• Big data amplify existing police surveillance practices: Study

    The big data landscape is changing quickly, and researchers wonder whether our political and social systems and regulations can keep up. With access to more personal data than ever before, police have the power to solve crimes more quickly, but in practice, the influx of information tends to amplify existing practices.

  • Escaping an unwelcome visit from mother nature

    Hurricane Irma forced mandatory evacuations throughout the Florida Keys. But with only two main north-south roads in and out of Florida - interstates 95 and 75 - Irma quickly became an exercise in preparedness for a storm described at times as “the size of the state of Ohio.” “Evacuation may not be the best goal in all cases. An alternative strategy to evacuating people to a far away destinations is to build more hurricane shelters near population centers,” says one expert.

  • World unprepared to deal with the effects of a thermonuclear attack

    The world is not prepared to deal with the devastating effects of a thermonuclear attack, says an University of Georgia’s Cham Dallas. He said that the development of a hydrogen bomb by North Korea is a transformative event, especially from the point of view of the medical and public health response to a thermonuclear detonation.

  • Antifa says it’s fighting Fascists. It just might be helping to re-elect Donald Trump.

    There’s no consensus of what Antifa, a contraction of “anti-fascist,” stands for, or whether their tactics will achieve their stated goals. The historian Ronald Radosh writes that the German communists used the slogan “After Hitler, Us,” and directed their energy and propaganda not against the Nazis, but against the mainstream socialists. “It didn’t end well,” says Radosh. Antifa emulates many of the actions of the German communists in the 1930s, villifying centrists and liberals who reject antifa’s commitment to violence.

  • Israel destroys Syrian chemical weapons facility

    The Israeli air force Thursday morning attacked and destroyed a chemical arms plant in in Syria. Media reports say that Israel had destroyed the Scientific Studies and Researchers Center facility near the city of Masyaf in central Syria, where Syria has been working on developing of chemical weapons. This was the first time a high-level Israeli official has confirmed the scope of Israel’s attacks. Thursday’s attack was the first Israeli strike against a military facility in Syria since a cease-fire was reached in southern Syria in July (there have been, however, low-level border skirmishes between Israel and units of Assad army). Israel bitterly complained that the cease-fire agreement negotiated between the United States and Russia ignored acute Israeli security concerns.

  • Assad used chemical weapons more than two dozen times: UN

    The regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has used chemical weapons on more than two dozen occasions since the outbreak of the civil war six years ago, including in April’s deadly attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a UN war crimes investigation revealed on Wednesday. In their 14th report since 2011, which includes the most conclusive findings to date from investigations into chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian civil war, the UN investigators said they had documented a total of 33 attacks.

  • Hospitalization costs of gun injuries exceeds $622 million a year

    Hospitalization costs associated with gun injuries in the United States exceeded $622 million a year, according to a new study. 57 percent of all firearm hospitalization costs were either paid by Medicaid—at more than $205 million—or not paid at all, as uninsured victims accounted for $155 million of the costs. More than 80 percent of firearm injury hospitalizations were among individuals age 15 to 44, with the highest annual rate of 28.9 per 100,000 among those age 15 to 24.

     

  • North Korea threatens EMP attack on U.S.

    North Korea’s relentless march toward acquiring the capability to place a hydrogen bomb on top of an ICBM will soon pose a threat to all major U.S. cities. There is another threat that marrying of a hydrogen bomb to a powerful rocket poses: An EMP threat. The North Koreans could launch a missile into the upper atmosphere, then detonate a high-yield hydrogen bomb in space in order to generate an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, which would shut down the U.S. power grid and damage electrical devices. Experts testifying before the Congressional EMP Commission said that in the event of a massive EMP attack on the United States using multiple high-yield warheads, around 90 percent of the American population would be dead after eighteen months due to famine, disease, and societal breakdown.

  • Why didn’t sanctions stop North Korea’s missile program?

    North Korea’s long-range missile program has made significant technological advances in the past few months. For most of the past twenty years, the international community has struggled to stop this kind of progress by imposing a series of severe sanctions on the country. Have sanctions failed? This question is complicated, but what is undeniable is that sanctions have had unforeseen consequences by making North Korea’s procurement efforts more sophisticated as Chinese middlemen monetize the risk. Americans tend to view North Korea as an inward-looking, economically isolated state cut off from the international community. However, the country’s illicit networks – including those supplying its missile program – are global and responsive. Ultimately, they will be difficult to counter.

  • Can the U.S. defend itself against North Korean missiles?

    Regardless of the specifics of the Sunday test, one thing is clear: North Korea will achieve — within months, not years, and if it has not achieved this already – the capability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the continental United States and detonate it over a major American city. Does the United States have the means to protect itself against a North Korean nuclear attack?

  • Trump can’t win: The North Korea crisis is a lose-lose proposition for the United States

    There seems to be no outcome from this crisis in which U.S. power is enhanced. There are no avenues for the Trump administration to demonstrate strength and resolve that do not ultimately expose the limitations of that strength. Could current events on the Korean Peninsula represent America’s “Suez Crisis” moment? In 1956, Britain over-reached in its attempt to maintain a post-war imperial toehold in Egypt, exposing the chasm between its imperial pretensions of a bygone era and its actual power in the aftermath of the second world war. The North Korea crisis is the most obvious face of hegemonic transition. Trump’s United States is facing a set of outcomes to the current crisis that are lose-lose. They are exposing the reality of U.S. decline and the growing limitations of its ability to shape the strategic environment in northeast Asia.

  • Detecting carriers of dirty bombs

    The threat of terrorism in Europe has been on the rise in recent years, with experts and politicians particularly worried that terrorists might make use of dirty bombs. Researchers have developed a new system that will be able to detect possible carriers of radioactive substances, even in large crowds of people. This solution is one of the defensive measures being developed as part of the REHSTRAIN project, which is focused on security for TGV and ICE high-speed trains in France and Germany.

  • Why we should start worrying about nuclear fallout

    Since North Korea’s recent missile tests, and Sunday’s underground nuclear test, the possibility of nuclear warfare looms larger than it has in more than five decades. Nearly thirty years after the cold war ended, are we prepared to face such a challenge? How would large-scale nuclear attacks affect the world today? “During the cold war, the United States, the Soviet Union, and several European countries built networks of fallout shelters — but even at their peak, these would not have effectively protected the majority of citizens,” says one expert. Nor is radioactive fallout the only problem, because “the damage from mass fires triggered by nuclear bombs has been radically and persistently underestimated.”

  • California’s police can't keep license plate data secret: Court

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU won a decision by the California Supreme Court that the license plate data of millions of law-abiding drivers, collected indiscriminately by police across the state, are not “investigative records” that law enforcement can keep secret. California’s highest court ruled that the collection of license plate data isn’t targeted at any particular crime, so the records couldn’t be considered part of a police investigation.

  • Finding better routes for relief supplies to disaster sites like Houston

    Harvey’s trail of destruction through southern Texas this week is drawing attention to the difficulty of providing relief services in a place where roads, ports, and airports are heavily damaged, if not destroyed. One expert uses mathematical modeling and high-powered computing to develop quicker, more efficient ways of moving something from one place to another. “Commercial supply chains are focused on quality and profitability,” she says. “Humanitarian supply chains are focused on minimizing loss of life and suffering, and distribution is focused on equity and fairness much more than in commercial applications.”