Author Archives: lawac
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Afghanistan is being methodically overrun by the Taliban as the US and NATO draw down their troops, and the country is not yet ready to stand on its own feet without outside help, according to Rod Nordland, the New York Times bureau chief in Kabul. As the Taliban advance in the provinces, more people are dying, other terrorist groups like ISIS are gaining a foothold, and human rights – notably the rights of women – are being trampled.
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Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California, said the university is 'in a state of excitement' after closing a multi-year budget deal with Governor Jerry Brown last Spring and that she now wants to 'ratchet down' student fees amid the rise of student debt. Speaking to a LAWAC dinner on February 3rd, Napolitano said that to convince Governor Brown to allocate more funds, she told him 'California would not be California without the UC system.'
Technological change is proceeding at an exponential rate, and international criminals are eagerly embracing technology to find new ways to cheat, steal and harm people, according to Marc Goodman, a former adviser to the FBI and Interpol. Unfortunately law enforcement and our political system only proceed on a linear basis, and are hopelessly behind the curve in such areas as cyber-security, online extortion and the hacking into a wide array of machines and medical devices we rely on in our daily lives.
Senator Lindsey Graham said that the Republican Party risks losing its soul because of its fear of Donald Trump, and that ISIS needs to be destroyed or they will launch another 9/11 on the United States. The Senator from South Carolina and Presidential candidate spoke to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council at a dinner on Wednesday
One of the most valuable tools in the struggle to understand our adversaries – be they military foes or commercial competitors – is the ability to predict what actions they might take against us. This is the job of so-called 'red team' thinking, a term coined during the Cold War by war-gamers at RAND Corporation who tried to work out the military strategies of the 'red' Soviets.
ISIS has 'no bounds to its brutality,' but the Paris attacks on November 13th that left 129 people dead did not mark the beginning of a structured international campaign that has been carefully plotted out by their leadership, according to Andrew Liepman, a 30-year veteran of the CIA who now is a senior policy analyst at RAND Corporation.
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Vladimir Putin knows that Russia is not a superpower today – ''and that is why he is so dangerous,'' said Steven Lee Myers. ''We are heading into a period of confrontation with Russia, there is no doubt about that. And it is going to linger– the next US president will have to deal with it,'' Myers told a sold-out LAWAC Global Café breakfast meeting.
Many attempts have been made to hammer out peace plans for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which involve dealing with divergent political and security perspectives, but there has been much less attention paid to the economic costs/ opportunities of the situation.
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