-
In-Group Perceptions Play Key Role in Driving Political Extremism: Study
Reducing the rising tide of political extremism –and violence –in the United States and beyond may require a rethinking of how we understand the forces that drive polarization. Believing your own side holds extreme views - even if it doesn’t - makes political violence more likely, researchers say.
-
-
Filtered Data Stops Openly Available AI Models from Performing Dangerous Tasks
Researchers have reported a major advance in safeguarding open-weight language models. By filtering out potentially harmful knowledge during training, the researchers were able to build models that resist subsequent malicious updates – especially valuable in sensitive domains such as biothreat research.
-
-
One in Five ICE Arrests Are Latinos on the Streets with No Criminal Past or Removal Order
Illegal profiling accounts for a substantial portion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in 2025. Mass deportation is a socially and economically damaging goal regardless, but it’s certainly not a goal for which we should sacrifice a sliver of our liberty or the Constitution. Only time will tell whether ICE and Border Patrol can continue to get away with these tactics.
-
-
Tariffs Can Improve U.S. Economy, but Global Trade Realities, Retaliation, Could Offset Gains
The United States could achieve modest economic benefits by applying uniform tariffs on all trade partners, but the complicated realities of supply chains, global trade and its downstream effects on people and businesses could offset economic gains and even lead to significant losses.
-
-
Trump Fired BLS Chief, but Skipped Causes of Weak Jobs Report
While the July U.S. jobs report last week was surprisingly bad—sending U.S. equities, bond yields, and the dollar all sharply lower—the reasons behind the labor-market developments have been pretty easy to see. The incontrovertible facts notwithstanding, Trump has fired a highly regarded, long-term government employee who received bipartisan backing to oversee the country’s labor-market statistics, bizarrely, and falsely, accusing her of “rigging” the figures he found to be inconvenient. Eroding trust in U.S. economic data and policymaking is a recipe for slower economic growth and even more challenging policymaking, whatever the data may say.
-
-
Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Their Country from Within
The Mossad made Iran its top priority in 1993 after Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, seemingly ending decades of conflict. The main goal of Israel’s focus on Iran: To protect Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region.
-
-
ICE Has a New Courthouse Tactic: Get Immigrants’ Cases Tossed, Then Arrest Them Outside
Inside immigration courts around the country, immigrants who crossed the border illegally and were caught and released are required to appear before a judge for a preliminary hearing. But in a new twist, the Trump administration has begun using an unexpected legal tactic in its deportation efforts. Rather than pursue a deportation case, it is convincing judges to dismiss immigrants’cases —thus depriving the immigrants of protection from arrest and detention —then taking them into custody.
-
-
HHS Scraps Further Work on Life-Saving mRNA Vaccine Platform
In what experts say will hobble pandemic preparedness, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the dismantling of the country’s mRNA vaccine-development programs—the same innovation that allowed rapid scale-up of COVID-19 vaccines during the public health emergency.
-
-
RFK Jr Is Wrong About mRNA Vaccines – a Scientist Explains How They Make COVID Less Deadly
In announcing the cancellation of US government support for research into mRNA vaccines, Kennedy has claimed that mRNA vaccines “encourage new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics” – a misleading statement that contradicts the scientific consensus on viral evolution and effects of vaccination. The false assertions by RFK Jr. and other vaccine-skeptics notwithstanding, mRNA vaccines do not cause viruses to mutate. Mutations are part of viral evolution: a natural process that happens regardless of our intervention. What vaccines do is give us a fighting chance.
-
-
I’m a Physician Who Has Looked at Hundreds of Studies of Vaccine Safety, and Here’s Some of What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong
In the five months since he began serving as secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made many public statements about vaccines that have cast doubt on their safety and on the objectivity of long-standing processes established to evaluate them. Many of these statements are factually incorrect. The evidence is clear and publicly available: Vaccines have dramatically reduced childhood illness, disability and death on a historic scale.
-
-
Incentives for U.S.-China Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation Across Artificial General Intelligence’s Five Hard National Security Problems
The prospect of either the United States or the People’s Republic of China —or both—achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) is likely to heighten tensions and could even increase the risk of competition spiraling into conflict. But the emergence of AGI could also create incentives for risk reduction and cooperation. We argue that both will not only be possible but essential.
-
-
Securing South Korea's Critical Minerals Supply Chains Through Trilateral Cooperation
South Korea, Japan, and the United States’ trilateral partnership has expanded to include collaboration on economic security, including on critical minerals supply chains (CMSCs). A new report offers analysis and tools for supply chain net assessment, supply chain cooperation, and economic security.
-
-
As AI Worsens WMD Threat, Australia Must Lead Response
When dealing with AI-enabled CBRN threats, we cannot afford to wait until the first catastrophic incident occurs. AI companies have acknowledged that frontier models have capabilities that, without adequate safeguards, could enable novices to create biological and chemical weapons.
-
-
Geological Mapping Project Supports Critical Mineral Explorations, Enhances Public Safety in the Southeast
A key focus of a new USGS mapping project is to identify where critical minerals vital to the economy and national security might be located. As demand for rare earth elements and other critical minerals grows for use in technology, energy, and defense sectors, this project can provide vital data that helps the U.S. secure domestic sources of critical minerals, thus reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign sources.
-
-
Europe Is Significantly Boosting Its Defense Spending. Can the Continent Become a Military Superpower?
Military spending across the European Union is ramping up in what observers have noted is a significant and “extraordinary” pivot from the comparatively placid postwar decades. Mai’a Cross thinks Europe’s shift toward an “era of rearmament” will be in its long-term interest.
-
The long view
Laughing Through the Storm: How Humor Can Help Us Not Only Survive but Thrive in Turbulent Times
The world feels heavy again. In a time such as this, laughter can seem almost obscene. Who dares to joke while the world burns? Yet, perhaps the better question is: how can we not?
Technology Evolves the Tactics: Preparing for the Rise of Terrorist AI Harms
Terrorist groups, like the societies they emerge from, adapt to new technologies. As AI capabilities evolve, so too do the tactics of extremist actors. While the full effects may take years to observe, as the technologies continue to develop, we are starting to see them directly alter extremism tradecraft.
Trump’s National Guard Deployments Raise Worries About State Sovereignty
In two instances – Portland and Chicago – President Trump’s campaign to send the National Guard into Democratic-leaning cities he falsely describes as crime-ridden, has turned to out-of-state National Guard troops. Presidents who have federalized National Guard forces in the past, even against a governor’s will, have done so in response to a crisis in the troops’ home state. But the decision to send one state’s National Guard troops into a different state without the receiving governor’s consent is both extraordinary and unprecedented, experts on national security law.
Correctly Assessing Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States
A recent CSIS report, making sweeping claims about a supposed rise in leftwing terrorism in the United States, risks feeding false narratives about political violence and polarization. Michael Jensen and Amy Cooter write that the evidence used to sound this alarm consists of just five plots and attacks, and that these five events not only “are doing a lot of heavy lifting” in the report, but that they are given “an unwarranted level of causal and predictive power.” This tiny sample “simply does not justify inducing panic with eye-popping headlines.”
What Just Happened? Dismantling the Intelligence Community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that the functions of the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) would be significantly reduced. Gabbard has thus dismantled the last remaining U.S. federal government organ dedicated to tracking and analyzing state-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society – following the Trump administration’s shutting down of related units at the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and Department of Justice earlier this year.
Silencing America’s Voice
The Trump administration has taken a series of steps which have substantially weakened U.S. government-funded media outlets whose task it was to tell the American story and counter the global propaganda and disinformation efforts of U.S. adversaries. These moves greatly benefit the anti-American propaganda efforts of Russia and China, which will now go unchallenged.