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As Philadelphia Struggles to Hire Cops, More Businesses Are Turning to Private Armed Guards
In Philadelphia, armed guards are summoned to stand sentinel in places where they’ve rarely — if ever — been before. Concern about homicides is also contributing to the rise of private security. But there are questions about limited training and regulation.
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Arrest Made in Central California Bio-Lab Investigation
Jia Bei Zhu, a citizen of China, was arrested earlier this week in California on a criminal complaint for manufacturing and distributing misbranded medical devices. Zhu and others manufactured, imported, sold, and distributed hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 test kits, in addition to test kits for HIV, pregnancy, clinical urinalysis, and other conditions in the United States and China.
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Working with Banks Around the World to Prevent Weapons Proliferation
Most banks have no interest in facilitating a risky weapons sale or contributing to instability in the global landscape. But most are either unaware of the issue or do not know how to address it. Through live and virtual events, the financial sector is learning how to avoid inadvertently facilitating illicit weapons trade.
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Adtech Surveillance and Government Surveillance are Often the Same Surveillance
In the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the United States, the targeted advertising industry, fueled by personal information harvested from our cell phone applications, has run roughshod over our privacy.
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Israel-Hamas War a Reality Check for India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor
The ongoing violence between Israel and Hamas has underlined the challenges facing an ambitious initiative to build a new trade route from India through the Middle East to Europe, according to analysts.
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Training Future Supply Chain Leaders
The field of supply chain management (SCM) deals with managing the complex, global webs of product design, manufacturing, inventory, warehousing, inbound and outbound logistics, and returns activities that underpin everything we use or consume.
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Arizona Is Evicting a Saudi Alfalfa Farm, but the Thirsty Crop Isn’t Going Anywhere
As Arizona struggles to adapt to a water shortage that has dried out farms and scuttled development plans, one company has emerged as a central villain. The agricultural company Fondomonte, which is owned by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate, has attracted criticism over the past several years for sucking up the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa and then exporting that alfalfa to feed cows overseas. Now Arizona has cancelled one of the company’s leases and says it will not renew the others, but the decision will do little to solve a water shortage largely driven by irrigated agriculture.
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China, U.S. Escalate Trade-Restrictions War
The Chinese government announced Friday that it would tighten export controls on graphite, a material essential to the construction of batteries used in electric cars and other green energy systems and of which China is the world’s preeminent supplier. The move came days after the Biden administration announced that the United States would widen the list of semiconductors that it prevents from being exported to China.
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It’s High Time for Alliances to Ensure Supply Chain Security, Researchers Urge
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the interconnected nature of global supply chains, and showed how a disruption in one part of the world can have global effects. In 2021, supply disruptions were cost the global economy an estimated $1.9 trillion.
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DARPA Selects Teams to Boost Supply-and-Demand Network Resiliency
DARPA selected teams to develop new tools and analytics capable of helping the Department of Defense and its commercial partners improve systemic resilience in various supply-and-demand networks. Resilient Supply-and-Demand Network performers will create a general-purpose toolkit to improve systemic resilience in modern supply chains.
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In Wildfire-Prone Areas, Homeowners Are Learning They’re Uninsurable
Wildfires cause billions in home damage every year – and they are not only a problem in the U.S. West. Close to a quarter of the Americans now at risk of catastrophic wildfires live in the eastern half of the country, in places that may not be prepared to respond. Now, insurers no longer want to take on the risk.
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Finland: Pipeline Leak Likely Caused by 'External Activity'
Damage to an underwater gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia may have been a deliberate act, according to Finnish authorities.
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Southeast Asian Casinos Emerge as Major Enablers of Global Cybercrime
A growing number of casinos in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are engaging in large-scale money laundering, facilitating cyberfraud that is costing victims in America and abroad billions of dollars, according to new research by the United Nations.
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Sam Bankman-Fried Trial Shines Light on the Rise and Fall of Cryptocurrency and Concerns About Its Use in White-Collar Crime
While Sam Bankman-Fried’s crime – he is accused of orchestrating a conspiracy to use $10 billion that FTX’s customers had entrusted to him for venture capital investments, political donations and luxury real estate purchases — may seem complicated because bitcoin is involved, a criminology expert says it really comes down to traditional embezzlement.
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How Foreign Investment in U.S. Land Affects Food Security
The United States has approximately 1.3 billion acres of privately held agricultural land, including forestland. Out of these 1.3 billion acres, around 40 million acres were under full or partial foreign ownership as of 2021. Current foreign agricultural holdings represent 3.1% of the country’s privately owned agricultural land.
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The long view
Need for National Information Clearinghouse for Cybercrime Data, Categorization of Cybercrimes: Report
There is an acute need for the U.S. to address its lack of overall governance and coordination of cybercrime statistics. A new report recommends that relevant federal agencies create or designate a national information clearinghouse to draw information from multiple sources of cybercrime data and establish connections to assist in criminal investigations.
Trying to “Bring Back” Manufacturing Jobs Is a Fool’s Errand
Advocates of recent populist policies like to focus on the supposed demise of manufacturing that occurred after the 1970s, but that focus is misleading. The populists’ bleak economic narrative ignores the truth that the service sector has always been a major driver of America’s success, for decades, even more so than manufacturing. Trying to “bring back” manufacturing jobs, through harmful tariffs or other industrial policies, is destined to end badly for Americans. It makes about as much sense as trying to “bring back” all those farm jobs we had before the 1870s.
The Potential Impact of Seabed Mining on Critical Mineral Supply Chains and Global Geopolitics
The potential emergence of a seabed mining industry has important ramifications for the diversification of critical mineral supply chains, revenues for developing nations with substantial terrestrial mining sectors, and global geopolitics.
Are We Ready for a ‘DeepSeek for Bioweapons’?
Anthropic’s Claude 4 is a warning sign: AI that can help build bioweapons is coming, and could be widely available soon. Steven Adler writes that we need to be prepared for the consequences: “like a freely downloadable ‘DeepSeek for bioweapons,’ available across the internet, loadable to the computer of any amateur scientist who wishes to cause mass harm. With Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 having finally triggered this level of safety risk, the clock is now ticking.”