• California's Wildfire Season Has Lengthened, and Its Peak Is Now Earlier in the Year

    California’s wildfire problem, fueled by a concurrence of climate change and a heightened risk of human-caused ignitions in once uninhabited areas, has been getting worse with each passing year of the 21st century.Researchers have found that the annual burn season has lengthened in the past two decades and that the yearly peak has shifted from August to July.

  • Syrian Missile Explodes Near Israel’s Dimona Nuclear Reactor

    A Syrian missile landed and exploded about forty miles from Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona. The IDF described the incident as unintentional: A Russia-made SA-5 was launched by a Syrian air defense unit, aiming at an IDF aircraft attacking Syrian military targets near Damascus. It appears that the Syrian missile had missed its target, and continued its flight trajectory which carried it all the way to the Negev desert, about 300 kilometers south of Damascus. There is unease in Israel over the fact that the missile managed to evade Israel’s robust anti-missile defenses.

  • Mathematics Professor and University Researcher Indicted for Grant Fraud

    A federal grand jury in Carbondale, Ill. On Wednesday returned an indictment charging a mathematics professor and researcher at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale (SIUC) with two counts of wire fraud and one count of making a false statement. The prosecution is part of the Justice Department’s ongoing China Initiative. Led by the Department’s National Security Division, the China Initiative is a broad, multi-faceted effort to counter Chinese national security threats and safeguard American intellectual property.

  • Domestic Violent Extremists’ Threat Has Increased Since 2015: Intelligence Chiefs

    Last week, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released to Congress an unclassified annual report – the IC’s 2021 Annual Threat Assessment. DNI Avril Haines, CIA director Bill Burns, and FBI director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. “DVE [domestic violent extremists] is an increasingly complex threat that is growing in the United States …. These extremists often see themselves as part of a global movement and, in fact, a number of other countries are experiencing a rise in DVE,” Haines said.

  • U.S. Should Make Monitoring and Detecting Nuclear Threats a Higher National Priority

    To address current and evolving nuclear threats, the U.S. needs a higher prioritized and more integrated program for monitoring, detecting, and verifying nuclear test explosions, nuclear weapon stockpiles, and the production of fissile material, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences.

  • How Much Regulation of the Tech Industry Is Too Much?

    As prominent figures, including former President Donald Trump, are banned from social media platforms for posting disinformation or inflammatory remarks, technology regulation has become a hot topic of debate. “We are living in times where technology has fundamentally changed almost all aspects of our lives,” says UCLA’s Terry Kramer. “It is within this context that we must carefully balance and enable the advantages of technology, which can improve our lives, improve our connectedness, lower the cost of critical goods and services, and improve health care against forces that can create negative externalities. Developing a critical understanding of the trade-offs is essential.”

  • Legislation Introduced to Ban TikTok from Government Devices

    U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Rick Scott (R-FL) have introduced legislation that would ban all federal employees from using TikTok on government devices. The U.S. State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and TSA have already banned TikTok on federal devices due to cybersecurity concerns and the potential for spying by the Chinese government.

  • China: Crimes Against Humanity in Xinjiang

    The Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the northwest region of Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Monday. The Chinese leadership is responsible for widespread and systematic policies of mass detention, torture, and cultural persecution, among other offenses.

  • Belfast Tinderbox: Why Loyalists Are in the Streets This Spring

    The violence that broke out in Northern Ireland earlier this month raised fears that sectarian conflict would return after decades of uneasy peace. Carolyn Gallaher and Kimberly Cowell-Meyers write that the latest unrest draws on many of the players during the so-called “Troubles” but that today’s politics, particularly disputes over Brexit, are driving much of the violence.

  • “I Felt Hate More Than Anything”: How an Active Duty Airman Tried to Start a Civil War

    Steven Carrillo, a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant, wanted to incite a second Civil War in the United States by killing police officers he viewed as enforcers of a corrupt and tyrannical political order — officers he described as “domestic enemies” of the Constitution he professed to revere. Carrillo’s path to the Boogaloo Bois shows the extremist anti-government group is far more organized and dangerous than previously known.

  • Iran Says 60 Percent Enrichment “Under Way” at Natanz Site

    Iranian officials say the country has begun enriching uranium up to 60 percent purity, higher than it has ever done before, despite ongoing talks between Tehran and world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran had committed to keep enrichment to 3.67 percent. Recently it has been enriching up to 20 percent, saying the deal was no longer enforceable. Enriching uranium to 60 percent would be the highest level achieved by Iran’s nuclear program, it is still short of the 90 percent purity needed for military use.

  • “Deprogramming” QAnon Followers Ignores Free Will and Why They Adopted the Beliefs in the First Place

    Recent calls to deprogram QAnon conspiracy followers are steeped in discredited notions about brainwashing. As popularly imagined, brainwashing is a coercive procedure that programs new long-term personality changes. Deprogramming, also coercive, is thought to undo brainwashing. Such deprogramming conversations do little to help us understand why people adopt QAnon beliefs. A deprogramming discourse fails to understand religious recruitment and conversion and excuses those spreading QAnon beliefs from accountability.

  • U.S. Expels Russian Diplomats, Imposes New Sanctions on Russia in Retaliation for Hacking, “harmful activities”

    The U.S. has imposed a new round of sanctions against Russia targeting what it calls the “harmful” foreign activities of Moscow. U.S. intelligence officials have pointed the finger at Russia for a massive hack known as SolarWinds that hit large swaths of the U.S. public and private sectors last year. Widely used software is believed to have been infected with malicious code, enabling hackers to access at least nine U.S. agencies, dozens of corporations.

  • U.S. Treasury Provides Missing Link: Manafort’s Partner Gave Campaign Polling Data to Kremlin in 2016

    The U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday that Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate and ex-employee of Paul Manafort, “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy,” during the 2016 election. Justin Hendrix writes that this is an apparently definitive statement that neither Special Counsel Robert Mueller nor the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation made in their final reports.

  • Afghanistan Withdrawal Could Pose ‘Significant Risk’ to U.S.: Intelligence Officials

    The plan to pull troops from Afghanistan could give terrorist groups like al-Qaida and Islamic State a chance to regenerate the capabilities they would need to carry out an attack against the United States, according to top U.S. intelligence officials.