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Is Withholding Federal Counterterrorism Funds from States – as FEMA Has Threatened – Legal?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued new grant guidelines that threaten to withhold counterterrorism funds from states that do not comply with President Donald Trump’s election security directives.
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States Challenge Trump’s Move to Tie Disaster Aid to Election, Immigration Policies
Twenty-six states accuse the Trump administration in a new lawsuit of illegally threatening to withhold billions in counterterrorism and emergency preparedness funds from states that don’t adopt sweeping election changes or cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
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Mail Ballot Mirages Aren’t Fraud, but Mail Ballot Fraud Isn’t a Complete Myth
A ballot mirage is a misleading early count that can temporarily show a candidate ahead in a race, sometimes by a significant margin, until votes which are counted later, often including mail-in ballots, help determine the winner. Trump argues that the “red mirage” is by itself evidence of election rigging. This is a baseless and misleading claim, but the fact that these mirages can be easily explained does not necessarily mean that mail-ballot fraud is a nonissue and that there is nothing to be concerned about.
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AI Tools That Can Steer Public Opinion Fall Outside Current Regulation, Study Finds
A new study has found that AI tools used to write, edit and contextualize social media posts can subtly steer public opinion - a form of influence that current regulation does not yet address.
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New Trump Administration Rules on Federal Science Funding Could Make American Research Slower, Costlier and Harder to Share
On 29 May 2026, the OMB announced its intentions to revise these rules that govern the federal grants funding science. The OMB proposed requiring political appointees to review grant decisions for whether research projects advance the president’s policy priorities. These political officials would also have greater authority to override the decisions of the research agencies managing the grants. Scientists have warned that these changes would allow political considerations to displace objective assessments, undermining merit-based federal research funding.
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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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The long view
The Drone Threat to America’s Cities
Drones are coming for our cities. The tech is cheap, the threat is real, and our defenses are nearly nonexistent. To avoid that ugly reality, we need to come up with better ideas, and we need them fast. Because ready or not, the drones are coming.
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.
Combat Experience as a Strategic Resource: Lessons of the Red Army Purges
Since January 2025, the Defense Department has removed, replaced, or forced the early retirement of a remarkable concentration of operationally experienced senior officers. What is the impact of these removals on combat effectiveness, which is Secretary Hegseth’s own widely shared standard? I believe the impact is negative. In fact, the impact of those decisions on combat effectiveness constitutes a strategic liability of the Defense Department’s own making – the depletion of a vital resource central to the Secretary’s sought-after lethality.
How Cybercriminal Networks Evolve into Global Security Threats
Cyberattacks have become an increasingly common part of modern life, disrupting hospitals, schools, businesses and governments around the world. New research points to a new threat: online communities can also spread political extremism.
‘Nihilistic Violent Extremism’ Isn’t a Thing, and I’m Tired of Pretending It Is
“Nihilistic violent extremism” (NVE) is a term used to bring together an array of hateful actors who, working online, try to convince people to kill themselves, produce child sexual abuse material, and other hateful actions. But the term confuses more than it helps—NVE is too vague a concept and encompasses too wide a range of behavior, leading to misunderstanding, poor analysis, and potential response mistakes.
Bookshelf: The Next China Is Still China
Could another country replace China as the world’s economic growth leader, or could China reset for a new phase of economic leadership? This is the key question Joe Ngai and Nick Leung address in their new book.