• Ukraine Needs U.S. Weapons. Trump Wants Its Rare Earth Minerals in Return.

    President Donald Trump wants to condition future U.S. aid to Ukraine on getting more access to the country’s valuable “rare earth” minerals — minerals that are in increasing demand for batteries, computers, smart phones, and electric cars, not to mention weaponry.

  • Southport Attacks: Why the U.K. Needs a Unified Approach to All Violent Attacks on the Public

    The conviction of Axel Rudakubana for the murder of three young girls in Southport has prompted many questions about how the UK handles violence without a clear ideological motive. This case has also shown up the confusion in this area, and made clear the need for a basic reframing of how we understand murderous violence against the public today.

  • What’s Going on at the FBI?

    The Trump administration has launched a broad political purge of the FBI, aiming to remove senior officials and field agents who are regarded as insufficiently loyal to President Trump. In addition to forcing the retirement of senior bureau leaders, the FBI’s interim leadership is now trying to identify agents and other personnel who had worked on the Jan. 6 investigations. Benjamin Wittes writes that “A lot of people at the bureau—leadership and street agents, analysts and staff alike—are flirting with heroism right now” by engaging in conscientious objection: they “are upholding the law, which is closely aligned with their own oaths and the FBI’s culture, and the rule of law itself.”

  • Turkey: The Threat of the Neo-Ottoman Caliphate to Regional Security

    Turkey is swiftly expanding its influence in a rapidly imploding Islamic world, as its ‘neo-Ottoman’ president is whipping up a new wave of Islamism across continents. The country is even intervening in South Asia now, by forging defense deals with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

  • Trump’s Risky New Era of Broken Trade Norms

    For many decades now, the international economy has been backstopped by a reasonably predictable set of rules, led by a United States that believed it had a strong national interest in nurturing that sort of predictability. With President Donald Trump’s decision over the week to declare a specious “emergency” for the purpose of slapping crippling tariffs on his continental neighbors, that era has come to an end.

  • Trump’s Tariff Threats Fit a Growing Global Phenomenon: Hardball Migration Diplomacy

    As an expert on migration policy and international affairs, I have observed the evolution of this global trend: nations leverage migration policies for geopolitical ends. While migration diplomacy does work both ways, richer countries by and large have the upper hand. And Trump’s threats against Colombia –and others –are just one example of this hardball migration diplomacy.

  • Get Rid of FEMA? Trump-appointed Group to Look at Shifting Disaster Response to States.

    Governors and state legislatures may have to bolster their natural disaster response and recovery efforts in the coming years as President Donald Trump looks for ways to shift the federal government’s role onto states.

  • A Michigan Nuclear Plant Is Slated to Restart, but Trump Could Complicate Things

    The owners of a shuttered nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Michigan are still banking on its historic reopening later this year, despite the confusion of President Donald Trump’s first days.

  • China’s DeepSee Has Close Ties to Beijing

    Rising AI star DeepSeek has close ties to the Chinese government that could explain its rapid progress from a 1 million yuan (US$138,000) startup in 2023 to a major global challenger in the industry, according to a recent investigation by RFA Cantonese. Founder Liang Wenfeng recently met with Premier Li Qiang to comment on his annual work report.

  • Analysts: Rubio Charts a Course for Countering China

    U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Southeast and East Asia strategies will be aimed at countering China by toughening U.S. policies to secure regional peace and maximize American interests, analysts say.

  • Diseased Illegal Immigrants Aren’t “Invading” the United States

    My research at the Cato Institute on crime and terrorism committed by illegal immigrants conclusively shows that they commit less crime than native-born Americans and have murdered zero people in domestic attacks since 1975. We also fond no statistically significant relationship between the size of the immigrant population, the illegal immigrant population, or the legal immigrant population and the spread of serious communicable diseases.

  • DeepSeek: How a Small Chinese AI Company Is Shaking Up U.S. Tech Heavyweights

    For consumers, access to AI may also become cheaper. For researchers who already have a lot of resources, more efficiency may have less of an effect. It is unclear whether DeepSeek’s approach will help to make models with better performance overall, or simply models that are more efficient.

  • DeepSeek Shatters Beliefs About the Cost of AI, Leaving U.S. Tech Giants Reeling

    Society may benefit from less computationally intensive, and therefore more energy-efficient, AI. However, the geopolitical risk of a single country capturing the market, together with concerns about data privacy, intellectual property and censorship may outweigh the benefits.

  • Greg Abbott Seeks $11 Billion in Federal Reimbursements for Border Security

    In a letter to U.S. congressional leaders, the governor blamed previous border security policy for leaving Texas “defenseless,” forcing state officials to spend billions.

  • Madison and Nashville School Shooters Appear to Have Crossed Paths in Online Extremist Communities

    A month after a student opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School, another killed a classmate at Antioch High School. Both were active in an internet subculture that glorifies mass shooters and encourages young people to commit attacks.