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Maintaining America’s Leadership in Biomedical Innovation
Thomas J. Bollyky’s testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce addresses how U.S. dependence on China has expanded from generic drug manufacturing into the innovation pipeline itself.
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What to Know About Pickaxe Mountain
Construction of the Pickaxe mountain facility started in the fall of 2020, and at the time Iran announced that the underground halls were intended to replace the destroyed above-ground advanced centrifuge assembly facility at the main Natanz site. The destroyed site was designed to assemble about 6000 advanced centrifuges per year, a large capacity, sized to produce the tens of thousands of advanced centrifuges during and after the phasing out of Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action limits from 2025 through 2030.
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The Antifa Terrorism Threat the Trump Administration Describes Does Not Exist
A September 2025 Trump’s executive order asserted an antifa enterprise into existence where none exists — and then declared war on it. After the organization was invented by the executive order, an enforcement machinery was built by presidential memorandum, and a foreign connection was manufactured by the State Department. Each step launders the previous one. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it. One result is certain: Genuine threats from real terrorist groups — with real leaders, actual funding, and malicious intent — will get less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted to focus on antifa.
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How Microsoft’s “Little Workaround” Created a Major Pentagon Threat
Reporter Renee Dudley heard Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary. She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it.
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Trump Administration Ramps up Pressure on Indefinite Immigrant Detention
Seeking to stop a “flood” of court cases freeing immigrants from mandatory detention, the Trump administration is asking an appeals court to put three immigrants back in detention.
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ICE Is Arresting Relatives Who Come Forward to Take Custody of Migrant Children in Federal Shelters
Attorneys say the federal agencies are using children as “bait” to detain sponsors, leaving kids waiting in shelters for months.
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Expert: Oil Is Rarely the Cause of War
It is a misconception to talk about ‘oil wars’ and great powers going to war to secure energy supplies, says a professor of political science.
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Immigrants, DHS agents and traffic stops: Violent outcomes repeat across the U.S.
ICE agents used live rounds to shoot at 22 people since January 2025 – 19 of them involved DHS officers shooting on people in their vehicles during traffic stops. Since January 2025, federal immigration officers have killed six people, three of them U.S. citizens. Four deaths came during traffic stops.
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Religious Motivation Needs to Stay in Our Terrorism Laws
Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is right to reject the proposal to remove religious motivation from Australia’s terrorism laws. The proposal rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what those laws are designed to do. Australia’s counterterrorism laws do not regulate extremism. They regulate the progression from extremist belief to politically motivated violence.
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The White House’s Approach to Frontier AI Might Be Worse Than an “FDA For AI”
Granting a new regulatory agency or an existing agency in the executive branch the power to decide when a model is considered safe enough for release will likely lead to regulatory capture, politicization, and legal uncertainty.
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An Initial Readout of Trump’s Election-Interference Speech
Under the pronounced partisan direction of Bill Pulte and John Solomon, declassified intelligence documents were released to support President’s Trump’s baseless claims and insinuations in last Thursday’s speech on election security. The principal risk with the declassification of documents is not the action itself but its selective use. A document may be genuine yet misleading if separated from coordinated assessment, confidence judgments, or subsequent reporting that gave it meaning. Declassification changes who may read intelligence. It does not decide whether the intelligence is reliable, what it proves, or how it should be used.
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Republicans Control Congress, So Why Is Trump’s SAVE America Act Stuck?
Congress’ hesitance to pass the SAVE America Act is more than a test of its relationship with Trump. It’s an example of Congress doing what it was intended to do: represent its constituents.
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Trump’s “Election Fraud” Declassification Bust
Last night during his national address, President Trump claimed that key documents he ordered declassified demonstrate that the US Intelligence Community (IC) withheld or otherwise soft-pedaled evidence of foreign election interference or voting machine vulnerabilities. The documents at issue—released in a process that can be charitably described as irregular at best—tell a different story.
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Behind the Fiction of Insecure Elections: Trump’s Worrisome Speech
It would be tempting to write off Trump’s speech on election integrity as “sound and fury signifying nothing”—a noisy exercise in performative alarmism, full of Trump’s specialties: baseless assertions, fact-ree claims, and conspiratorial hints. On some level, that judgment would fit. But the danger is that the speech does signify something: a willingness to erode the very norms of losers’ consent and winners’ restraint on which a self respecting, sustainable democracy depends. And that is worrisome indeed.
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Remotely Coerced Violence: 764, The Com Network, and the Hybridization of Threats
Nihilistic violent extremism is best understood as a victim-driven, youth-centered online ecosystem in which status, belonging, and identity are earned through the production, circulation, and escalation of harm. It combine sadistic online exploitation, cybercrime, self-directed violence, animal abuse, school-violence threats, and terrorist or violent-extremist conduct.
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More headlines
The long view
Conflicts Between States Highest Level Since World War II
A new report documents eight interstate conflicts in 2025 – twice as many as the previous year and the highest number recorded since 1946.
Will Generative AI Fundamentally Change Terrorist Threats?
Does generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) represent a genuine transformation in terrorist capability, or are its risks being overstated within contemporary security discourse? Gen AI tools, particularly large language models, can improve the efficiency, accessibility, and scale of certain terrorist activities, but there remains limited evidence that they fundamentally alter the nature of terrorism or significantly enhance operational capability.
The Paranoid Style in American Oversight, Part I
Senator Grassley’s account of how and why the FBI investigated Trump’s role in the false electors plot is a feat of political conspiracy.
The Paranoid Style in American Oversight, Part II
The criticism of the techniques used in the FBI’s investigation of the false electors plot, much like the critiques of how it was opened, do not bear scrutiny. The days of the FBI trying to speak only through indictments are apparently over, and Director Kash Patel’s willingness to endlessly provide piecemeal documents, without any explanation, annotation, or context to the bureau’s most vituperative critics is just one more sign not that a page has merely been turned, but that it has been ripped out of the book entirely and burned to cinders.
Presidential Discretion and the Insurrection Act
The Supreme Court, in Trump v. Illinois, further diminished the president’s ability to use § 12406 to federalize the National Guard in order to directly interfere in domestic activities in pursuit of his most controversial policies. With § 12406 now unavailable, the likelihood of the current president resorting to the Insurrection Act, the statute affording him the most oppressive domestic suppression capabilities, has only increased.
More States Restrict 3D-Printed Firearms
For decades, making an untraceable firearm required specialized tools, technical expertise and hours of work. Today, it can start with a downloaded file and a consumer-grade 3D printer. At least six states this year have outlawed or imposed regulations on such guns.
