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Digital Siege Puts Taiwan’s Resilience to the Test
The most sustained conflict unfolding between China and Taiwan is not taking place on the water or in the air; it is happening in cyberspace.
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Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Their Country from Within
The Mossad made Iran its top priority in 1993 after Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, seemingly ending decades of conflict. The main goal of Israel’s focus on Iran: To protect Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region.
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Anti-Jewish Hate Crimes Comprised Nearly 70% of All Religion-Based Hate Crimes in 2024: FBI
Jews only make up around 2 percent of the U.S. population, but reported single-bias anti-Jewish hate crimes comprised 16 percent of all reported hate crimes and nearly 70 percent of all reported religion-based hate crimes in 2024.
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To Better Detect Chemical Weapons, Materials Scientists Are Exploring New Technologies
Chemical warfare is one of the most devastating forms of conflict. It leverages toxic chemicals to disable, harm or kill without any physical confrontation. Across various conflicts, it has caused tens of thousands of deaths and affected over a million people through injury and long-term health consequences.
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As AI Worsens WMD Threat, Australia Must Lead Response
When dealing with AI-enabled CBRN threats, we cannot afford to wait until the first catastrophic incident occurs. AI companies have acknowledged that frontier models have capabilities that, without adequate safeguards, could enable novices to create biological and chemical weapons.
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Geological Mapping Project Supports Critical Mineral Explorations, Enhances Public Safety in the Southeast
A key focus of a new USGS mapping project is to identify where critical minerals vital to the economy and national security might be located. As demand for rare earth elements and other critical minerals grows for use in technology, energy, and defense sectors, this project can provide vital data that helps the U.S. secure domestic sources of critical minerals, thus reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign sources.
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Europe Is Significantly Boosting Its Defense Spending. Can the Continent Become a Military Superpower?
Military spending across the European Union is ramping up in what observers have noted is a significant and “extraordinary” pivot from the comparatively placid postwar decades. Mai’a Cross thinks Europe’s shift toward an “era of rearmament” will be in its long-term interest.
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Not Just Drones, but Massed Swarms of Them. Defenses Can’t Cope
A new and sophisticated phase of aerial warfare has emerged from the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East over the past month, defined by the systematic use of massed drone saturation attacks. This evolving doctrine uses quantity and simultaneity to overwhelm even the most advanced air-defense systems.
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U.S. Moves Decisively to Avoid Dependence on China’s Rare Earths
The Pentagon’s package of support for rare earths company MP Minerals, announced on 10 July, should free the US military and eventually much of US industry from dependence on Chinese supply chains for rare earth magnets.
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Moving Targets: Implications of the Russo-Ukrainian War for Drone Terrorism
Small and commercially available drones in the hands of violent extremists pose a rapidly growing terrorist threat. This threat hasimplications for global counterterrorism, especially when considering the psychological impact, scalability, and low operational risk of drone attacks.
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Citing Potential for Fraud, Blue and Red States Pass New Crypto ATM Laws
While the crypto machines can be used for legitimate reasons, they’ve become favored by scammers.
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The Taiwan Scenarios 4: The Catastrophe
By any measure, China’s four main choices for forcing unification with Taiwan—subversion, quarantine, blockade, or invasion—would all have far-reaching consequences for Beijing and the wider Indo-Pacific. The world must convince China that the road to Taipei is lined with peril, not prizes. If Beijing acts, it faces the wrecking of its global standing. Preventing conflict is not Taiwan’s burden alone.
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Building Taiwan's Resilience
China’s increased military threats and intimidation activities against Taiwan and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have prompted Taiwan’s government and civil society to strengthen the country’s resilience.
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How Male Grievance Fuels Radicalization and Extremist Violence
Social extremism is evolving in reach and form. While traditional racial supremacy ideologies remain, contemporary movements are now often fueled by something more personal and emotionally resonant: male grievance.
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The Taiwan Scenarios 3: Day Zero
If China decides to dramatically accelerate unification with Taiwan—whether through subversion, quarantine, blockade or full-scale invasion—the first 24 hours will be pivotal. But they will hardly be the end.
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The long view
An Analysis by The Trace of 150 U.S. Cities Shows One of the Greatest Drops in Gun Violence — Ever
Gun violence is trending downward for more than three quarters of cities with the most shootings, according to a new analysis by The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub. The downward trend cuts across red and blue cities and states in every region of the country.
Trump’s National Guard Deployments Raise Worries About State Sovereignty
In two instances – Portland and Chicago – President Trump’s campaign to send the National Guard into Democratic-leaning cities he falsely describes as crime-ridden, has turned to out-of-state National Guard troops. Presidents who have federalized National Guard forces in the past, even against a governor’s will, have done so in response to a crisis in the troops’ home state. But the decision to send one state’s National Guard troops into a different state without the receiving governor’s consent is both extraordinary and unprecedented, experts on national security law.
Correctly Assessing Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States
A recent CSIS report, making sweeping claims about a supposed rise in leftwing terrorism in the United States, risks feeding false narratives about political violence and polarization. Michael Jensen and Amy Cooter write that the evidence used to sound this alarm consists of just five plots and attacks, and that these five events not only “are doing a lot of heavy lifting” in the report, but that they are given “an unwarranted level of causal and predictive power.” This tiny sample “simply does not justify inducing panic with eye-popping headlines.”
Europe’s Banks Quietly Mobilize for Economic Warfare
For years, banks treated defense as a reputational issue, as well as an environmental, social and governance risk, often lumping it with tobacco or fossil fuels as something to be managed at arm’s length. That era is ending. Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s coercive trade tactics and the United States’ pressure on Europe to shoulder more of its defense burden have exposed the limits of moralistic restraint. Financial mobilization is the new norm.
U.S. and Australia Deepen Critical-Minerals Engagement to Counter China
Engagement between Australia and the United States on critical minerals has matured from technical cooperation into a strategic partnership, aligning resource security with clean energy and defense priorities.