• Former U.S. Ambassador and National Security Council Official Charged with Secretly Acting as an Agent of the Cuban Government

    Federal prosecutors have charged Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, of Miami, Florida, a former U.S. Department of State employee who served on the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995 and ultimately as U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, with committing multiple federal crimes by secretly acting for decades as an agent of the government of the Republic of Cuba.

  • Santos, Now Booted from the House, Got Elected as a Master of Duplicity – Here’s How It Worked

    U.S. Rep. George Santos, a Republican from New York, was expelled on Dec. 1, 2023, from Congress. How could a politician engage in such large-scale deception and get elected? What could stop it from happening again, as politicians seem to be growing more unapologetically deceptive while evading voters’ scrutiny? I am a scholar of political deception. Experiments I conducted have revealed how the trustworthiness of politicians is judged almost entirely from perceptions of their demeanor, not the words they utter.

  • Texas Must Remove Floating Barrier from Rio Grande, Fifth Circuit Court Orders

    The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Texas on Friday to remove the floating barrier it deployed in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass this summer, affirming a lower court’s ruling. The appeals court upheld an earlier ruling by an Austin federal judge to remove the 1,000-foot-long barrier the state deployed near Eagle Pass.

  • Venezuela Voters Back Territorial Claim on Region in Guyana

    Venezuela’s government pressed ahead with the non-binding referendum despite the UN’s top court urging restraint in a territorial dispute with neighboring Guyana. Venezuelan voters also supported the formation of what Venezuela’s government describes as a new state whose inhabitants would be given Venezuelan citizenship.

  • The Road to October 7: Hamas’ Long Game, Clarified

    When Hamas took over the Gaza Strip by force of arms in 2007, it faced an ideological crisis. It could focus on governing Gaza and addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, or it could use the Gaza Strip as a springboard from which to attack Israel. Even then, Hamas understood these two goals were mutually exclusive. And while some anticipated Hamas would moderate, or at least be co-opted by the demands of governing, it did not. Instead, Hamas invested in efforts to radicalize society and build the militant infrastructure necessary to someday launch the kind of attack that in its view could contribute to the destruction of Israel. The road from Hamas’ 2007 takeover of Gaza to the October 2023 massacre offers insights about the organization and its goals.

  • Labeling Hamas as a Terrorist Organization

    Since October 7, 2023, top news sources have published thousands of reports, articles, and stories covering the Israel and Hamas conflict. These sources vary in the terminology they use to describe Hamas, which affects how audiences view the conflict. Different news organizations use different terms to describe Hamas, and the use of these terms and descriptors can be misleading and inaccurate.

  • British Documentary Alleges China Influences Universities, Spies on Hong Kongers in UK

    A BBC Channel 4 documentary claims the Chinese government is interfering with academic freedom and spying on Hong Kong activists in the United Kingdom. The film also alleges that Chinese government agents pretending to be journalists used fake profiles and avatars to target Hong Kong activists now living in the U.K.

  • How Word Choices in the Mainstream News Media Signal a Country's Level of Peace

    By analyzing the frequency of certain words within mainstream news media from any country, a machine learning algorithm can produce a quantitative “peace index” that captures the level of peace within that country.

  • Huawei’s New Mate 60 Phones Are a Lesson in Unintended Consequences

    In October 2022, the Commerce Department introduced a set of export-control measures designed to prevent the use of American chip technology for Chinese military purposes. Rules were also imposed that aimed to restrict China’s semiconductor production to older 14-nm technology. These controls have had varying degrees of success, but the 14-nm restriction is one of the more overt failures, as the 7-nm chips in the new Huawei’s Mate 60 phones shows.

  • German Domestic Intelligence: Heightened Terror Risk

    Germany’s domestic intelligence agency says the danger of a terror attack in the country is “higher than it has been for a long time.” It cited the October 7 Hamas attacks and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war as factors.

  • Stop Venezuela's Aggression - Before It Creates a War in the Americas

    As a ploy to distract from his country’s domestic collapse, Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro - following the Putin and Hamas play-book - is suddenly demanding that neighboring Guyana “surrender” 2/3 of its territory - the entire western region called Essequibo - to him.

  • Argentina: Can Milei’s “Radical, Untested” Ideas Supplant Peronist Clientelism?

    As an antisystem candidate and now president-elect, Javier Milei, who will become Argentina’s news president on 10 December, is not a singular phenomenon in Latin America. Dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy was key to catapulting Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Milei, however, has significantly less political experience than either of them, and his proposals are a more radical break from the past than what even most political outsiders propose.

  • International Partnership Focuses on Insider Threats

    Insider threats can take many forms. They are real, and if not identified, they can be costly and damaging.

  • Bioengineered Potato Plant Detects Gamma Radiation

    A researcher in the University of Tennessee Herbert College of Agriculture has developed a potato plant that can detect gamma radiation, providing reliable indications of harmful radiation levels without complex monitoring technologies. The natural radiation sensor is affordable, too.

  • Global Shipping Rattled After Houthis Seize Israeli Vessels

    Since Houthis seized a ship owned by an Israeli businessman last week in the Red Sea, global shipping has been taking stock of potentially rising risks.