• N. Korea’s test of miniaturized warhead, submarine-launched ballistic missile, are game changers

    North Korea has conducted its fifth nuclear test last night, marking the 68th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Military analysts say the test shows a worrisome improvement in North Korea’s nuclear capabilities: It was the most powerful nuclear test to date, with a 10-kiloton yield – slightly smaller than the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, estimated to have been between twelve and eighteen kilotons. The warhead tested in the explosion was miniaturized, indicating that North Korea now has the capability to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile. Last night’s test, together with North Korea’s proven progress in launching ballistic missile from submarines, mean that the country is getting closer to possessing a nuclear arsenal capable of hitting the United States.

  • Boko Haram embroiled in deadly in-fighting between rival factions vying for control

    Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, already reeling under the combined military pressure of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, and facing a growing wave of desertion from its ranks, is now also being hobbled by in-fighting between rival factions. The rift began in early August, when ISIS announced that Abu Musab al-Barnawi was the group’s new leader, replacing Abubakar Shekau, who had led the group since 2009. Shekau defied ISIS and announced he was still the leader – and the two factions have been locked in deadly skirmishes for four weeks now.

  • Report: Hamas spends $100 million annually to build up its military infrastructure

    Hamas spends an annual $100 million on its military infrastructure in order to prepare for its next war against Israel. Roughly $40 million is spent on employing around 1,500 diggers to build the Iran-backed terror organization’s network of tunnels. Despite the financial hardships experienced by Gaza residents, Hamas, which in 2014 had a budget of around $530 million, is intent on increasing its military spending. In addition to digging tunnels, it hopes to upgrade its capabilities, which were degraded during its war with Israel two years ago, and is seeking to develop more precise rockets that could evade Israel’s Iron Dome defensive shield.

  • Israel building underground wall around Gaza to foil Hamas’s tunnel digging

    Israel has begun work on a deep underground wall along its border with the Gaza Strip in order to prevent Hamas from digging cross-border tunnels into Israel. The barrier will run about 37 miles along the border with Gaza, and be equipped with sensors. The Gaza Strip, where about 1.8 million Palestinians live, is already surrounded by a sophisticated system of walls, fences, sensors, and a military patrol road – and the new structure will extends these barriers underground.

  • Car filled with gas cylinders near Notre Dame cathedral part of a terror plot

    The French security services are looking for a young woman after a car carrying seven gas cylinders was discovered Saturday parking near Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. The car was found on a Seine riverside stretch called the Quai de Montebello, only meters from the cathedral. The father of the missing 19-year old – himself on the French intelligence services’ terror watch list – informed the police that his daughter, who was being monitored by the police for expressing her desire to go to Syria to join ISIS, had disappeared with his car.

  • Growing concern about amateur “biohackers” creating biological weapons

    American and European security agencies have been increasingly focusing on the risk that “biohackers” – scientists who use genome-editing techniques to change life forms by increasing or decreasing the function of genes — could develop biological weapons or other dangerous biological substances. The problem is not only – or even mostly – with the work of professional scientists. Rather, the real danger lies with amateur scientists around the world who have started to use gene-editing techniques after the tools became cheap and readily available.

  • FBI’s WMD Directorate marks its first decade

    If you can imagine a disaster involving explosives or the release of nuclear, biological, chemical, or radioactive material, there is a pretty good chance a group of subject-matter experts within the FBI has built an elaborate scenario around it and tested how well emergency responders face up to it. It is the main jobs of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Directorate — to imagine worst-case scenarios and then devise ways to prevent and prepare for them. The Directorate was created ten years ago, on 26 July 2006.

  • World’s largest regional security group turns to Israel in fight against cyber terror

    The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an umbrella body for fifty-seven European, North American, and Central Asian nations in the security field, has chosen an Israeli professor to plan and establish a new teaching and research framework concerning online terror. “Online incitement, radicalization, and recruitment have had a significant impact on the recent waves of terror around the world,” Prof. Gabi Weimann, the author of Terrorism in Cyberspace, said. “This has raised awareness of the importance of research and academic knowledge in this field.”

  • Rules governing targeted killing by U.S. drones need clarifying

    Since the beginning of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has dramatically increased use of unmanned drones, developing technology to target and kill those identified as being terrorist leaders. Current U.S. policies on using drones for targeted killing are characterized by ambiguities in interpretations of international law and too many generalities, despite recent efforts by the Obama administration to clarify the policies, a new report finds.

  • ISIS new publication shows the terror group is struggling to regain its footing

    ISIS’s new publication, called Rumiyah (Arabic for Rome) appears to be yet another typical ISIS media product, combining glossy pictures with Islamist propaganda. A terrorism expert says, however, that the publication suggests that the organization may be struggling to cope with the mounting pressures of unrelenting airstrikes and increasingly more effective Turkish, Kurdish, and Iraqi military offensives on the ground.

  • U.S. violating nonproliferation agreement: Nuclear experts

    More than two dozen nuclear experts, including former U.S. officials under the six preceding presidents of both parties, accused the Obama administration of violating a 2012 nonproliferation agreement to end exports to Europe of bomb-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) for production of medical isotopes. The administration proposes to export sixteen pounds of nuclear weapons-grade uranium metal to France to produce medical isotopes in Belgium and the Netherlands.

  • U.S. has killed 45,000 ISIS militants since September 2014; 3 U.S. soldiers killed by ISIS

    The U.S.-to-ISIS “kill ratio,” that is, the number of American soldiers killed relative to the number of killed ISIS militants, is a staggering, and unprecedented, 15,000-to-1. The U.S. military claims to have killed 45,000 militants, including a number of senior leaders, since the September 2014 launching of the U.S.-led coalition campaign against ISIS. Only three U.S. troops have been killed in the campaign. The U.S. killed 6,000 militants between September and December 2014, and 39,000 between January 2015 and July 2016.

  • White Nationalist groups growing much faster than ISIS on Twitter

    The number of White Nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers on Twiter had multiplied more than 600 percent in the last four years — outpacing ISIS in all social media aspects, from the number of follower counts to the number of daily tweets, a new study found. The study’s author notes that ISIS has gained a reputation for effectively using Twitter for propaganda and recruitment, but that White Nationalist groups have excelled even more in exploiting the medium. The report says that unlike the campaign Twitter has been conducting against ISIS, White Nationalists are continuing to use the service with “relative impunity.”

  • Muslim women in the West wear a veil to signal they are integrating into a modern, secular world: Study

    Researchers have studied why young, highly educated Muslim women who live in modern urban environments may be choosing to wear the veil and have uncovered a paradox. Their study, which drew on data of thousands of women living in Belgium, Turkey, and twenty-five Muslim countries, suggests that women who cover their head this way are often doing so because they are engaging with a modern, secular world.

  • Solar-powered Ring Garden combines desalination, agriculture for drought-stricken California

    With roughly 80 percent of California’s already-scarce water supply going to agriculture, it is crucial for the state to embrace new technologies that shrink the amount of water required to grow food. Alexandru Predonu has designed an elegant solution which uses solar energy to power a rotating desalination plant and farm that not only produces clean drinking water for the city of Santa Monica, but also food crops — including algae.