Military Competition in Space Will Intensify  (Economist)
Five areas to watch in the coming year.

When Leaders Mistake Brutality for Strength  (Jeff Flake, The Atlantic)
Americans may disagree on many things, but they still distinguish between necessary force and needless killing.

read more

Trump Calls Europe “Decaying” Group of Nations with Weak Leaders  (Lara Spirit, The Times)
US president singles out London, saying it is now a “different place” and referring to London mayor Sadiq Khan as “vicious and disgusting.”

read more

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.

read more

The purpose of a new report from RAND is to represent the ongoing policy debate on the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) in a mathematically neutral model that allows policymakers to compare the outcome of alternative strategies in in

read more

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER) and DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory announced the winners of the eleventh CyberForce Competition held on Nov. 15 in Tinley Park, Illinois. At the end of the competition, Tinley Park MHC from the University of Central Florida defeated 93 teams from 73 universities to claim first place.

read more

In a joint research project, researchers at Julius MaximilliansUniversität Würzburg have developed a system capable of repelling and capturing unauthorized drones. The interceptor drones operate entirely autonomously.

read more

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.

read more

A pioneering new test that can recover fingerprints from ammunition casing, once thought nearly impossible, has been developed by scientists at Maynooth University.

read more

The Trump administration has removed scientific data and climate change information from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) webpages, including all references to human activities driving climate change. This includes key U.S. climate change indicators such as changes in temperature, drought and extreme precipitation over the last few decades.

read more

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. 

read more

The Documented Strategy of Civilization Jihad by the Muslim Brotherhood  (Mubin Shaikh, HSToday)

read more

A Strategy That Ignores the Real Threats  (Thomas Wright, The Atlantic)

read more

How a US “Suez Moment” Could Hollow the U.S. Alliance System  (Bence Nemeth, Texas National Security Review)

read more

In a world where misinformation spreads faster than fact, a new study is offering insight into why so many people fall for fake news, even when they suspect it’s false.

read more

When a natural disaster strikes, time is of the essence if people are trapped under rubble. Conventional methods use radar-based detection or employ acoustics that rely on sounds made by victims.

Since most people carry their phones with them every day, Shogo Takada, a student at the University of Tokyo, is working on a way to use smartphone microphones to assist in locating disaster victims.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

THE LONG VIEW

Trump Is Taking 3 Steps Backward in the AI Race  (Arati Prabhakar and Asad Ramzanali, Politico)
The administration needs to shift focus away from providing chips and datacenters to the world’s richest companies.

read more