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Reports of China's Overseas 'Police Stations' Spark Controversy
Recent allegations of China operating 54 overseas “police stations” to pressure its citizens — including dissidents — to return home have sparked controversy and led to a number of investigations into their activities across Europe and North America.
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China and Global Development of Critical Resources
To what extent has China adhered to its pledge to not build new overseas coal power plants? What are the main concerns related to China’s ownership or control over power transmission and distribution companies in Latin America? What is the state of China’s deep- and distant-sea and seabed mining exploration activities, and to what extent does it use these activities for ulterior strategic purposes?
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Survey Reveals Worrying Trend in Conspiracy Theories That Deny Terrorist Attacks Ever Happened
As a study my team and I conducted highlights, frightening proportions of the public believe in conspiracy theories that doubt the truth of reported events, even terrorist attacks. In our findings, one in seven respondents believed victims of the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing were not really victims at all, but “crisis actors” – essentially, that they were brought in to pretend to be victims of an attack to manipulate public opinion. We also found that one in 20 were convinced the attack in Manchester and the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 were “hoaxes”.
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The Missing Review of FBI’s January 6 Intelligence and Law Enforcement Failures
Much attention has been paid to the troubling institutional culture among agents at the U.S. Secret Service – agents who, according to Asha Rangappa. sympathized with, and since minimized their advanced knowledge of, the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6. “It is time to focus similar attention on the FBI,” she writes.
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No Evidence of Any Voting Machine Compromised: CISA
“We have seen no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was any way compromised in any race in the country”: CISA
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Voters Largely Reject Election Deniers as Secretaries of State – but the Partisan Battle for Election Administration Will Continue
It appears that voters have largely rejected the vast majority of chief election official candidates who ran their campaigns as election deniers. But this election season raises questions, and exposes flaws, about how senior election officials are selected in the U.S. The platforms of these election deniers who appeared on the 2022 midterm ballot illustrate the risk that this dynamic poses to ongoing voter trust and future election results.
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Improving Security for Smart Systems
In an increasingly connected and smart world, sensors collect and share large amounts of data to help people make decisions. Researchers has recently developed a way to statistically analyze such complex sensor data, so that the computer algorithms that make data-based decisions can be more resilient and better able to cope with small errors.
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U.S. Officials Hope Confidence Campaign Pays Off for Midterm Elections
“Americans should go to the ballot box with confidence,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Election Security Agency (CISA), told a cybersecurity forum late last month. Yet U.S. officials also acknowledge the threats to Tuesday’s elections are serious and are being treated with proper caution.
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Beyond the Results, the Midterms Can Tell Us a Lot About How American Democracy Is Faring
Election night and the days immediately before and after will provide valuable insights into the health of democracy in the United States. Here are four things to watch.
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German Ministry Seeks to Block Chinese Chip Factory Takeover
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck wants to stop the sale of a chip production plant to a Chinese investor. The Green Party politician has expressed concern about giving China control over key infrastructure.
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Bolstering Biosafety Education to Address Biosecurity Professionals Shortfalls
Many countries face an severe shortages of biosafety and biosecurity professionals. To address these shortages, experts call for a multisectoral effort toward a future sustainable workforce by formalizing a biosafety & biosecurity career path within the higher education system.
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Better Defense Planning Could Use Statistics to Try to See into the Future
The war in Ukraine is not the first time—nor will it be the last—that the Department of Defense (DoD) has been forced to respond rapidly to unexpected threats or to reorient priorities when the assumptions guiding its force planning changed.
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Investigating Stockpile Stewardship Applications for World’s Largest Computer Chip
The Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine is the largest computer chip in the world, containing 2.6 trillion transistors, 850,000 artificial intelligence cores. Researchers at Sandia and Los Alamos are accelerating advanced simulation and computing applications in support of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship mission.
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Nuclear Weapons Use Will ‘End’ Kim Regime, US, South Korea Say
The United States and South Korean defense leaders are warning Pyongyang that any use of nuclear weapons by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would be the “end” of his regime.
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Panic Buttons, Automatic Locks and Bulletproof Windows Top the Proposed Safety Rules after Uvalde Shooting
These proposed requirements could take effect this school year after the Texas Education Agency takes public comment into consideration.
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The long view
Kinetic Operations Bring Authoritarian Violence to Democratic Streets
Foreign interference in democracies has a multifaceted toolkit. In addition to information manipulation, the tactical tools authoritarian actors use to undermine democracy include cyber operations, economic coercion, malign finance, and civil society subversion.
Patriots’ Day: How Far-Right Groups Hijack History and Patriotic Symbols to Advance Their Cause, According to an Expert on Extremism
Extremist groups have attempted to change the meaning of freedom and liberty embedded in Patriots’ Day — a commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord – to serve their far-right rhetoric, recruitment, and radicalization. Understanding how patriotic symbols can be exploited offers important insights into how historical narratives may be manipulated, potentially leading to harmful consequences in American society.
Trump Aims to Shut Down State Climate Policies
President Donald Trump has launched an all-out legal attack on states’ authority to set climate change policy. Climate-focused state leaders say his administration has no legal basis to unravel their efforts.