Images from Afghanistan have flooded the news media this year as the US completed its chaotic withdrawal. Crowds of Afghans desperate to escape the Taliban takeover flocked to Kabul airport despite the risk of terrorist attacks. Just a fraction made it onto evacuation flights, and those who remain...
Associated Press reporter Nomaan Merchant has been listening to the latest warnings from the US intelligence community that wants the public to understand it is time to be seriously afraid of China. It’s not just about Beijing’s military might. The real problem is that the Chinese are thieves,...
Regionally organized clouds (ROCs) can be the answer to a series of problems public policy is currently struggling with. Global cloud companies, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, provide valuable services. But societal concerns are being raised about the control of data and the concentration...
Today’s technology-oriented, media manipulated civilization has succeeded in imposing a degree of hyperreality capable of obscuring whatever remnants of reality still remain within the average person’s field of perception. This requires a permanent effort to deviate attention from hyperreality...
The Republican Party is facing an existential crisis. Will their traditional base of small-government, low-tax party members endure, especially as they come under increasing attacks from, anti-immigrant, anti-science MAGA fundamentalists? Democrats face challenges of their own trying to figure...
A news story that falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine caused the death of an American doctor was the most viewed article on Facebook in the US for the first three months of 2021. Instead of going public about the platform promoting such misinformation, Facebook held back on publishing the...
As the pandemic progressed, more and more workers shifted to working remotely. At the height of lockdown, more than 70% of the US workforce was toiling from home. It began to look as if remote working arrangements would become the new normal. Headlines proclaimed that COVID-19 would result in the...
India’s government and Twitter have been fighting a legal battle over compliance with domestic laws. In June 2020, the tech giant failed to make key local appointments required under India’s new information technology rules. Twitter has more than 22 million users in India and was recently...
Only days after The Washington Post’s startling revelations of abuse by various governments using Israeli firm NSO’s Pegasus spyware, Axios reports on the case of a Catholic Church official in the US, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned after being shamed as apparently gay by the Catholic...
My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has...
The New York Times on Monday reported that the US has accused China “of breaching Microsoft email systems used by many of the world’s largest companies.” On the same day, The Washington Post announced the findings of an investigation into “spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments...
