• The Pandemic Has Revealed the Cracks in U.S. Manufacturing: Here’s How to Fix Them

    The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed glaring deficiencies in the U.S. manufacturing sector’s ability to provide necessary products – especially amidst a crisis. Globalization is at the heart of the problem. With heavy reliance on global supply chains and foreign producers, the pandemic has interrupted shipping of parts and materials to nearly 75% of U.S. companies. Decades of “offshoring” domestic manufacturing to other countries have led the U.S. to the current crisis. It has seriously damaged the nation’s industrial base, increased income inequality and caused stagnation in U.S. living standards. How the U.S. responds will determine the long-term health and prosperity of the nation.

  • DHS Draft Document: White Supremacists Are Greatest Terror Threat

    White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security. Betsy Woodruff Swan writes in Politico that two later draft versions of the same document — DHS’s State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020 — describe the threat from white supremacists in slightly different language. “But all three drafts describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.” Woodruff Swan notes that “None of the drafts Politico reviewed referred to a threat from Antifa, the loose cohort of militant left-leaning agitators who senior Trump administration officials have described as domestic terrorists.”

  • What’s Ailing California’s Electric System?

    California made headlines for all the wrong reasons recently with widespread rolling power outages in the middle of a heat wave and a pandemic. These blackouts were not an accident—they were intentionally scheduled by the grid operator, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), due to a shortage of resources available to keep the lights on.

  • Better Strategy to Protect U.S. Agricultural Sector

    The agriculture sector in the United States accounts for more than 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (about a trillion dollars) and provides jobs for more than 10 percent of U.S. workforce, and threats to the agricultural sectors. Agriculture impacts more than just the food provided for the family dinner. It’s a part of forestry, fishing, food and beverages for restaurants, textile, and leather products. In the past, biological weapons (BW) attacks were typically considered with the framework of anti-personnel attacks. Experts say that state-actors or terrorists could wreak havoc – and misery – on millions of Americans by launching attacks on the U.S. agricultural sector.

  • Two Boogaloo Followers Charged with Trying to Sell Weapons to, Become Mercenaries for Hamas

    Federal prosecutors charged two self-proclaimed “Boogaloo Boys” with trying to sell weapons to someone they believed was a member of the Palestinian Islamist terrorist group Hamas for the purpose of attacking Israeli and U.S. soldiers. Prosecutors said that the two also considered becoming “mercenaries” for Hamas in order to raise funds for and boost the reputation of the Boogaloo movement.

  • To Prevent Extremist Violence in the United States, Think Beyond the Homeland Security Box

    Over the past decade, with the FBI focused on surveilling and otherwise investigating suspected terrorists, the United States has relied on the Department of Homeland Security to work with local law enforcement, municipalities and communities to strengthen their capacity to prevent violent extremism. “Our research and experience shows that the department’s emphasis on security can be counterproductive and that the most promising strategies can be found in models and partnerships led by actors not involved in security,” Eric Rosand, and Stevan Weine write.

  • DHS: Russia “Amplifying” Claims of Mail-In Voter Fraud

    New analysis by DHS’s intelligence unit, released Thursday to federal and state law enforcement agencies, warned that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March. ABC News has obtained the document, which says that Russia has sought to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud. This Russian campaign of disinformation replicates and reinforces President Donald Trump’s own campaign of unfounded claims about the integrity of mail-in voting.

  • How to Change an Election

    A 3 August report from the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan group of political, government, and academic experts that ran election crisis-planning exercises to game out what might happen between now and Inauguration Day, predicts “lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides.” With both sides wary of tampering, Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard government professor, tries to game the game on what tactics could follow a close result.

  • “Weapon of Terror”: A Novichok Creator Tells How Navalny Case Differs from the Skripal Attack

    Medical specialists in Germany have determined that Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, who is being treated in a hospital in Berlin after falling ill on 20 August on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, was poisoned with a form of the Soviet-developed nerve agent Novichok. The toxin found in Navalny is from the same group of poisons as the one used in the March 2018 poisoning of former Soviet intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury. Both Skripals survived the attack and were released after spending weeks in the hospital.

  • Novichok: How Are Victims Surviving Poisoning?

    Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is likely to survive a suspected poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok, according to the hospital treating him. There have now been at least six known cases of serious Novichok poisoning in the past two years. But only one victim tragically died from it. Why is that? Is the substance less lethal than previously thought? Or could it be that the stockpile of the nerve agent is degrading?

  • The Role of Russian Espionage in Re-Shaping the West

    Arthur Martirosyan writes that despite “the incomplete evidence, Harding’s hypothesis [the Russia controls Donald Trump and Boris Johnson through money and compromising information] is embraced enthusiastically by many. After all, it may very well be that for lack of direct evidence, the treasonous crime has gone unpunished. It will take time, but above all, political re-configurations in the U.S. and U.K. allowing new investigations to provide proof and refutations, to establish not the intent—which very few argue even in Russia—not the interference—which has been established—but the impact on political processes. This only means that the book will be in high demand for the foreseeable future especially among readers who are seeking data to confirm their conclusion that Putin somehow controls Trump and Johnson.”

  • NSA’s Post-9/11 Mass Surveillance Program, Exposed by Snowden, Illegal: Court

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that the National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence’s surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was unlawful, and possibly unconstitutional. Critics of the program say that in addition to violating privacy rights, the program’s was ineffective: Billions of phone calls and email messages were collected and scanned over the years, but only a handful of terrorism suspects were seized, and even fewer were convicted.

  • Navalny Poisoned with Nerve Agent Novichok

    Germany says scientists have “proven beyond doubt” that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the chemical nerve agent novichok. Navalny was poisoned ten days ago by operatives of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, in the Siberian city of Omsk.

  • As Trial Begins in Paris for Charlie Hebdo Attack, the Magazine Republishes Cartoons of Mohammed

    Yesterday (Wednesday, 2 September 2020), the trial of fourteen people, accused of participating in the plot to attack the editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015, begins in a Paris court. As the trial begins, the magazine is reposting the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad who had made the satirical weekly a target of jihadists.

  • Charlie Hebdo, Freedom or Death

    The pencil against the Kalashnikov, the schoolboy humor against the holy war … At first glance, yes, the battle is lost. The more so as a constant cowardice dressed in silliness makes entire sections of society fall into the trap of the fight against “Islamophobia.” Saint Matthew said that “It is the violent who win.” Our enemies choose the targets, not the other way around. That’s why we must not give up. History bears witness to this: it is when it is sure of its strength, of its rights, that the free country prevails over the “violent.”