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Republicans Are Pushing for Drastic Asylum Changes – an Immigration Law Scholar Breaks Down the Proposal
There is bipartisan agreement for the need for immigration reform and stark disagreement on what that reform should be. Conservative Republicans in Congress are now proposing legal changes that would make it harder for most applicants to get asylum. The Republicans’ plan is similar to both a similar rule that the Department of Homeland Security adopted in 2019 and a policy that President Joe Biden is trying to push through. The proposed changes would make it almost impossible for a migrant entering through the U.S.-Mexico border to get asylum, even if that migrant has a legitimate fear of returning to his or her home country.
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Are Ski Mask Bans a Crime-Fighting Solution? Some Cities Say Yes.
Amid concerns about crime and public safety, at least two major U.S. cities recently considered banning ski masks or balaclavas to prevent criminal behavior, despite a lack of academic research about the effectiveness of such bans. Philadelphia is the latest city to prohibit ski masks in some public areas.
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How Houthi Attacks in the Red Sea Threaten Global Shipping
Houthi attacks against commercial ships in the Red Sea have upended global shipping. The disruptions could soon ripple through the global economy.
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Ethiopia and Somalia: Conflict Intensifies Over Port Deal
Ethiopia’s agreement with breakaway region Somaliland, seeking port access in exchange for potential sovereignty recognition, could cause upheaval in the Horn of Africa. Somalia views it as an attack on its sovereignty.
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The Signal in the Noise: The 2023 Threats and Those on the Horizon
We enter the new year with “blinking lights everywhere,” Austin Doctor writes. “From a U.S. homeland security perspective, the terrorism threat in 2023 can be summarized as diverse, diffuse, and active. In 2024, we are likely to continue to see signs of continuing shifts in the terrorism landscape—such as the threats posed by lone juvenile offenders, the malign use of democratized technologies, and ‘violent resistance’ narratives adopted across the extremist ecosystem.”
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How Far-Right Terrorists Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Bomb
There used to be a time that domestic terrorists favored bombing as their preferred method. “Today, however, the terrorists’ preferred tactic is the mass shooting,” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware write. “Assault-style rifles have replaced explosives.”
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NYC Sues Bus Companies that Texas Hired to Transport Migrants
More than 33,000 migrants have arrived from Texas since August 2022. The city wants the 17 bus and transportation companies twhich contracted with Texas to take the migrants to New York City to pay more than $700 million in damages.
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Extreme Weather Cost $80 Billion in 2023. The True Price Is Far Higher.
The U.S. saw 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 — more than ever before. 2024 could be worse. Congress has long punted on reforming FEMA and the nation’s disaster relief policy, but it’s only a matter of time before there’s a disaster bad enough that legislators feel pressure to act. That catastrophe didn’t arrive in in 2023, but it is surely coming.
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Jan. 6 Was an Example of Networked Incitement − a Media and Disinformation Expert Explains the Danger of Political Violence Orchestrated Over Social Media
The shocking events of Jan. 6, 2021 were an example of a new phenomenon: influential figures inciting large-scale political violence via social media, and insurgents communicating across multiple platforms to command and coordinate mobilized social movements in the moment of action. We call this phenomenon “networked incitement.” The use of social media for networked incitement foreshadows a dark future for democracies. Rulers could well come to power by manipulating mass social movements via social media, directing a movement’s members to serve as the leaders’ shock troops, online and off.
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The True Dangers of Long Trains
Trains are getting longer. Rail companies had recently adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster than ever, with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any time in history. Railroads are getting richer, but these “monster trains” are jumping off of tracks across America and regulators are doing little to curb the risk.
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American Victims of Hamas Attack on Israel Plan to Sue North Korea
Families of Americans killed and injured in Hamas’ October 7 terror attack in Israel are contemplating a lawsuit against North Korea for indirectly supplying the Palestinian militant group with weapons, according to an Israeli attorney representing the families.
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Ukraine, Gaza, and the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Legacy
It makes perfect sense for American military organizations to study both the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, and to draw insights from both. But as the U.S. Army studies these two wars for insights, let’s drop the “learned” from the phrase “lessons learned.” Lessons learned assumes that an insight—a “lesson”—from these current wars can also, at the same time, be “learned”—that is, incorporated into the training and strategies of another military. This is a highly problematic assumption.
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Why Have Authoritarianism and Libertarianism Merged? A Political Psychologist on “the Vulnerability of the Modern Self”
Logically, authoritarianism and libertarianism are contradictory. Yet there is a history of these two outlooks being intertwined. A psychological approach can help us to understand the dynamics of this puzzling fusion. As Erich Fromm and others have shown, our ideological affinities are linked to unconscious structures of feeling. At this level, authoritarianism and libertarianism are the interchangeable products of the same underlying psychological difficulty: the vulnerability of the modern self.
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Growing Number of Migrants Highlights Border Crisis
U.S. officials processed an estimated 300,000 people at the U.S. border with Mexico in December, which would be the highest number ever recorded, according to multiple news organizations. While DHS will release the December numbers later this month, Reuters and other news organizations estimate that 300,000 people attempted to cross the border in the final month of 2023, with about 50,000 of them coming through designated points of entry.
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The Organized Crime Threat to Latin American Democracies
Latin America’s democracies and democrats don’t get enough credit for weathering inequality, violence, and economic stagnation. Miraculously, only two of the region’s former democracies, Venezuela and Nicaragua, have collapsed into full-fledged authoritarianism. In no other part of the world have so many democracies held up under such pressures for so long. Governments have learned to manage many threats, but they are failing to curb the growing power of organized crime.
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More headlines
The long view
Improving the Security of Soft Targets and Crowded Places
Attacks on soft targets and crowded places (ST-CPs) represent a significant challenge. How can prevention, protection, and response and recovery investments reduce the risk of casualties from attacks on ST-CPs?
Canada’s Biosecurity Scandal: The Risks of Foreign Interference in Life Sciences
In July 2019, world-renowned biological researchers Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng were quietly walked out of the Canadian government’s National Microbiology Lab (NML). The original allegation against them was that Qiu had authorized a shipment to China of some of the deadliest viruses on the planet, including Ebola and Nipah. Then the story seemed to go away—until now.
Don’t Buy Moscow’s Shameless Campaign Tying Biden to Its Terrorist Attack
Russia has offered many different explanations to the ISIS-K’s 22 March 2024 terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, but the most recent explanation offered by Russia is the most audacious yet: Russia now charges that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma financed the attack. Burisma is at the center of an effort by a congressional committee to impeach President Biden, but the case has all but collapsed. Hunter Stoll writes that Russia’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus appears to be searching for ways to keep Burisma in the news ahead of the U.S. presidential election.
West Reliant on Russian Nuclear Fuel Amid Decarbonization Push
A new report and research from a British defense research group has found that many Western nations are still reliant on Russian nuclear fuel to power their reactors, despite efforts to sever economic ties with the Kremlin following its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
‘Fake News’ Legislation Risks Doing More Harm Than Good Amid a Record Number of Elections in 2024
“Fake news” legislation that governments around the world have written in recent years to combat mis- and disinformation does little to protect journalistic freedom. Rather, it can create a greater risk of harm. That’s the main finding of a review I helped conduct of legislation either considered or passed over the past several years related to fake news and mis- and disinformation.
Video Games Might Matter for Terrorist Financing
Every day, billions of dollars flow across international borders among millions of people on a public online market, with functionally no government oversight or regulation. The market? Virtual currency and digital assets in video games. Moshe Klein writes that “as terrorists seek new methods of conducting financial activity, governments must remain one step ahead and consider how they can proactively investigate and close extant avenues for terrorist financing.”