ALT "If you had the tools and support, what would you no longer be willing to tolerate in your life, starting today?"

ALT "The program's funding of social science research for national security purposes has proven controversial. Although many scholars support Minerva, at the program's start a number of academic researchers sounded public alarm about the prospect of Defense Department funding for research. In 2008 the American Anthropological Association sent a public letter suggesting that the funding be transferred to a different body, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF). Hugh Gusterson, a prominent anthropologist at George Mason University, wrote a series of articles in a variety of venues that have attracted significant attention, any attempt to centralize thinking about culture and terrorism under the Pentagon's roof will inevitably produce an intellectually shrunken outcome. ... The Pentagon will have the false comfort of believing that it has harnessed the best and the brightest minds, when in fact it will have only received a very limited slice of what the ivory tower has to..."

ALT "Minerva Project: Emotions in Social Media Adversarial entities worldwide continue to spread disinformation on social media and have revealed a severe vulnerability in the United States' security and its Western allies. The ARLIS-led Emotions in Social Media research project is funded through the prestigious DoD Minerva Research Initiative program to investigate the spread of information campaigns by examining how different emotions influence resharing content in Polish and Lithuanian socio-political social media. ARLIS's multinational Minerva team collects and analyses real-world Facebook and YouTube data from Poland and Lithuania - countries that were chosen for their strategic relevance to NATO and Europe. Researchers annotate samples of over 1000 public Facebook posts and 300 YouTube videos from each country for emotions and topic content. Our team also conducts computational linguistic analyses from 2015 to 2020 to examine sociopolitical topics and cross-platform..."

ALT "This volume of the NATO Defence Strategic Communications journal traces how the European External Action Service (EEAS) came to define Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). I’m always interested in emergent sense-making processes, and how they are products of collective judgement, expert practices, and institutions of power. Here, the need for a shared epistemology and vocabulary, alongside institutional need to operationalise security responses, converged to define how we understand threats and act upon them. FIMI deliberately moved beyond content-focused and politicised terms like “disinformation,” and towards identification of behavioural patterns. Sounds simple, but in practice, it’s often a top-down endeavour to invent analytical methodologies to match the strategic objective. The “foreign interference” part of FIMI permits sanctions against foreign actors interfering in domestic processes. This excludes the sensitive issue of domestic discourse and its..."

ALT "But as quickly as it was announced, it seemed to fall apart. Thursday morning, Trump said in a social media post that the deal was subject to a new condition: Saudi Arabia would have to join the Abraham Accords, an initiative dating back to Trump's first administration that led to several Arab countries normalizing their diplomatic stance toward Israel. Trump also denied that the agreement would allow uranium enrichment. The president, according to a source familiar with the matter, was already angry over the unveiling of the deal, which Wright had not told Trump he would be announcing. Trump's frustration was then exacerbated, sources told CNN, after a flurry of criticism from experts and conservative media outlets. This included skeptical coverage on his preferred channel, Fox News, & on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that questioned why the deal was made absent a normalization agreement — something both outlets pointedly noted President Joe Biden had been seeking."

ALT "The deal, in the mind of some Trump aides, was not finalized since letters required to be sent to Congress hadn't gone out. And the president and many of his senior staffers were livid at the decision to roll out the deal, the source said."

ALT "Trump's Truth Social post Thursday morning also blindsided the Saudis, for whom the nuclear deal — which did not include the normalization requirement — had been a major triumph. The accord would permit uranium enrichment on Saudi soil once certain conditions were met while limiting a UN watchdog agency's ability to inspect suspected covert nuclear sites. CNN has reached out to the Saudi embassy."

ALT "Proponents focused on the deal's commercial benefits and strategic calculus: the Saudis want a nuclear program on their terms, and the US should partner with Riyadh and gain influence over Saudi safety and nonproliferation practices — lest China or Russia step in."

ALT "Protecting Hamid Karzai On 5 September 2002, DEVGRU operators protected President Hamid Karzai during an assassination attempt in Kandahar. The DEVGRU operatives shot the would be assassins, accidentally shooting two Afghan soldiers who were wrestling with the assassin. During the attack, a round ricocheted and hit a SEAL operative in the head lightly wounding him, requiring him to improvise a bandage with his t-shirt."

ALT "The Trump administration is demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list that some officials fear will be misused or compromise operations, according to people familiar with the matter."

ALT "No Position of Comfort: Unlike a broken bone that can be stabilized in a cast, an inflamed sciatic nerve can trigger severe pain whether you are sitting, standing, walking, or lying down, making restful sleep nearly impossible. Anecdotal Comparison: In clinical settings and patient forums, individuals who have experienced both frequently state that severe sciatica pain feels worse than childbirth, broken bones, or kidney stones. Where Sciatica Ranks on Clinical Pain Scales Medical professionals utilize specialized frameworks like the McGill Pain Questionnaire to evaluate the sensory, emotional, and evaluative dimensions of suffering. While conditions like Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) and trigeminal neuralgia consistently rank at the absolute top of the index, lumbosciatica tracks significantly higher in affective distress and evaluative pain intensity than localized lower back pain. On a standard 10-point scale, acute sciatica flare-ups routinely score in the 7 to 9..."

ALT The damage of grade inflation Professors named various harms of grade inflation — including the difficulty for extraordinary students to distinguish their grades and an increased sense of stress and perfectionism. Chemistry professor Patrick Holland wrote in an email to the News that grade inflation “takes away the opportunity for the most outstanding students to distinguish themselves,” noting that inflated grades are therefore “not victimless.” He added that inflated grades do not reflect an “honest assessment” of student performance, and they also do a “disservice” to future employers, graduate schools and instructors of advanced courses, “telling them that a student is excellent at a subject when they were not.”

ALT "CBS News, the BBC's US news partner, reported that Navy Seals - highly trained special operations troops - were then airdropped in to recover the airman. The rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refuelling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft and more, Trump said. "We were bringing them all over, and a lot of it was subterfuge," he said. "We wanted to have them think he was in a different location, because they had a vast military force out there - thousands of people were looking.""

ALT "The crew member hid in a mountain crevice and restricted the use of his beacon signal out of concern it could be picked up by Iran, Trump administration officials confirmed at a news conference on Monday. A senior Trump administration official said the CIA was able to trace the airman's exact location and informed the Pentagon, which would have also had to rule out the possibility the beacon signal was an Iranian trap. US President Donald Trump later said the airman's location was monitored "24 hours a day" as he was "being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer by the hour". At Monday's news conference, the president said the US soldier was severely injured, treated his own wounds, and - while bleeding profusely - scaled cliffs to transmit his location."

ALT "But instead the resolution was further weakened to eliminate any reference to Security Council authorization — which is an order for action — and limit its provisions to the Strait of Hormuz. Previous drafts had included adjacent waters. The resolution vetoed Tuesday “strongly encourages states interested in the use of commercial maritime routes in the Strait of Hormuz to coordinate efforts, defensive in nature, commensurate with the circumstances, to contribute to ensuring the safety and security of navigation across the Strait of Hormuz.” This should include escorting merchant and commercial vessels, and deterring attempts to close, obstruct or interfere with international navigation through the strait, it says. The resolution also demanded that Iran immediately halt attacks on merchant and commercial vessels and stop impeding their freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and attacking civilian infrastructure."

ALT "In response to Iran’s strikes against its Gulf neighbors, the Security Council adopted a Bahrain-sponsored resolution on March 11 condemning the “egregious attacks” and calling for Tehran to immediately halt its strikes. That resolution, adopted by a vote of 13-0 with Russia and China abstaining, also condemned Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz as a threat to international peace and security and called for an immediate end to all actions blocking shipping."

ALT " World Russia, China veto UN Security Council measure to reopen Strait of Hormuz By Edith M. Lederer And Farnoush Amiri The Associated Press Posted April 7, 2026 3:26 pm 5 min read"