue with Joe Biden when the two meet this week.
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Rare Earths in Australia Must Be About More Than Mining
REEs are a group of 17 metals—15 elements from the lanthanide series and two chemically similar elements, scandium and yttrium. Each has unique properties vital for a range of commercial and defense technologies, including batteries, high-powered magnets and electronic equipment. China’s rare-earth production exceeds that of the world’s second-largest producer, the U.S., by more than 100,000 tons per year. The U.S. still relies on China for most rare-earth imports. In some cases, like heavy REE processing, China has 100 percent control of the market.
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The Chinese Military’s Access to AI Chips
The Chinese military has made rapid progress in artificial intelligence. This progress largely depends on continued access to high-end semiconductors designed by American companies and produced in Taiwan and South Korea. The aggressive moves by the Trump and Biden administrations to limit technology exports to the Chinese military notwithstanding, China continues to order large quantities of American-designed advanced semiconductors from manufacturers in Taiwan and South Korea.
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Cyberproofing Small and Medium Businesses -- a Small Step with a Big Impact
Small businesses are not immune to cybersecurity incidents. In fact, they’re often more vulnerable because they lack the time, resources and sometimes the skills to prepare for and defend against an attack, or to mitigate and remedy any consequences. In Australia, they created a tool to help businesses quickly and easily test the security of their websites.
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The Strategic Relevance of Cybersecurity Skills
Evidence suggests there is a global cybersecurity skills shortage affecting businesses and governments alike, which means that organizations are struggling to fill their cybersecurity vacancies. Tommaso De Zan writes that “the absence of cybersecurity experts protecting national critical infrastructures constitutes a national security threat, a loophole that may be exploited by malicious actors.”
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Fighting Global Cybercrime
Cyber threats from across the world—from Russian attempts to influence the war in Ukraine by threatening cyberattacks against the West, to China stealing defense and industrial secrets, to Iran’s 2021 targeting of Children’s Hospital in Boston, thwarted by the FBI — were the focus of recent remarks by FBI Director Christopher Wray.
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Announcing the Electric Resilience Toolkit
A new Electric Resilience Toolkit aims to support policymakers and stakeholders working on issues around electric sector regulation and climate resilience planning. Such planning is essential to ensure electricity infrastructure is designed and operated in a way that accounts for the impacts of climate change—impacts that are already being felt and which will only intensify in coming years.
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More headlines
The long view
U.S. Debt Default Could Trigger Dollar’s Collapse – and Severely Erode America’s Political and Economic Might
By Michael Humphries
Brinkmanship over the debt ceiling has become a regular ritual. As an economist, I know that defaulting on the national debt would have real-life consequences. Even the threat of pushing the U.S. into default has an economic impact. In August 2021, the mere prospect of a potential default led to an unprecedented downgrade of the nation’s credit rating, hurting America’s financial prestige as well as countless individuals, including retirees. And that was caused by the mere specter of default. An actual default would be far more damaging.
U.S. Nonfuel Mineral Production Jumps $3.6 Billion in 2022
U.S. mines produced approximately $98.2 billion in nonfuel mineral commodities in 2022—an estimated $3.6 billion increase over the 2021 revised total of $94.6 billion.
Great Leap Nowhere: The Challenges of China’s Semiconductor Industry
China is struggling in the battle for advanced semiconductor technology. With President Joe Biden’s most recent round of export controls on semiconductors, China is now facing an increasingly urgent challenge as it seeks to ramp up its domestic innovative capacity for high-end chips. These difficulties and challenges notwithstanding, Elliot Ji writes, “U.S. policymakers should be keenly aware that China’s relative success with creative adaptation means that it can boost certain sectors of the chip industry by exploiting leaky export controls and engaging in cyber espionage.”