The ABC has been embarrassed by self-censorship in Chinese language news items selected and posted on its AustraliaPlus.cn website. The broadcaster’s ABC International division recently admitted to Media Watch that the AustraliaPlus.cn website, with online penetration of China’s internet firewall to a potential audience of 700 million people, is actually meant to exclude news and current affairs, with the possible exception of business news.

Arguing that the United States has so far failed to invest seriously in understanding or pushing back against the problem of Russian propaganda and disinformation, Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Washington Post columnist, and Edward Lucas, a senior editor at the Economist, are launching this week a counter-disinformation initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington, DC. 

There is a growing anxiety among some observers in the EU that a disinformation strategy pursued by the Russian government since the Ukraine crisis might fragment and disintegrate the Union. It is claimed that Russia’s use of targeted disinformation is seeking to influence public opinion within the member states with the aim of paralysing decision-making processes at the EU level.

Last night, Republican front-runner Donald J. Trump secured a decisive win in the Indiana primary. [...] International scholars, journalists, and policymakers have started to take this “political outsider” more seriously as a candidate bidding for the most important job in the world. China is no exception; Chinese media even published a series of reports analyzing the rise and popularity of Trump.

In 2016 interviews, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter compared the ISIS base in the Middle East to a tumor, demonstrating the cancer analogy had embedded in the administration’s thinking: "There are metastases elsewhere – Libya, Afghanistan…." The analogy, while sobering, offers a useful way to think about the strategies to challenge the Islamic State.