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Originally published on June 17, 2020

From the Washington Examiner:

We finally agree that it’s good that the Confederacy lost. It deserved to lose. And what’s more, its leaders don’t deserve to be memorialized in stone and metal in places of public honor. The Confederate flag belongs in the history books and on old Lynyrd Skynyrd albums.

—Jeremy Mayer

From Responsible Statecraft:��

This rhetoric often provides governments with a lucrative scapegoat: by labeling those protesting as terrorists, intense countermeasures taken to quell their actions are therefore framed as legitimate operations designed to belay enemies of the state as opposed to peaceful demonstrations calling for change.

—PhD Political Science Student Jonathan Hoffman

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From Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project:

The members of the Romanian group that generated these huge revenues had little formal education but great criminal savvy. They recruited tech personnel online, they bribed ATM technicians to install their skimmers, they moved their cash through DHS and Western Union and bank transfers. Since their prime targets were tourists on vacation in Mexico, U.S.-based banks lost hundreds of millions over the years without connecting the dots.

—Louise Shelley

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From the Washington Quarterly:

Emerging Technologies and the Future of CBRN Terrorism

According to the scenario, the radiological material was stolen from a hospital and sold via the Dark Web to a terrorist group that delivered it using a drone against a civilian target. The scenario, while fictional, was firmly rooted in technological developments that present a new range of challenges to preventing non-state actors from acquiring and using chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons.

—Gregory Koblentz

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From PONARS Eurasia:

Perhaps most importantly, Trump’s V-E Day post provided tailor-made evidence for Putin’s claims about falsifications of history. If Washington ditches the role of paying historical tribute to inconvenient allies—while perhaps slightly implying that it was the force that had given Hitler’s regime its final blow—then Moscow’s propagandistic claims become more credible globally and in the eyes of apolitical Russians who care more about veterans than politics.

—GVIP Junior Alexander Naumov

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From the Washington Times:

The vile nature of dishonesty has seeped so deeply into the veins of the WHO and to such a great extent that the esteemed director-general of the organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised the Chinese government for its transparency in its “fight” against the coronavirus. Alas, the plague of Maoism-Marxism-Leninism infecting international organizations does not stop spreading there.

—GVIP Junior Ryan Ghandour

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From the Hill:

In 1968, voters longing for normalcy voted for Nixon, who was deeply experienced in national politics. This year, the candidate who represents normalcy and relief from turmoil is certainly not Donald Trump.

—Bill Schneider

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From the Atlantic Council:

With its rich oil and gas resources, Iran will not be eliminated from the energy market, but, given the glut in world supply and the temporary collapse of demand, it will have less of a chance to play an active role in the market. Iran needs foreign investment and technology to increase its production capacity, but that will be hard to achieve without a resolution of US-Iran tensions and an easing of US sanctions.

—Omid Shokri Kalehsar

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From the Center for European Policy Analysis:

Making matters worse, Azerbaijani authorities are��exploiting��the pandemic to arrest government critics. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), authorities recently “have sentenced at least six activists and a pro-opposition journalist to detention for between 10 and 30 days on spurious charges including breaking lockdown rules or disobeying police orders.” Most of those arrested had slammed conditions in government-run quarantine centers and the government’s anemic response to the public health crisis.��

—Richard Kauzlarich and David J. Kramer

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From the Atlantic Council:��

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Moscow made clear months ago that, once the United Nations arms embargo on Tehran expires in October, Russia intends to resume selling weapons to Iran. Not surprisingly, then, Moscow has reacted negatively to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s call for the UN Security Council to extend the arms embargo or, if it doesn’t, for the United States to exercise its right as a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) participant to unilaterally force the “snapback” of multilateral sanctions against Iran, despite the Trump administration’s 2018 withdrawal from the nuclear agreement.

—Mark N. Katz