• Pakistan Protests Biden Questioning of Safety of Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons

    Pakistan has formally protested to the United States over remarks by President Joe Biden questioning the safety of Islamabad’s nuclear weapons. Biden told a Democratic Congressional fundraiser Thursday night that Pakistan “may be one of the most dangerous nations in the world” for possessing “nuclear weapons without any cohesion.”

  • “Terror Granny” Charged with Plotting German Civil War to Bring Back the Kaiser

    A 75-year old retired theology professor was arrested and charged with organizing a nationalist, far-right terrorist group aiming to bring back the Kaiser. The group aimed to attack power stations and transmitters in order to plunge large parts of Germany into black out in the hope of promoting civic unrest.

  • What Is a Terrorist Movement?

    The analysis of terrorism is plagued with definitional disagreements, and most of the definition in use suffer from gaps, ambiguities, and inconsistencies. Daniel Byman writes that terms such as “groups” or organizations” no longer applies to many who engage in terrorist activities – but the term “lone wolf” is also misleading. He offers the term “network: “Network analysis can be another way to identify the contours of a dangerous movement.” Because so many of today’s terrorism challenges “are better characterized as movements or networks rather than as groups or organizations, it is valuable to explore how such amorphous concepts might be operationalized.”

  • The Promise and Peril of Guyana’s Oil Boom

    Most people may not have even heard of Guyana, a tiny country on the northeast coast of South America, but the former British colony is in the midst of an oil boom of staggering proportions. The vast oil reserves discovered off the Guyana coast will soon make Guyana a major oil producer. The question is whether Guyana will escape what economists call the “Resource Curse” — the phenomenon which sees economies that are blessed with natural resources experience less favorable development outcomes than their resource-poor counterparts.

  • Extracting Personal Information from Anonymous Cell Phone Data

    Researchers haves extracted personal information, specifically protected characteristics like age and gender, from anonymous cell phone data using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, raising questions about data security.

  • U.S. Officials Reassure Americans: Upcoming Election Will Be Trustworthy

    Top U.S. officials are ramping up efforts to convince Americans that the upcoming midterm elections will be safe and that the results can be trusted – but officials note the election threat environment is “more complex than it has ever been.” The head of U.S. Cyber Command told an audience Tuesday that “we are seeing no significant indications of attacks that are being planned right now.”

  • Risk-Limiting Audits: Efficient Means of Confirming Accuracy of Election Results

    Risk-Limiting Audits refer to a process by which humans can ensure within a specified risk tolerance that the computerized tallies of paper ballots are correct by examining a random sample of paper ballots by hand.

  • Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality

    Activists and academics have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in studies when claiming that illegal immigrants have relatively low crime rates. These studies fail to appreciate the fact that it can take years for Texas to identify convicts, while they are in custody, as illegal immigrants. These studies thus misclassify as native-born a significant number of offenders who are later identified as illegal immigrants.

  • China’s Challenge: Why the West Should Fear President Xi’s Quest to “Catch and Surpass It’ with Technology

    Beijing’s bid for technological dominance is a threat to global security and liberty. The Western democracies must not shirk the task of confronting it.

  • China Faces Major Challenges in Achieving Goal of Global Technological Pre-Eminence

    China has overtaken the United States to top the world in the number of high-quality scientific papers it is producing, and there has been a marked improvement in the quality of China’s scientific and technological development over the past two decades. But at the same time, China has attempted to become fully self-sufficient in core technologies – a policy which is creating its own dilemma: The more the Chinese leadership promotes self-sufficiency, the harder it will be to maintain an open-door policy—and to realize its dream of becoming a science and technology great power.

  • Who Are Russia’s War Hawks, and Do They Matter?

    The evolving views of hard-liners within Russia’s paramilitary, media, and national security establishments offer important clues as to the direction Putin will take the war in Ukraine.

  • Retribution and Regime Change

    Everything that now happens in this war, including the murderous missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, has to be understood in terms of the logic of Putin’s exposed position as a failed war leader. What we are witnessing, in other words, are the consequences of Putin’s weakness.

  • “The Most Dangerous Man in the World”: The Life and Times of Vladimir Putin

    How did he manage to rise from a communal apartment in suburban Leningrad and a mediocre early career in the KGB to become Russia’s all-powerful president? What has driven this former spy, who was once described as so forgettable that he ‘disappeared into the wallpaper’, to launch a war on Ukraine?

  • Self-Identified “Incel” Plotted Mass Shooting of Women at OSU

    A 22-year old Ohio man admitted he plotted a mass shooting of women at a university in Ohio. The man identified as an “incel” or “involuntary celibate.” The incel movement is an online community of predominantly men who harbor anger towards women.

  • Brazil’s Election and South America’s Looming Migration Woes

    The second round Brazil’s presidential election, to be held 30 October, might plunge the highly polarized country into a political chaos. One side-effect would be the mass migration of Brazilians fleeing instability, exacerbating the hectic state of migration at the U.S. southern border. Brazilian migrants will join the growing number of migrants from Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in reshaping migration trends.