• Hamas Assault Echoes 1973 Arab-Israeli War – a Shock Attack and Questions of Political, Intelligence Culpability

    The parallels were striking – and surely not coincidental. Exactly 50 years and a day after being taken completely off guard by a coordinated military attack by its neighbors – Egypt and Syria – Israel was again caught by surprise. The invasion of southern Israel by Hamas militants on 7 October 2023 will probably be even more traumatic for Israelis than the 1973 war was because while in 1973 it was members of the military bearing the brunt of the surprise assault, this time it is Israeli civilians who have been captured and killed, and on sovereign Israeli territory. In this crucial respect, then, this war is unlike the one in 1973.

  • Hamas Attacks Israel

    While I am always wary of predicting the course of a war, we can be reasonably sure of one thing. The political backlash within Israel will be harsh and will go beyond inquiries into the intelligence failure. Not yet, for the country will come together as the fighting continues and partisan differences will be put aside. But once the dust settles. Not only has the coalition’s policies on judicial reform left Israeli society deeply divided, something of which Hamas will have been well aware, but also its active support of extremist groups stirring up trouble in the West Bank and Jerusalem meant that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were diverted to protect them. This is one explanation for the empty guard posts and thin lines of defense on the border with Gaza, which affected the ability to respond to the attacks.

  • Sam Bankman-Fried Trial Shines Light on the Rise and Fall of Cryptocurrency and Concerns About Its Use in White-Collar Crime

    While Sam Bankman-Fried’s crime – he is accused of orchestrating a conspiracy to use $10 billion that FTX’s customers had entrusted to him for venture capital investments, political donations and luxury real estate purchases — may seem complicated because bitcoin is involved, a criminology expert says it really comes down to traditional embezzlement.

  • How Foreign Investment in U.S. Land Affects Food Security

    The United States has approximately 1.3 billion acres of privately held agricultural land, including forestland. Out of these 1.3 billion acres, around 40 million acres were under full or partial foreign ownership as of 2021. Current foreign agricultural holdings represent 3.1% of the country’s privately owned agricultural land.

  • States Vary in Firearm Ownership, and the Storage and Carrying Habits of Owners

    Keeping a firearm in the home sharply increases the risk for injury and death. Researchers find firearm owning communities in five states are diverse, with risky behaviors more common in some than others.

  • What’s Causing the Panama Canal Logjam

    Low water levels have, the result of prolonged drought conditions, led to a traffic jam at one of the world’s busiest maritime passages. The Panama Canal Authority has capped the number of ships that cross the canal each day, and has restricted their maximum weight and draft, or how deep below the waterline a ship sits. The bottleneck demonstrates how accelerating climate change is threatening global supply chains.

  • New Tool Helps Communities Plan for and Mitigate Disasters

    When hurricanes make landfall, coastal communities are especially vulnerable to storm surges, high winds, and freshwater flooding. Residents can be left without clean water, food, shelter, electricity, and access to medical care for days.  Communities need proper tools to adequately prepare for these storms, especially as climate change worsens the impact of these extreme weather events. The Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard (PIRS), recently launched by S&T’s Coastal Resilience Center, helps local governments plan for hurricane season—and beyond.

  • Cities Should Act NOW to Ban Predictive Policing...and Stop Using ShotSpotter, Too

    Sound Thinking, the company behind ShotSpotter, is reportedly buying Geolitica, the company behind PredPol, a predictive policing technology. When companies like Sound Thinking and Geolitica merge and bundle their products, it becomes much easier for cities who purchase one harmful technology to end up deploying a suite of them without meaningful oversight, transparency, or control by elected officials or the public.

  • Book Review: How Xi Jinping Derailed China’s Peaceful Rise

    In just one decade, Xi Jinping managed to dismantle the collective leadership system carefully crafted by Deng Xiaoping; sour China’s relations with most of its neighbours; and set China on a collision course with the United States. A new book offers an answer.

  • AI Disinformation Is a Threat to Elections − Learning to Spot Russian, Chinese and Iranian Meddling in Other Countries Can Help the U.S. Prepare for 2024

    Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence. Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential election. But there is a new element: generative AI and large language models. These have the ability to quickly and easily produce endless reams of text on any topic in any tone from any perspective, thus making generative AI and large language models a tool uniquely suited to internet-era propaganda. The sooner we know what to expect, the better we can deal with what comes.

  • U.S.-China “Tech War”: AI Sparks First Battle in Middle East

    The U.S. has restricted exports of some computer chips to the Middle East, to stop AI-enabling chips from getting to China. But there’s no information on which countries are affected, or how chips would get to China. What is becoming clear is that AI could well become a new source of friction between democratic and autocratic states.

  • Fact Sheet: Disinformation, Propaganda, Censorship -- China’s Effort to Construct a Global Information Ecosystem

    China’s information manipulation efforts feature five primary elements: leveraging propaganda and censorship, promoting digital authoritarianism, exploiting international organizations and bilateral partnerships, pairing co-optation and pressure, and exercising control over Chinese-language media. 

  • China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment

    China is pouring billions of dollars into efforts to reshape the global information environment and, eventually, bend the will of multiple nations to Beijing’s advantage, according to a new assessment from U.S. officials.

  • Nagorno-Karabakh: The World Should Have Seen This Crisis Coming – and It’s Not Over Yet

    The global community and its institutions, including the EU, arguably let Azerbaijan get away with its military adventures, which only spurred the country on. As a result of the Azerbaijani attack on the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19 and the forced exodus that followed it, this region will soon be empty of Armenians – for the first time in more than two millennia. The lesson of the tragedy now unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh is that verbal condemnations and appeals do not stop the aggression of authoritarian states.

  • The Southern Border Poses Terrorism Risks. Homegrown Threats Still Loom Larger.

    The fears of terrorists entering the U.S. illegally can never be completely dismissed, but to date they have been mostly hypothetical, as there is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have committed acts of terrorism in the United States. For now, the most serious terrorist danger still comes from lone-actor racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs), radicalized online here inside the United States, attacking soft targets using firearms.