• Looking for Critical Minerals in Mine Waste

    Mine waste is the material left over after mining. It consists of tailings, the material that remains after mined ore is milled and concentrated, as well as the topsoil, waste rock and other materials that were removed to get to the ore. Some critical-mineral commodities, like rare earth elements, are known to occur alongside more commonly mined minerals like iron or nickel. Because of this, mine-waste sites are now being revisited.

  • Stoking Wildfire Resilience in Oregon

    Monitoring allows all the moving pieces of an emergency response to launch into action and for decision makers to have as much time as possible to assess and mitigate the threat. This is certainly true when it comes to wildfires. S&T is piloting smoke detection sensors ahead of the 2023 wildfire season.

  • Michigan State Murders: What We Know About Campus Shootings and the Gunmen Who Carry Them Out

    A gunman opened fire at Michigan State University on Feb. 13, 2023, killing three people and injuring five others before taking his own life. There have been nine mass shootings in or around college or university settings since 1966, according to The Violence Project database, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are murdered in public in a single incident. This would not include the Michigan State University shooting at this stage, or many other incidents in which fewer people than four were killed. It also doesn’t include the 1970 Kent State massacre in which four students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard. In all the campus mass shootings in the database, the gunman was a man, with an average age of 28. The youngest was 22 and the oldest was 43. Six of the nine perpetrators were nonwhite.

  • China-Owned Parent Company of TikTok Among Top Spenders on Internet Lobbying

    ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of social media platform TikTok, has dramatically upped its U.S. lobbying effort since 2020 as U.S.-China relations continue to sour and is now the fourth-largest Internet company in spending on federal lobbying as of last year, according to newly released data.

  • German Court to Rule About Phone Searches of Asylum-Seekers

    Judges could announce this week if authorities broke the law when they combed an asylum-seeker’s phone to find out where she was from. The searches are common practice — and the ruling could have major consequences.

  • Public Awareness of “Nuclear Winter” Too Low Given Current Risks

    The scientific theory of nuclear winter sees detonations from nuclear exchanges throw vast amounts of debris into the stratosphere, which ultimately blocks out much of the sun for up to a decade, causing global drops in temperature, mass crop failure and widespread famine. The combined nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia have about 1,450 megatons. The use of only 0.1% of this joint arsenal would cause a nuclear winter which will claim 225 million lives.

  • American Democracy and Pandemic Security

    Covid-19 cost the nation and the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars in economic losses and caused major societal deficits in learning, health, and well-being. The United States faced specific challenges in how its national pandemic response, rooted in its culture and federated system of public health, was organized and executed. National crises have historically brought the country together. Yet, the United States was unable to organize cohesive leadership at the national, state, local, and tribal levels, and it failed to rapidly unify its citizens to act in solidarity to suppress the emerging pandemic.

  • “The Most Dangerous Possibility”: U.S. Fears of a Russia-Ukraine War, 30 Years Ago

    On January 5, 1993, just days before Bill Clinton was inaugurated as U.S. president, the outgoing secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, finished a 23-page memo to his successor, Warren Christopher, who would be taking over in a few weeks. The memo was a rundown of global hot spots “Ukraine not the most likely but certainly the most dangerous possibility,” he wrote.

  • Russia Continues to Spread Disinformation on Imaginary U.S. Biowarfare Facilities in Ukraine

    On January 30, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the chief of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) Warfare at the Russian Ministry of Defense, claimed once again in a briefing that the United States developed biological weapons in facilities in Ukraine. Kirillov went further than he had previously, this time referencing the EcoHealth Alliance in his claims that the U.S. has done work “enhancing the pathogenic characteristics of COVID-19.” Kirillov appeared to have tried to appeal to Western outlets that have trafficked in conspiracy theories about both the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine.

  • Since Elon Musk’s Takeover, Twitter Has Seen a Rapid Rise in Gen-Z, Neo-Nazi Antisemitism: Study

    A new study has demonstrated that extremist elements have viewed Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter as an opportunity to rejoin the social media platform en masse. The study also indicates that a sea change is taking place on Twitter with respect to the proliferation of extremist antisemitic content.

  • U.S., China Compete for Africa's Rare Earth Minerals

    African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo have some of the largest deposits of these resources, but China currently dominates the supply chain as well as their refinement and the U.S. wants to reduce its reliance on the Asian giant.

  • U.K. to Reform the “Prevent” Counter-Radicalization Program

    A just-published review of Prevent, the U.K. program aiming to curb radicalization, harshly criticizes the program for succumbing to political correctness. William Shawcross, the author of the review, says that this has caused officials at Prevent to downplay the role of religion and militant Islamic ideology as drivers of radicalization, focusing instead on the psychological vulnerabilities and economic and social privation of Muslim extremists. At the same time, Prevent has inflated the threat posed by far-right extremists.

  • U.K. Deradicalization Program Downplayed Islamist Extremism, Exaggerated Far-Right Extremism: Report

    The U.K. Prevent counter-radicalization policy was introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2003 and expanded in 2015 by Prime Minister David Cameron. In 2017, Prime Minister ordered a thorough review of the program, and William Shawcross, the author of the review, has submitted it earlier this week to Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

  • 2023 Border Security Summit

    Defense Strategies Institute announced its 11th Annual Border Security & Intelligence Summit. This forum will bring together DHS, IC, Federal Agencies, and Industry to discuss the protection of U.S borders through enhanced technology and intelligence solutions.

  • What China’s Surveillance Balloon Says About U.S.-China Relations

    The question of what information the Chinese were trying to uncover using a balloon – when China’s many satellites could glean this same information – is intriguing. A far more important issue, however, is what this episode says about the ability, or more accurately inability, of Washington and Beijing to manage a future crisis. Worryingly, it appears that neither the United States nor China is prepared for a serious crisis.