At least 16 people – including a ten-year-old child – are dead after two men opened fire on a crowd of people celebrating the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah on Sunday in a public park at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Many more are injured.

I am horrified. But as a researcher who studies hate and extremist violence, I am sadly not surprised.

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It would be a mistake for allies or adversaries to read President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS), released late at night on December 4, as a guide to Washington’s moves over the next three years. But it is significant for a different reason: the first MAGA national security strategy previews a new vision of the United States as an illiberal superpower.

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The Japanese far-right has emerged as a radical challenger to the conservative socio-political landscape, long dominated by the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party.

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In late September, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his government’s plans to introduce a new digital ID scheme in the country to take effect before the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029).

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As the United States accelerates deployment of advanced and small modular reactors (A/SMRs), the nuclear energy sector is embracing a digital future. While digital systems provide operators with big benefits, they can also create vulnerabilities that enable criminals to access critical infrastructure.

To protect the next generation of reactors, cybersecurity has become a critical pillar of trust, safety and resilient operations.

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Very little new information has been released since Rahmanullah Lakanwal murdered West Virginia National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom in Washington, DC, two weeks ago. He also shot and injured Andrew Wolfe, another National Guardsman, in the same attack. Prosecutors have since charged Lakanwal with murder, assault with intent to kill while armed, and possession of a firearm during a violent crime. Terrorism charges are absent because prosecutors do not yet know his motives. The FBI is conducting a terrorism investigation to discover those.

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In federal courtrooms across America, a pattern has emerged in cases in which immigrants are being rounded up and jailed without a hearing. That’s a departure from fundamental constitutional protections in the U.S. that provide the right to a hearing before indefinite imprisonment.

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Derrin Robinson has worked in Oregon elections for more than 30 years, long enough to remember when voters in the state cast their ballots at physical polling sites instead of by mail.

As the nonpartisan clerk of Harney County, a vast, rural expanse larger than Massachusetts, Robinson oversees elections with about 6,000 registered voters. Oregon has exclusively conducted elections by mail since 2000, a system he thinks works well, requires fewer staff and doesn’t force voters to travel through treacherous weather to reach a polling place.

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Robert McNamara was considered one of the brightest stars of his generation. He excelled at Harvard Business School, where he went on to teach, rose through the ranks of the Ford Motor Company to become chief executive, and was appointed secretary of defense by president John Kennedy at the age of 44. He capped his career serving for over a decade as president of the World Bank.

In charge of the Pentagon under presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson from 1961 to 1968, McNamara was one of the key architects of the Vietnam war. However, the war also proved to be his personal undoing.

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As 2025 winds to a close, new data show a surprising trend: this year is on track to record the fewest mass killings in two decades. That is according to data collected by James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist and leading expert on mass murder. 

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New Mexico is known for bringing the heat with its famous green chiles, but a new report points to another source of heat that’s causing excitement. Project Innerspace’s report titled “Future of Geothermal in New Mexico” lays out the opportunities — and challenges — to harnessing the state’s geothermal resources as a reliable, sustained domestic source of energy.

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The US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, believes that aluminum in vaccines can cause health issues, such as neurological disorders, allergies and autoimmune diseases. This contradicts scientific evidence from many studies that have confirmed the safety of vaccines and aluminum “adjuvants” – substances that boost vaccines’ effectiveness.

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On Friday morning, after contentious discussion, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 8-3 to drop the recommendation for a universal birth hepatitis B vaccine dose and 6-4 to suggest that parents use serologic testing—which detects antibodies in the blood—to determine whether more than one dose of the three-dose series are needed.

Under the first recommendation, only infants born to mothers who test positive for hepatitis B would receive a birth dose, while parents of other babies would be advised to postpone the first dose for at least two months.

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Editor’s note: We published this article nearly three months ago, on 10 September 2025. The recent revelations about the killing, on 2 September, of two survivors who were clinging to a sinking shipwreck after their boat had been destroyed in the initial attack by U.S. forces, highlight the deeper problems with the Trump administration’s approach of using military force to deal with what is essentially a law-enforcement issue.

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How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away.

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Immigration has historically driven U.S. growth and filled labor shortages in various sectors, but it has also remained one of the most politically divisive issues. In the modern era, successive administrations have agreed on the need to reform the asylum system and bolster border security, while differing sharply on how to manage immigration more broadly.

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The total federal debt of the United States passed a new milestone on October 21, 2025, reaching $38 trillion for the first time, with $30.4 trillion in federal debt held by the public, which is equivalent to about 100 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP). This is the highest level it’s been relative to our GDP since 1946.

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Licensed gun dealers are a major source of firearms that end up illegally trafficked, according to a new analysis using federal data by the research arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for stricter gun laws.

Gun trafficking involves diverting guns from legal commerce into the illegal market, often through straw purchases, unlicensed dealing or other methods that bypass background checks and federal recordkeeping requirements.

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The signals from Washington on critical minerals are no longer ambiguous; they are decisive, strategic and aligned with Australia’s long-term interests. The issue is whether Canberra and industry can convert this momentum into concrete projects that deliver secure supply chains, new processing capacity, domestic industrial depth and worthwhile commercial returns. To do that, Australia must move at speed, locking in partnerships, prioritizing specific minerals, and supporting companies ready to diversify minerals markets.

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Growing energy demand means the U.S. will almost certainly have to expand its electricity grid in coming years. What’s the best way to do this? A new study by MIT researchers examines legislation introduced in Congress and identifies relative tradeoffs involving reliability, cost, and emissions, depending on the proposed approach.

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