• As Crime Dips Worldwide, Agile Syndicates Adapt to Pandemic

    Countries around the world are reporting a dip in criminal activity. Due to stay-at-home orders and fewer opportunities for crime, there has been a noticeable decline in burglary, assault, murder, robbery and grand larceny. But law enforcement officials and analysts say a second look reveals a more complicated and disturbing picture. Cybercrime has exploded, with mounting reports of an increase in ransomware attacks. Headline crime may have dropped, and the statistics may have improved, but analysts say that as the pandemic reorders geopolitics and economics, it is doing the same in the world of crime.

  • Leader of British Far-Right Group Convicted under Terrorism Law

    Paul Golding, 38, the leader of the British far-right political group Britain First, has been found guilty of an offense under the Terrorism Act after refusing to give police access to his mobile phone on his return from a political trip to Russia.

  • Boogaloo Supporters Animated by Lockdown Protests, Recent Incidents

    Across the country, boogalooers are energized by resistance to lockdown restrictions, which they view as tyrannical government overreach. Boogaloo adherents have shown up at numerous lockdown protests, waving boogaloo signs, wearing Hawaiian shirts, and carrying firearms, sometimes illegally. These boogalooers are part of an embryonic, decentralized movement that organizes largely online but whose presence has increasingly been felt in the real world. While boogaloo supporters hail from a variety of movements, and include some white supremacists who advocate for race war, the lockdown protests have largely featured the anti-government version of the boogaloo favored by the militia, gun rights, and anarcho-capitalist movements. Boogaloo advocates are talking openly about providing protection for local businesses determined to reopen in violation of state mandates. The presence of these frequently armed protesters could escalate already tense situations.

  • Tracking the tinderbox: Scientists Map Wildfire Fuel Moisture Across Western U.S.

    As California and the American West head into fire season amid the coronavirus pandemic, scientists are harnessing artificial intelligence and new satellite data to help predict blazes across the region. Researchers have developed a deep-learning model that maps fuel moisture levels in fine detail across 12 western states, opening a door for better fire predictions.

  • “Coronavirus Murders”: Media Narrative about Domestic Abuse During Lockdown Misses the Point

    In more “normal” times, two women a week are murdered by their partners in the UK, but these crimes rarely make the news. Now, following lockdown around the world, there has been a flurry of reports of a surge in domestic violence and abuse (DVA) cases. Domestic abuse has been deemed newsworthy. Has it taken a global health crisis to shine a light on violence against women in the home? Emma Williamson, Nancy Lombard, and Oona Brooks-Hay write in The Conversation that many believe spikes in the number of cases point to a rise in one-off incidents, but our research into perceived links between football and domestic abuse demonstrates that it’s more likely that existing patterns of abuse are increasing in terms of frequency and type because people are permanently at close quarters. So it is critical to put this in context: more men are not becoming abusive or violent – women who are already suffering abuse are being attacked by their partners more often. As experts in this area we urge the media to make this important distinction.

  • Venezuela Failed Raid: U.S. Has a History of Using Mercenaries to Undermine Other Regimes

    In early May, the Venezuelan military intercepted a group of dissidents and American mercenaries. These events in Venezuela echo past U.S. secret sponsorship of private armies to overthrow governments elsewhere. The U.S. has an extended history of sponsoring insurgents and mercenaries to undermine unwanted foreign regimes.

  • Separating Industrial Noise from Natural Seismic Signals

    For the first time, seismologists can characterize signals as a result of some industrial human activity on a continent-wide scale using cloud computing. A transformative, cloud-computing approach to analyzing data helps researchers better understand seismic activity.

  • Floods and Emergency Response Time

    First responders, such as fire and ambulance services, will likely struggle to reach urgent cases in a timely manner during flooding in England, researchers found. The researchers investigated how various levels of flooding impact the ability of emergency services to reach urgent cases.

  • Germany: Revised Domestic Surveillance Bill Submitted to Bundestag

    A draft law to reform Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency is to be re-submitted to parliament after long debate. It will allow German domestic intelligence and law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance of telephone calls and SMS text services, including encrypted “chats” via services such as WhatsApp and Telegram, but will  not allow the use of cyber “Trojan” trawling tools.

  • Mount St. Helens’ 1980 Eruption Changed Volcanology

    If scientists armed with today’s monitoring tools and knowledge could step back in time to the two months before 18 May 1980, they would have been able to better forecast the forthcoming devastating eruption.

  • Cold War Nuclear Tests Changed U.K. Rainfall

    Nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War may have changed rainfall patterns thousands of miles from the detonation sites, new research has revealed. Scientists have researched how the electric charge released by radiation from the test detonations, carried out predominantly by the U.S. and Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, affected rainclouds at the time.

  • COVID Is Ushering in a Surveillance State That May Never Be Dismantled

    Is the “new normal” to be a surveillance society, with tracing apps and facial recognition health passports? Philip Johnston writes in The Telegraph that the British government insists not; but if we are hit by a second wave of COVID-19, the temptation to extend the monitoring will be hard to resist.

  • In Germany, Vaccine Fears Spark Conspiracy Theories

    The increasing number of gatherings in German cities, some under the motto “Resistance 2020,” have attracted all sorts of supporters: people who belong to the far-right Reichsbürger movement, conspiracy theorists, liberals, and people from the neo-right — and increasingly, those who support the anti-vaccine movement. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is keeping an eye on the protests, has noted an increase in right-wing extremists in attendance, as well as growing anti-Semitic and anti-democratic symbols and slogans.

  • Students Take Witness Stand in Virtual Courtroom

    USC students took the stand as part of the capstone project in their advanced digital forensics class at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. In years past, students in the class traveled to a real courtroom, but this year the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them to a digital venue: a videoconference on Zoom.

  • Russian, Syrian Forces Continue a Campaign of War Crimes in Syria: Amnesty

    In a new report, Amnesty International offers details of a continuing Syrian and Russian campaign to destroy hospitals, clinics, and schools in the Sunni-majority province of Idlib, in order to drive as many Sunnis as possible out of Syria. Since 2011, the Assad regime has conducted the largest ethnic cleansing campaign since the Second World War, aiming to change the ethnic composition of Syria. “Even by the standards of Syria’s calamitous nine-year crisis, the displacement and humanitarian emergency sparked by the latest onslaught on Idlib has been unprecedented,” said Amnesty.