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The Inflation Reduction Act Is the Start of Reclaiming Critical Mineral Chains
One important component of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed by Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden on Aug. 16, has been largely overlooked. “Built within the IRA is a commitment to increasing the domestic U.S. supply of critical minerals—lithium, nickel, manganese, and graphite, among others—to provide the materials necessary for a vast expansion in electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, and renewable power production infrastructure,” Morgan Bazilian writes. “The United States needs more wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars. But to make that possible, it will need more mines.”
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U.S. Plans to Boost US Biotechnology Manufacturing
The administration announced Monday steps to bolster the “bioeconomy” in the United States, a classification that covers research and development across a broad swath of products, including medical supplies, sustainable new fuels and food, as well as technologies meant to help fight climate change. The order comes barely a month after President Biden signed a major piece of legislation, the CHIPS Act, meant to supercharge U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors, an area in which the U.S. has lost its once-dominant global position.
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Three Iranian Nationals Charged with Cyber Plots Against U.S. Critical Infrastructure Providers
An indictment was unsealed Wednesday charging three Iranian nationals with allegedly orchestrating a scheme to hack into the computer networks of multiple U.S. victims, including critical infrastructure providers. The defendants’ hacking campaign exploited known vulnerabilities in commonly used network devices and software applications to gain access and exfiltrate data and information from victims’ computer systems.
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Heading Off a Future Constitutional Calamity
The Electoral Count Reform Act offers the opportunity to address a potentially existential national security threat with a relatively small number of keystrokes revising the U.S. Code—but time is short to get it done.
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Off-the-Shelf Crypto-Detectors Give a False Sense of Data Security
A team of computer scientists outlines a leading reason behind insecure data and makes recommendations about how to fix the problem.
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Scapegoating of Jews for the 1969 Al-Aqsa Arson Continued as Usual in 2022
August 21 marked the 53rd anniversary of the 1969 al-Aqsa Mosque arson and the ongoing disinformation campaigns scapegoating Jews and Israel for the attack. The culprit, Denis Michael Rohan – a Protestant extremist from Australia who believed his actions would prompt the Second Coming of Jesus – but Middle Eastern outlets have been publishing inaccurate reports of the event to this day.
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Guantanamo Bay: Twenty Years of Counterterrorism and Controversy
The U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has generated intense debate for two decades, raising enduring questions about national security, human rights, and justice.
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Let’s Stop Being Cavalier About Civilian Control of the Military
The message of a remarkable open letter by former secretaries of defense and former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, published last week, is straightforward: The United States needs to review the basic principles of civilian control of the military and recommit to best practices in civil-military relations. Peter Feaver and Michèle Flournoy write that the statement dismisses what might be called the naïve theory of civilian control — the idea that every whim of the president should be immediately executed as a direct order without any further thought. “In a democracy, that can be as dangerous as rank insubordination, if a president is reckless,” they write. “It is hard not to think of President Trump and the way his impulsive, idiosyncratic approach to the commander-in-chief role made this rearticulation of first principles necessary.”
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California Dreaming? Nope.
Expert welcomes aggressive move toward electric vehicles, but sees one ‘huge mistake’ policymakers need to avoid and a surefire way to anger drivers.
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No End in Sight to “Beginning of Putin’s End”
The first predictions that Vladimir Putin’s reign was about to end – the wording often referred to “the beginning of the end” of Vladimir Putin’s regime – were made in 2002, three years after his ascension to power in December 1999. The number and frequency of such predictions have increased since the launch of the botched invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The staff of Russia Matters examined thirty-eight of these predictions and the context in which they were made.
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9/11 Survivors’ Exposure to Toxic Dust and the Chronic Health Conditions That Followed Offer Lessons That Are Still Too Often Unheeded
After the 9/11 attack, more than 100,000 responders and recovery workers from every U.S. state – along with some 400,000 residents and other workers around ground zero – were exposed to a toxic cloud of dust that fell as a ghostly, thick layer of ash and then hung in the air for more than three months. The World Trade Center dust plume consisted of a dangerous mixture of cement dust and particles, asbestos and a class of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants. The dust also contained heavy metals that are known to be poisonous to the human body and brain, such as lead and mercury, and PCB.
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China Intensifying Its Global Push for Media Influence
The Chinese government’s media influence efforts, turning to more covert and aggressive tactics, have increased since 2019 in most of the 30 countries under study by a new report, but democratic pushback has often curbed their impact.
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Iran Nuclear Weapons Breakout Time Remains at Zero
A new report from the Institute for Science and International Security summarizes and assesses information in the (IAEA) quarterly safeguards report for 7 September 2022. The main finding: Iran’s breakout time, that is, the time between a political decision to produce a nuclear weapon and the completion of such weapon, remains at zero.
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U.S. Moves to Keep Advanced Semiconductor Technology Out of China
Companies that accept U.S. funding under the CHIPS Act — a plan to build up America’s computer chip-making capacity — will be barred from establishing advanced fabrication facilities in China for 10 years. The CHIPS Act is a response not just to the computer chip shortage that snarled global supply chains during the pandemic but also to the perceived national security threat that a lack of domestic semiconductor manufacturing presents.
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The Oath Keepers Data Leak: Unmasking Extremism in Public Life
A data leak revealed the information of thousands of people whose names were in an Oath Keepers database as having paid for a membership at some point. The Oath Keepers are an anti-government extremist group associated with the militia movement.
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More headlines
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.
Vaccine Integrity Project Says New FDA Rules on COVID-19 Vaccines Show Lack of Consensus, Clarity
Sidestepping both the FDA’s own Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), two Trump-appointed FDA leaders penned an opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine to announce new, more restrictive, COVID-19 vaccine recommendations. Critics say that not seeking broad input into the new policy, which would help FDA to understand its implications, feasibility, and the potential for unintended consequences, amounts to policy by proclamation.
Twenty-One Things That Are True in Los Angeles
To understand the dangers inherent in deploying the California National Guard – over the strenuous objections of the California governor – and active-duty Marines to deal with anti-ICE protesters, we should remind ourselves of a few elementary truths, writes Benjamin Wittes. Among these truths: “Not all lawful exercises of authority are wise, prudent, or smart”; “Not all crimes require a federal response”; “Avoiding tragic and unnecessary confrontations is generally desirable”; and “It is thus unwise, imprudent, and stupid to take actions for performative reasons that one might reasonably anticipate would increase the risks of such confrontations.”
Luigi Mangione and the Making of a ‘Terrorist’
Discretion is crucial to the American tradition of criminal law, Jacob Ware and Ania Zolyniak write, noting that “lawmakers enact broader statutes to empower prosecutors to pursue justice while entrusting that they will stay within the confines of their authority and screen out the inevitable “absurd” cases that may arise.” Discretion is also vital to maintaining the legitimacy of the legal system. In the prosecution’s case against Luigi Mangione, they charge, “That discretion was abused.”