Having spent months assessing the role of contractors in U.S. intelligence agencies, U.S. intelligence officials say they cannot disclose how many contractors there are, because that’s classified. See “Government Keeps a Secret After Studying Spy Agencies” by Scott Shane, New York Times, April 26.
Veteran female intelligence officers charge that the Central Intelligence Agency deals more harshly with women employees who have relationships with foreign nationals than it does with men. See “Does the CIA have a double standard when its spies cozy up to foreigners?” by David E. Kaplan, U.S. News and World Report, April 22.
A tumultuous congressional hearing on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program was captured by Jeff Stein in “A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on Secret Abductions,” CQ Homeland Security, April 20.
In 1967 the United States had a top secret contingency plan for attacking Israel to prevent it from moving westward into the Sinai or eastward into the West Bank, reported Amir Oren in Haaretz. See “The Right to Strike,” April 23.
Declining U.S. manufacturing has sharply curtailed a key path to the middle class for those with high school educations or less, thereby exacerbating income inequality nationwide. The United States can address many of these problems through concerted efforts in advanced manufacturing.
The research community lacks strategies to incentivize collaboration on high-quality data acquisition and sharing. The government should fund collaborative roadmapping, certification, collection, and sharing of large, high-quality datasets in life science.
The potential of new nuclear power plants to meet energy demand, increase energy security, and revitalize local economies depends on new regulatory and operational approaches at the NRC.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.