Swiss ambassador Sabrina Dallafior, the newly elected director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), traveled to Damascusin mid-October. As the head of the international organization charged with implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that bans chemical weapons, her visit marked Syria’s progress in closing the book on the nation’s decades-long chemical weapons program.

read more

Editor’s Note: Ten years on, Russia’s 2016 interference operation on behalf of Trump, and the Trump administration’s dismantlement of all the U.S. federal government organs dedicated to tracking and analyzing state-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society, offer two lessons, Julia Cutler writes. First, a foreign intervention pays off most durably and reliably when its beneficiary has every incentive to hide the intervention sponsor’s hand.

read more

The current Trump administration claims its mass deportation efforts have expelled nearly a million people through July of this year, but those include both voluntary returns and people turned around at the border, according to a new analysis by the former chief statistician for the Department of Homeland Security.

read more

More than three years after its COVID-19 disaster period ended, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is still closing the books on pandemic spending, including millions of dollars for the Los Angeles Opera Company that pays its top executive $1 million a year.

FEMA’s latest statement was provided in response to an investigation by The Center Square exposing $27 million worth of government grants and $33 million in executive compensation at the opera. 

read more

Editor’s Note: There are 193 countries in the world. Only four of them still hold public executions: Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Somalia. Two countries – Saudi Arabia and Yemen — have public execution on the books, but have not conducted public executions since 2000. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants the United States to join Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Somalia by livestreaming the execution of the Fort Hood shooter.

*   *   *

read more

Military firings, removals from promotion lists, and early retirements have rarely, if ever, been in the headlines as much as they have been over the past year. Recent domestic military deployments with never-before-used authorities (10 U.S.C.§ 12406) or reinterpreted authorities (32 U.S.C.

read more

An eight-state coalition filed lawsuits Tuesday challenging the Trump administration’s payments to private companies to cancel offshore wind leases, escalating an ongoing legal battle over the government spending billions of dollars to block wind projects. 

read more

Editor’s note: This piece is part of Lawfare’s collection “9/11 at 25: The Legal Architecture of the War on Terror, Twenty-Five Years On,” examining how 9/11 remains—or doesn’t—embedded in current legal and policy frameworks, a quarter century after the attacks. Read the full collection here.

read more

A federal judge has sided with Anthropic on its claims that the Department of Defense illegally retaliated against Anthropic’s protected speech by labeling the AI company a “supply chain risk.” The judge found that designation, intended to penalize Anthropic for telling the U.S. military it would not allow their technology to be used for mass surveillance of U.S.

read more

Economists, policymakers and journalists have been puzzling over why so many workers between 25 and 54 have been leaving the labor force over the past two years.

An Ohio data analyst has identified one cause that could be a warning sign for the overall economy.

read more